Petrified Hollywood
The ossification of empires
Hollywood began as a battle to the death between Thomas Edison and Georges Méliès, with Edison pirating Méliès’ work, particularly Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902), leaving the pioneering French director bankrupt and destitute. Edison is analogous to George Lucas, while Georges Méliès would be Steven Spielberg — the former is a consummate technician whose greatest film was directed by someone else, and the latter a consummate storyteller and illusionist.
Thus, Hollywood was born as a swindle and not much has changed.
For folks who follow the laments of Doomcock, Nerdrotic and Critical Drinker, much has been made of the decline and fall of Hollywood. The consensus is that Hollywood has Gone Woak and is in the process of Going Broke, and to a greater or lesser extent this is true. Certainly, the giants like Disney, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, and Warner Bros. have nose-dived in quality since their creative peak in the mid-1980s. In the past decade, feature films have come to resemble more the ideological, ham-fisted, unabashed Soviet propaganda, than the epic popcorn spectacles of Hollywood in the 1960s to 1980s. In fact, Battleship Potemkin (1925) is still better than the vast bulk of Hollywood’s current output.
While the decline is quite real and visible, it is a bit simplistic to blame the decline solely on the poor quality of film school grads and the hive-mind swarming of the Bumbledicks. There is something much more nefarious and sinister going on. After all, with budgets approaching a half billion dollars for the tent-pole “blackbusters” and “femsploitation” flicks in recent years, you’d think Hollywood, with the most creative accountants on the planet, could do the math and see that they aren’t getting their money’s worth out of the producers, writers, performers and technicians. So what gives?
As an aside, I differentiate between Gary Oldman, who is an actor, and Tom Cruise, who is a performer. Oldman is hardly recognizable in his roles, while Cruise is basically just himself in different costumes and adventures.
So how is it that the Hollywood Machine, which is essentially run by accountants and statisticians, is blind to the gross ineptitude, bloated budgets, deflated returns, and dwindling audiences? Surely, they can graph the finances and chart the demographics, and see that their empire is in free-fall.
We can blame part of the decline on technology. Once upon a time, the cinema was a unique experience. Folks actually dressed up to go to movie palaces for glamorous cultural events. Now they lie on the couch in nightclothes gazing at their 60-inch OLED monster with 7.1 Dolby(tm) Surround Sound, while shoving chemical crunchies in their mouths. Why go through the trouble and expense of a night at the cinema?
Hollywood went through an existential panic with the dawn of TeeVee, and later both New York (TeeVee) and Los Angeles (Movies) panicked with the introduction of the Video Cassette Recorder (VCR). Both industries survived by carving out niches for themselves, while striving for greater quality to differentiate their products.
We could further blame the democratization of production technology. Once, the production tools for film and TeeVee were rare, complex and very expensive, thus limiting access to a privileged few, who got funding by having commercially viable projects to create. In addition, there was the cost of film stock, developing, handling, and conforming negatives, not to mention dozens of work prints.
With the advent of powerful mobile computing, feature-packed software suites, and distribution platforms like Rumble and YouBoob, the ability to create and profit from high-end video production costs just a few thousand dollars. In the old days, I paid that much for a single afternoon in an online post house using millions of dollars worth of gear filling entire buildings to do less than I can do on my desk right now — not to mention generational loss with every copy made.
Technology and democratization are part of the puzzle, but not the key to understanding the implosion of Hollywood, once the global crown jewel of mass entertainment. When was the last time you saw a $400 million ($200M for production, $200M for marketing and distribution) feature film that looked like it cost $400 million? My guess is probably about ten years ago or so. Disney’s recent fiasco, The Acolyte, is reported to have cost more than $300 million for eight half-hour episodes of what is likely the worst “professional” production ever.
Where is all that money going? If technology is making eye-popping effects and origination (camera originals) cheap enough for basement dwellers, surely budgets should be falling, while quality is increasing (and stop calling me Shirley).
I am of the opinion that the same criminal activity going on in the public sector, is occurring at the corporate level. Government and corporate treasuries are being looted before our very eyes — governments in the form of “foreign aid,” and corporations in the form of DEI/Woak make-overs.
Here’s how it works: studios pay outrageous sums to hire CGI farms in the Philippines, Vietnam and India to crank out mediocre product. Just watch the end credits and see how many names you can pronounce. Most of those enormous sums do not go to the CGI farms, but are creatively channelled to cut-outs that put the money into various Woak organizations (NGOs and such) that are little more than fronts for mass manipulation of national and regional legal and political systems around the world to maintain the flow of funds.
The mega-corporations have a jewel that is a primary target for looting: pension funds. The pension funds are “invested” in various equities and assets that benefit the same DEI/Woak organizations, and offer little to no benefit for the pension funds themselves, thus “legally” leaching money, while robbing hard-working folks right under their noses. A portion of the ill-gotten profits are then set aside for bonuses to producers who pack their products with talentless demographic avatars, to keep the process rolling.
If you line up all the weirdly anomalous behaviors of governments and corporations just so, you see a massive looting campaign through programs like Net Zero, economic resets, DEI/ESG, and similar Woakness. There is no way any sensible institution or investor would buy into the plainly obvious silliness. All the mandates and programs to enhance “diversity” and “sustainability” are just sparkly things to keep everyone distracted and arguing over utterly meaningless issues, while the Insiders are walking out the door with huge sacks of money slung over their shoulders.
Think of any great caper movie you’ve ever seen, and multiply it to a global scale.
Hollywood’s perplexing and incongruous decline is not being caused by Woakness, rather Workness is being caused by Hollywood to hide the looting.
It’s not just Hollywood. The vexxing weirdness in national elections worldwide, the colossal spending on dead-end technologies, the laser-like focus on “diversity” and “sustainability,” the authoritarian mandates for pharmaceutical products, the incomprehensible “green revolution” that is raping the global environment — it’s all a smoke screen for the transfer of mind-numbing amounts of wealth from our pockets to some hazy cabal of Monopoly guys enjoying cigars and brandy by the fire in a Swiss chalet.
The looting began decades ago, with the Military-Industrial Complex and their $200 ashtrays, $6,000 hammers and $20,000 toilet seats. The vast profits they reaped were cycled into political “donations” to perpetuate the system, and into various “think tanks” and “focus groups”. Today, this same process has expanded to nearly every industry, with unimaginable amounts of money being thrown at DEI/ESG, Net Zero, “sustainability,” and dozens of other pointless dead-end “initiatives”. Shareholders are being robbed by “stakeholders”. Governments are being replaced by NGOs. The entire system has become a money laundering operations for pilfered pension funds and looted public and private treasuries.
Hollywood is more obvious than other industries, because its products are far more visible than most. We can all clearly see the decline in creative and technical quality, while budgets go through the roof for things that should be getting cheaper, faster and better. There is no way to ascribe this to incompetence, as it is far to consistent and widespread across every espect of the industry.
Many folks have been aware of the looting and economic harvesting of the masses for a long time. After all, President Dwight Eisenhower warned us in 1960, and it was already ongoing in his era. In recent years, however, it has become far more blatant and institutionalized, spreading across all aspects of the public and private sectors. Inflation — money sloshing through the economy without corresponding increases in productivity — is a direct result of vast cash outflows that are not paying for goods and services, but are instead pure grift and graft.
The next time you stare at your screen in horror and disbelief at the utter rubbish being foisted on audiences as professional “arts and entertainment,” go look at the reported budget for that crud. Ask youself, “Do I see those millions of dollars and years of work on the screen?” If not, you can rest assured that the CGI sweatshop in Vietnam didn’t get that money, so where did it go? And why are the fan films and indies so much better with relatively no budgets at all?
This begs the question, why are studios paying more to produce less, when audiences are clearly staying away? And what role do the unions have in denuding us of our hard-earned wealth?
Don’t miss the exciting conclusion of Woakworld, coming to a cinema near you!
Welcome to the world of RoboCop (1987).
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Solid observation.
I guess the only question that remains is what's on when the last dollar is looted...will it be fist-pumping reality shows or just plain static?
Thank you for the two links to worthwhile films.