HOLLYWOOD: STRIKE IN A GHOST TOWN (1960)
Actor Clifton Webb walked across the 20th Century-Fox lot one day last week and wept real tears. “It’s so awful,” said he, “everything has stopped. In the barbershop, no one talked.”
Things have been pretty quiet in all the barbershops and all the studios for years, but after the Screen Actors Guild followed the screen writers and went on strike last week, Hollywood looked more than ever like a ghost town. It was the first time in Hollywood history that actors had walked out, although in the ’30s and ’40s there had been plenty of strikes by other movie unions. This time there were no pickets, no soup kitchens, no sheriffs’ deputies. Big shots from both sides of the barricades simply drove home in their Cadillacs and snarled at each other from their swimming pools.
But the strike was on, just the same, and whether or not it would be settled quickly, it told a lot about the present state of the movie industry…
...The businessmen who followed the sun westward generations ago to build their dream world on the Hollywood lots are dead, dying or dispersed. Harassed by taxes, producers and actors have split Hollywood into countless independent corporations that make more and more of their movies abroad...
...Columnist Hedda Hopper, who has seldom acted for a decade, hinted of stuffed ballot boxes (she got two ballots, voted against the strike on both) and of Red influence. “This is the greatest industry ever put in the hands of man,” she said. “I don’t want our way of life thrown in the discard.”
...THE NEW HOLLYWOOD: DEAD OR ALIVE? (1981)
Beset by megabudgets and minimoguls, the movie industry suffers a crisis of conscience
Next Monday is Oscar night, when Hollywood’s elite will tux and tart themselves up, like 3,000 extras in some impossibly opulent ’30s costume drama, for the movie industry’s spring ritual of self-congratulation. In the packed Los Angeles Music Center they will hear a former B-movie swain and Screen Actors Guild president named Ronald Reagan deliver an address on the theme “Film Is Forever.” They will bestow Academy Awards on their most envied colleagues. They will snicker as professional actors flub a three-line introductory speech. For the benefit of 80 million TV-watching Americans, the movie people will put on a spectacle that combines the solemnity of graduation day at West Point with the giddy naivete of a greasers’ sock hop.
They might also, according to some observers, be attending a state funeral —for the state of the art and the industry. Hollywood shows every sign of a town in crisis. The movie audience is shrinking as budgets soar toward the $40 million point and beyond. The average studio movie today costs $10 million to make and $6 million to publicize in newspapers and on television. Because of inflation and high interest rates, producers want to release films that will make their money back quickly. This means recycling the familiar into the surefire: 1980’s biggest hit was The Empire Strikes Back, George Lucas’ sequel to Star Wars. It means signing box-office stars at huge salaries: Burt Reynolds pulled in a reported $5 million for The Cannonball Run, Barbra Streisand $4.6 million for All Night Long. Directors are stars too: Francis Ford Coppola was offered $3 million to direct One from the Heart. Says Director Martin Scorsese, 38: “We’re working ourselves right out of jobs. I’m concerned that the industry is being destroyed.”
With inflation and recession come managerial convulsions. Five of the seven major studios have suffered abrupt changes of management in the past two years. The rash of new production outfits, born in the flush of Star Wars and Grease profits a few years ago, either have folded or are struggling to survive. The U.S. Congress disallowed most no-risk tax shelters, which once offered the hope of a quick buck for producers and a long write-off for investors, and 19 states have outlawed blind bidding, which allowed studios to extract money commitments from theater owners for an unseen product. Now cable TV and cassettes are starting to offer the movies serious competition for the entertainment dollar. The gloomiest forecast is of a nation of stay-at-homes getting all their fun from the giant video screen. “We are supporting a dying business, and the change is scary,” says Paul Schrader, 34, who wrote Taxi Driver for Scorsese and directed American Gigolo. “Movies are on their way out.”
The corpse sprawls over the business and entertainment pages of daily newspapers. In the Polo Lounge and at college seminars, amateur detectives search for the murder weapon. And, as in an Agatha Christie movie, there are suspects aplenty, all swearing they were the deceased’s best friend. The Producer: claims he tried to keep the costs down; charged with lack of vision and insufficient use of his power. The Studio Executive: claims he really does support good pictures; charged with not knowing the business and caring only about his skin. The Agent: claims he has filled the creative vacuum left by producers and studio men; charged with seeing films as “packages” of familiar actors and directors, all of whom are his clients. The Star: claims he is the main attraction, thus has the responsibility to supervise production; charged with squandering his leverage by spoon-feeding the public with junk-food comedies. The Audience: claim they are the victims; charged with leaving the scene of the crime.
The prime suspect is the Hot Young Director. In the ’70s, a swarm of graduates from film schools and TV revitalized an industry grown geratic with aging talents and traditions. Coppola (the Godfather films), Scorsese (Mean Streets), Lucas (American Graffiti), Steven Spielberg (Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind) and others became Hollywood royalty. They worked on each other’s projects, helped even younger film-school grads make movies, dreamed bigger dreams, sweated to put their dreams on film. They made millions for their studio sponsors: of the eight alltime highest-grossing films, six were directed by men who were under 35, and the other two were produced by men under 35. The experience was a heady one, and for some the thrill is still there. Says Coppola, now 41: “If we coordinated, we could take control of the movie business in one minute.”
These Young Punks couldn’t play Leonardo and Peter Pan forever. After their early hits the hot directors almost mega-bucked their way to disaster. In the mid-’70s Coppola went to the Philippines to make his Viet Nam epic, Apocalypse Now; battled typhoons, Marlon Brando and a regiment of skeptical bankers; mortgaged his home to pay for the movie; spent $31.5 million. Spielberg lavished $27 million on the slapstick 1941; critics reviewing it replayed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. John Landis, whose $3 million National Lampoon’s Animal House earned $74 million in North America, invested $30 million in a two-hour car chase called The Blues Brothers. The rampant inflation of budgets and ego may even have affected Warren Beatty. Beatty has spent two years and more than $30 million on Reds, a biography of Writer-Revolutionary John Reed, and the picture is still at least nine months from release.
The biggest turkey arrived just in time for last Thanksgiving. Michael Cimino, fresh from his Oscar for The Deer Hunter, blew $36.5 million on Heaven’s Gate, a handsome, incoherent western that United Artists withdrew from release after New York critics gave it—and the profligate artist at its helm—a sound drubbing. Heaven’s Gate opens in an abridged version next month, but in its initial release, about 8,000 moviegoers paid to see it: U.A. had spent $4,500 for every ticket sold. At the premature burial of Heaven’s Gate—and, many thought, of the New Hollywood—the pallbearers could be seen dancing on the grave. …
…Columbia’s Price frets that the studios are “run by the three A’s: accountants, attorneys and agents.” Stan Kamen, who represents Warren Beatty, Barbra Streisand, Michael Cimino and a dozen other heavyweights, and whose William Morris Agency is sent 2,500 scripts a year, counters that “ex-agents are running major studios. They were packagers. They know how these deals are made. Half the Hollywood movies today are packaged or semipackaged by agents.” Diller agrees ruefully: “This town is Deal City. Do you know the amount of time spent on deals instead of what the movie is? I hate the whole process.”
If the chairman of Hollywood’s smartest studio does not have fun making deals, what are those visionary mavericks Coppola and Lucas doing playing the game —indeed, setting up their own studios? For one thing, it allows them to buy control of their films. With the profits from Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas, 36, could probably buy control of every film in Hollywood and have enough left over to pick up an MX missile: he is said to be worth more than $100 million. He is building a model-village production plant—a sort of Disney World for cineastes—in Northern California’s Marin County. He has seven more Star Wars movies in mind. And he has just produced an adventure film by another strong director: Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spielberg is proud that their picture was completed under schedule and within the budget: $19 million. “Lucas was to me what David O. Selznick was to his directors on Gone With the Wind. I respect his comments totally. Raiders proved that two people can make a movie together and remain friends.” The film will be released this June.
“Lucas has a bank called Star Wars,” notes Spielberg, 33. “Coppola doesn’t have a bank—only courage and fortitude. Chutzpah too: his Zoetrope Studios is preparing more than a dozen challenging projects, despite the fact that Coppola nearly went bankrupt just a month ago. The minimogul, who drives a mini-limo, a customized black Volkswagen Rabbit with dark tinted windows, admits that it is hard to keep one eye on the artistic horizon and the other on the bottom line. “Film makers are not necessarily good administrators. And the concept of the studio is vitally important. But the majors understand the selling of films more than the making. Zoetrope is based on the new technology. We’re in the vanguard of the electronic revolution, and I want the other studios to copy us. They can make excellent pictures and a lot of dough too.”
At the moment, Zoetrope—where Coppola is shooting his $23 million musical drama One from the Heart—is a futuristic anachronism. The technology is indeed new: computerized story boards, video-taped rehearsals and pre-editing on video rather than film. But the concept of actors and artisans under contract recalls the studio system that flourished for 40 years and died out in the ’60s. Can Zoetrope work? Can it be profitable? Will a dozen cantankerous directors chafe under the effusive rein of an auteur-mogul? Many people in the New Hollywood, including some of Coppola’s competitors, hope he makes it. Others are more skeptical. Says Ned Tanen: “Francis has all the answers. Too bad someone doesn’t give him the questions.” …
… To predict Hollywood’s future, it helps to be both Cassandra and John the Baptist. Most of the major directors see a timid few years ahead, followed by the explosion of technological liberation. Benton hopes “Coppola is right: that the software revolution will increase the demand for material and change the structure of film making.” Redford is convinced that “with the cable market opening up, we need a larger supply of film makers, a wider range of options.” To this end, he has established the Sundance Institute of Film and Video in Provo Canyon, Utah, which holds its first session this June. Says Redford: “I’m hoping that our program will help people realize you don’t have to go into the mainstream in order to survive.”
Already film makers are leaving Hollywood, at least geographically, to survive and thrive. George Lucas presides over a contingent of resourceful directors in the San Francisco area. And New York, which lost its production-center supremacy to California 65 years ago, is again nourishing film makers. Benton, Brian De Palma and Woody Allen all live and work in New York. And if Ordinary People cops the top Oscar, it will be the seventh consecutive Best Picture directed by a man who grew up or lives in New York.
But the New Hollywood need not be New York, or Marin County, or anywhere. The art industry is a state of mind — a gorgeous hallucination dreamed by a few inventive writers, ambitious directors, daring producers and caring studio bosses. It is a dream that can still seize the world’s imagination on a screen. And it is not a new dream. In 1919, when D.W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks deserted the studios to form United Artists, one executive declared: “The lunatics have taken charge of the asylum.” That wasn’t — and isn’t — a bad thing. To make films, it helps to be cost-conscious. But to make a difference, you’ve got to be a little movie-mad.
HOLLYWOOD IS CRUMBLING RIGHT BEFORE OUR EYES (2024)
Outside every executive’s office in Hollywood right now, stand gloomy portents of a town dying on the vine. The iconic palm trees of Los Angeles – imported from Mexico in 1926 ahead of the 1932 Olympic Games – are withering. The trees only live 100 years, and the city is at a crossroads as to whether to import more, or face a future without one of the things it’s most famous for. As visual metaphors go, it’s a doozy.
Like those dying palms, the film hub known as Hollywood was imported, from New York to the other side of America, approximately a century ago. And it too might just be in its death throes, or so many of its lower-tier workers fear. The city right now is facing a movie-making exodus. Productions are moving to other locales across America, and increasingly abroad. Films, to put it bluntly, are no longer being filmed in LA in the numbers they once were, and it’s creating a number of nightmares.
For the city itself, that nightmare is existential. What is LA without its most famous export and number-one tourism driver, if this trend continues? “Eight out of every 10 emblems of Los Angeles are to do with the movie industry. The Paramount Studios arch, the Hollywood sign, Mann’s Chinese Theatre – they’re what people associate the city with. Without the industry, you start to ask yourself, why does LA even exist? I mean, the beaches are great, but come on,” laughs writer-producer Carlos Foglia, who has lived in the city for 15 years…
...Foglia is wary of what will become of LA if Newsom’s move doesn’t reverse the production exodus.“Not to sound too dramatic, but look at what happened to Detroit after the car industry left. It’s finally on its way back but it took 50 years to take an upswing. They called it the first modern American ruin.” Los Angeles without Hollywood, could become its second.
Prat paints an even dystopian version of what the city might evolve into, should productions continue to be pushed outside of Tinseltown. “LA will continue to be the home of the studio execs – their castle in the sky where they’re lording over everything. The brick and mortar folks who are the underpinning of the industry, they’ve been abandoned by these folks in search of the cheapest bottom line. I think it’s gonna cause a further mass exodus of creative individuals, more so than it already has.” Like the dying palm trees lining the streets of LA, the future of Hollywood is currently wavering in the wind. Uncertainty looms ahead.
Hollywood is dead.
In October of 2024, The Hollywood Reporter (THR) posted this on social media: "Hollywood, meet your new A-List." There were no actors in the accompanying photo. Featured instead were TikTokers and Instagram "influencers" who function primarily as infomercial salespeople.
In the past, THR's "New A-List" was reserved for actors rising quickly to the top—the ones to watch. In fact, THR did publish a New A-List of Movie Stars a few months prior. Perhaps THR was simply making a new list, one filled with these types of salespeople. But the accompanying text was leveled at "Hollywood," as if these salespeople were the new inhabitants. And that was quite inaccurate.
Hollywood is dead. These salespeople are too late and too off-target to have been a part of it.
Hollywood was amazing.
It was something beautiful and singular and frustrating and hard and touching and incredible, and I think it's a crime that we destroyed it.
A crime.
I'll tell you what it was like, up to the last era of Hollywood. There was a high concentration of talented artists. There was enough room for everyone who had the luck, the determination, and the talent. Room for new actors, directors, and writers to come into the established business. There was a place for the Farrah Fawcetts and the Sir Lawrence Oliviers.
There were Gatekeepers, Tastemakers, and Kingmakers. Up through the gatekeeping and tastemaking filters, these talents would emerge. Time would be taken to promote their work and their image. Careful decisions would be made to maintain the quality of their output. And new arrivals paid respect to those who were already here, those who had built the business up for these newcomers to flourish.
Money was paid to everyone, and there seemed to be enough to go around. Residuals were healthy and could sustain those between jobs. Distribution was clear and steady, whether on TV, in a cinema, or on DVD or video.
There were parties and meetings and lucky encounters with all kinds of executives, actors, directors, cinematographers, costumers, etc. And all of it happened in person. It was an entity, a world, and a group that you earned your way into; and you knew that your reputation was going to matter now and in the future. You wanted the respect of those around you. You wanted to be worthy of being brought onto their projects. All of this mattered to everyone in the business, and the audience knew it when they saw the resulting work.
But, that structure—the emotional and financial scaffolding necessary to support that film business—is gone. In its place, we have something of a conveyor belt, churning out "content," with only a few standouts once in a while.
So, how did Hollywood die?
About 15 years ago, the studios had become too focused on films that made hundreds of millions of dollars. Streaming services saw an avenue into this business by funding and/or buying the projects that the studios had largely forgotten—the midrange award pieces like House of Cards, Manchester by the Sea, and others. That seemed good, for a bit.
Then these streaming services (like all tech companies) needed to scale. With an eye toward global expansion, these tech companies needed more "content" where the audience needn't know the language. And so, drama, comedy, rom-coms, and satire (which typically do not do well internationally) were pushed off, and there was a full embrace of "genre content." Those "genres" are action, horror, and thrillers—all easy to follow without knowing the language. They filled out the platform with the inconsequential, plot-free stuff you can have playing in the background as a "second screen," while you scroll through your Instagram feed, cook dinner, and answer emails on the "primary screen" of your phone or laptop.
For many years, we have been locked in this Content Era. Some good work has been produced during this time, but that's been the exception, not the rule, or the focus. The studios have all but abandoned their own 100-year-old business model and their objective to make great films, and have instead tumbled after the streaming services to try to compete with them in the tech-platform business.
That's not in Hollywood's DNA. We don't have the same goals as the tech bros. We don't have the same kind of funding. We are not valuated in the same way, and we don't (aren't supposed to) make "content."
Then generative artificial Intelligence (GAI) arrived during the spring of 2023, for which the tech bros illegally hoovered up 100 years of copyrighted series and films (along with all your social media reels and YouTube home movies). They started spitting out little Frankenstein video spoonfuls, based on prompts.
GAI is very good at regurgitating the past and vomiting up "content." And because it does it faster and cheaper than any filmmaker or showrunner could, the studios and streaming services that fund and distribute films and series will use it at maximum capacity because it will widen profit margins. It will enable them to give glowing reports during their quarterly stockholder calls.
What once was Hollywood—with its goal of making the best film or series possible, its financial structure of gathering revenue to pay its actors, directors, and crews, its residuals for artists between jobs, its camaraderie on the set, the passion behind a marketing campaign, and the triumph of making a film or series that is not only very good but has the luck of being released to the public at exactly the right time to cause a sensation—has passed.
The audience is too fractured for anything but the most expensive marketing campaigns to work. The studios' focus is too distracted by their stock-price performance and streaming dominance with home viewers to give the care necessary for the kinds of projects (or the cultivation of new stars) that audiences deserve. And there's too much going on in the world, and too many ways for audiences to get that information, to draw their attention back to films and series in a meaningful way.
This shouldn't have happened. But the fear, the love-of-money-above-all-else, and the abandonment of that singular goal of making outstanding art, no matter the emotional or financial cost, caused the whole magic web of scaffolding to fall.
When you have something this special, you should know better. You should know to protect it, to support the structures that make it possible for it to breathe and exhale beautiful pieces of filmed movement that change people's lives. Because it's not a given for it to exist.
So, what now? What of the art of filmmaking, of those gifted in that particular arena, and of audiences who genuinely love film?
There is a tunnel through this AI inferno (which will cause the end of the "content era"), to a glorious place on the other side: a new genre in the arts. We haven't truly had a new genre in the arts, of any real significance, since the 1990s. In essence, this upcoming new genre has been delayed by more than 20 years because tech overstayed its moment on stage. The New has been waiting....
...When you bring together those filmmakers who are doing things to differentiate their work, along with what audiences will want (and add in a bit of magic I know God is going to drop down on us), you're going to have the birth of the most incredible creative genres we've ever known. It will be new to us in the way jazz or rock and roll were new at the time, or French new wave films were back then. However, this will not be a return to anything from the past, but be something entirely new. Just The NEW.