Hollywood is dying.
I don’t say that lightly… Hundreds of thousands of people live in LA making a living in the Entertainment industry. Heck, I have a few friends there who work in the “biz.”
But the numbers don’t lie. Ratings are down, ticket sales are WAY down (the pandemic is much to blame, but year-over-year, interest in new “product” is waning).
Take for example the recent “spinning off “of Time Warner from AT&T. AT&T bought Time Warner in 2018. For 85.4 billion dollars. They sold said company for $43 billion, now.
Math is not my strong suit… But that is a 50% DROP IN VALUE in less than 3 years. CNN. HBO. Warner Brothers. DC Comics. And more.
50% off.
Other industry news is similarly grim. MGM was in deep trouble, as well, sitting on an unreleased James Bond movie. One that was delayed (checks calendar) FOUR TIMES. Every month that passes when it is not released means MGM paid INTEREST on the $250+ million dollar loan to make the movie. They already spent MILLIONS marketing the movie. Twice. As a result, they just sold themselves to Amazon just this week, for 8.5 billion dollars.
The House of Mouse is also in troubled waters. Disney’s revenues are WAY down without their summer blockbusters. And ratings for award shows such as The Golden Globes and the Oscars recently hit all-time lows… But it’s not just industry news that leads me to my statement that Hollywood is in deep deep trouble.
Look at this chart:
In 10 years, people en masse have stopped watching TV and listening to the radio. Instead, they consume content on mobile and computers. What do people watch on mobile and computers? YouTube.
Who provides 80% of the content on YouTube? Independent creators. NOT Hollywood.
The writing, as they say, is on the wall.
What is not sustainable, can’t be.
And a primary factor on why the Entertainment industry is in decline is simple. The stories suck.
Remember when summer blockbusters had sharp scripts with interesting characters? Yeah, so do I. It’s now a rarity. Why? Well, I have three reasons why modern movie scripts suck, and
Reason One: Hollywood writers are stupid and haven’t lived
Why do people still read Hemingway?
Because the man LIVED.
He traveled the world. He interviewed scores of people as a journalist. He was a sportsman. An ambulance driver in World War One. And more.
You write “what you know.” Hemingway lived more than most of us ever will. And his words reflect that experience.
What has the typical Hollywood screenwriter done?
Gone to college. Watched and studied a lot of movies and TV. And then the aped what they saw.
If you haven’t lived, your “battery” of experience to write about is low. Or empty. So, we get vapid ideas from people who have lived in a vapid bubble most of their lives.
Not to compare myself to Hemingway, but at one point in my life and travels I was on a dark side-street in South Africa past Midnight, because I was mistakenly dropped off by a taxi driver at the wrong hotel. As I walked to my ACTUAL hotel, I had a moment of sheer terror. I won’t recount it here, but I dare say that 99.5% of Hollywood writers have never had such a moment in their lives.
On to reason 2.
Reason Two: Consumption
Not food. The content writers consume.
In the dawn of TV, the writers who worked in the medium had worked as playwrights, or novelists. You look at the people who wrote live TV in the fifties, and you see some of the best writers EVER.
These are people who read Shakespeare, Kipling, Proust, and Faulkner. It continued into the 60s.
Heck, look at the first seasons of Star Trek and the Twilight Zone. A murderer’s row of some of the best SF/fantasy writers ever. Robert Bloch. Richard Matheson. Harlan Ellison. Theodore Sturgeon. Ray Bradbury.
People who READ the classics and were inspired by them.
Bradbury, especially, said he sought out the classics every day. “’Stuff your head’ with greatness, every day,” he said to young aspiring authors.
What are Hollywood writers stuffing their head with these days? TV SHOWS AND MOVIES.
The snake is eating its tail.
“Write what you know.”
If TV writers only know the work of OTHER TV writers, you get copies of copies. Xeroxes, instead of ideas driven from experience. And understanding.
Onto reason 2a: Bubbles
The typical Hollywood Entertainment Writer doesn’t leave his bubble. If he/she does, it’s along with fellow travelers. You think they would TALK to us great unwashed if they were writing about a (GASP) conservative character?
Hell, no. That would be WORK.
So, they write what they know.
Reason Three: Risk
Hollywood is not about new ideas. It was, once. That ended around 1988, IMO.
In the late sixties/early seventies the studios were lost. And when I mean lost, I mean LOST. The old guard was gone. Corporations were beginning to buy studios. For some background, I highly recommend the book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. It tells the story about how utterly clueless the industry was… And how young upstarts took full advantage.
Folks who are household names today. Spielberg. Scorsese. Coppola. Lucas.
And they brought with them smart young (and old) writers.
But the corporations took full control by the late 80s, and we started seeing less and less risk-taking. Risk taking, you see, was a problem for the bottom-line. Too many studio heads lost their head (metaphorically) because of risk taking.
So, Hollywood started sequel-izing. And spinning off. And creating Cinematic Universes.
Playing it safe means, you might not hit a homerun, but you won’t strike out. You’ll get on base.
You’ll keep your job.
Michael Eisner at Disney and Touchstone Pictures institutionalized this idea by making “high concept” lower-budget films in the 90s. If they succeeded, great! If they failed, well… They didn’t cost that much.
(Ironically movie studios today are in a much different place, in that they are making less “product” and spending lot’s more for the big “tentpole” films. Which makes the studios even MORE risk averse than they were under folks like Eisner).
And the Peter Principle applied.
The Peter Principle is one of the most universal Truths I have ever seen in my travels.
It states, simply, that people in businesses rise to “their level of incompetence.”
Look at Kathleen Kennedy, current head of Lucasfilm. She was, at one point, Steven Spielberg’s secretary.
So, yeah.
Closing
In the end, Hollywood is way past any “crossroads”. They are afraid to try anything new (because it costs too much to do ANYTHING, thanks to unions and SFX).
The creative folks learned how to write from watching television (and NOT reading). And they write what they know… And they don’t know much.
Because knowing, learning something… Well, that’s really HARD.
It might take away from their time on social media.
So, that’s my reasons Hollywood is out of ideas. I’m sure you have others.