Oz ,'Him'
[NAFDA] "There will be an occasional happy, so that it might be crushed under the boot of the writer." From Zorro to Angel (including Wonderfalls, The Inside and Drive), this is where Buffistas come to anoint themselves in the bloodbath.
I don't think they've been artist-controlled for decades, though (unless Cruise did take it over and they are again).
He did. Lions for Lambs was their first release, I think, as the new UA.
I don't think anyone can accurately predict what the future holds. I think people will try new things. Some will work, some won't. Personally, I don't think the studios will ever truly go away. But, if they did, I'm pretty sure SAG, WGA and DGA would be phased out along with them.
The Studios per se may go away, but the multinational conglomerates which own them won't. They are the ones trying to pay as little as possible for content and theones which control a lot of the distribution of that content.
Are there really "studios" as such anymore? Or even "networks"?
From what I can see, the opposition is multi-national conglomorates that just happen to produce, among their other products, film and television.
Not that it would be impossible for an artist-generated UAish thing to happen again, but they wouldn't be competing against film studios -- they'd be up against GE.
"Studios" was just faster to type. But you're right.
The studios have power because they have:
#2 is becoming more and more irrelevant thanks to the Internet. #1 is more tricky. If someone is going to take the risk of financing you're venture, they're obviously going to want some measure of control.
Well, yes, multinational conglomerates will likely still be here for a long time to come, but everything goes away eventually. Even multinational conglomerates. Even if we can't imagine such a thing right now. Many fortunes have been made throughout history by imagining the unimaginable, and if there ever were a time to try even just crazy schemes to make a quick buck, now is as good a time as any.
There's an article in today's LA Times specifically about #1. It's what got me thinking about this. Today, anyway. The subject has been brewing in my mind for at least a week now.
In our shiny new digital world #1 can involve a lot less money.
Once upon a time, in a pre media age, music and theater and most entertainment were a largely local phenomenon -- each town had its very best fiddler, etc. You had the occasional show that came to town as well, but they only had so much market penetration due to the constraints of, you know, horsies.
I'm intreigued by the thought of that sort of less-global entertainment returning to prominence. In some ways it has.
Marc Anderssen has written about applying the "Silicon Valley" model -- where venture capital pays for production -- to Hollywood: [link]
And John Rogers agrees that it'll happen, but thinks that Anderssen's being a little optimistic about how quickly it'll happen:
We already have indie movies, but not everyone out in viewer-land is going to be happy with talky-talk and horror flicks. They'd occasionally like some car crashes and exotic locations, please, not to mention actors they recognize. You're also in direct competition with the system you're trying to kill, who knows you're trying to kill it and also happens to control almost all mainstream distribution. Good luck. TV's no easier -- you can't partially finance a TV entertainment start-up. If you want to make TV shows, you need to finance an entire season. The pilot process is a monstrous waste of time and money, stunningly inefficient (an you say "amortize" kids? Knew ya could) and will make no sense in the Internet download model. Six to eight episodes at a time, costing about .5 to 1 million a pop, will be the base level of investment. That's with the sharpest producer on the planet, and a lot of people taking a flyer on their usual fees. Not even talking promotion, although that will change ... eventually. Not a ton of money in the grand scheme of things, but it's real money. Beyond the ken of all but the richest individuals, particularly when you build in the assumption that the first batch of these things, used as the sharp wedge on changing the business model and viewer/download habits, are almost guaranteed to fail pretty miserably.[link]
Some hedge funds are starting to pay for films. It's exactly the type of high-risk/high-reward investment that they look for.