269 karma · joined August 8, 2011
www.charliecurran.com
Some of the best writing about being alive right now to be found if you're interested in anthropology, art history, and philosophy. Can't recommend it enough.
This is straight up surveillance that will cannibalize what it's observing.
They're quite creative, they're gonna dazzle your machine vision. Why build tools to hinder/distort/build paranoia into something you're interested in if you genuinely are?
2/ I've been a longtime reader of @stratechery, especially @benthompson's analysis of Netflix // can't recommend enough his posts on aggregation theory when thinking the future of media distribution, especially re: Netflix.
3/ So…it wasn’t new or surprising to read that Netflix is debt financing a larger slate than Universal, and competing for zero-sum prestige films courting top talent and mounting a massive award campaign to check off their first best picture nom on the strength of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma.
4/ What felt new and “infrared” was the reach for Lew Wassermann’s lineage.
5/ “After graduating from the University of Arizona with a film degree…Mr. Stuber got a job at Universal in 1992 as a publicity assistant. His duties included delivering news clippings at 8 a.m. daily to the studio’s all-powerful chief, Lew Wasserman.
6/ “After about six months, Mr. Wasserman, apparently impressed by Mr. Stuber’s punctuality, spoke to him for the first time. “He said, ‘Hey kid, what do you want to be when you grow up?’” Mr. Stuber recalled. The young Mr. Stuber’s quick reply? “You.”
7/ For those less geeked on Hollywood history, Lew was the man responsible for dismantling the Studio System as it had been known, and with the invention of film packaging gave birth to the start system we’re living the end times of.
8/ That’s why connecting Netflix’s disruption back to the coup that reconfigured Hollywood for me sounds like a formal challenge. What a time to be alive.
I have to imagine a lot of these commenters would say the same in regards to any sort of subjective artistic choice that isn't purely optimized for efficiency.
I would like to leave you with a quote by Briano Eno from a really good lecture he gave several years ago that I hope can provide a jumping off point for alternate ways to think about style, and why I think y'all are asking the wrong questions.
"So the first question is, why is any of that important? Why do we do it? And notice it’s not only us relatively wealthy people, in terms of global wealth, who are doing it - it’s everybody that we know of. Every human group we know of is spending a lot of their time – in fact almost all of their surplus time and energy – is spent in the act of stylising things and enjoying other people’s stylisations of things. So my question is, what is it for? In fact, my friend Danny Hillus, who’s a scientist, was asked by a well-known science website, along with about 300 other scientists, he was asked what is the most interesting scientific question at the moment? A lot of the other people replied with things about the cosmological constant and Ryman’s Hypothesis and all these very complicated things. And his question was very simple: he said why do we like music? And if you start thinking about that, that is really one of the most mysterious things you can imagine. Why do we even have an interest in music? Why do we have preferences? Why do we like this song better than that one? Why do we like this Beethoven sonata better than that Beethoven sonata? Why do we like this performance of that same sonata better than that other performance? We had very fine distinctions about things that we prefer, aesthetic things. And, yet, none of it seems to have much to do with functionalism, with staying alive and certainly not with industries I would say." - Brian Eno
https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/speeches/2015/bbc-music-jo...
This magic, the lady-in-a-box, rabbit-in-a-hat form of magic, is predicated on two questions: where did she go? And how did we get here? When you’re a baby, things are constantly appearing out of fucking nowhere and vanishing with no hope of return, until at some point you learn pattern recognition. But let’s not forget that on some level believing that the sun will rise again is rooted in magical thinking."
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.
I still truly believe that being called a liar and hung up on trying to explain my position was an unnecessary line to cross when dealing with someone who had been consistently renting from them withut issue and had returned their lost gear notifying them within 24 hours of receiving it. But then again, that may just be me. :/