Less Trout Than You’re Used To
When I first came to Los Angeles in 1985, it was boom times for the industry. The recently burgeoning home video market, combined with the popularity of American Films overseas, assured film producers that if you were smart enough with your budget, you could turn a profit out of anything. The weekend I arrived the local six-plex, an enormous crackerbox that only had stereo in two auditoriums, was opening CAVEGIRL, a low-budget comedy from Crown International. They had ascended in that decade making movies based on market research questions. And while it didn’t break records, CAVEGIRL did indeed make money.
Meanwhile, the record industry was on the verge of a renassaisance due to the new technology of compact disks. More durable than vinyl, cheaper to produce, and an opportunity to resell its entire back catalog. Any time you can get somebody to give you new money for something you’ve already amortized, take it baby.
Television was doing okay as well, having enough audience to spawn a brand new cheeky fourth network in the form of Fox. At the time there was some hand wringing about the competition from VHS and HBO but compared to nowadays, they had it great. Living in Los Angeles then was like being a fisherman surrounded by a steady downpour of falling trout.
Well, twenty years has gone by and the entertainment business is scrambling around with nets, desperately trying to be under the next trout. And increasingly, that trout is falling somewhere else. The days of overseas sales of any damn crap ended around the early nineties when even the Koreans started to insist on production values. You couldn’t rely on foreign investor money on the promise of a breast and gunplay. Or was it the other way around? Anyway, that’s why you stopped seeing movies from Crown, and Cannon, and Roger Corman’s New Horizons pictures.
The record industry plateaued, then started to put all their promotional energy into sure things like boy bands, which led to a predictable backlash. Televsion added more cable channels and started carving up the pie so that no one was getting a satisfying piece.
Then arose the internet.
Oh man, is that thing hurting the majors! You can look at the computer revolution as a great tool of democratization. Now you can print your own menu and it will look gorgeous, where before you had to take a list of dishes to the local typesetter. Now you can edit video with equipment costing $500, and it has all the features of an Avid that used to cost $90,000. Everybody wins, except the local typesetter and they guys in Tewksbury who built Avids.
The internet is doing the same thing to distribution. A movie typically ships in two or three cans weighing about 30 pounds each - pretty soon it can be uploaded to your fourplex and you won’t even be able to tell the difference. You used to have a store full of little silver disks, and that’s where you got your music from - now you just call a server and get music.
And while it’s going to save the industry a ton of money, the problem is that distribution is so easy, even you can do it. And admit it, you are.
The major media companies are stuck with these ancient distribution mechanisms, inefficient and expensive to maintain, and at the same time they’re only beginning to figure out how to compete with a college kid who wants to push their stuff around for free. And they’ll come up with something, but not soon and not before there is some serious deadwood clearing.
Let’s face it, showbiz had it so good for so long that everybody makes too much money. That is going to change, whether by conscious sacrifice or by people bidding themselves out of the market. Hello Jim Carrey! Working much lately? In the meantime expect it to get get ugly and gloomy as New York snow. The coming actor’s strike, I expect, will be just as ugly as the writers strike. Both sides will insist that the other needs to make less money, not them. It probably won’t go on as long because the producers have less product in the pipeline so they’ll be compelled to get serious quicker, but it will go on longer than you want.
Some debate about whether America is in a recession; but showbiz is clearly around the corner from one. They say you can’t be too thin in this town. There see? The glass is half full.
-daniel k.