Tag: Hollywood
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Decline? Yes. Collapse? No.
Decline? Yes. Collapse? No. Collapse would mean CIA spooks scribbling op-eds on Substack and hawking $10-a-month subscriptions like two-bit grifters at a carnival sideshow. The agency boys in their ill-fitting suits, slumped in coffee shops from Langley to Lincoln, churning out think pieces titled “The Death of American Empire: A Personal Journey” or “How I…
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Ben-Hur
The brilliance of Ben-Hur, and its simultaneous duplicity, lies in its quiet realignment of cultural identity for the sake of narrative expedience. Judah Ben-Hur, ostensibly a Middle Eastern Jew in the Roman province of Judea, is unmistakably reframed as an Ashkenazi Jew—a Jewishness that is Western, assimilable, and, crucially, palatable to mid-century American audiences. Charlton…
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IP Bloat and ZIRP
IP bloat and zero interest rates, my friends, are the twin nightmares of our modern entertainment and economic systems. The former, a grotesque carnival of stale franchises and soulless sequels, floods the market with an avalanche of derivative dreck, hoping to drown out the creaky echoes of its own mediocrity. The latter, zero interest rates,…
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Film Executive Priorities
In the high-stakes world of Hollywood, film executives emerge as tragicomic figures, navigating a landscape where profit, status, and survival dominate every decision. Their priorities are not mere tasks to be checked off but are deeply embedded in the very fabric of the industry. It’s a brutal game where the sharpest minds, the quickest thinkers,…
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Hollywood Debt Obligations
“Hollywood has become a conduit for studios and artists to meet their debt obligations because studios are in great great debt and the job is not so much to make great movies, their job is to make their debt obligation” In the labyrinthine fever dream of Hollywood, where ambition curdles into celluloid and dreams are…
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The Illusion of Funding: How Hollywood Forgot How to Dream
The primary challenge for Hollywood now is to abandon the idea of creating various schemes around box office numbers, realizing that they could essentially “print money” using alternative financial methods, relying on box office and streaming figures to uphold the belief that these streams primarily funded projects. What it funded was an artistic vision of…