"The End of Hollywood As We Know It" in Harper's, May 2024
Apr 25, 2024 19:30:30 GMT -5
Celebith, Jean-Luc Lemur, and 2 more like this
Post by rjamielanga on Apr 25, 2024 19:30:30 GMT -5
The cover article, by Daniel Bessner (Harper's allows 2 free articles a month). It's about both movies and TV, but since there's no top-level "Hollywood" Board, I figured I'd put it here.
Some thoughts (you may want to skip past the bullet points to the sum-up at the end):
• It is almost a necessity that any article of this sort is going to have to take an absolutist stance: either TV and movie writers are facing doom, or things are going to be great.
• The article opens with the case of Alena Smith, whose show Dickinson on AppleTV was, apparently, the platform's most-watched series in its second and third seasons, but who went (she says) generally unappreciated by Apple. This is an A-list writer (the article argues), and still she wasn't doing that well, economically.
• It's not just that the writers were doing badly when they went on strike, "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 worked 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."
• What follows is a passage where Bessner argues that the broad rise-and-fall of the writers can be attributed to various legislation, court rulings, and enforcement decisions. He writes, "it wasn't until the early Eighties, when the Reagan Revolution hit Hollywood, that the guardrails began to fall. In 1983, the Department of Justice allowed HBO, Columbia Pictures, and CBS to merge to form TriStar Pictures, combining cable, film, and broadcast-network interests in direct violation of antitrust law. Executives at other entertainment companies took note and moved to create their own conglomerates. In 1985, the DOJ went a step further, issuing a memo, later discovered by the historian Jennifer Holt, stating that it would no longer enforce the Paramount Decrees, and the studios scooped up theater chains once again."
This seems (perhaps I'm missing something) a weak link in the chain of Bessner's argument. He had written a couple of paragraphs earlier that "When the Supreme Court ruling came down, studio power was dealt another blow. The industry's eight companies were each forced to enter into an agreement with the Department of Justice, collectively known as the Paramount Decrees, which prohibited them from both distributing and exhibiting the films they produced--they could do only one or the other. The companies that owned theater chains gave up their cinemas, taking a significant hit." This came in the wake of the formation of the Screen Writers Guild. But the effect of this antitrust ruling was not good for the writers: "In the years that followed, the studios, less flush with cash, began to prefer freelance writers to salaried employees."
• So establishing direct causality is tricky. Bessner admits this ("at first, deregulation did not seem to harm writers"). There follows a passage discussing writers in the Eighties and Nineties were making out well. But that deregulation eventually allowed conglomerates to screw writers because "Hollywood accounting" was much easier.
That seems ... well, dubious to me. I can't imagine that writers would have had an easier time getting residuals if it weren't for conglomeration making it easier to hide profits. I'm not saying he's wrong, but making that point seems like a book-length undertaking to me.
• Strike One: the WGA strike of 2007-8. In the wake of which Wall Street came in and imposed some discipline on these companies. Then there was the Great Recession and more belt-tightening.
Marvel and preexisting "IP" gets a first mention here as the safe bet that studios ran to.
• Strike Two: the 2023 WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike. The new agreements that followed, says Bessner, weren't exactly all that great.
• His conclusion? "What is to be done? The most direct solution would be government intervention. If it wanted to, a presidential administration could enforce existing antitrust law, break up the conglomerates, and begin to pull entertainment companies loose from asset-management firms. It could regulate the use of financial tools ... it could rein in private equity. The government could also increase competition directly by funding more public film and television. It could establish a universal basic income for artists and writers."
I don't know. Look, it's easy to shit on Hollywood, and I absolutely reserve the right to do so.
But what a lot of people view as the new Golden Age of Television was in the mid-to-late Aughts. Mad Men premiered in July of 2007; Breaking Bad premiered in January of 2008. At least when it comes to TV, an inverse correlation between industry rapaciousness and show quality doesn't really seem to exist.
To which he might come back and say these are long-term factors and when everything comes crashing down, there won't be quality TV or movies. Maybe. I wonder at his solutions, though. Antitrust enforcement might improve things, although I'm curious what its application to Netflix would look like (and if it would survive a court challenge) with regards to its original programming.
But a UBI for writers and artists? I don't know how you determine who counts in those categories (I mean, I've self-published two novels, and any self-respecting writer would be pissed if I were included). I'm pretty damn far from "libertarian", but it strikes me as very undesirable for the government to be making that decision.
Anyway ... what do you guys think?
