Creative Destruction-Hollywood Division
There is a level of panic in Hollywood I haven’t seen for a while. Studio execs are being fired right and left and DVD sales revenue (which make up about 50% of a pictures revenue) are falling 15% YOY as people stop buying movies and use rental services like Netflix and Redbox. Foreign DVD revenues from the BRIC’s are non-existant as piracy continues to flourish with little government attempts to police the more outrageous vendors who make millions of DVD’s in large duplication factories.
Into this panic, one of our greatest film artists, Francis Coppola has some words of wisdom.
“The cinema as we know it is falling apart,” says Francis Ford Coppola.
“It’s a period of incredible change,” says the director of “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now.” “We used to think of six, seven big film companies. Every one of them is under great stress now. Probably two or three will go out of business and the others will just make certain kind of films like ‘Harry Potter’ — basically trying to make ‘Star Wars’ over and over again, because it’s a business.”
Coppola, 70, sporting a dark suit, is being interviewed in the Lebanese capital Beirut, where his latest movie “Tetro” opened the Beirut Film Festival after premiering at the Cannes Film Festival this year.
“Cinema is losing the public’s interest,” says Coppola, “because there is so much it has to compete with to get people’s time.”
The profusion of leisure activities; the availability of movies on copied DVD and on the Internet; and news becoming entertainment are reshaping the industry, he says. Companies have combined businesses as customers turn to cheap downloads rather than visit shops or movie theaters.
“I think the cinema is going to live off into something more related to a live performance in which the filmmaker is there, like the conductor of an opera used to be,” Coppola says. “Cinema can be interactive, every night it can be a little different.”
The reporter from Bloomberg does not record an elaboration on this last comment, but it’s fascinating. I hope we can get him to expand on this. Certainly his comment on the major studios turning out sequels by the dozen aligns with my feelings about the dearth of imagination in Hollywood.
Any thoughts on where this all goes?
Not so much a “dearth of imagination in Hollywood.” as business as usual among the suits. The creative side will always have more talent than ever gets tapped and much of it incredible in terms of potential art, but the production side is dominated by same thinking that drove wall street; show me the money. Art Schmart. The number of truly creative production people is limited, and even less so among the investors. You get middle eastern oil money at the table, for example, and creatives end up with “notes” that are superficial, formulaic, and intended to recapture lightning that hasn’t actually struck in years.
Hollywood, like Wall Street has always been a big casino. The people who bring big money to the table want a sure and fast return, the production people who line up the money want to assure them that that is exactly what they will get, and the talent more often than not has to shake it’s head and say “how high sir?” knowing the changes being asked for were thought of and discarded early in the process.
Add to the whole “how to make a box office hit” the flummoxing of the production/distribution system by new technologies, while capital is drying up in both theatrical and TV areas and it doesn’t promise to be a very productive period.
Or not… the dying of the old guard helped release the Easy Riders Raging Bulls (which, if you haven’t read the Perter Biskin book of that title, subtitled “…How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood” do yourself a favor.)
Hollywood has to reinvent itself every so often. The last big one was computer animation as a source of family movies leading to the current glut of Pixar wanna-bes, but overall a good thing. Comedy has moved back to TV for it’s most creative current work (e.g. 30 Rock), and we can hope the Marvel pantheon is getting mined out, but the auteur wing is going to continue to have thin output as the $$$$ keeps chasing what worked. Such as it ever was.
Roger Ebert had a great blog entry on the clenching going on in the Indie Film distribution world called “Indie security alert level: Severe”
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/09/indie_alert_level_severe.html
What we aren’t seeing is the low budget, shot with Red Camera cut on a Mac we expected to be the source of unleashed art, but that’s also the whole distribution channel issue shaking out.
Not so much a “dearth of imagination in Hollywood.” as business as usual among the suits. The creative side will always have more talent than ever gets tapped and much of it incredible in terms of potential art, but the production side is dominated by same thinking that drove wall street; show me the money. Art Schmart. The number of truly creative production people is limited, and even less so among the investors. You get middle eastern oil money at the table, for example, and creatives end up with “notes” that are superficial, formulaic, and intended to recapture lightning that hasn’t actually struck in years.
Hollywood, like Wall Street has always been a big casino. The people who bring big money to the table want a sure and fast return, the production people who line up the money want to assure them that that is exactly what they will get, and the talent more often than not has to shake it’s head and say “how high sir?” knowing the changes being asked for were thought of and discarded early in the process.
Add to the whole “how to make a box office hit” the flummoxing of the production/distribution system by new technologies, while capital is drying up in both theatrical and TV areas and it doesn’t promise to be a very productive period.
Or not… the dying of the old guard helped release the Easy Riders Raging Bulls (which, if you haven’t read the Perter Biskin book of that title, subtitled “…How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood” do yourself a favor.)
Hollywood has to reinvent itself every so often. The last big one was computer animation as a source of family movies leading to the current glut of Pixar wanna-bes, but overall a good thing. Comedy has moved back to TV for it’s most creative current work (e.g. 30 Rock), and we can hope the Marvel pantheon is getting mined out, but the auteur wing is going to continue to have thin output as the $$$$ keeps chasing what worked. Such as it ever was.
Roger Ebert had a great blog entry on the clenching going on in the Indie Film distribution world called “Indie security alert level: Severe”
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/09/indie_alert_level_severe.html
What we aren’t seeing is the low budget, shot with Red Camera cut on a Mac we expected to be the source of unleashed art, but that’s also the whole distribution channel issue shaking out.
Well, Jon, I’ll always be interested to learn what you and Maestro Coppola have to say about the industry, because you both represent a dedication to the art form as distinct from its economics. So when either of you advises regarding the fiduciary realities, I can be sure that you both keep the art in view.
I’ve got only two suggestions, both of them anecdotal. First, I never saw the point in purchasing DVDs or of upbuilding a personal collection. I think I own six of them, two of which are Coppola films. To me, the arguments against owning the movies include, for example, the solace I take from the film archive projects at USC and UCLA (reassuring me that the movies will always be retrievable); the distasteful prospect of screening a movie at home time and again as if to justify its purchase price; and a nostalgia for the unique experience of viewing a film for the first time, in a well run picture palace, in the company of others.
Which leads me to my second anecdote, one that speaks perhaps to Coppola’s comment about tinkering with a film continuously, so that it’s never really finished. That’s an interesting comment, totally consistent with a distinguished graduate of the “auteur school” of filmmaking. It was my great good fortune to have attended, at the Cinerama Dome, the premiere of his “Apocalypse Now”. He had four-walled the theatre and had hired ushers in fancy dress to hand out printed copies of the extensive film credits as though we were attending one of his beloved operas. The lights came down, and the “Doors” fired up with “This Is the End”, and it was as though the ceiling fan/Huey blades were swooping over our heads–an illusion due partly to the convex, wrap-around screen and to the innovative Dolby/THX rig, the effects of which I don’t think very many of the attendees expected. My point is this: I’ve seen no fewer than three endings to that picture, yet I think he got it right the first time. The people in lobby afterward were dumbstruck by their sense of having just witnessed the next steps in Cinema. So why is FFC now talking about tinkering and dithering? Is that so marketable? I don’t think so.
The artist gets to say, as hard-earned as on Golgotha, “it is finished”, and so it is. We either get the vision or we don’t, but I don’t want Miro coming into my house monthly to throw down a drop-cloth and add a few more strokes.
Well, Jon, I’ll always be interested to learn what you and Maestro Coppola have to say about the industry, because you both represent a dedication to the art form as distinct from its economics. So when either of you advises regarding the fiduciary realities, I can be sure that you both keep the art in view.
I’ve got only two suggestions, both of them anecdotal. First, I never saw the point in purchasing DVDs or of upbuilding a personal collection. I think I own six of them, two of which are Coppola films. To me, the arguments against owning the movies include, for example, the solace I take from the film archive projects at USC and UCLA (reassuring me that the movies will always be retrievable); the distasteful prospect of screening a movie at home time and again as if to justify its purchase price; and a nostalgia for the unique experience of viewing a film for the first time, in a well run picture palace, in the company of others.
Which leads me to my second anecdote, one that speaks perhaps to Coppola’s comment about tinkering with a film continuously, so that it’s never really finished. That’s an interesting comment, totally consistent with a distinguished graduate of the “auteur school” of filmmaking. It was my great good fortune to have attended, at the Cinerama Dome, the premiere of his “Apocalypse Now”. He had four-walled the theatre and had hired ushers in fancy dress to hand out printed copies of the extensive film credits as though we were attending one of his beloved operas. The lights came down, and the “Doors” fired up with “This Is the End”, and it was as though the ceiling fan/Huey blades were swooping over our heads–an illusion due partly to the convex, wrap-around screen and to the innovative Dolby/THX rig, the effects of which I don’t think very many of the attendees expected. My point is this: I’ve seen no fewer than three endings to that picture, yet I think he got it right the first time. The people in lobby afterward were dumbstruck by their sense of having just witnessed the next steps in Cinema. So why is FFC now talking about tinkering and dithering? Is that so marketable? I don’t think so.
The artist gets to say, as hard-earned as on Golgotha, “it is finished”, and so it is. We either get the vision or we don’t, but I don’t want Miro coming into my house monthly to throw down a drop-cloth and add a few more strokes.
Ken, your last point is especially interesting. A lot of talent is being squeezed out of movies, into television, and so forth. And with theatrical distribution going digital, the cost of production equipment falling, greater access to large audiences online, and the growing importance of word-of-mouth marketing, along with a wealth of balloon boy videos there’s bound to be a few interesting projects coming from the fringes.
Ken, your last point is especially interesting. A lot of talent is being squeezed out of movies, into television, and so forth. And with theatrical distribution going digital, the cost of production equipment falling, greater access to large audiences online, and the growing importance of word-of-mouth marketing, along with a wealth of balloon boy videos there’s bound to be a few interesting projects coming from the fringes.
The most downloaded song on iTunes was Do You Want To Date My Avatar following on the success of the web series The Guild. No one is making a lot of money but surely she is becoming a star by her own hand and yet is not offered parts by the Hollywood elite which I sense fears exactly what is going on in those little sheds.
If you can’t make movies for the people downloading The Guild, and frankly, you can’t because you don’t get them just as your parents didn’t get Easy Rider or Mean Streets, you’re done. The money elite fails to understand what it means for a culture to bifurcate leaving their 1% with all the power and none of the influence. Don’t come with UCLA film school chops and Westwood angst. No one gives a twinkle. It ain’t relevant. “Capitalism: A Love Story” is. Instead of a high budget action cartoon, try the truth.
And twelve bucks for popcorn and a coke? Not happening anymore.
The most downloaded song on iTunes was Do You Want To Date My Avatar following on the success of the web series The Guild. No one is making a lot of money but surely she is becoming a star by her own hand and yet is not offered parts by the Hollywood elite which I sense fears exactly what is going on in those little sheds.
If you can’t make movies for the people downloading The Guild, and frankly, you can’t because you don’t get them just as your parents didn’t get Easy Rider or Mean Streets, you’re done. The money elite fails to understand what it means for a culture to bifurcate leaving their 1% with all the power and none of the influence. Don’t come with UCLA film school chops and Westwood angst. No one gives a twinkle. It ain’t relevant. “Capitalism: A Love Story” is. Instead of a high budget action cartoon, try the truth.
And twelve bucks for popcorn and a coke? Not happening anymore.
Doesn’t it come down to giving the audience what they want?
If you make an entertaining work, they will come.
If you make a really entertaining work, you should be able to leverage it to make lot of money.
One needs to feel that the theatrical experience, or home experience or just watching cable (or television) is worth it.
Most works shouldn’t be released globally in that most works aren’t global products but rather targeted.
So, fix the business model, make works for your target markets and figure out how to get it them in a cost efficient manner.
Doesn’t it come down to giving the audience what they want?
If you make an entertaining work, they will come.
If you make a really entertaining work, you should be able to leverage it to make lot of money.
One needs to feel that the theatrical experience, or home experience or just watching cable (or television) is worth it.
Most works shouldn’t be released globally in that most works aren’t global products but rather targeted.
So, fix the business model, make works for your target markets and figure out how to get it them in a cost efficient manner.
As the Buffalo Springfield sang, “There’s something happening here. What it is, ain’t exactly clear.” But Felicia Day, who created the independent sitcom web series The Guild, that focuses on the lives of online gamers, is showing that there are audiences out there that want to watch original creative content including her 1.3 million Twitter followers. An LA based TV actress, she was tired of waiting for the phone to ring and turned her obsession with online gaming into her break out webisodic hit. Which she’s supported with a PayPal button on the show’s website and by selling DVDs at fan events and online. While an interesting model, “it still isn’t monetized,” said her agent when delicately explaining that The Guild doesn’t really make any significant money. Even though a plethora of inexpensive digital cameras and editing software choices have made the means of production affordable and the internet is making finding an audience easier the hard part is still eeking out a living creating something you care about. So what are today’s “Easy Riders and Raging Bulls” supposed to do? Don’t sit around waiting for the phone to ring. Go get a camera and make something. Will it be a blockbuster and turn into a theme park ride? Probably not. But maybe you’ll discover the answer to what’s “happening here” while you’re at it?
As the Buffalo Springfield sang, “There’s something happening here. What it is, ain’t exactly clear.” But Felicia Day, who created the independent sitcom web series The Guild, that focuses on the lives of online gamers, is showing that there are audiences out there that want to watch original creative content including her 1.3 million Twitter followers. An LA based TV actress, she was tired of waiting for the phone to ring and turned her obsession with online gaming into her break out webisodic hit. Which she’s supported with a PayPal button on the show’s website and by selling DVDs at fan events and online. While an interesting model, “it still isn’t monetized,” said her agent when delicately explaining that The Guild doesn’t really make any significant money. Even though a plethora of inexpensive digital cameras and editing software choices have made the means of production affordable and the internet is making finding an audience easier the hard part is still eeking out a living creating something you care about. So what are today’s “Easy Riders and Raging Bulls” supposed to do? Don’t sit around waiting for the phone to ring. Go get a camera and make something. Will it be a blockbuster and turn into a theme park ride? Probably not. But maybe you’ll discover the answer to what’s “happening here” while you’re at it?
When I was at University 35 years ago, I was mad for film, and the only place pre-VCR to see one was in a movie theatre. For a year I was the university film committee, all by my greedy self. For what would be about a $250k budget today, I picked four films a week to show at the student union building – feature night, foreign night, political night, stoner night. On top of that I went to the local non-university movie theatres one to the three times a week. I saw a lot of film.
Fast forward to now – I still watch a lot of films, but never ever in some POS theatre. I would rather do Netflix, or DirecTV downloads. I have beer, bathroom, food, a great sound system, 1080p, a very comfy sofa, a pause button, no annoying fellow audience members, no sticky floors, no schedule, and I don’t have to drive anywhere. Plus with Netflix the cost me is working out to about $US 0.65/film.
Remind me again of what I am missing at the CinePlex.
When I was at University 35 years ago, I was mad for film, and the only place pre-VCR to see one was in a movie theatre. For a year I was the university film committee, all by my greedy self. For what would be about a $250k budget today, I picked four films a week to show at the student union building – feature night, foreign night, political night, stoner night. On top of that I went to the local non-university movie theatres one to the three times a week. I saw a lot of film.
Fast forward to now – I still watch a lot of films, but never ever in some POS theatre. I would rather do Netflix, or DirecTV downloads. I have beer, bathroom, food, a great sound system, 1080p, a very comfy sofa, a pause button, no annoying fellow audience members, no sticky floors, no schedule, and I don’t have to drive anywhere. Plus with Netflix the cost me is working out to about $US 0.65/film.
Remind me again of what I am missing at the CinePlex.
When I was at University 35 years ago, I was mad for film, and the only place pre-VCR to see one was in a movie theatre. For a year I was the university film committee, all by my greedy self. For what would be about a $250k budget today, I picked four films a week to show at the student union building – feature night, foreign night, political night, stoner night. On top of that I went to the local non-university movie theatres one to the three times a week. I saw a lot of film.
Fast forward to now – I still watch a lot of films, but never ever in some POS theatre. I would rather do Netflix, or DirecTV downloads. I have beer, bathroom, food, a great sound system, 1080p, a very comfy sofa, a pause button, no annoying fellow audience members, no sticky floors, no schedule, and I don’t have to drive anywhere. Plus with Netflix the cost me is working out to about $US 0.65/film.
Remind me again of what I am missing at the CinePlex.
Elux, this is not a refutation, as I definitely answer to the description from Michael Rose and Buffalo Springfield in that I (and Mr. Jones) don’t know what is happening. But I’d like to tell you briefly about my own neighborhood Cinema Paradiso.
It’s a discount theatre, three blocks up. In the trade I believe it’s commonly called a “dollar theatre”. They screen second-run movies, most of which are of the sort geared to 13-year-olds, but some of which are tolerable to sentient beings. (Last year I saw two wonderful satires there, and also the latest Bond flick.) They charge US $1.25 at peak, and even less off-peak. Six screens. And the snacks are reasonably priced, in that one pays at that place for popcorn or candy or soft drinks about what one would pay at a big-box retail store. They have a party room, off the lobby, in which parents enjoy celebrating their children’s birthday parties prior to hosting a movie viewing. The place smells of salty popcorn butter, but is well maintained.
I have no idea why people trundle down there instead of watching, e.g. the same flicks on Pay-Per-View, but practically everybody hereabouts does so. It may have to do with the constant challenge of custodial care of children, or it may have to do with folks escaping the weather (hot or cold), but I think it’s more to do with sociability. A movie ticket is an invitation to a kind of event.
It surprises me that Jon is reporting the downturn of the movie industry during this severe recession, as anyone familiar with the Great Depression knows that inexpensive filmgoing (and racetrack gambling) thrived during that period, whereas newspapers, for example, suffered badly. For some reason the people preferred the ephemeral promises of the Silver Screen and the Racetrack rush to the cold morning reality of the headlines. And yet here we find ourselves again in hard times, except with the movie industry in trouble.
Elux, this is not a refutation, as I definitely answer to the description from Michael Rose and Buffalo Springfield in that I (and Mr. Jones) don’t know what is happening. But I’d like to tell you briefly about my own neighborhood Cinema Paradiso.
It’s a discount theatre, three blocks up. In the trade I believe it’s commonly called a “dollar theatre”. They screen second-run movies, most of which are of the sort geared to 13-year-olds, but some of which are tolerable to sentient beings. (Last year I saw two wonderful satires there, and also the latest Bond flick.) They charge US $1.25 at peak, and even less off-peak. Six screens. And the snacks are reasonably priced, in that one pays at that place for popcorn or candy or soft drinks about what one would pay at a big-box retail store. They have a party room, off the lobby, in which parents enjoy celebrating their children’s birthday parties prior to hosting a movie viewing. The place smells of salty popcorn butter, but is well maintained.
I have no idea why people trundle down there instead of watching, e.g. the same flicks on Pay-Per-View, but practically everybody hereabouts does so. It may have to do with the constant challenge of custodial care of children, or it may have to do with folks escaping the weather (hot or cold), but I think it’s more to do with sociability. A movie ticket is an invitation to a kind of event.
It surprises me that Jon is reporting the downturn of the movie industry during this severe recession, as anyone familiar with the Great Depression knows that inexpensive filmgoing (and racetrack gambling) thrived during that period, whereas newspapers, for example, suffered badly. For some reason the people preferred the ephemeral promises of the Silver Screen and the Racetrack rush to the cold morning reality of the headlines. And yet here we find ourselves again in hard times, except with the movie industry in trouble.
Elux, this is not a refutation, as I definitely answer to the description from Michael Rose and Buffalo Springfield in that I (and Mr. Jones) don’t know what is happening. But I’d like to tell you briefly about my own neighborhood Cinema Paradiso.
It’s a discount theatre, three blocks up. In the trade I believe it’s commonly called a “dollar theatre”. They screen second-run movies, most of which are of the sort geared to 13-year-olds, but some of which are tolerable to sentient beings. (Last year I saw two wonderful satires there, and also the latest Bond flick.) They charge US $1.25 at peak, and even less off-peak. Six screens. And the snacks are reasonably priced, in that one pays at that place for popcorn or candy or soft drinks about what one would pay at a big-box retail store. They have a party room, off the lobby, in which parents enjoy celebrating their children’s birthday parties prior to hosting a movie viewing. The place smells of salty popcorn butter, but is well maintained.
I have no idea why people trundle down there instead of watching, e.g. the same flicks on Pay-Per-View, but practically everybody hereabouts does so. It may have to do with the constant challenge of custodial care of children, or it may have to do with folks escaping the weather (hot or cold), but I think it’s more to do with sociability. A movie ticket is an invitation to a kind of event.
It surprises me that Jon is reporting the downturn of the movie industry during this severe recession, as anyone familiar with the Great Depression knows that inexpensive filmgoing (and racetrack gambling) thrived during that period, whereas newspapers, for example, suffered badly. For some reason the people preferred the ephemeral promises of the Silver Screen and the Racetrack rush to the cold morning reality of the headlines. And yet here we find ourselves again in hard times, except with the movie industry in trouble.
Jon, I think Mr Coppola is out on a limb here. People have experimented with interactive Cinema for decades now. In the 1990s Sony sank hundreds of millions of dollars into it, making a couple of movies (some of them helmed by Bob Zemeckis) that people (the few people that saw them) loathed, loathed enough in one case to begin tearing up seats in the cinema.
I recall being at a test screening of an interactive movie Zemeckis did with Christopher Lloyd and being quite stunned at how angrily the audience responded. It seems that if you try to engage the audience more, and fail, you fail in a much bigger way because they want to give you feedback (anger) and can’t find the mechanism for doing that in your film.
Doug Gayeton, a game designer I know in LA, did some really interesting work trying to make a better experience, culminating in a not-very-good game based on Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic. The game wasn’t all that good, but it ran on an engine that was something like a real-time video editor, which was fascinating.
Anyway, what Sony (who financed both Mnemonic and the Zemeckis movies) discovered is that audiences don’t want films to become more like games. If anything, they’d like films to become less like games. Good movies succeed in part because of the power of narrative. That’s not going to change. What’s more likely to change – is changing – is the way those movies are consumed.
I’m with Hugo – I think date movies, kids movies, and movies for 30-50 year old women who lunch, are all going to be fine for quite some time. But the kinds of popcorn fare the studios have been serving up won’t last. When James Cameron suggested something similar a few years ago people weren’t sure how to respond, but at Toronto last month there seemed to be a broad acceptance by Producers that the future was $500k movies or $200m movies, without a great deal between.
I think Ken’s comments above about creative change coming from the dying of the old guard are well made. As John Boorman once noted, there’s nothing that gets filmmakers more excited or creative than a challenge. There are certainly a lot of challenges out there right now!
I got a few thought about this
I think the idea of “interactive cinema” is sort of bull (or at least, it intuits the direction but misses the mark by a mile). It’s trying to see the future through the eyes of the past. Much in the same way people thought the internet would be like television and a phone combined. And in fact internet is nothing like a television and a telephone combined.
I think people still want to see movies the way their authors originally intended. There’s a reason we want to see directors’ cuts of classics like Apocalypse Now and Blade Runner (and why we hate seeing the original Star Wars with new digital effects).
If anything this interaction with cinema – that Coppola intuits, but fails to understand – will come in the form of remixing. Remixing by fans of cinema taking it apart and making new things with it. Putting their own stamp on old movies without damaging the original.
That’s the only form of interaction I can envision cinema taking – sort of like Tom Stoppard writing a whole new play that interweaves with Hamlet. Viewers interacting with their culture and making it their own. If it’s good, others will want to see it too.
Of course for that interaction to take hold, our views of culture and intellectual property will have to fundamentally change. Though as I’ve said before, I believe that change is already underway.
PS. Coppola’s conflation of “the availability of movies on copied DVD” with the availability of movies on internet belies his age and biases.
DVD’s are dying. The internet is growing.
These two paths (paid-for physical object vs. free virtual file) are diverging at a rapid pace. Lumping both together as “piracy” doesn’t really say anything meaningful about either. At most it assumes that actions once taken against the former will also work against the later. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I think the big studios will die while small studios will thrive.
The cost of making and distributing movies (and pretty much all other media) is dropping, while the common audience for expensive productions is fragmenting and decreasing.
While it’s becoming harder to find a sizeable paying audience it’ll always be possible to find an audience somewhere.
It’s not unlike the trouble large music labels have – there’s decreasing opportunities for owning and controlling distribution but increasing opportunity to help artists find their audience.
I susepct movie studios, like music labels, will be replaced by two things – investors (many who might imagine themselves patrons of the arts) who are looking for talent to nurture;
and people (smaller companies) who make it their business to find audiences and nurture them on behalf of artists.
New technology makes it possible to up-end the relationships that had studios calling the tune in favour of the artists – but causes problems because artists don’t want the studios job.
As big businesses generally don’t adapt well the old studios will die, but there will be a market for a new sort of artists representation that works for, rather than trys to employ, the artist.
Which leaves the question of finance – who pays for it? Ultimately an audience it is hoped. But there are up front production costs, and not all art finds a paying audience.
Perhaps what we’ll see is the fragmentation of existing studios into smaller and smaller pieces each nurturing their own market linked by a common investment house.
It’s always possible that certain kinds of art are dying. We may have a future in which the big budget extravaganza fades for lack of will to invest in the risk.
I don’t find that a worrying prospect.
That may happen, Armand, but not in narrative. The game people understand this topic much more clearly and debate it often (see Raph Koster’s blog). In gaming, the difference in a single or even a MMO player authored game and a framework are well understood. The satisfaction of narrative is diluted in multi-branching plots.
Remixing and mashing are a fact of art already and even life. Even trivial productions such as taking all the video and still shots from a live event or a weekend spent attending them can be cut into a new context that adds to the enjoyment. I’ve been doing that with the material from Great Barrington for the enjoyment of the folks who attended. Resourcing social network distributed media is a means to make episodic work which is creative even if not (yet?) profitable.
Meanwhile Alabama and South Carolina are tangling. Back to the game.
Was supporting with a PayPal button and hand wrapped DVDs. Microsoft is the sugar daddy now. Smart deals for distribution keep the series alive and her and her partners able to retain owner ship so future distribution. Also, she can possibly eventually make a much sweeter deal for a mainstream production such as a TV series.
But the fact remains that all her phenomenal online popularity is not translating into better mainstream acting jobs, just guest appearances (eg Dollhouse) and even those sometimes don’t get released (eg, Dollhouse went to DVD as a bonus episode) a fact she bemoans herself on her blog.
Pioneers: face down in the mud with arrows in their back. It’s an old story. Eventually, someone makes the right deals and it will be made to look like they are the uber-transition star while the achievements of those that come before are brushed aside by publicists as being unimportant or merely protos. That’s entertainment.
The re-mix concept that Armand mentions was the first thing to cross my mind. Like the Grateful dead never played the same song the same way twice – or the way Dylan makes up new lyrics on the fly live – I could see the technology emerge for a director/editors to create the film in real time (no pun).
How much film gets left on the cutting room floor per feature movie? How much could be reused to put some different emphases on the narrative? Different outcomes? I don’t know. Could DJs’ turntables become like a handful of Avid setups for live mix?
My field is computer science. I could see a setup where the author of a book or screenplay can generate the visual and audio output on the fly. Imagine Kerouac creating “On the Road” live with different riffs each time, different scenes or different perspectives on each scene. You’d need a band-like team and the product could be like video jazz.
Just thinkin’.
It’s not possible today but it is not impossible either. Each Dead show was unique. It’d be interesting to see the film analogue of that.
What’s the future of the video arts? One possibility, or maybe foretaste:
Anyone remember “Farenheit 451?” Speaking now about the Ray Bradbury oeuvre, which has appeared in many forms — book, movie, novella, tee-off for Michael Moore.
Basic story: Sick future world, books are banned to keep people from having dangerous ideas, “Firemen” now START fires, to burn all books. Houses are made of fireproof material, if you’re found reading and holding books your house and books are burned out by “firemen” who hose everything down with kerosene and light it up. You the reader get institutionalized or executed. The streets are filled with random violence despite heavy law-and-order, robot Dalmatians are programmed by bored “firemen” to track and kill animals and people, and there have already been a couple of nuclear wars.
Protagonist has a “modern” marriage, wife stays tranquilized or nags him to buy another “television wall” to complete the Home Entertainment System that includes all-day soap operas in which the viewer can take an active part, with lines and emoting and all that, the Screen Actors actually turn to the viewer and offer cues and “relationships,” having all four walls as Big Screen Wall Size TVs enhances the experience, whatever that “valuable experience is.”
Everybody, almost, wears “Seashells” in their ears, remarkably like your basic iPod plugins, for “entertainment” and subliminal help from the gov’t to be good citizens.
What we need is to complete the enclosure of the Entertainment Centers of everybody’s houses, universalize and enforce the use of iPods or equivalent, then there will be an endless supply of consumers for the artistic products, and Everything Will Be Beautiful, In Its Own Wa-ay…
Read a BOOK???? My dear, that is so 20th CEN-tury…
But please remember that the book, as yet unburned, ends on a very hopeful note. The link here is how many students “read” this work (oh damn, I was going to try to be positive here at the end.) Isn’t the Web Wonderful?
Hey, I’m just glad to see some nice stuff happenin’ when some other stuff gets started in spite of the stuffs.
Went and saw “Where the Wild Things Are” last night (good movie, I recommend it). Did I need to see it in a huge theater with kids and families and such? Nope, if I could have downloaded it or rented a DVD of it, I would have been just as happy watching it. But for now, I have to wait about 4 to 6 months before it gets released on DVD even though all of the special features and such for DVD are already done and in the can.
I hope the big movie studios die and something else comes along.
What works for music will not necessarily work for film and storytelling or cooking. There has been a lot of experimental work with non-linear stories and mileage varies. Emotional involvement and participatory involvement affect each other but are different forces. It’s straightforward enough to create branching systems and multi player systems but the emotional entanglement that satisfies the denouement, the emotional resolution tends to be linear even where the communications that create a coherent experience tend to be fractal.
Actually, Jim, it’s not only possible, it’s done all the time. See Band-in-a-Box and loop editors. The results unfortunately tend to be pretty mundane.
The kinds of surprises that are coming from the bottom are things like the styles emerging from the constraints such as having to write five minute webisodes given YouTube restrictions on upload lengths. It’s similar to what play length constraints did to pop songwriters. Structures that reduce the time to pop the cork become formulas and everyone learns them. Constraints are relaxed and creatives begin to exploit them.
See chord police. See LP vs 45. Concept album vs LP as 45 collection.
That was my point. I think we actually are in agreement about this.
The interactivity that we expect from a game cannot translate into a cinematic movie. As you said, the narrative would be hurt. One could not have the same movie but with things different every time – like a different ending. Such a change would entail changing almost every single scene, and in fact the entire narrative, for a movie to still work.
When people watch a movie they want the author to take them by the hand. They don’t want to lead or affect the plot in any way, as they would in a game.
The only interaction I see happening with cinema is not as viewers but as creators. The ability to take materials and make things of our own with them and release them as independent interpretations – that stand on their own.
Tom Stoppard did not take Hamlet and change anything in it. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is still Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Stoppard just took existing scenes and characters and weaved a whole new story around those few untouched scenes.
If people are to interact with cinema it will, in my opinion, be more along those lines. People creating cinema of their own out of existing bits and pieces of others’ cinema.
The core of the issue is that publishers are unable to distinguish between getting paid, and getting paid in one very particular and increasingly untenable fashion.
Sure, they go an ad nauseam about their ‘right’ to get paid. But it’s not sales they’re after – they want rent.
And they’re willing to conflate customer’s natural resistance to rent-seeking behavior into an ungrounded belief that people who are unwilling to to pay on those terms in particular are unwilling to pay on any terms whatsoever. Then, having already screwed up the negotiations by saying they want one thing while pursuing another – they go on to abuse anyone who points out the distinction by calling them moral degenerates. For added good measure, they lock down everything they can, on the assumption that everyone is a criminal.
So it’s no wonder that people on they buy side loose patience. The (highly justified) response to such bad faith negotiating tactics is the simple suspension of moral reciprocity, and a willingness to let these players die of starvation, if that’s what it takes to maintain healthy social norms.
With the movies (which seem to be managed by a considerably smarter crowd of executives than the record trade) there was a push to establish legitimate online options, so that Hollywood didn’t get Napsterized. And since they weren’t gouging artists and audiences alike in the same over-the-top fashion as the music business, so there was no built-up charge of animosity to contend with.
Still, good defense is not the same as smart offense, without which the day of reckoning is simply delayed. And to be fair, it’s probably impossible for any business as closely connected to the increasingly obsolete trade in physical media to magically transform itself into its diametric opposite – all while delivering smoothly escalating returns each and every quarter.
My own experience has taught me that there are no essential players – only essential roles, and that the possibilities within a given moment are grounded in the place where these roles all intersect.
If the players filling various roles find the ground disappearing beneath them, the game doesn’t stop. It simply continues in a different direction – one determined by the more stable location of whoever came along to refill the position.
And if you understand that commercial-grade collaborative work depends on the convergence of five fundamental positions, it’s easy to see how quickly life will move on. After all, the need for each position remains, as does the supply of people willing to fill each one. All they’re looking for now is a new point of convergence.
Just consider: we still have States, which even in free countries exercise enormous influence in what gets made, while providing essential pieces of infrastructure that continue to operate suitably well. Though uneven in places, the field is still in place.
And we still have Underwriters – individuals and people who have an interest in influencing others, and the means to do so via public media. They may be loosing interest in the established channels for doing this. But the demand for the power of industrial-grade suggestion is right up there with the need for fresh bread and water. And it’s a *big* market – one that includes everyone from taste makers to policy makers to soap makers. So that element remains in play.
And then there are the Producers. I use this tag as a proxy for all the artists, technicians, and managers whose combined efforts result in the kind of work that can actually move people. And here, again, there’s no doubt that the possibility of moving people with media is very much alive, whether it’s moving them to laughter, tears, a shift in political outlook, or a change in toothpaste.
Producers may find that the market power of underwriters who want nothing more than a direct cash return is on the wane. But those aren’t the only people willing to pay the bills. Smart producers will seek out solvent employers as sure as night follows day. And they’ll use that unslaked desire for influence as leverage to realize the creative ambitions of artists and craftsmen alike.
We’ve not seen the end of Publishers either. In fact, we’ve seen an astonishing multiplication. The new ones don’t look, feel or operate anything like the dinosaurs they’re eclipsing. But that’s because they’re not playing by the same rent-seeking rules that dictated the form of the old guard. Which isn’t to say that they’re simply giving away the store. They’re all highly transactional, only their primary currency isn’t dollars, it’s information.
So while it becomes increasingly difficult to expect that Publishers will do double duty as exclusive sales agents, it also becomes impossible for this new breed to carry any amount of traffic at all without returning significant data about where it’s going. Unlike rent-seekers, who try to limit circulation only to areas that pay directly, these new players are interested in the broadest reach possible. Their ability to reliably reveal what goes where is the crux of their value proposition.
Put differently, their attention isn’t focused on their own exclusive routes to and from the bank. No, they want to see the entire map, enabling them to see how everyone else is getting to and from the bank when allowed to operate freely. In this model, distribution is not a tightly restricted service. It’s an abundant byproduct of broader intelligence gathering which depends on free fruit to scatter seeds.
Which brings us to the final set of players: Audiences. They are profoundly engaged – willingly transforming their entire lives to take advantage of the same technological shifts that are producing such consternation among traditional publishers. Not all of these changes are easy, or without risk. Nonetheless, they’re being made because on balance, people see them as advantageous in their own pursuits of life, liberty, and happiness. And that recognition only fuels discontent with organizations that appear reactionary, and who ask for exemptions from History.
So forget about “saving” (i.e. continuously recycling) the old forms. Just recognize that the current players among States, Underwriters, Producers, Publishers, and Audiences will all continue with their daily struggles. And somewhere – inevitably – their interests will overlap. And in those places, you’re going to get a deal.
What creative forms will come out of that deal? Who knows. That’s the exciting part. All we know is that they will meet five basic criteria – their legality will be commonly respected, the potential for engagement will be clear, execution will be superb, and ongoing development will be highly responsive and relevant to its audience. And these forms will command serious attention, making them magnets for the proverbial best and brightest.
Not only that, but they will do so in an environment where focused attention is widely seen as highly prized. This will be an accomplishment in its own right, and will endow the successful with a natural authority that was once enjoyed by books, newspapers, radio stations, movies, and television.
And people will love it for that very reason. Because in our bones, we dislike the idea of an entirely commodified culture that banks on the residuals of a previous generation while showering derision and contempt on those who are making their way today. Sadly, a cartel that behaves like this is exactly what the market for copies has produced. Propping this up with anachronistic rules that undercut its basic claim to cultural relevance only adds to the tarnish. Not only is this bad for the market in general, it’s terrible for the artists who are unable to transcend it.
Like them, we want something that’s grounded in the present, something that we can admire, something we can respect, and something that draws attention to the deeper meaning of a particular moment in time.
One particularly interesting characteristic of the present moment is the disappearance of a certain cultural hegemony. With China, Brazil, India and others all becoming increasingly self-confident at the same time Western Europe and the United States are becoming increasingly diverse, there’s a general sense that the possibility of global dominance by any one tribe is receding, even as individuals are becoming increasingly global in their own senses of self. The result is a peculiar dichotomy that seeks connection with international memes – on the condition that they can be modified by locals to mesh with their distinct outlooks.
In this scheme of things, the central strands are loose and unfinished – unifying themes, as opposed to polished works. To connect, local agents are required – not simply as neutral intermediaries, but as creative forces in their own right, who will start by taking possession of a meme so they can credibly refashion it into something that a particular audience can see as their own take on a global theme.
Faced with a demand like this, the hardline, read-only conditions of current publishers seems increasingly like a type of cultural colonialism in which the recipients have little say about the forms they’re provided with, and no control over the resources they contribute – nearly all of which get syphoned into another country.
As they continue to struggle with the same forces that did in the world’s last big batch of colonialists, the essential creative positions once dominated by publishing’s old guard remain highly active. Again, it’s only a matter of time before the people in them discover new points of intersection where underwriters can safely and legally support producers who can not only command attention, but who can – with the aid of data-centric publishers – generate documented real-world effects in the wake of major concentrations. Using statistical analysis to predict these effects, Underwriters start by making informed bets on the outcomes.
Assuming that the most fertile convergences are going to be highly localized, and that people in these places will want to see internationalized versions of their own distinct identities, I can see a market for global memes developing.
To work, they’d have to be sufficiently international to produce consistent results in a broad range of fashions, and their creation would have to be underwritten by those who stand to benefit from others taking ownership for variations on the theme, as opposed to those who do their very best to crush any derivative use that’s not specifically authorized and directly compensated. Moreover, they’d have to be satisfied (financially) with simple adoption, allowing the producers and underwriters of of derivate works to profit freely.
Above all, they need to assume that once a piece of media is released into the wild, direct control over that work has been lost. Assuming its digital, you can no more govern what people do with it than you can dictate what they think about it. All you can do is observe the path it takes, and decide how to approach your next effort accordingly.
And yes, that effort must supply more than easily copied ephemera. You really do need to stage a show.
And that’s what we see in mashups as you say. We take bits of other things and make new things. We’ve been over this ground. Creative Commons was designed to enable it.
It helps for example with charity events to be able to take footage, photos, sound samples, etc and weave them together for pushing the event a bit further, say to Paypal enabled social network sites. As long as artists don’t get too wrapped up in their image, one can do some good work for a good cause. I promised George Laye I wouldn’t use the footage of the Guthrie Family show in the center although I and others video taped it and the Guthrie’s are very generous about that. However I got plenty of footage of the tailgate event, restaurants and other bits that can be put together with photos and audio snippets to promote the center wrapped around humor in the subtitling, etc.
Interactive cinema? That’s what many games have been for over a decade. Gamers are trying to get away from that and going in the opposite direction of turning inteactive game samples into movies, ie, machinama. Frankly, I took the videos on my site from an interactive 3D album and while practical, not nearly as good as the 3D presentation itself.
Lots of options and venues. Really, explore them all. Reuse. Reuse. Reuse. At the very least, one gets new and better chops and as artists, that’s gold.
“And yes, that effort must supply more than easily copied ephemera. You really do need to stage a show.”
At least an event. Even the show is only one part of the content.
I think Coppola’s comment at the end, on cinema as an interactive art form, is not referring to so-called “interactive cinema” (where the audience votes on plot points and stuff like that), but to something more like Peter Greenaway’s live remixing of his recent movies:
http://www.petergreenaway.info/content/blogcategory/30/57/
That link has some great pictures of him in action.
He was so impressed after his first performance, in 2005, that he basically declared his career as a conventional film director over. From then on, he apparently does not conventionally edit his films – the films are recordings of his live remixing.
Another possible direction for cinema could be the route shown by video games, which increasingly have cinematic production values and storylines (see “Bioshock” and “Halo”).
Paul Graham writes a number of interesting essays. Recently he’s mused interestingly on the subject of declining markets for newspapers. While not the same thing as movies his take on the value of ‘content’ is intriguing.
The level where games, music and cinema meet is gestural. A musician or improv commedian gets that. A gamer has no choice if the game is narrative (very few branches in the situation possible: meet troll – > swing sword | cast spell).
To make that non-linear, one has to model at fairly abstract levels. We took that up in the HumanML design. One has to be an accomplished modeler. There are tricks and degrees that are satisfying without dropping all the way into real time simulation.
A problem with Graham’s analysis is overlooking that lots of music and books are published in the same format and don’t sell. The ratio of records created vs the ones that sell over 1000 copies is astonishing and puts record producers in the same mathematical camp as Las Vegas whales. In short, it is content that sells and worse, content by particular artists. This is true of the mystery novel genre as well.
The current and probably short lived dilemma is the control by the computer science businesses of the formats. It’s as if someone had a lock thin paper and typefaces. The standards folks tried desperately to break this stranglehold against the owners of the mp3 formats, Flash, etc., but the customers bought in and then took out their inferiority complexes on the artists who already by dint of that ratio were in desperate straits.
That is where it stands today. As long as the public insists on forging their own chains, it’s hard to conceive of this changing. If it does, it will come from artists banding together with assistance from a well-heeled third party such as the government.
Maybe there is another way. I don’t see it.
Yes, that’s a better word for it.
That gives a model where certain parts in certain locations at certain times have different values and constraints for repurposing. That way, it quits being an all or nothing game vis a vis intellectual property. It also can enable different artists to make different declarations about being media-friendly. Until the law catches up, local agreements prevail. Smarter artists are realizing they have to take control of this situation because connecting to the audience in ever more diverse ways depends on it.
“The feeling is that it’s too expensive in this economy to successfully open an unknown film. Most indies feel they must open in New York, the most costly media market in the country, and of course that means an ad big enough to be visible in The New York Times, buys in the other major daily and weeklies, maybe some public transportation posters, maybe some radio, maybe some television, maybe some internet, and pretty soon you’re talking maybe more money than the movie maybe cost.”
He later says paraphrased, so you conquer the blogosphere. So what?
No change until the ad costs drop. Anyone in any entertainment industry can explain that problem. It’s been with us for a very long time.
Here’s an interesting graph that illustrates the cascading pattern of dominance and decline experienced by every framework for delivering information.
Film is not cited here, and rightly so. It’s not news. But still, it’s clear that its production and promotion has always been part of a broader media ecology. The form has been perpetually influenced by the shifts shown here. (Just consider how newsreels and features once shared the same screen, and the subtle – and now irreplaceable – influence that juxtaposition once had.)
I keep wondering about all the other subtle circumstantial influences that determine what is and isn’t shown on theatrical screens. Only occasionally does something happen that even indicates they’re there.
For instance, I think the last film I saw that I really considered Art was American Beauty. It was so astonishingly candid, so politically incorrect, and so completely ambiguous about themes that are typically walled off as settled matters.
The whole time I was watching it, I remember thinking “I cannot believe this film got made.” This was followed by “I cannot believe a movie is going here“. I realized that I had simply stopped expecting anything this revealing from cinema. That’s how consistent these unseen influences had become.
Entertainment? Yes. Sensation? Absolutely. Genuine Emotion? Sometimes. Appreciation? Quite often. But truth? Never quite like this. I felt, for some reason, that it wasn’t allowed. It seemed the Mendez had beat the system. Not the studio system per se, but a larger and much less formal set of norms and expectations that inhibited expression like this.
When I think about my favorite directors (Fincher and Mann), I realize that I’m hoping for an aesthetic experience that I’ve not actually seen either completely realize, and that I keep hoping they’ll deliver in their next film. Still, I’m expecting something within the established bounds of what contemporary cinema is expected to do. I’m not expecting to see anything like what Mendes did.
Michael Clayton flirted with it. So did Syriana. Fight Club too, for that matter, though it missed the mark by not letting the audience in on the secret until the very end.
Most documentaries aim for it directly, but what they end up with (sometimes) is simply very good reporting. They’re still focused on the world itself, and not the internal constructs that underpin our acquiescence to it. They’re also limited by their necessary avoidance of the sort of truth that only fiction can deliver.
Even so, most fictional cinema rarely takes aim at the uncertain, conflicted, shrouded, and divergent frameworks with which we interpret events. It tends to add filters, not remove them. Idealized forms, not revealed ones, are the primary stock in trade. Perhaps this is what establishes such a sultifying continuity with advertisements, television, and increasingly, the news – which is packaged more like entertainment every day.
But if video games emerging into augmented reality, merging with commerce and massive spectacle are all converging to produce a new and crowning form of massive entertainment, I wonder if big budged ride films will even be able to compete?
If narrative film gets dislocated from it’s current and rather constricted position, then perhaps that broader range of forces now inhibiting the creation of films like American Beauty will recede, freeing a much smaller industry to pursue a different course entirely.
At this stage, I imagine the form itself would acquire a certain ancient patina, giving everything it contains a certain reflective, contemplative quality. And perhaps, by no longer being the locus of theatrical event-type entertainment, it would become increasingly private in nature – designed for people alone with their own screens. It would become rarefied, to some extent, and like novels, not so closely tied to the particular moment in which they were released.
In many ways, their productions would be smaller. But their lives would also be longer. And like modern orchestras – which are far more polished, professional, and precise than anything available in the major composer’s days – they could go on advancing and art long after the need for pure entertainment has found more gratifying destinations. The support of patrons would become increasingly important. Not necessarily individual patrons, but dedicated groups willing to underwrite the cost of groundbreaking work that could be distributed freely.
The problem with live anything is that live is messy. It’s unpredictable. It requires hedging. There’s a persistent attraction to work that is finished, and which stands on its own, independent of particular circumstance, but still capable of revealing truth within it.
So as The Next Big Thing becomes increasingly social, and starts to offer more immerse versions of the vicarious experience offered in film, I wonder if film, like painting responding to the advent of photography, won’t begin to retreat from reliance on actors, and focus instead on the orchestration of visual composition, music, a few words carefully selected for their poetic value and ease of translation.
Actors will still have a role, to be sure, but if what Len says about the role of gesture in computing is right (which I think it is), then this will become the focus of characterization. Starring roles will go to those who communicate the most by moving the best while saying the least.
I think the guys who made Wall*E appreciate all of this. I mean, the entire first hour went by dialog free. And then they laced into people who appeared uncomfortably American.
Now that I think about it, their film also triggered the I can’t believe this got made response.
More, please.
Too true.
Information Theory: choice (first order), choice of choices (second order), chooser of choices (third order), on to chooser of choosers of choices (modern politics as seen through paranoid lens: Manchurian Candidate). :-0
That is the power curve, so to speak. The Internet increasingly becomes less about choice and more about power. Anyway, most of that graph is already understood. Evelyn Sinclair gets an A.
Building a bot or avatar that can act as well as a human is a matter of getting a third or fourth order system to appear to an observer to be a first order system, that is, highly refined acting appears to be natural because you can’t catch them in the act. As a film person, Alex, you know what this is about.
An actor becomes so skilled they become the character because the choice of gestures has been boiled down to a natural flow of gestures: no choosing. The character is ‘made’ or compiled and then the situation is varied.
Indirection must vanish. A secret unspoken is not a secret. It must be shared by two. When the gesture is direct, it is not acting. That is the key to the gestureless gesture, the thoughtless thought. True magic is not misdirected attention. It is directly attentive. Zen 101.
There came a point in the 70s when everyone want to be Bergmann. It was psychologically seductive, seamless, dream like and disturbing.
Then Star Wars brought back cowboys and we returned to happily buying popcorn and smooching.
Evolution more often crabwalks than it ascends. A fully realized gestural system can either mimic the reality around you (See Mars! Be a spy!) or it is just a much cheaper way to make Total Recall.
The problem is still the cost of ads. After that, novelty inside a recognizable framework or situation.
It is indeed an interesting graph, Alex, but a graph on drugs. It’s horizontality belies its status as a graph–which axis?–and its wavy lines are more Wavy Gravy than social-scientific.
Similarly, the labels it employs to describe great, demarcated sweeps of communications media, which sweeps really should be rendered instead in transitional, tertiary colors showing one wave diluting the previous one. Not all of these modes really fit into the description of mere “information delivery”, as some of them were much more than that.
You show as much with your remarks on cinema, with its occasional breakthroughs into art. I’d mention also the enduring importance of literacy, which is much more than information delivery and which also has suffused and enabled all the other forms down to the present day. As I see it, on this “chart” it is the elephant.
One thing that this chart makes clear (at least, to me) is how limited a resource Attention truly is.
My reading indicates that no area has managed to command a growing share without some previously dominant channel registering a loss.
What’s not shown here is how the displaced continue to capture any Attention at all, once their moment has passed them by.
My supposition is that they evolve away from handling the types streams that others can improve on (or simply commodify) and focus their energies on developing strengths that are intrinsic to their medium, and theirs alone.
I suspect that if you wanted to find the ‘best’ examples of work in any format, the place to look wouldn’t be at the top end of the cycle, where simple novelty can carry the day, or at the so-called peak, where monopolistic forces breed a ‘just maintain’ complacency that dilutes most expressions of real ambition.
No, to find the truly exquisite efforts, you need to look past the point on inflection, into the sustained decline.
Here’s where you have highly refined tools and very accomplished people who are now thinking very carefully about what they alone can do. From this, you can (finally) get the fullest expressions of a medium’s potential.
For the first time, you get work that’s great because it has to be, and not just because it happened to beat the odds in a regime that doesn’t actually care about the sublime. Or more specifically, cares only about the disruptive tendencies of its production.
But if you’re still working actively (and not just hanging on) in a format that’s loosing the Attention is once commanded, chances are good that massive but undifferentiated traffic was never your goal to begin with. If it were, you’d have already given up, or moved on.
If you’re there by choice, it’s probably because you have a rare understanding of a medium’s irreplaceable virtues, the skill to make those the bedrock of your own efforts, and the resources to deliver what the upstarts can’t to an audience that is also there by choice.
What an elegant comment, Alex. There’s a book in it, sure. And I don’t intend irony. Perhaps the folks who crafted this chart don’t realize that the book is a technology comprising a couple dozen specific innovations over time. It never was eclipsed, just overshadowed over time–depending upon whether one refers to technique or content. It’s still the most durable of all the forms.
I’m very interested in your attention to “Attention”, but I can’t put my finger on why it itches. Perhaps it has to do with my raw sense that this chart assembles a lot of imcommensurables, probably on the crude criterion of market “attention”.
If we call that mercantile criterion one axis, in what purports to be a chart, then let me nominate, for the other axis, the medium’s power to elevate–and not just to hold–the human imagination. Ergo, Attention toward what end?