The Murderer Is…

I encourage you to read Daniel Bessner’s article at Harper’s Magazine, “The Life and Death of Hollywood”. In it he crafts a narrative of an industry in which there was a Golden Age of “prestige television”, roughly 1995-2015, during which:

TV had become a place for sharp wit, singular voices, people with vision—and they were getting paid.

It was the era of Frasier, The West Wing, Mad Men, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad. The article has a considerable amount of information about Hollywood’s structure and inner workings. He attributes the decline from the heights of 20 years ago to a number of factors:

• Consolidation
• Deregulation
• Financialization
• Pursuit of international audiences
• Changes in how the product was produced

But the business of Hollywood had undergone a foundational change. The new effective bosses of the industry—colossal conglomerates, asset-management companies, and private-equity firms—had not been simply pushing workers too hard and grabbing more than their fair share of the profits. They had been stripping value from the production system like copper pipes from a house—threatening the sustainability of the studios themselves. Today’s business side does not have a necessary vested interest in “the business”—in the health of what we think of as Hollywood, a place and system in which creativity is exchanged for capital. The union wins did not begin to address this fundamental problem.

Currently, the machine is sputtering, running on fumes. According to research by Bloomberg, in 2013 the largest companies in film and television were more than $20 billion in the black; by 2022, that number had fallen by roughly half. From 2021 to 2022, revenue growth for the industry dropped by almost 50 percent. At U.S. box offices, by the end of last year, revenue was down 22 percent from 2019. Experts estimate that cable-television revenue has fallen 40 percent since 2015. Streaming has rarely been profitable at all. Until very recently, Netflix was the sole platform to make money; among the other companies with streaming services, only Warner Bros. Discovery’s platforms may have eked out a profit last year.

His prescriptions are, somewhat unsurprisingly, given his analysis of the problem for the federal government to step in and break up the media conglomerates and for reregulation to prevent their re-establishing themselves. I would completely agree with one of his prescriptions: actual creators (rather than the companies that employ creators) should hold full copyrights to their works. I would add that I believe the terms of such copyrights should be for 25 years or until the natural death of the creator, whichever comes first.

While the author’s contribution is valuable, I think he’s ignoring some fundamentals. First, supply and demand. When the first screenwriters union was founded in 1921 there were fewer than 20 members. The relatively small number of screenwriters remained the norm for decades. Today the Writers Guild of America has more than 10,000 members.

Second, Hollywood is obsessed with making pictures that Americans don’t want to see. Rather I think they’re making the pictures they want to make with the stories they want to tell and the messages they want to send. When they make pictures that Americans do want to see, e.g. Barbie and Top Gun: Maverick, they do well and people are even willing to go to the theater to see them.

Third, when you can make a quality production with an iPhone and a personal computer and whose production costs can be crowdsourced I think that Hollywood is doomed. The only thing keeping it afloat is a lock on distribution and streaming is weakening that lock.

Finally, when everything is a spin-off, reboot, remake or otherwise derived from something made before and smart, creative dialogue is actually an impediment to the work’s being suitable for the overseas market, generative artificial intelligence might actually be a better fit for writing those works than real live writers.