4 ms·

And so, 40 years later, the creative process in North America is no more and the film industry is brankrupt.

kiba 7y ago
It is? My impression, speaking as someone who lived through only part of the period, that the creative process is the same as it always. Hollywood made shit movies, and good ones. Piracy made zero difference despite hollywood's insistence otherwise.
- tombert 7y ago
  Not the OP, but I think they were joking; the argument that Hollywood was making when the VCR came out was that because of how easy it was to make copies, there will be no more film industry, they're going to be broke, and it will be the death of media. And of course that was ridiculous; the film industry still does well, despite (and some may argue in some cases because of) piracy. EDIT: I forgot to point out that because of how easy the copy-process became with VHS (and most of the other subsequent video recording and distribution media that followed), it greatly lowered the bar for regular people to start making movies or other kind of art projects. Stuff that these movie studios argued existed purely to pirate media gave the regular person access to a lot of the same tools that were previously prohibitively expensive for the average consumer. For example, I used to make home movies as a kid with my VHS camcorder, and used a VHS bootlegging setup (two VCRs, one hooked into the record input of the other) to edit them.
  - Adverblessly 7y ago
    > despite (and some may argue in some cases because of) piracy. A while ago there was an article on HN about the EU hiding the results of a study they ordered into the effect of piracy on actual sales because the study showed that piracy wasn't really that much of a problem. That study showed a 27% displacement rate for films (i.e. for each 100 copies pirated, 27 sales were lost), so going by that study it is indeed "despite of piracy" and not "thanks to piracy". IIRC this is the study: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59ea4ec1-a19b-11e7-b92d-01aa75ed71a1/language-en https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59e... Super-summary: 0% displacement rate for Music, 27% for Film/TV-Series, 38% for Books and -24% for Games (i.e. every 100 copies of a game pirated resulted in an extra 27 legal copies sold!).
    - tombert 7y ago
      I apologize for not making this terribly clear; obviously piracy can be a bad thing, and I'm not arguing otherwise. I certainly think that if you make a product, you at some level should be allowed to monetize and make a profit off of it. That being said, there are plenty of pieces of media that only exist today because of pirated copies being circulated. The immediate example that comes to mind is the Star Wars Holiday Special (though some might argue that that would have been better forgotten). Games like Earthbound didn't do terribly well when they were released (at least not in the US), but due to pirated ROMs being circulated around the internet, and due to the increased popularity of emulation, the game has since received a second wind and has had several re-releases; obviously anecdata doesn't mean much, but I first played Earthbound with a ROM file when I was 13 years old, and when I saw they were putting it on the SNES Classic, it was literally the only reason I bought one. I can't remember where I heard this, but they said something to the effect of "piracy is sort of like bacteria; a lot of it is bad for you, and you certainly don't want too much of it, but some bacteria is necessary", and I think that's a pretty good way of viewing it.
      - bloak 7y ago
        It was ordered that all copies of the film "Nosferatu" be destroyed, because it allegedly infringed copyright. Shortly after the alleged copyright had expired a copy was found in a safe. It seems that someone had failed to fully implement the court order: a punishable crime, no doubt, if it was done deliberately, but perhaps it was just incompetence.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  @stanski was being sarcastic.
- hnick 7y ago
  They seem to make far more sequels and remakes these days, catering to nostalgia. That's a pretty big sign of lack of creativity. Though maybe it was always like this and I'm just old enough to notice.
arethuza 7y ago
That's probably just Hollywood Accounting, where everything makes a loss so you don't have to pay out to anyone who signed up for a share of the profits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting e.g. Apparently the Lord of the Rings movies made losses using these rules...
- babypuncher 7y ago
  That hasn't been an issue for years. People know to ask for a % of the gross rather than the net. It helps that almost every creative position in Hollywood is protected by a union.
  - jsmith45 7y ago
    I've literally seen contracts that define promise n% of "____ gross", where "____" is some inconspicuous seeming word, but they then define that phase in such a way that it does not even remotely correspond to the actual gross. So knowing that you want gross instead of net is nowhere near good enough to avoid getting screwed. (In the case I am referring to a book author who sold movie rights was screwed over by a contract specifically misworded to sound like she would be getting a percent of of gross, when the actual definition used was much closer to that of net).

kiba 7y ago

It is? My impression, speaking as someone who lived through only part of the period, that the creative process is the same as it always. Hollywood made shit movies, and good ones. Piracy made zero difference despite hollywood's insistence otherwise.

tombert 7y ago
Not the OP, but I think they were joking; the argument that Hollywood was making when the VCR came out was that because of how easy it was to make copies, there will be no more film industry, they're going to be broke, and it will be the death of media. And of course that was ridiculous; the film industry still does well, despite (and some may argue in some cases because of) piracy. EDIT: I forgot to point out that because of how easy the copy-process became with VHS (and most of the other subsequent video recording and distribution media that followed), it greatly lowered the bar for regular people to start making movies or other kind of art projects. Stuff that these movie studios argued existed purely to pirate media gave the regular person access to a lot of the same tools that were previously prohibitively expensive for the average consumer. For example, I used to make home movies as a kid with my VHS camcorder, and used a VHS bootlegging setup (two VCRs, one hooked into the record input of the other) to edit them.
- Adverblessly 7y ago
  > despite (and some may argue in some cases because of) piracy. A while ago there was an article on HN about the EU hiding the results of a study they ordered into the effect of piracy on actual sales because the study showed that piracy wasn't really that much of a problem. That study showed a 27% displacement rate for films (i.e. for each 100 copies pirated, 27 sales were lost), so going by that study it is indeed "despite of piracy" and not "thanks to piracy". IIRC this is the study: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59ea4ec1-a19b-11e7-b92d-01aa75ed71a1/language-en https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59e... Super-summary: 0% displacement rate for Music, 27% for Film/TV-Series, 38% for Books and -24% for Games (i.e. every 100 copies of a game pirated resulted in an extra 27 legal copies sold!).
  - tombert 7y ago
    I apologize for not making this terribly clear; obviously piracy can be a bad thing, and I'm not arguing otherwise. I certainly think that if you make a product, you at some level should be allowed to monetize and make a profit off of it. That being said, there are plenty of pieces of media that only exist today because of pirated copies being circulated. The immediate example that comes to mind is the Star Wars Holiday Special (though some might argue that that would have been better forgotten). Games like Earthbound didn't do terribly well when they were released (at least not in the US), but due to pirated ROMs being circulated around the internet, and due to the increased popularity of emulation, the game has since received a second wind and has had several re-releases; obviously anecdata doesn't mean much, but I first played Earthbound with a ROM file when I was 13 years old, and when I saw they were putting it on the SNES Classic, it was literally the only reason I bought one. I can't remember where I heard this, but they said something to the effect of "piracy is sort of like bacteria; a lot of it is bad for you, and you certainly don't want too much of it, but some bacteria is necessary", and I think that's a pretty good way of viewing it.
    - bloak 7y ago
      It was ordered that all copies of the film "Nosferatu" be destroyed, because it allegedly infringed copyright. Shortly after the alleged copyright had expired a copy was found in a safe. It seems that someone had failed to fully implement the court order: a punishable crime, no doubt, if it was done deliberately, but perhaps it was just incompetence.
dredmorbius 7y ago
@stanski was being sarcastic.
hnick 7y ago
They seem to make far more sequels and remakes these days, catering to nostalgia. That's a pretty big sign of lack of creativity. Though maybe it was always like this and I'm just old enough to notice.

arethuza 7y ago

That's probably just Hollywood Accounting, where everything makes a loss so you don't have to pay out to anyone who signed up for a share of the profits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting e.g. Apparently the Lord of the Rings movies made losses using these rules...

babypuncher 7y ago
That hasn't been an issue for years. People know to ask for a % of the gross rather than the net. It helps that almost every creative position in Hollywood is protected by a union.
- jsmith45 7y ago
  I've literally seen contracts that define promise n% of "____ gross", where "____" is some inconspicuous seeming word, but they then define that phase in such a way that it does not even remotely correspond to the actual gross. So knowing that you want gross instead of net is nowhere near good enough to avoid getting screwed. (In the case I am referring to a book author who sold movie rights was screwed over by a contract specifically misworded to sound like she would be getting a percent of of gross, when the actual definition used was much closer to that of net).