MICHAEL WALSH ON GREED, HOLLYWOOD STYLE:

The old moguls — whether semi-literate glove salesmen or fast-talking Sammy Glicks — at least knew which business they were in. They had come from the Jewish Rialto on Second Avenue in Manhattan, from the nickelodeons, and the schmatta trade: they knew that the customer was a) fickle and b) king. When they went to Hollywood, they understood instinctively they needed a wide array of wares, goods that appealed to as broad a clientele as possible, not a one-size-fits-all union suit.

But ever since the studios started disappearing into the bean-counting maws of Gulf & Western, funeral-parlor and parking-lot operators, cable companies, and Japanese electronics manufacturers, the show has gone out of show business. The rise of the Internet, and the advent of the streaming services provided by Netflix, Amazon and others — which are so rich and successful that they are now not only creating their own content but outbidding studios for it as well — has meant that the theaters will soon be out of the theater business.

Comes the news of Disney’s tender for some bleeding chunks of 21st Century Fox, one of Hollywood’s Big Six studios that used to be known as 20th Century Fox or, in the old movie-biz parlance, simply “Twentieth.”

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