GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Putting the Joy of Storytelling in a Tech Bro Chokehold.
For all the changes which have roiled the movie business over the last 50 years, the basic process has remained essentially the same. Creative artists drive to a motion picture studio and meet with a “creative executive.” In that meeting the artist pitches their vision for a movie. Afterwards, the executive goes to his or her boss and re-pitches a thumbnail version what they were just pitched. Maybe the two executives kick around some ideas… “we could get Nolan, or Taika… maybe even Tom Cruise”, they might dream together. And sometimes, after all the dreaming has come to an end, the boss takes that leap of faith and says “yes, let’s develop that idea.” But again, remember what William Goldman said… “nobody knows anything”… so at the end of the day, that “yes” is delivered with a shrug… at best.
Thus begins a process in which tens of millions of dollars will be spent without the guarantee that there will be even a single customer willing to pay for the resulting product.
There was a time when the senior executives doing the shrugging had great instincts for what the audience wanted and got the “shrug” right more often than they got it wrong… but we no longer live in that world. The corporatization of Hollywood brought a new business sense to the art of making movies. And by “business sense” I mean an instinct for cost-cutting, a willingness to default to “no” rather than “yes” and the desire to always choose the sure thing over the artistic gamble. Over time, experience running widget factories in the “legitimate” business world, or time spent on the money side of the Hollywood machine became a more important metric for hiring studio bosses than whether or not the candidate had ever greenlit a hit movie before. “No one knows anything” has never been more true, and the Shrugers have never been more scared… never less sure of their instincts.
Enter the Tech Bros, led by Netflix and Amazon.
What follows is not an improvement.