The Death of Hollywood

In many ways I'm not the person you should ask about what's eating Hollywood. Criticism is best delivered by those who love the underlying institution. I don't watch many movies or much TV. The death of Hollywood, that engine of American Culture, is a large enough story that no one really can understand it in full. In which case I'll take a look. I should be clear at this point that when I say "Hollywood," I mean in part the town, in part the movie industry in general, but mostly the dream that is Hollywood.

Strap in, this is going to be a long one. I'll start with more general trends that eat away at the industry. The further in we get, the more I'll dig into the core problem --- they aren't writing good stories anymore --- and why they can't solve it. If I give short shrift to a favorite complaint of yours, please understand it's due to length.

Secular Trends

There are a lot of things working against the industry. Hollywood provides entertainment, which means they're always going to compete with other entertainment sources. YouTube offers endless dumb fun without going through the studio system. Video games offer a better return on your dollar. You can buy a game for the same price as a trip to the movies that will entertain you for ten times as many hours. The home theater experience has gotten so good that you don't have to leave your living room for spectacle. Yes, they sold you Die Hard to begin with, but every DVD rewatch is free. The old stuff is so much better than the new we get today. Popcorn's cheaper there, too.

Then there's the elephant in the room. AI. I'm not going to argue how good it gets. Suffice it to say that it threatens to seriously disrupt the industry. Whether we'll whistle up movies on demand or whether adopting AI can replace any number of Hollywood jobs (writers, yes, but also lighting techs and sound mixing and on and on) the studio system should be bracing for a big shock. The industry's recent overreliance on CGI hurts, too. Partly this makes the actor's job harder, but also it opens up more opportunities for AI.

There are other problems relating to Hollywood in particular. I don't want to spend this post arguing California politics, so I'll sum up the problem in the name "Gavin Newsom". Alongside that, you've got the California diaspora. Whenever someone gets fed up and leaves, the state is poorer for it. If a third-string stuntman decides show business isn't worth it anymore and heads out to Idaho, you don't have him to call on when the situation requires a third-string stuntman. Never inquire for whom the U-Haul tows. It tows for thee.

There's another potential existential threat on the horizon --- the TikTok attention span. If cellphone doomscrolling trains the populace to be unable to sit through a two-hour movie, then you don't want to be in the movie business. I don't know if I buy that this is a real problem. People are willing to sit through things worthy of their attention. If they can't maintain attention at all, they're going to have problems elsewhere in life, going to have to train themselves out of it, and incidentally back into the market for movies. But it might be a problem, I don't know.

China's a threat too. Not just as intellectual property pirates, but also the Chinese film industry has been spinning up. Fewer Chinese exports means less money sluicing through the system. Money can be used to patch over many problems.

All of these trends work against Hollywood. All of them (except maybe AI) could be bucked individually, or perhaps all together. We're used to facing impossible odds but trying anyway through pluck and determination. Ask anyone looking for a job. Bucking them needs a healthy industry. Let's look at Hollywood specifically next.

Woe Business like Show Business

First off, Hollywood has always operated with a hit/flop model. If you make ten movies, seven will be flops, two will break even (more or less) and one will be a hit that pays for all the flops. It's clearly possible to succeed, but it's uncomfortable. More, it tends to blur signals. Was it a flop because this guy is no good, or was he unlucky somehow? The model also favors sure things. Add more spectacle, more money, to the next picture because the public always likes spectacle. Until the people feel like all they're getting is spectacle, there's no heart to the movies anymore.

Worse than that is art done by committee. Nobody likes throwing around dollars by the hundred million without paying attention to where exactly they're going. (Government aside.) Supposing the studio hired a genius, gave him that budget, and asked for a movie. You think they'll be able to resist leaning over his shoulders and adding notes? You think every executive who's asking for changes will also be a genius? Movies made on that scale will necessarily have their edges sanded off and will have a harder time innovating. Perhaps they're less likely to be flops, but you're also abrading the chance they'll be hits.

The alternative to art by committee, by the way, is to find someone whose creative vision you trust and give him the freedom to make what he wants. This does not guarantee success. See The Acolyte.

Another way they try to avoid flops is by bringing in a preexisting audience. This is why you get legacy sequels thirty years after a movie was a hit. Video game adaptations might be the next big thing. Ask a gamer what they'd like Hollywood to adapt and see them wince. Hollywood has a long tradition of screwing up other people's stories; of ignoring what made them great in the first place. Oftentimes it's even worse. The only way a guy can get his project made is if he attaches someone else's name to it, which means the adaptation bears no fundamental relation to the original. (Alien: Earth looks an awful lot like they wanted to be writing a Blade Runner story.) Let's take a look at the faithless adaptation.

I watched the first season of Rings of Power. It takes Galadriel, whom we know from the books to be a figure of wisdom and majesty, and makes her into an angry, driven warrior woman. Absent everything else about that show, what you've done is slapped the label of something I love on a creation of your own and asked me to love it as well. I heard of one writer (I don't remember for what) who advised not to look at the source comics because "we don't want to influence your take." That's not the same story. They'll often rewrite the story so that their new thing works at the expense of the old. They try to convince you to like it by drowning it in memberberries. That is, they'll include reminders of the thing you loved; show you a reference to the original for that brief frisson of recognition. Memberberries are only sweet when the underlying show is good.

When the adaptation releases, in the best case you've got something people like on its own (Starship Troopers). In worse scenarios, it's no good, it fails, and Hollywood blames the fans (when they aren't deliberately baiting them as a cynical marketing strategy). Because when you take something I like, change it to remove what was good, add in your own stuff, which is stupid, and present a lousy show, it's my fault for not liking it. Clearly I'm not open to new things.

Does everything they write have to be terrible? Yes, and for multiple reasons, which will take me a long time to spell out. One of the contributing factors is second-screen viewing. The audience plinks on their phone and only occasionally looks up to see the show. If you have two screens going at once, you'll miss things. The studios (Netflix in particular) ask show writers to add dialogue to describe what's on the screen. That leads to incredibly obvious dialogue for anyone watching. ("My goodness! His head's come off!") It leaves writers with two unappetizing choices; either write good stuff for a visual medium and lose everyone who wants to also doomscroll, or write stuff for second screen viewing that's going to feel slow for anyone not holding a phone.

Hollywood suffers from unions. They're stuffed with them and they slow down business. Part of the reason the shows in the last two years have been awful comes from the writer's strike. I hear the writer's union is striking against itself right now. I understand the union members wanting to get contractual guarantees before AI upends everything. It seems like a dangerous idea to me, but perhaps it's their best option available. I'll merely note that the whole process ain't going to do the viewing public any favors.

Before I leave the business side, I should mention the Warner Bros. Sale. I'll only say the sale reduces the number of studios. Large corporations are not known for their creativity.

The Hollywood Bubble

No, not their insufferable politics, that's coming up in the next section. Right now, I want to remind us all that show business people aren't normal people. The studios are enmeshed in time-honored traditions, things like the eternal Yes-Man. Actors, writers, everybody's always got their eye on the next gig. That means that you've always got to be careful not to annoy anyone important. Therefore, when a show fails, it is the toxic fans, rather than any specific person, at fault. Please hire me tomorrow. That kills accurate feedback. Without accurate feedback, your problems keep getting worse until you can't ignore them.

There's a modern twist on those problems, too, and that's the Twitter echo chamber. Your 'creative' goes on social media. Some people offer adulation, some people offer really rude comments. Because Twitter. Or BlueSky, or whatever platform. The 'creative' blocks the trolls. If you're blocking everyone you suspect of being a troll you'll end up blocking anyone offering criticism, however legitimate (and even if it sounds legitimate to us, how legitimate can it be if it disagrees with the yes-men?) Net result, you have the illusion of engaging with the public, but you're only engaging with a public who'll offer unstinting adulation. That's not a healthy feedback loop.

There's also no self-importance like Hollywood self-importance. These days it manifests as actor podcasts and Twitter feeds. And the public learns they're really only good at acting. Hard to maintain the old Hollywood glamour that way. People get too much of you.

There's another, more subtle problem with a late-stage industry like Hollywood. Writers who only know how to be writers. You grow up as a kid watching TV. You want to make shows for a living. You go to film school, then grind in Hollywood for twenty years, getting crap jobs in writing rooms before finally getting your big chance. Then what do you write? All you know is the life of a writer. (Partly this comes from another problem with America, the HR culture. How do you know who to hire? Their resume is in order. And how can a resume be in order without a film school degree?)

Tell me if you've seen this one: the hero is fighting a gang of bad guys. Despite being outnumbered, he uses superior skill to take them down one by one. Then the big guy comes in. Our hero tries skill, but skill isn't enough to overcome the raw brawn. Things look bad for our hero, but finally he's able to use found objects or superior observation of the battlefield to outsmart his opponent and win.

Of course, you've seen that one. That's every fight scene. They aren't fights; they're stories expressed in choreography. It's the difference between a sports movie and a sports game. Unless you've been in a fight, you'll rehash fights you've seen on screen, which means you get the same fight scene repeated with interchangeable heroes. Perhaps we'd all benefit from some intercollegiate MMA in those film schools.

That spills over into everything. Science fiction is better when the writer knows science. Stories are more compelling when you understand real-world limitations and force yourself to write around them. You need to know more than writing to get that.

One more problem with being a career writer: you end up deeply uninterested in telling the story straight. In Starfleet Academy there's an episode where one character acts like she's from the 90s Nickelodeon show, Clarissa Explains. She (the character, not Clarissa) breaks with the general tone and feel of the show by talking to the audience directly, and things get scribbled on the screen in crayon. What nobody's explained to me is why they felt the need to pay tribute to that show. It's unconnected to Star Trek, it's not science fiction, and the people who are going to recognize the gag and appreciate it are millennials, 90s kids. That's not Starfleet Academy's target demographic. Why did everyone, from writers to showrunners to producers, think that reference was a good idea? Because they're all Hollywood people who know TV shows. People who think everyone's interested in a TV show no one remembers. Telling the story without that doodad wouldn't have made it tolerable, but it would have helped.

Finally, there's the Oscarbait movie. Once upon a time, Hollywood made movies for the public. Some the public liked and those received awards. Then Harvey Weinstein invented the Oscarbait movie. In essence it's meant to appeal to Hollywood and forget the public, exchanging production money for industry respect. At a minimum this doesn't make new customers. Lately it seems to have gotten worse, leaving the impression that the award shows are an act of punishment because the general public is liking the wrong things. (Emilia Perez.) The award shows become irrelevant, and the casual fans wander off to entertainment that seems glad to see them.

Hollywood Politics

Since we're already on award shows, we might as well start with award show idiots. (Obligatory Ricky Gervais clip.) The actors get up on stage and want to appear to be people of substance, so they spout off a stupid take on an issue that half the country disagrees with. You might not boycott their movies, but it tarnishes their star power.

Then there's 'clapter'. Humor acts as a sort of catharsis. You can get something similar by reinforcing your beliefs. Hence you'll see on the comedy news shows jokes that aren't jokes. They provoke not laughs but applause, 'clapter'. It can work as long as you're in tune with your audience, but, again, you've cut yourself off from half the country.

There's one more level to this kind of thing, even if the audience agrees. You know how for one month the entire NFL turns pink? It's not helping. Everyone is 'aware' of breast cancer already. You're not helping any more than you've ended racism by printing "End Racism" in the end zones. If you're selling entertainment but stepping on your product with a moral lecture, then you can't expect your customers to get the same high.

That sums up the detrimental effects of ordinary activism. You still have the institutional propagandizing. Get ready for...

The Message

Leftism looks to push History in the right direction. The entertainment industry is threaded through with leftism, much like tendrils of fungus grow through a corpse. Every show they put out is chock full of shibboleths meant to advance history.

It's an article of faith in Hollywood that everyone deserves to have role models that represent them. They think a black boy can't ever pattern himself off of a white hero, or a gay girl off a straight leading lady. If your cast isn't diverse enough, you'll hear about it. In practice this means that every population -- every culture -- in a fictional world must have the same mix of skin tones you might find in downtown LA. The starting town in The Wheel of Time books is a backwater where everyone looks like everyone else from generations of intermarriage, where the main character's unusual hair is a plot point. In the show they cast it with a dozen different races such that you'd never expect any two of them to be related. You saw the same thing in The Rings of Power, in The Witcher, in the Britain of Bridgerton, for heaven's sake. At a minimum you could give visual cues as to population; elves are black, hobbits are white, humans are Asian, but even that soupçon of reason is too much. They must all be a mix of all, or you're a bigot.

And then there's the gays. It's a bit disconcerting when you notice that nobody on TV is straight anymore.

More annoying to me than either of those is the way that representation makes every show predictable. If you have a cop show with two suspects, one white and one black, you won't have to flip a coin to guess whodunit. Once you notice that the good guys and bad guys on screen follow exactly the leftist hierarchy of victimhood (and hence moral worth), character motivations become a snap to suss out. You'll never be caught napping when it turns out your villainess was good all along.

There's one more level to this one, and that's the modern studio's tendency to cast directors rather than hiring them. They'll grab a Muslim woman or whatever because of what an inspirational story it is (as part of the marketing) rather than hire the best person for the job. How do you ensure your film is any good with a random director? Simple; you don't give them power. You make all the decisions by committee.

The Dreaded Girlboss

Girls need role models too. Modern feminism can only believe women have worth when they're better than men at male things. Therefore the modern heroine tends to be predictable, trite, and boring. Here's a quick run-down of girlboss characteristics:

• She tends to be given the most expansive powers the setting allows, usually with no training. If she requires mentoring at all, it's with another girlboss.
• She's never wrong.
• People inexplicably like her, make exceptions for her, and excuse her like she's Harry Potter.
• She can never be emotionally vulnerable. Or if she is, never in front of a man.
• If she's a villainess, then any past misdeeds are immediately ignored as soon as she makes her turn to good.
• If she's caught and imprisoned, she has to save herself; she can never have a man save her.
• She can't lose a fight to a man, no matter how big or well-trained he is.
• She often shows up in prequels, so she can do whatever made the male character cool, only first and better.
• She never loses an argument or comes off worse in an exchange with a male character.
• Pregnant women in combat. This comes up disturbingly often recently, despite how little sense it makes. (The Last of Us, One Battle after Another)
• If it's a legacy sequel, she'll establish herself by tearing down the male character you actually like.

Girlboss stories usually follow the Shero's journey. She starts already amazing but crippled by self-doubt. Good guys (usually male) tell her she's awesome, bad guys (always male) prey on her insecurities. The conflict is resolved when she learns to believe in herself and kicks as much butt as she always could.

One more aspect of girlboss stories: men get really stupid around them. Not stupid like men do with any pretty lady. Stupid to advance her story. In the animated War of the Rohirrim, Helm Hammerhand stays outside the gates to needlessly sacrifice himself so that his daughter has the rest of the story to shine. In The Last of Us 2 (The video game, or Season 2 of the show), Ellie lambasts Joel for the decision he made at the end of the first game. Or season. He had several good arguments in defense, which the script never let him proffer.

I want to emphasize here that not every girl who wins fights counts as a girl boss. If she's five foot nothing and has superpowers, then nobody minds if she beats up unpowered six-foot bruisers. You can write her as beating men in arguments or staying cool when they panic, as long as your whole story isn't a paean to her greatness. You're allowed to like a heroine with some or many of those characteristics. I don't think you can tell a good story if she has all of them all the time. It's no fun if you can't occasionally rescue a princess.

#MeToo

The thing about the #MeToo movement is that it had its basis in reality. There's a freaking monument to the freaking casting couch in Hollywood. Some of the creeps hounded out of town deserved all they got and more. Some folks were just unlucky. There's more rot unaddressed. I'm not going to litigate specific cases. (Some killed careers look suspiciously like power plays. It's bad to eliminate talent for no good reason.) I will point out a couple ways the movement influenced Tinseltown.

It spawned intimacy coordinators, those bureaucrats of the bedroom. These days, people who show their affection by bumping foreheads together. Once is unique and interesting. When every show does it, it's weird. If you can't show a man and a woman kissing on screen anymore, you've gone too far.

Another thing you'll see is ugly women and man candy. In video games especially, they'll make their heroines look uglier in order not to present a Barbie-like standard of beauty. In shows women will wear bulky and unflattering clothing while guys gratuitously go shirtless. To be fair, Hollywood has been famous for their L-sheets, which cover the female to her neck but only the male's waist. I can't say that I want movies to go back to women reliably getting topless, but I will say I don't want so many man torsos around.

Finally, #MeToo has largely eliminated the raunchy comedy. You can't make off-color jokes when off-color jokes are a firing offense. Perhaps we don't need raunchy comedies, but there's more humor than Marvel humor.

The Inability to Admit Retreat

None of the things I've listed up until this point are fatal. The industry is founded on beating impossible odds (just ask anyone who's "made it"). If Hollywood wants to make money (always a reasonable bet), then it should have scrapped "The Message" ages ago. Why haven't they?

It’s a necessary implication of the unconstrained view. Briefly, the unconstrained view is that mankind is perfectible, and that we’re on a long historical arc that points us in that direction. That’s why opposing gay marriage is exactly the same in their mind as opposing miscegenation. Their fundamental principle is that more equality is better.

Their trouble is that the unconstrained view doesn’t allow for backsliding. Going towards more equality is good, and any deviation away from that is evil. Once the leftist hive mind has determined trans is the new hotness, then a JK Rowling who agrees with them on everything except for trans isn’t just a pagan but a heretic and must be destroyed. Partly that’s also based on the long-held principle that there are no enemies to the left. A moderate lefty might not go full communist, but they’ll admire the spirit of people further down that road. The dar-al-islam of leftism admits of no retreat.

There’s a further wrinkle where devotion is shown by being more inclusive than the next xer. It’s not good enough to only highlight trans people; we need body positivity too. When Hollywood started hiring DEI consultants, they naturally reached for the best-regarded, which meant they started asking extremists how to propagate more equality in their shows. That the ordinary run of Hollywood executives -- I assume center left to begin with-- have signed on to keep pushing “The Message” because they can’t admit the DEI consultants are enemies to their left and because the perfection of humanity is a one-way street.

That, on a very fundamental level, leads to bad writing. Assume a generic cop show. Assume that the writers are sloppy for no good reason, and the cops never Mirandize suspects. Once you notice that it doesn’t happen, it’ll bug you every time they leave it out. If it’s a good show, you’ll ignore it for the good parts. (Everyone likes The Matrix, everyone agrees the energy stuff is stupid.) If it’s a bad show, it’ll be one more tick on a list of complaints (minor lore problems in Starfleet Academy). Every time you break the rules of reality, you make it a bit harder for your audience to suspend disbelief.

Now yoke your show to “The Message”. Shuffle and deal out races without regard to context. You start to contradict things your writing says with things you must show on screen. The Fallout TV show had a bit about the Vault running out of food, and also a 300 lb Vault dweller. Starfleet Academy includes a deaf telepath communicating with other telepaths using sign language. And you can predict the endings from the capital-I Identity of the characters. You might as well color-code their hats. In theory it’s possible to tell a compelling story saddled with all that, but like the sloppy cop writers you aren’t making it easy.

Then you've got the receding impact of cultural messaging. The Left has been trying to win the argument by doing anything other than arguing. In the context of Hollywood that means they tell stories that are meant to have an impact. But every time you force a message that weakens the story, it lessens the reach of further stories. Every time you lose some of your audience due to implanted politics, that makes future implanted politics less effective because you're reaching a smaller audience. And so like a junkie chasing the dragon, you keep looking for a stronger dose to get the same high.

One more aspect. If you're enslaved to historical progress, then you're going to have a hard time writing ages past. Your heroes will have suspiciously modern sensibilities, as will the conflicts they fight. Or perhaps that's because the only happiness they can offer is a feminist happiness which doesn't deserve the name. This is a deeper rot than even ordinary leftism. If perfection is only achieved at the end point of history, then nothing you believe today may end up to be correct. Without a truth that transcends historical progress, there's nothing you can rely on except a willingness to change as history demands. If you believe that, perhaps even at a level below consciousness, it's difficult to tell happy stories. An ambivalence about everything you believe now carries over into an ambivalence about your hero's triumph. A nihilistic worldview doesn't let you write a story with meaning because you don't believe in meaning. Moral greyness in your personal life poisons any moral certainty in your character.

The Audience Prefers Mediocrity

Whenever I hear the phrase "AI slop," I remind myself that the important word is "slop," not "AI." It's possible to use AI to create something great. That's not how people use AI. They create something servicable, quick. To a first approximation, people don't want great stuff; they want okay stuff, but a lot of it.

This extends beyond Hollywood. How many times have you read a newspaper comics page without cracking a grin, let alone laughing? You still check the comics first. There are great romance novels, but far, far more essentially replaceable bodice rippers. Great science fiction but far more pulp. Do you want to make it as an author today? Churn out a book every year. As a professor? Publish or perish, and never mind if your paper advances human knowledge. The fast food industry exists because when I go out to eat, my main goal isn't something good, it's something predictably acceptable, not made by myself.

For show business this explains Avatar. If you spent the three hours to see Avatar 3, I challenge you to name three characters. Those movies have no lasting cultural impact but they still make their billions because they provide the audience with a few hours of low-effort escape. So why worry if every show is chock full of "The Message" or faithless adaptations? If all the audience demands is glittery lights, why strain yourself for more? This is also how people can get away with saying absurd things like "you have to watch four episodes before it gets good." If you're already choking down slop, four episodes isn't too much to ask.

This is the "if you think about it" test. The Fallout TV show was, in some ways, splendid. Walton Goggins was great whenever he was on screen, the props were superb (speaking as someone who knows), and it captured very well the experience of emerging from a vault into the wild wasteland. But if you think about it for five minutes, the whole thing collapses. The story doesn't make any sense, even given the wacky universe. This is also why writers feel like they can always resurrect dead characters. You liked him? We'll bring him back. Hollywood has embraced the slop model so much that it'd be tedious to rattle off even the most obvious examples. If Avatar works, why not?

First off, that's no way to beat AI. Ignoring the more extreme predictions, I'm confident AI will produce slop cheaper than Hollywood.

Secondly, you can't churn out slop without greatness to leech off of. Back when people still had cable, when they flicked through channels, they'd stop on a movie they knew well and loved. Depending on the person that could be The Godfather, or Caddyshack, or Supertroopers, or The Avengers. Maybe you've seen the movie twenty times, but you've seen the second half fifty. To get to that state, the movie had to be great to begin with; You develop the attachment and follow the repeatability because you first loved something new, different, great.

There are countless Tolkien fantasy knock-offs. They scratch the itch, but they only exist because Tolkien's work created that market. If Hollywood aspires only to create slop, if they endlessly recycle existing properties, if they don't bother with stories that make sense when you think about it, they'll never create new opportunities. Of the endless Star Wars slop, you get some that are acceptable (Rogue One) and some that are awful (The Acolyte). You don't get any of those without Star Wars.

(I hate that word: 'properties'. It formalizes storytelling in a way that tends to produce slop. Similarly, the words 'content' and 'consumer'.)

Of everything in this post, this one breaks in Hollywood's favor. The audience will let you get away with a lot. Hollywood has taken the wrong lesson from this: that they can always expect the audience to let them get away with everything.

Forgetting How to Write a Good Story

The only thing that a story needs is to be a good story. Necessarily that's a nebulous concept. What else do The Iliad, Terminator, and Northanger Abbey have in common? Hollywood exists on hits paying for flops because this is so difficult to nail down.

Most of this post has examined ways that Hollywood today constrains the creation of good art. It's harder to write a good story with a predictable end, though not impossible. See Romeo and Juliet. It's harder to write a good story when constricted by politics, but some products made in the old Soviet Union weren't bad. Churning out movies on the old studio model oughtn't create great art, except that's how we got Casablanca. Writing a power-trip fantasy character shouldn't make good stories, but James Bond has done fairly well. Listing every problem that Hollywood inflicts on itself can't prove they won't make good stories. The human hunger for good stories is so great that it's paid for a century of Tinsel Town.

People look for magic. There's a reason the Disney Corporation keeps Tinker Bell waving a wand over the Magic Kingdom. But they'll only keep looking in places where it can be found. Searching for gemstones in a sea of slop, the slop will sustain you only so long as you find the occasional gemstone. Eventually you'll go elsewhere.

Despite everything the AI and Gavin Newsom tag team can throw at the entertainment industry, they still have a chance to survive. They could weather it if only they could write good stories. They're only going to write good stories if they're setting out to write good stories, rather than instructional moral tales advancing the leftist eschaton. I'm betting that that's not going to happen. I assume that they'll stay on board the burning and sinking ship because their principles prevent them boarding a lifeboat. My advice to Hollywood is that it get on board. Your only chance is to tell good stories again.

For the customer, my advice is to take your custom elsewhere. Perhaps even more than the bulk of humanity, Hollywood will ignore signals until they get loud enough that they can't. Get some entertainment elsewhere. Almost anything will help. If you go out to a bar and sing karaoke every so often, you'll have fewer hours to fill with TV slop. You'll cut out the worst stuff first by default.

Finally, for those looking to replace this dying engine of culture, my advice is to stop trying to duplicate the Hollywood model. You're not making movies, you're making entertainment. If a movie is the way to do that, go ahead. If you're writing a book that doesn't lend itself well to the screen, don't worry about that. And if you're a money man, don't think that building a new, conservative studio will push the culture in the right direction. Find people who are doing something worthwhile already and invest in them. The death of Hollywood is not the death of all culture. There will be something new.