Kill Hollywood
January 21st, 2012Via: Y Combinator:
Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.
That’s one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn’t stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it’s only when he’s beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.
Related: Google Backing Original Shows for YouTube — Lots of Them
The Pirate Bay released a text file on SOPA that speaks of Hollywood’s birth on the west coast to escape Edison’s patent in the east. I wish they’d elaborated on it, but still, here it is:
http://static.thepiratebay.org/legal/sopa.txt
I partly agree with this assessment. Technology in cameras and editing software and other production tools have come a long way toward liberating the independent (i.e. non-LA-based, lower budget) film culture to create interesting and effective story-lines. Even finding capital of these type projects has gotten easier. This is why the Industry (as it’s referred to in LA) seems to have chosen instead concede ground for most ‘standard’ films to the independent artists, then cherry-pick distribution rights to the best that come along. At the same time, Hollywood seems to be concentrating more and more of their efforts in the ‘high-tech-special-effects’ arena for original works, and in ‘remakes’ of past successful ideas. The Industry has been steadily shedding risk and concentrating its power where it’s most effective and uncontested.
Also, it’s worth acknowledging that high-tech players like Pixar are creating some of the most exciting and popular films around – and as a result, more and more films are going toward ‘actorless’ animation. 3D filming is another stab at changing the game as well.
But this doesn’t mean the death of Hollywood, by any means. It simply signals that Industry is ‘out-sourcing’ a lot of risk. Which also conversely means wealth is being concentrated among fewer and fewer ‘super’-players.
Ultimately, just as with music, the Revolution Against Control happens when the artists themselves finally become empowered to ignore the distribution magnates altogether and maintain self-distribution via the internet. All the pieces are in place, and have been for some time, which is why it boggles my mind this hasn’t happened yet.
How hard is it really to create an open-sourced site where artists could sell their mp3’s or film-streams direct to your computer or TV? At prices they determine? Where pre-views and the site users themselves generate demand and determine what is popular?
Is this not happening now? It must be, right? Is it available but simply not on the public ‘radar’ yet?
@ The Lagavulian
It’s happening in the music “business” as we type, with a variety of small-scale start-ups straddling the space between the sharecropping system of the “major” labels, the not-so-independents mostly hoovered up by the majors (i.e.: SubPop, et al.) and the true independents emerging at the fringes.
The shift toward DIY music production by way of less-expensive digital tools has cut both ways, allowing greater latitude for artists with an active muse but at the same time spawning the “lo-fi” movement and flooding the mindspace with mediocre content.
Interestingly, in the realm of established acts, those with open eyes and minds are experiencing a renaissance of sorts as they build out their own boutique labels, maintain publishing rights and develop direct-to-fan relationships sans any middle men via social media, etc.
Despite all the yelling and screaming in the mainstream media about file sharing “killing the music business”, in truth the damage has more to do with calcified old-guard business models hemorrhaging profits as the lose their iron grip on distribution.
THAT is what SOPA/PIPA is fighting to bring back. The “old days” of top-down distribution control. Which is, of course, like trying to squeeze a genie back into a bottle.