Can Hollywood Make Like Obama -- and Change?
Sharon Waxman is Editor in Chief of TheWrap.Com, which launches today
LOS ANGELES - The ground has shifted beneath the foundations of what for the better part of the century has been one of America's most reliable and desirable products: movies and television shows.
Since this thing called the Internet came along, anyone, anywhere in the industry will tell you this: Hollywood must adapt in order to survive.
The entertainment industry exuberantly embraced the change offered by Barack Obama. Will it be able to embrace the necessary change for it to adapt in the age of the web?
Cracks have formed in the hard earth that has been the bedrock of the popular culture and media consumed by people around the world., evidenced in the broad changes in consumer behavior set in motion by Google, Facebook, YouTube, Digg and a host of other new companies that for the most part did not even exist a decade ago.
Millennial-generation digital entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Kevin Rose of Digg are displacing once-omnipotent Hollywood players such as DreamWorks' David Geffen, who has just retired, or Michael Eisner, the former Disney mogul who has remade himself and is now a minor figure in the world of new media.
Thus far, attempts to figure out exactly what a successful digital-era Hollywood venture will look like have been met with scant success.
"People truly do not understand the extent to which new media is not a business," said Marshall Herskovitz, the veteran television producer who last year declared his independence from the networks and created "quarterlife," a web series and social media hub. "It's remarkably not a business. I'm speaking from painful experience."
Herskovitz managed to make money from a single episode of the series that ended up airing on NBC before the show was canceled. But he lost money on the 36 episodes that were streamed on MySpace and the show's own site.
The Kansas State University anthropologist Michael Wesch has found that the amount of video content created by YouTube users, for free, in six months is more than the broadcast networks produced in 60 years of paid, professional programming.
YouTube produces some 9,232 hours of new video every day. (Feel free to re-read that sentence a few times.) It's not mass programming. But as an aggregate, it creates a smorgasbord of satisfying entertainment and the opportunity to take part in "participatory culture."
Therein lies the shift that will determine Hollywood's fate in the age of the Internet. Web culture, and the businesses connected to it, are all about transparency and collaboration and adaptive improvisation. Companies share and connect in a spirit of "competition." It is additive, and iterative in nature. Failure is seen as merely a necessary prelude to success.
All that makes the web a very different environment than the cutthroat entertainment industry familiar to the world from countless novels and movies -- "Day of the Locust," "The Player," or "Swimming With Sharks."
It's a subject The Wrap will explore continually as Hollywood embarks on this great new adventure. Please comment. Contribute. Give us feedback. Above all, make yourself at home in our community -- today and every day going forward. Read the full story here, and at www.thewrap.com.
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"Web culture, and the businesses connected to it, are all about transparency and collaboration and adaptive improvisation."
Hardly. It's a monkey see, monkey do environment in which cliches rule alongside received ideas.
The Internet is an extension of television. It's impacting television and movies the way that television impacted motion pictures circa 1954. Whatever comes after the Net will impact the Net similarly.
Eventually, we'll run out of technologies and have to revert to reading books and making our own music.
I was hoping this would be a commentary on how Hollywood behind-the-scenes (ie production companies, agencies) continues to hire clones of themselves, and just like copies of copies, these "clones" have become more shallow and less knowledgeable as they come. When 95% of the people wtih "green light" power identify with, had friends or relatives like or want to be Seth Rogen-types, then you know that Hollywood is doomed-for. All the young actors look alike and are interchangeable, especially the women. Even Scarlett Johansen has become non-descript. No one is taking the shlock and pushing the envelope like Heath Ledger did. Why are movies so dumbed-down nowadays? I look at the Oscar & Golden Globes nominees and shrug my shoulders!
"Slumdog Millionaire"
"Doubt"
"Milk"
"Frost/Nixon"
ALL cookie cutter movies with interchangeable casts.
Get real.
Ahhhh.... the typical response of the entertainment fundie. Movies are a religion that must not be questioned or criticized. Ditto for rock, jazz music, and "edgy" HBO comedies.
Frank Schaeffer pointed out that we (the left) need to stop worshiping celebrity. That includes enshrining moving pictures, I think.
Have a blessed evening.
Trying something new, I like it. We'll see how it works out, if it holds up.
"YouTube produces some 9,232 hours of new video every day."
Yeah, and 9,231 hours of it are a total waste of time. I'm no fan of most of the junk on TV, but there are at least a few shows worth Tivo-ing. Youtube is mostly a wasteland inhabited by inane high school nitwits. Most of what I wind up viewing on youtube was originally produced for TV anyway. To compare the daily original "content" produced on youtube to professionally produced film & television is a stretch. They're two different animals.
I think you are making a mistake in assuming that YouTube is a certain type of content. YouTube is anything anybody puts up there. Yes there is a lot of junk, but there's a lot of junk everywhere. Finding the good stuff that you want to see is the key.
And YouTube isn't the only place for video on the internet. There are a lot of other video hosting services like blip.tv and Vimeo. Much of the really good content has it's own website too. Check out our little knitting show at
http://LetsKnit2gether.com
We created it to prove that internet video didn't have to be crap.
Sharon, your article actually provides me with tremendous hope. Let me explain.
This weekend, the three most successful movies were of an idiotic Mall Cop, a blood feud between two families of vampires, and a Holiday Inn for dogs. In short, Hollywood is insulting everyone's intelligence and PROFITING FROM IT TO THE TUNE OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS!
They're also profiting from a recession that has forced people to choose cheap forms of entertainment (which is what movies are compared to a rock concert or sporting event or dinner at a nice restuarant).
Slumdog Millionaire's BOLLYWOOD form gives the consumer hope that the limits placed upon America's population may be coming to an end. The success of this film may mean that "alternative" movies may be what's needed to shake us out of our Hollywood induced coma.
YouTube reflects how normal black-male/white female relationships are in this country because the website is a mirror of America. While European filmakers have had little difficulty doing this (even placing Samuel L. Jackson in bed with a white Afrikaner), Hollywood never will because senior citizen men run the industry.
Sharon, Hollywood's failure to adapt to the digital age is not the problem. IT'S THE SOLUTION!
SHHH!!!! - Let it fail!
Made for the Web content is worth exactly what the consumer pays for it.
As a fan of Tesla, you should appreciate the ones who struggle against a larger and entrenched entity with their innovations, however primitive in their development they may be.
Tesla was underwritten by Westinghouse. It was his neurosis that did him in. He gave away the patent to his most important invention, the AC engine, which is STILL in use today.
With Digital Cameras and Editing Software talented content producers have a fairly level playing field.
One can only watch a Cat Eating Spaghetti so many times. To equate that with the work of professionals dedicated to their craft is silly.
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