Sorry for these very long screeds, but walking in slow picket-line circles in the sweltering sun these past few months -- and everything changing for the better with SAG jumping in -- and well, I've got a lot on my mind about the state of things and nowhere to really put it.
I keep hoping we're nearing the end of this era of Hollywood, similar to when 1960s Hollywood collapsed under the weight of a bunch of big-budget musicals and old-fashioned spectacles, all of which bombed at the box office one after the other. Tastes had changed, the younger audiences didn't give a single fuck about Paint Your Wagon, and Hollywood couldn't quite figure out what they wanted. (In today's equation, I'm thinking the zillionth superhero retread and tired franchises with very little gas left in their respective tanks. This summer's dismal box office under-performance supports how dire this problem is today.)
So... what happened next? The dawn of New Hollywood. The Godfather, Chinatown, The Conversation, Cabaret, The Exorcist, Robert Altman. The 1970s remain the undisputed artistic era for cinema.
How exactly could another New Hollywood happen today? Well, it probably involves these bratty corporate titans dismantling the studios and selling them for parts. That sounds dramatic, but Zas is kind of already doing that with WB and it's an open secret that Paramount doesn't have that many years left as a studio. Or maybe it involves Wall Street massively downgrading media stocks for terrible box office receipts and a lack of streaming profits. Or maybe, just maybe, it involves the writers and actors demanding radical change (it's sad that 'radical change' here means "don't replace us with machines and also let us be able to afford to live in the city where we work", but hey, that's just late stage capitalism.)
We write cool shit in Hollywood, I promise -- but we're not the ones with greenlight power. This era of Hollywood is so deeply risk averse and IP obsessed, and I for one would love to see it collapse. Another New Hollywood -- let's fuckin go.
(We don't have nice things anymore, so this won't happen, but hey, it's fun to dream.)