From The Hollywood Reporter we get an opinion piece on how to save Hollywood. Bring Back the Hollywood Asshole: Joseph Kahn Opinion Column
Joseph Kahn is a Grammy-winning director, who has been involved, primarily, with music videos the past three decades. That apparently gets him an entry into Hollywood studios on a somewhat regular basis.
His radical idea? Hollywood needs to go back to making money, and for that Hollywood needs suits that understand business.
If you do not start making more movies about white guys flying fighter jets, the box office will not justify the monthly gardening bill at the Paramount lot, and you will be replaced by Larry Ellison’s AI or Netflix’s Deep-learning Algorithm Network Licensing Intelligence Node, aka DAN LIN™.
He talks a lot about what happened since COVID, but Hollywood's downfall started long before then.
So this is what we need you to do with your elite MBAs and high SAT scores: Get back to being a meritocracy. Drop the affectations. Best, most profitable idea wins. Hire crews and staff based on excellence, not what your favorite Harvard admissions counselor would love. Build movie stars. Learn what the poors want — people in flyover states who make less than $300,000 a year. Make sure those movie stars do not offend those poors by insulting Jesus or Tom Brady.
If they don't change the way they are running Hollywood, all we will get is the drek coming out of streaming. And yes, some of it is good. A lot of it is filler. Bad filler.
Remember that people's pensions are tied up with Hollywood. Not movie stars or executives, but people who build sets, and record sound, and do all of the other things that make movies and TV possible.
In my youth, back in the dark ages, going to the cinema was something we did on a regular basis. Dates consisting of dinner and a movie became so cliche that TBS adopted it as regular show from 1995 until 2011. Of course movies were not 3 hours, but closer to 90 minutes, which left time, for dinner, a movie, and a drink or dessert. 3 hour movies make that impossible, or at least unreasonable. And just groups of friends would go to the movies to watch the latest over-the-top action movie, or the romantic comedy.
Personally, I think it is too late for Hollywood, in the same way the auto industry will never again be concentrated in and around Detroit. And that's okay. I do hope it survives in some form, and not in the drek we've been getting from the likes of Amazon Prime (Rings of Power or The Wheel of Time) or Disney+ (Willow).
In the late 80s my mentor in college told me I could move to LA and work in film and Hollywood, or move to NYC and work in theater. He then advised me to move to Hollywood because "in Hollywood, no one cares if you are an assh*le, as long as you get the job done."
ReplyDeleteIt's a bit insulting to be called an assh*le by someone who knows you well, but he was right. I was an assh*le arrogant kid, but I also had talent. I went to the East Coast, and didn't last 6 months. I ended up having a multi-year career in LA in the technical side of the entertainment business and leveraged that into a couple of decades of various jobs that were 'adjacent' to the industry.
It was 30+ years ago, but Hollywood was full of assh*les who got the job done.
nick
(it wasn't just me, that mentor trained a whole bunch of young men and women to work in Hollywood and the entertainment industry in several different aspects of production. He was an assh*le himself but also a great guy and a great mentor.)