You have to beat the man to be the man

There are several reasons why Y combinator is unlikely to kill hollywood.

The Author touches on part of the problem. To make a good movie you need:

1) an excellent script (if it reads like shit, its going to look worse, if the pitch is "its like X but...." its a fail)

2) a significant amount of captial ($1million)

3) quality actors

4) ridiculously good organisation skills (you'll be organising 40+ people hundreds and thousands of pounds worth of equipment for around 40 days (or a lot more))

that's just first part. You then need to wrangle all the footage, and massage it into a cohesive and flowing narrative, something most "film" buffs fail cataclysmically ally at. (why do you think most youtube videos are only 3 minutes top?)

Once you've spent three years of your life doing that, you then need to get your movie seen. That means persuading people who think you are worse than dogshit to watch a movie that they really couldn't care about, much less actually pay you for.

This will take you the next 3-6 years. It also costs a lot.

I thought this was a great read, clearly the author has thought through is argument and does a good job of describing his reasoning about the challenges the tech community faces with regard to Hollywood's livelyhood.

The only weakness for me was that it is hard to argue from a point too far removed from the sources of your arguments. Specifically if you are arguing the future of "entertainment" then Hollywood is but a piece, similarly if you argue too closely to the source such as the future of "movies" then technology is but a piece. So finding a place in the spectrum where one point of view and dominate another isn't a very solid way of making your point. :-)

That said, it made me wonder if computer games will go through the 'star' system (clearly some of that has happened with titles like "Sid Meir's Civilization") or if it will be different for programs. At the 'top' (or most diffuse?) point of the spectrum you can take examples from music, books, games, movies, and television as ways people tease dollars from consumers. And following that line of reasoning lead me to thinking about the fundamental question, is it money or is it art?

There are two parallel universes in most entertainment systems, the one that is designed to extract the most money (consumer focused) and the one that is designed to express the artists intent most faithfully (artist focused). The latter occasionally makes a lot of money, the former occasionally makes very little money. The "space" is a blend of the two.

Many of the developers I know are "artists' where they have very strong feelings about how their programs should work, and I believe we see a lot of that here on HN. But I also know engineers who are focused more on the "business" where they write code that makes them the most money, period. And they are often harshly judged in fora such as this one.

So where does that leave us? I think it makes it important to fix the context before we debate, as that affects the persuasiveness of the different points of view. It also suggests that Paul's call to action could be interpreted more literally to be "Work on the 'consumer focused' side of tech for entertainment harder."

If you think of Entertainment as a giant pie of dollars, getting more of those dollars can be achieved either by being better than other players in your wedge, or by increasing the size of your wedge relative to the other players. Looked at in that context, it isn't about "beating" Hollywood so much as making Hollywood less relevant.

When I clicked on this link the anchor text was "Why Silicon Valley will never beat Hollywood" (or something like that). When I came back, it had changed to "You have to beat the man to be the man," which is the title of the piece. But IMHO the original title (presumably the one written by the submitter) was much better and more descriptive. I don't think I would have clicked on this link with the current title.

There seems to be a lot of this headline-rewriting going on on HN nowadays. IMO it's going a little too far.

"At the very heart of the film industry’s longevity is the art of narrative storytelling which has been refined continuously"

The overwhelming majority of Hollywood movies are terrible, shallow stories with formulaic development that are designed to grab money from specific demographics. There is hardly anything artistic left.

It may be what people want, but let's not pretend that great works of art are what keep Hollywood profitable.

"you have to remember this is a sixty-five billion dollar a year industry that has survived multiple world wars and the great depression"

The typewriter industry also survived those wars and the great depression, and where is it now? Times change, and businesses that adapt poorly to a changing market will be replaced.

Great article with sound reasoning. I love reading op-ed style pieces that legitimately educate me on something just outside of my radar.

Two points to add:

1. I disagree that Netflix can't win by trying to out-HBO HBO, because as I understand Netflix' strategy is closer to Amazon Prime. Amazon loses money on Prime shipping (although with volume, not as much as you think) but in exchange they become the default place that customers come to buy just about anything they need, which means that loss in shipping was actually a massive reduction in marketing. They tilt the customer acquisition cost lower and the LTV higher. If Netflix succeeds in creating content that most consumers can only get in one place, it will dramatically increase the size of the iceberg under the surface.

2. One of the most interesting and successful tech/media hybrids I'm aware of is hitRECord, which is spearheaded by the brilliant Regular Joe aka Joseph Gordon-Levitt. This is a stunning example of crowd-sourcing and community collaboration working. http://www.hitrecord.org/ - check out "Morgan M. Morgansen's Date With Destiny" on the Greatest Hits page: http://www.hitrecord.org/greatest

It's silly to speculate whether YC will or will not fund the evolution of entertainment. It's also not an interesting debate.

Charlie Curran's mistake is thinking the entertainment of the future will be just like the entertainment of the past. pg's essay was a challenge to find what the future will look like. He wasn't excluding any possibility. He wasn't predicting the demise of every single aspect of Hollywood, or even, of any specific aspect of Hollywood

pg was just pointing out that entertainment will continue to evolve, that change is the only thing that's for sure, and that like all industries, Hollywood is not immune to outside challenges.

"the basic formula of pairing known stars with compelling stories has not and will not change"

Didn't it change with the advent of the modern TV Shows?

How big were Schwimmer, Laurie or Cranston as stars before their show made a hit? Laurie was locally known but not that much.

With modern show, you have select good actors for their role, not stars from an universal pool, and that's what changed.

And I fail to name terribly many films in the last ten years that can be compared to the best TV shows which are a plenty.

This article seems to ignore one of the biggest, most basic issues facing hollywood right now - the demise of innovation in the VFX industry. Studios have carefully orchestrated an incredibly hostile working environment for people creating the biggest cash-cow it has left. For profit colleges are pumping out scores of young people every year with just enough training to get a low-paying job in whatever tax-incentive location is paying the most at any given time. Then you work 80-100+ hour weeks for a few months and are kicked back out on the street to start over in a new city (or country) at a new company, probably for even less money. It's a HUGE crisis and causing a massive exodus of mid and senior-level talent, myself included. Check out www.vfxsoldier.com or effectscorner.blogspot.com for more info.

All the while, film budgets go up, ticket prices go up, profits go up.

My point is that there IS a huge potential for disruptive influences in filmmaking, television and VOD, but it will likely come from the people that have been straddling the line between innovative technology and entertainment for longer than anyone - the VFX people. It's happening already.

Now if only I could find some time to work to work on that side project...

I don't think the author is responding to Graham appropriately. Graham's argument is against the power structure of Big Media, not the enduring value of narrative. Hence Graham's post beginning by pointing to the industries' push for SOPA signaling that they're running out of ideas, not on how to entertain people, but to constrict people to being entertained on Big Media's terms. This has a negative effect on quality of narrative, as many have noted.

I think the nature of the confusion is that Graham hints at his personal preferences on how people should spend time ("It would be great if what people did instead of watching shows was exercise more and spend more time with their friends and families" [0]) right besides endorsements for products that shift demand for screen narratives ("new media", "things... that have little in common with movies and TV except competing with them for finite audience attention" [0]).

But even with that said, Graham's view is ultimately inclusive of Curran's. Graham:

>"There will be several answers, ranging from new ways to produce and distribute shows..." [0]

Curran:

>"The internet has paved the way once again for a vertically integrated system of production and distribution, and we know that today’s youth is hungry for stories that matter to them. Whomever is the first to put that together will win." [1]

Screen narrative was never in question.

Edit: Forgot to add links

[0]: http://ycombinator.com/rfs9.html

[1]: http://charliecurran.com/you-have-to-beat-the-man-to-be-the-...

I think many, if not most, of the people in this conversation really are forgetting that taste is subjective. What you view as a terrible film is often what millions of people enjoy. What you view as great cinema millions of others would find boring.

As an antidote most people I know do not share the same tastes as me (I find the 30s-50s as my golden age of cinema and love Humphrey Bogart) as I with them. While my wife can't stand black and white movies (with a few exceptions) I also really dislike most modern romantic comedies (with a few exceptions such as Love Actually). Of course she says she enjoyed the black and white movie that I made. :)

This also holds true to television as well. I don't want to keep up with the Kardashians or see which C-list celebrity has the best dance moves. Other people didn't want to watch Rubicon or don't want to watch Portland Timbers soccer. (I also think I'll be much worse off with unbundling of cable channels as the niche channels are often included in packages with more popular channels and will likely die off without enough interest and pricing power to sustain the programming.)

John August, a screenwriter with a great blog and podcast and a geek at heart, has made the observation that talented writers are starting to prefer working with TV (channels such as HBO, Showtime, AMC, FX, etc.) as they're given more latitude to tell their stories than they are in a feature length film for a studio. So, if you were to ask me for a prediction (and you didn't), that is the way I imagine the industry going with Amazon, Netflix, etc. picking up some of those shows as well. Those, along with live sports, will continue to draw audiences as they provide topics of conversation for the majority of society. (Obviously you and your group of friends are too sophisticated for that and discuss philosophy and indie rock but you're a small segment of society.)

You can never please everybody. And you'll likely go broke trying.

Netflix was started in Los Gatos, California. Silicon-Valley-ish. Gumroad sells documentary films. They've grown. Funded by Silicon Valley Kleiner Perkins VC fund.

I disagree with Paul Graham's notion that we need to find a better way to entertain ourselves. The narratives of films are powerful and are not always fun and entertaining yet people will go watch them; even if they walk out a bit disturbed. Hollywood creates content. I think to beat Hollywood, would require a platform that enables the film production process to happen outside the Hollywood system. Youtube, Netflix already have the distribution end. Movie stars are not a requirement for a good film, they can be replaced with good upcoming talent, (visit any major drama school). A large budget is not a requirement either, principal photography has never been cheaper. So what does Hollywood have that makes it special? It has the network which connects and coordinates all the key players (actors,writers,cameramen,animators etc). That's the problem that Silicon Valley needs to solve (not entertainment). It(we?) need to provide a platform to streamline the process of making film. Perhaps Paul Graham should have thought of an Incubator for Filmmakers. Demo night could be a short film.

i like this post/article/statement. it reminds me that as technologists we tend to want to reduce things to algorithms.

that just doesn't work when you get to aesthetics and the human side of the equation.

Hey everyone, I just got out of the editing bay and was really happy to see such a well thought out discussion playing out amongst the community. I wanted to take a moment to clarify my argument and respond to some of your comments in the hopes of furthering the conversation.

The major criticism I noticed was that I somehow misunderstood Graham's argument or that it functioned in such a way that subsumed mine. As I understood Graham's call to arms to kill Hollywood, he was soliciting entrepreneurs to start thinking about how to disrupt Big Media's grasp on the entertainment market. While I am whole heartedly against the practices of a Hollywood we all can agree is in a current rut (e.g. SOPA, DMCA takedowns, etc.) I do not believe that Hollywood has peaked, nor that his prescriptions for hastening its demise are feasible. I took his call as soliciting two options for responding to Hollywood:

a.) By creating more entertaining offerings that would create a zero-sum trade off with Hollywood's offerings ultimately rendering their products irrelevant.

b.) Leveraging technology to create alternate production and distribution mechanisms including new media and interactive programming offerings.

My argument takes a historical approach to examining how Hollywood has previously addressed similar disruptions citing the emergence of television and the rise/collapse of the studio system to begin thinking how one might approach “eating Hollywood's lunch”. Against alternative forms of entertainment and distribution mechanisms, one thing has remained consistent and that is the power of cinema be it in episodic television content or feature length material to consistently survive industry transformations and reorganizations. I think this historical pattern is owed to the nature of the medium itself which satisfies a very human need which is the transmission of stories. I believe that film more than any other medium has refined this craft, and in many ways developed the visual language through which we understand contemporary storytelling. Other mediums will of course tell stories, but I think only filmmaking for the foreseeable future will have the ability to tell stories with the richness and complexity we've evolved as a species to receive and share.

I think it's misguided to place a technologist's view of industry disruption before an examination of the medium's history because I believe it discounts the power of narrative and how we've found ourselves in this particular position. Despite Hollywood's current rut the market for film exhibition has only grown with foreign markets and alternative distribution mechanisms expanding the potential reach of Hollywood's content. I think what is needed now is a leveraging of technology to push film to its inherent potential to tell meaningful stories, what Hollywood once understood, rather than view it as a tool to destroy an industry.

A few of the comments that I thought particularly interesting/pertinent to respond to.

@Nileshtrivedi

I am assuming that the basic format of narrative television and features will remain a constant, due to the historical evolution of the form into its current iteration. Initially conceived films were exhibited at nickelodeons which served up customers short form content though it failed to evolve beyond a mere novelty that soon went through its own bust. It was Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount Pictures, who championed the format as we currently know it drawing on his understanding of how storytelling dating back to Plato, Aristotle, and the great play-writes of yesteryear stumbled on a nearly universal structure for telling effective stories.

@KaiserPro

I absolutely agree the current pipeline of monetizing Hollywood's offerings is fundamentally broken and has to be done away with. Theatrical distribution demands enormous costs guaranteeing that we will only see low-risk content that has proven to be Hollywood's undoing. The internet and Video on Demand offers a chance to remove these costs in many ways and generate riskier fare delivered straight to the consumer.

@Walshemj and Djloche

Coming up through film school witnessing the rise of crowdfunding and the widespread adoption of digital filmmaking and editing, the costs must and absolutely can come down. These film's budgets assume a pipeline that requires enormous spends on development, production, distribution, print/advertising, and studio overhead. I think Vice offers a great example of how low-cost content paired appropriately with relevant niche markets can provide compelling entertainment alternatives to Hollywood's current offerings.

@Paulsutter

I am not by any means ruling out the inevitable evolution of entertainment offerings we'll see over the next twenty years, but I think to assume film will go away is a hard position to defend. I think it's far more likely that a medium which has demonstrated serious lasting power will evolve and adapt rather than be dismembered by dying conglomerates or new media offerings which will be in their infancy. Far more likely I believe we'll see something similar to the era of New Hollywood in the sixties and early seventies repeat itself.

@Betterunix

The claim that the vast majority of Hollywood's movies are terrible is really a subjective view. For every Transformers there are independent alternatives and risky studio films that sneak through the development pipeline. However, I do agree that the current system of exhibition necessitates a system of tent-pole event films that will inevitably sink the industry if left as it exists now. Look no further than what George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had to say about the sustainability of the current Hollywood model.

http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/is-hollywood-model-d...

@Guard-of-terra

Absolutely, the star system underwent a fundamental shift with the introduction of television though its ability to adapt to the new pipeline I believe displays its lasting power. A really great read on the transformation the star system underwent with the introduction of television is “Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame,” by Ty Burr. A short excerpt that might address your comment.

“The essence of the broadcast revolution is simple: it offered a literal home theatre. No longer did you have to go out to see the stars and be entertained. Now they came to you. This affected the kinds of stars who were created from the 1950s on, in the sense that the people you let into your house are different from the people you pay to see in a theatre. They're more like you and me, for one thing, which also means you and I are more like the stars. For decades – until, arguably, the arrival of nighttime soaps in the 1970s and '80s – the most celebrated figures on the small screen evoked not glamour but ordinariness. They acted out comic and dramatic versions of our own dilemmas, or they filled history with life-sized personalities rather than the bigger-than-life stars of film.”

@Hayesdaniel

While I absolutely feel for you and everyone I know in the Visual Effects industry who has been clearly mistreated in the current system of studio filmmaking, I don't believe that the resolution of that issue is the most fundamental problem facing contemporary filmmaking. I think it's a symptom of larger ills that will need to be resolved. Ultimately I believe if we can't disrupt the model in its current form collectively secured bargaining rights and organization similar to how other industry groups such as the Screenwriter’s Guild or the Directors Guild of America could go a long way towards negotiating fair pay for visual effects studios and subsequently their employees.

@MaysonL

I didn't by any means set out to ignore the success of the video game industry or Pixax, but for my argument I didn't believe them wholly relevant. I think that Pixar offers a really great example how well crafted storytelling above all can be film's savior. They go to incredible lengths to develop and protect their stories, and it shows. However, I don't think that they are the answer to saving the industry either. I have a real fondness for everything Pixar is doing, one of the best storytellers I had the chance to know at film school now works there, but I think the trend of Pixarification of films is actually a threat to the kinds of film that will ultimately usher in a new era of Hollywood. You might enjoy what Danny Boyle recently said on this point.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz6W0h3r30k

I know this will be a controversial statement, as I get into this argument with my friends who are game design majors on a regular basis, but I do not believe that video games will supplant film as the highest form of narrative storytelling. The industry is relatively young and as such most likely won't create its own Citizen Kane for quite some time. I think far more likely is that a reinvigorated hollywood will become far more intertwined. Looking to Microsoft and Spielberg's recent collaborations I think is telling of where these trends will head with narrative filmmaking supplementing and expanding upon franchises, and video games working more closely with Hollywood to infuse their games with the level of storytelling audiences have grown to expect from their entertainment.

Great, provocative thinkpiece.

I'd add that considering the number of expensive flops this summer, the audiences' responsiveness to the massive CGI-spectacles and remakes of recent years might be beginning to wane. To make film No Country for Old Men again might require not 'beating' the man but replacing spectacle with heartfelt passion. Pay more attention to why gay-rights are unstoppable.

I'd consider NetFlix to be a prototypical Silicon Valley start-up and they are showing the way forward with House of Cards, which I thought was fantastic. It might be a Hollywood formula, but they are bypassing traditional distribution channels.

Lets play devils advocate - How might VR change the nature of narrative storytelling, and what would that evolution look like?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6280754

The real reason a VC company isn't going to kill hollywood is because there's not enough money in it. The author throws around $65 billion industry as if that's some sort of impressive number. FB alone is worth $100B. We could liquidate FB and buy the entire industry and shut it down if we really wanted to. Compare that to LNKD, EBAY, GOOG, hell even CRM. We have hit after hit after hit that are worth more than the entire film industry after a few years' worth of nurturing.

No, the reason that a VC-funded company won't kill Hollywood is because there's not enough money there - not because Hollywood has some sort of monopoly on how to entertain people.

>since the days of Adolf Zucker

I think he is referring to Adolph Zukor.

Of course, Mr. Curran totally ignores Silicon Valley's two major successes in entertainment: video games and Pixar.

"instead we see Youtube desperately trying to go Hollywood, offering lucrative contracts to production companies and celebrities to create branded content for the site"

Last time I've saw the TV it had feature films about wild life and a lot of youtube videos about pets but not one "celebrity" in sight.

The word "celebrity" makes me want to vomit. Can we please ignore that and instead disrupt just that part of Hollywood and TV that doesn't make us vomit? And don't touch the other part with 5 meter pole.