Hollywood has always been great at telling a story. It hasn’t been as good at telling that story when the story is quite complex, preferring to boil things down to the essentials – the hero, the villain, the basic plot. This has worked well enough that it influences how we think and act as a society and in our individual lives. We’re so used to seeing a Hollywood story-arc that we expect this same drama in our own lives and work to make it so, seeing patterns where there are none and elevating ourselves as heros/villains in some greater narrative; but if there is a greater narrative, we’re surely just bit players in it, given the billions of us this story must encompass.
You can see the wish for a Hollywood story arc in how we think of the recent financial collapse. We demonize scapegoats such as Bernie Madoff (who was a guilty man) and try to pin the blame for the whole mess on bankers, or perhaps if you have a different political outlook, you pin it on homeowners who won’t take personal responsibility. In reality, the economic mess we’ve found ourselves in is quite complex, and while there are guilty parties, there are many of them and too many to make this a neat and tidy story, although Margin Call was pretty fun.
No, the bigger story of that continuing mess is that it was/is the result of systemic flaws in the economy and indeed in the brand of capitalism we practice ‘round these parts. Addressing systemic flaws is complicated, however, so we tend to try to simplify the story to fit the storytelling pattern Hollywood has taught us to expect. This is good for bankers, politicians, economists and yes, the consumers, who are all part of the mess, because examining it in its entirety would make us wake up and demand change – if we understood the full story, we’d demand a refund on this particular movie. Perhaps we’re seeing this now in both the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements. A lot of people are waking up, and many of them are demanding change. They aren’t necessarily calling for an end to capitalism, but they are calling for a different practice of it. We’ll see over the next few years how this plays out.
Well, Hollywood is telling another story these days that it likes to summate easily, and that’s the one where piracy is killing the industry, and they need things like SOPA and ACTA and other legal change to stop the robbery of their profits. Unfortunately for Hollywood, however, we the people are now able to step back, use the power of the network – which is precisely to connect the dots more easily – and think about this story some more and realize that this story isn’t so simple either, because it too is about systemic flaws. Likewise, when we connect the dots here, we won’t likely say let’s get rid of entertainment, but rather how we practice it.
So, the real story is that the Hollywood way of doing business is broken. It was broken before digital came about, but that really did take it to another level. How is it broken? Well, this would take many blog posts, but let’s just say that every single aspect of the system is flawed. From the way films are financed – usually by ripping off a new, clueless investor; to how they are made – usually by paying exorbitant fees to stars with too much control, while underpaying the crew making it below the line; to how they are consumed – in overpriced theaters, then windowed to be sure to maintain the artificial high box office and force certain consumers to look for them online through piracy. This barely scratches the surface of the flaws, and I’m just now mentioning the fact that we keep minting hundreds of thousands of filmmakers at film school who go on to produce more films than can be consumed by the world’s population. Or that festivals argue over premieres that are meaningless to anyone but the press; or that the press went to journalism school and didn’t learn how to dig beyond the press release and give us actual news about the business.
Every aspect of this is fundamentally flawed. Does this mean we don’t want to watch movies and entertain ourselves? No. But it does mean that as digital continues to turn dollars to pennies, it will expose more and more of these flaws – because they’ve all been hidden with dollars and fables, and these don’t hold up in the digital economy. As I’ve said before, digital is the moon that pulls the tide, and when the tide goes out, we see who’s wearing the swim trunks (per Warren Buffett’s famous quote), and there’s a lot of naked people in film.
Hollywood tells us everything is fine, we just have these damned pirates. I’m not conceding pirates are a problem at all, but even if they are, they are just one of many, many problems, and not likely the biggest in this pile of mess. Nope, it makes a nice story, and people getting ready for bedtime, like most of our politicians, love a good story, but it’s an oversimplification.
Hollywood is an empire, and like all empires, it will collapse at some point, precisely because of its efforts to prolong itself indefinitely. While it keeps telling itself the pirate story – ironically, all this while lionizing them in Pirates of the Caribbean, a Disney property that is likely a rip off of someone else’s intellectual property, like the rest of Disney’s IP – there’s a better story being told, and it’s not coming from Hollywood. It’s coming from Silicon Valley, and all of the little Valleys out there. It’s coming from DIY, and Makers, and kids in their bedrooms making mash-ups and video games, and from the whole lot of us making really cool shit at a fraction of the cost, and with almost no flaw in the business model (Ok, there are some, but let’s also pretend a little).
These stories are becoming legion. They are coalescing, and they are much less frightening (or annoying or deluded) than those coming from Hollywood today. They are inspiring, and I say we should all start spending more of our attention and dollars on these stories than theirs, and in making sure these stories win sooner rather than later, because win they will. The question is always just how bloody and long will be the death of the empire? This story has been told many times, and we’re all watching it unfold now, like all audiences, pretending not to know the end of the story.
As regulars know, I’ve helped out on the great film General Orders No. 9, and we’re proud to announce that it is finally available on DVD, Blu-Ray and VOD. If you were a fan of this film, I highly recommend buying the Blu-Ray along with the limited edition, numbered books created by the filmmaker (pictured here). Get them from his 