Notes

“Hollywood’s Slo-Mo Self-Sabotage”

At The New Yorker, Inkoo Kang writes about turbulence in Hollywood. “To survey the film and television industry today is to witness multiple existential crises. Many of them point to a larger trend: of Hollywood divesting from its own future, making dodgy decisions in the short term that whittle down its chances of long-term survival. Corporations are no strangers to fiscal myopia, but the ways in which the studios are currently squeezing out profits—nickel-and-diming much of their labor force to the edge of financial precarity while branding their output with the hallmarks of creative bankruptcy—indicate a shocking new carelessness. Signs of this slow suicide are all around: the narrowing pipelines for rising talent, the overreliance on nostalgia projects, and a general negligence in cultivating enthusiasm for its products. Writers and actors have walked out to demand fairer wages and a more equitable system, but they’ve also argued, quite persuasively, that they’re the ones trying to insure the industry’s sustainability. Meanwhile, studio executives—themselves subject to C-suite musical chairs—seem disinterested in steering Hollywood away from the iceberg.”

Read more here.

1 reply »

  1. This is a fabulous article, thank you. The painfully one-sided clash between creativity and commerce will not end until we creators work to support each other. We all lose when we are forced into competition with each other for vanishing dollars – divide and conquer works absurdly well – but we all win if/when we find ways to support each other professionally and, possibly, financially. I do not know what that looks like, but it is an idea I have mulled recently.

    Guttersnipe is an interesting model because it presents the work of multiple creators in one place, like an internet-age literary salon. I could easily have “guest” posts and essays on Just Bear With Me, though I could not pay anything and my readership is less than vast. It makes me happy, though.

    If anyone reading this has other ideas, feel free to reach out to me throught the contact page of JBWM.

    Like

Leave a comment