”I used to be in the movie business where you made something really because you cared about it," he said, noting that popular reception mattered more than anything else.
What arrogance.
What arrogance.
> "The system is not necessarily to please anybody," Diller said, suggesting Prime Video's primary purpose is to get more customers to sign up for Amazon Prime.
Memory is kind. Barry Diller's Paramount made Orca, Bad News Bears Go to Japan, etc. Art and commerce were always mixed. The arrogance is in being able to convince yourself it was different in the old days without risk of being contradicted.
Still, you have to admire Barry Diller.
Of course that doesn't mean it was ever "pure" at any point in time, just that it got worse. I've seen so much regression and dumbing down in just the last 20 years, that I don't care if that guy is a hypocrite, I think he happens to be correct anyway. I see what I see, and I can only imagine how it would seem if I had overview of 50 years of that shit.
> When books or pictures in reproduction are thrown on the market cheaply and attain huge sales, this does not affect the nature of the objects in question. But their nature is affected when these objects themselves are changed rewritten, condensed, digested, reduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies. This does not mean that culture spreads to the masses, but that culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.
> The result of this is not disintegration but decay, and those who actively promote it are not the Tin Pan Alley composers but a special kind of intellectuals, often well read and well informed, whose sole function is to organize, disseminate, and change cultural objects in order to persuade the masses that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and perhaps educational as well. There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
-- Hannah Arendt
^ Good luck making movies (with a budget, and an audience) that are not entertaining, because they have something serious to say that doesn't happen to be funny. They do exist, and in absolute numbers I bet there's more of them made each year than ever before, just because of accessibility of the technology. But it would be dishonest to focus on those and ignore the fact that, say, three The Hobbit movies exist, or how people break out in tears over Star Wars movies -- and all that insane, infantile, extremely commercialized utter crap.
Again, Barry Diller may have been just as guilty of that stuff. I don't know and I don't care, because he doesn't matter. The world matters, the human species matters. How cool a specific individual is or isn't doesn't matter, they and anyone who remembered anyone who remembered them will be gone in a few centuries.
> The arrogance is in being able to convince yourself it was different in the old days without risk of being contradicted.
That would be nostalgia. And I'm not even convinced the assessment is wrong. And calling someone "arrogant" isn't contradicting them anyway, it's avoiding the argument if anything.
If you don't have a large talent pool fuelled by financial prosperity, you lack the prerequisites to create works of the highest quality.
In other words, nothing much comes from it.