7 ms·

You have to beat the man to be the man

116 points by charliecurran 13y ago

guard-of-terra 13y ago
"instead we see Youtube desperately trying to go Hollywood, offering lucrative contracts to production companies and celebrities to create branded content for the site" Last time I've saw the TV it had feature films about wild life and a lot of youtube videos about pets but not one "celebrity" in sight. The word "celebrity" makes me want to vomit. Can we please ignore that and instead disrupt just that part of Hollywood and TV that doesn't make us vomit? And don't touch the other part with 5 meter pole.
- dasil003 13y ago
  That part that makes all the money?
  - guard-of-terra 13y ago
    Bundleware toolbars for IE that fake search engine choice make pretty money, malware that steals money - too. Not a reason to enter this business. You aren't getting that money until you shrug off what you have left of your moral values, so the only feasible thing is that part that doesn't offer easy money. Instead offering real product and real satisfaction.
    - anon1385 13y ago
      >Bundleware toolbars for IE that fake search engine choice make pretty money, malware that steals money - too. Not a reason to enter this business. Paul Graham disagrees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059806
- mikecane 13y ago
  Then you haven't looked very closely at YouTube. You can pay to watch movies there now too. http://www.youtube.com/user/movies http://www.youtube.com/user/movies
paulsutter 13y ago
Charlie Curran's mistake is thinking the entertainment of the future will be just like the entertainment of the past. pg's essay was a challenge to find what the future will look like. He wasn't excluding any possibility. He wasn't predicting the demise of every single aspect of Hollywood, or even, of any specific aspect of Hollywood pg was just pointing out that entertainment will continue to evolve, that change is the only thing that's for sure, and that like all industries, Hollywood is not immune to outside challenges.
- lisper 13y ago
  Yes, but Silicon Valley's mistake (not necessarily PG's mistake) is thinking that what will kill Hollywood is technology. It isn't. What will kill Hollywood is the marriage of technology and the new content creation and distribution models that the technology enables. Curran's point is just that cute cat videos will only get you so far. It's what comes after that that no one seems to have figured out yet. The current approach is desperate attempts to access or reproduce Hollywood's content, and that surely won't work.
  - nileshtrivedi 13y ago
    > cute cat videos will only get you so far. Aren't we already spending more time watching videos on YouTube / CollegeHumor and funny pics on Reddit than we do watching films? One might think that we have solved the content / attention problem. What remains to be solved is monetization.
    - lisper 13y ago
      Yes, just that one little detail to work out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts
    - KaiserPro 13y ago
      At what time of day? The main problem that people fail to grasp is that nobody really cares about the technology, unless it gets in the way. People only care about content, look at the signal to noise ratio on youtube, it's astronomically high. American TV has a lower s/n ratio, but not much lower. (I'm british so fortunately we have a stream of relatively HQ TV without the shitty twitter gimmicks that plague things like discovery.) In short, there is no problem with monitization really, netflix has it nailed.
lisper 13y ago
When I clicked on this link the anchor text was "Why Silicon Valley will never beat Hollywood" (or something like that). When I came back, it had changed to "You have to beat the man to be the man," which is the title of the piece. But IMHO the original title (presumably the one written by the submitter) was much better and more descriptive. I don't think I would have clicked on this link with the current title. There seems to be a lot of this headline-rewriting going on on HN nowadays. IMO it's going a little too far.
- MarcScott 13y ago
  Also, the title on the front page is different from the title in the comments. I don't think I've seen this before, but maybe I'm just not very observant. edit: They're the same now. Confused.
  - charliecurran 13y ago
    Hey, just came back to hacker news and noticed the change as well. Very confused as I didn't edit the title after I had posted it.
- dylandrop 13y ago
  "Why Silicon Valley will never beat Hollywood" inaccurately summarized the piece (see the bottom of the article, where the author says the industry could go either way). Also, IMO, having inflammatory titles beginning with "Why..." is way too common on HN and is way more of an annoyance than headline-rewriting.
  - lisper 13y ago
    So change it to "Why Silicon Valley may have a hard time beating Hollywood" or something like that if you really want to be that anal about accurate summarization. But the current title tells me absolutely nothing about what the article is actually about.
    - dylandrop 13y ago
guard-of-terra 13y ago
"the basic formula of pairing known stars with compelling stories has not and will not change" Didn't it change with the advent of the modern TV Shows? How big were Schwimmer, Laurie or Cranston as stars before their show made a hit? Laurie was locally known but not that much. With modern show, you have select good actors for their role, not stars from an universal pool, and that's what changed. And I fail to name terribly many films in the last ten years that can be compared to the best TV shows which are a plenty.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  What applies to TV shows doesn't necessarily apply to movies. The thing TV has going for it? A pilot is twenty minutes long, instead of a hundred and sixty. To me, as far as actor career trajectory, TV seems to be like a minor league that some actors use to help launch their overall career.
  - guard-of-terra 13y ago
    We no longer have to care about actor career. We care about whether the show is good as a whole. Movies are subpar compared to TV shows with a tiny number of exceptions.
KaiserPro 13y ago
There are several reasons why Y combinator is unlikely to kill hollywood. The Author touches on part of the problem. To make a good movie you need: 1) an excellent script (if it reads like shit, its going to look worse, if the pitch is "its like X but...." its a fail) 2) a significant amount of captial ($1million) 3) quality actors 4) ridiculously good organisation skills (you'll be organising 40+ people hundreds and thousands of pounds worth of equipment for around 40 days (or a lot more)) that's just first part. You then need to wrangle all the footage, and massage it into a cohesive and flowing narrative, something most "film" buffs fail cataclysmically ally at. (why do you think most youtube videos are only 3 minutes top?) Once you've spent three years of your life doing that, you then need to get your movie seen. That means persuading people who think you are worse than dogshit to watch a movie that they really couldn't care about, much less actually pay you for. This will take you the next 3-6 years. It also costs a lot.
- nileshtrivedi 13y ago
  You're assuming that the content has to have the same format as movies. Short videos (like the ones produced by CollegeHumor) can have a good script and quality visuals without involving a big budget. The market isn't "films". It is "entertainment".
  - Spearchucker 13y ago
    I like feature-length movies. Short films are a way to fill an idle minute, but otherwise bore me. No one I know spends 2 hours straight just watching short clips or movies on YouTube.
    - drblast 13y ago
      My wife and I spend quite a bit of time watching 22 or 50 minute TV shows in succession on Netflix. I think that format is in many ways more interesting, as you can develop a story in much more depth than you could with a 2 hour movie.
      - 13y ago
kumarski 13y ago
Netflix was started in Los Gatos, California. Silicon-Valley-ish. Gumroad sells documentary films. They've grown. Funded by Silicon Valley Kleiner Perkins VC fund.
nawitus 13y ago
>since the days of Adolf Zucker I think he is referring to Adolph Zukor.
gergles 13y ago
The real reason a VC company isn't going to kill hollywood is because there's not enough money in it. The author throws around $65 billion industry as if that's some sort of impressive number. FB alone is worth $100B. We could liquidate FB and buy the entire industry and shut it down if we really wanted to. Compare that to LNKD, EBAY, GOOG, hell even CRM. We have hit after hit after hit that are worth more than the entire film industry after a few years' worth of nurturing. No, the reason that a VC-funded company won't kill Hollywood is because there's not enough money there - not because Hollywood has some sort of monopoly on how to entertain people.
- vehementi 13y ago
  Sounds like there's an untapped $65 billion market that other VCs won't touch. What opportunity!
- JackFr 13y ago
  Ummmm, not quite. Fox, Disney, Universal all have market caps larger than FB at P/E's 20 times lower. I think the $65 billion he's talking about is revenue.
- tlb 13y ago
  $65B is Hollywood's annual revenue. $100B is Facebook's market cap -- its revenue is $5B (2012). Hollywood's revenue is a plenty big enough prize to chase.
- robin2 13y ago
  It rather depends what you count as "killing Hollywood". Back in the late 90s, I used to get rather perplexed by the way geeks railed against DVD zoning, DMCA, etc. Yes, the entertainment industry was acting in fairly nasty ways to defend itself, but then drug dealers can be unpleasant too. My view was the debates around DRM circumvention didn't even touch on the root cause of the entertainment industry's power. Michael Ventura once summarized the meaning of entertainment: "You go from a job you don't like to watching a screen on which others live more intensely than you." On that view of things, something like meetup.com is more of a threat to Hollywood than youtube could ever be.
- 13y ago
rdxm 13y ago
i like this post/article/statement. it reminds me that as technologists we tend to want to reduce things to algorithms. that just doesn't work when you get to aesthetics and the human side of the equation.
betterunix 13y ago
"At the very heart of the film industry’s longevity is the art of narrative storytelling which has been refined continuously" The overwhelming majority of Hollywood movies are terrible, shallow stories with formulaic development that are designed to grab money from specific demographics. There is hardly anything artistic left. It may be what people want, but let's not pretend that great works of art are what keep Hollywood profitable. "you have to remember this is a sixty-five billion dollar a year industry that has survived multiple world wars and the great depression" The typewriter industry also survived those wars and the great depression, and where is it now? Times change, and businesses that adapt poorly to a changing market will be replaced.
- diminish 13y ago
  Here comes the formulaic HN movie, two hackers decide to kill movie industry.....
- dylandrop 13y ago
  People always enjoy escapes from reality. This is what makes Hollywood so successful. And while artistic movies might not be the biggest money makers, there are still plenty of respectable titles that earn a large amount of money and are tasteful/fascinating to watch. In regards to your second point, I think you didn't read the full article. The point is that Hollywood historically HAS been a VERY successful industry at rebounding, most specifically in the era of the TV (which is probably most applicable here).
- jmduke 13y ago
  The overwhelming majority of Hollywood movies are terrible, shallow stories with formulaic development that are designed to grab money from specific demographics. There is hardly anything artistic left. This argument is not necessarily in conflict with what you quoted.
- larrys 13y ago
  Typewriter industry didn't continually have to be creative through those time periods. Hollywood did. It has to be creative and constantly come up with new "merchandise" in order to survive. IBM just had to come up with the "Selectric" or make slight improvements to satisfy what amounts to almost a cash cow type business in a more or less stable market. Hollywood is in the entertainment business. They have adapted well to (as a business venture and to make money) the entertainment business over time. Movies aren't made the same way they were in the 30's, 50's or 70's. While they certainly make their share of mistakes (with flops and not knowing necessarily what will be the next blockbuster) so do VC's and angels. They just try to match the best pattern they can and spread the money around. Hollywood does a version of the same. But Hollywood has been much more successful (at scale that is) than the "startup" industry has been. (Even taking into account VC investing prior to the Internet). "Disrupt" hasn't been around that long. Hollywood has. People buy the product.
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lists 13y ago
I don't think the author is responding to Graham appropriately. Graham's argument is against the power structure of Big Media, not the enduring value of narrative. Hence Graham's post beginning by pointing to the industries' push for SOPA signaling that they're running out of ideas, not on how to entertain people, but to constrict people to being entertained on Big Media's terms. This has a negative effect on quality of narrative, as many have noted. I think the nature of the confusion is that Graham hints at his personal preferences on how people should spend time ("It would be great if what people did instead of watching shows was exercise more and spend more time with their friends and families" [0]) right besides endorsements for products that shift demand for screen narratives ("new media", "things... that have little in common with movies and TV except competing with them for finite audience attention" [0]). But even with that said, Graham's view is ultimately inclusive of Curran's. Graham: >"There will be several answers, ranging from new ways to produce and distribute shows..." [0] Curran: >"The internet has paved the way once again for a vertically integrated system of production and distribution, and we know that today’s youth is hungry for stories that matter to them. Whomever is the first to put that together will win." [1] Screen narrative was never in question. Edit: Forgot to add links [0]: http://ycombinator.com/rfs9.html http://ycombinator.com/rfs9.html [1]: http://charliecurran.com/you-have-to-beat-the-man-to-be-the-man/ http://charliecurran.com/you-have-to-beat-the-man-to-be-the-...
hayesdaniel 13y ago
This article seems to ignore one of the biggest, most basic issues facing hollywood right now - the demise of innovation in the VFX industry. Studios have carefully orchestrated an incredibly hostile working environment for people creating the biggest cash-cow it has left. For profit colleges are pumping out scores of young people every year with just enough training to get a low-paying job in whatever tax-incentive location is paying the most at any given time. Then you work 80-100+ hour weeks for a few months and are kicked back out on the street to start over in a new city (or country) at a new company, probably for even less money. It's a HUGE crisis and causing a massive exodus of mid and senior-level talent, myself included. Check out www.vfxsoldier.com or effectscorner.blogspot.com for more info. All the while, film budgets go up, ticket prices go up, profits go up. My point is that there IS a huge potential for disruptive influences in filmmaking, television and VOD, but it will likely come from the people that have been straddling the line between innovative technology and entertainment for longer than anyone - the VFX people. It's happening already. Now if only I could find some time to work to work on that side project...
- hayesdaniel 13y ago
  Here's another awesome breakdown of where we're at by former Digital Domain CEO Scott Ross - http://www.awntv.com/playlists/scott-ross-fmx-11-presentation-future-vfx-industry http://www.awntv.com/playlists/scott-ross-fmx-11-presentatio...
thinkersilver 13y ago
I disagree with Paul Graham's notion that we need to find a better way to entertain ourselves. The narratives of films are powerful and are not always fun and entertaining yet people will go watch them; even if they walk out a bit disturbed. Hollywood creates content. I think to beat Hollywood, would require a platform that enables the film production process to happen outside the Hollywood system. Youtube, Netflix already have the distribution end. Movie stars are not a requirement for a good film, they can be replaced with good upcoming talent, (visit any major drama school). A large budget is not a requirement either, principal photography has never been cheaper. So what does Hollywood have that makes it special? It has the network which connects and coordinates all the key players (actors,writers,cameramen,animators etc). That's the problem that Silicon Valley needs to solve (not entertainment). It(we?) need to provide a platform to streamline the process of making film. Perhaps Paul Graham should have thought of an Incubator for Filmmakers. Demo night could be a short film.
MaysonL 13y ago
Of course, Mr. Curran totally ignores Silicon Valley's two major successes in entertainment: video games and Pixar.
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ChuckMcM 13y ago
I thought this was a great read, clearly the author has thought through is argument and does a good job of describing his reasoning about the challenges the tech community faces with regard to Hollywood's livelyhood. The only weakness for me was that it is hard to argue from a point too far removed from the sources of your arguments. Specifically if you are arguing the future of "entertainment" then Hollywood is but a piece, similarly if you argue too closely to the source such as the future of "movies" then technology is but a piece. So finding a place in the spectrum where one point of view and dominate another isn't a very solid way of making your point. :-) That said, it made me wonder if computer games will go through the 'star' system (clearly some of that has happened with titles like "Sid Meir's Civilization") or if it will be different for programs. At the 'top' (or most diffuse?) point of the spectrum you can take examples from music, books, games, movies, and television as ways people tease dollars from consumers. And following that line of reasoning lead me to thinking about the fundamental question, is it money or is it art? There are two parallel universes in most entertainment systems, the one that is designed to extract the most money (consumer focused) and the one that is designed to express the artists intent most faithfully (artist focused). The latter occasionally makes a lot of money, the former occasionally makes very little money. The "space" is a blend of the two. Many of the developers I know are "artists' where they have very strong feelings about how their programs should work, and I believe we see a lot of that here on HN. But I also know engineers who are focused more on the "business" where they write code that makes them the most money, period. And they are often harshly judged in fora such as this one. So where does that leave us? I think it makes it important to fix the context before we debate, as that affects the persuasiveness of the different points of view. It also suggests that Paul's call to action could be interpreted more literally to be "Work on the 'consumer focused' side of tech for entertainment harder." If you think of Entertainment as a giant pie of dollars, getting more of those dollars can be achieved either by being better than other players in your wedge, or by increasing the size of your wedge relative to the other players. Looked at in that context, it isn't about "beating" Hollywood so much as making Hollywood less relevant.
- araes 13y ago
  Or by doing something like Nintendo or Blizzard in the last gaming generations, where you increase the size of the pie itself.
peteforde 13y ago
Great article with sound reasoning. I love reading op-ed style pieces that legitimately educate me on something just outside of my radar. Two points to add: 1. I disagree that Netflix can't win by trying to out-HBO HBO, because as I understand Netflix' strategy is closer to Amazon Prime. Amazon loses money on Prime shipping (although with volume, not as much as you think) but in exchange they become the default place that customers come to buy just about anything they need, which means that loss in shipping was actually a massive reduction in marketing. They tilt the customer acquisition cost lower and the LTV higher. If Netflix succeeds in creating content that most consumers can only get in one place, it will dramatically increase the size of the iceberg under the surface. 2. One of the most interesting and successful tech/media hybrids I'm aware of is hitRECord, which is spearheaded by the brilliant Regular Joe aka Joseph Gordon-Levitt. This is a stunning example of crowd-sourcing and community collaboration working. http://www.hitrecord.org/ http://www.hitrecord.org/ - check out "Morgan M. Morgansen's Date With Destiny" on the Greatest Hits page: http://www.hitrecord.org/greatest http://www.hitrecord.org/greatest It's silly to speculate whether YC will or will not fund the evolution of entertainment. It's also not an interesting debate.
cmbaus 13y ago
I'd consider NetFlix to be a prototypical Silicon Valley start-up and they are showing the way forward with House of Cards, which I thought was fantastic. It might be a Hollywood formula, but they are bypassing traditional distribution channels.
wj 13y ago
I think many, if not most, of the people in this conversation really are forgetting that taste is subjective. What you view as a terrible film is often what millions of people enjoy. What you view as great cinema millions of others would find boring. As an antidote most people I know do not share the same tastes as me (I find the 30s-50s as my golden age of cinema and love Humphrey Bogart) as I with them. While my wife can't stand black and white movies (with a few exceptions) I also really dislike most modern romantic comedies (with a few exceptions such as Love Actually). Of course she says she enjoyed the black and white movie that I made. :) This also holds true to television as well. I don't want to keep up with the Kardashians or see which C-list celebrity has the best dance moves. Other people didn't want to watch Rubicon or don't want to watch Portland Timbers soccer. (I also think I'll be much worse off with unbundling of cable channels as the niche channels are often included in packages with more popular channels and will likely die off without enough interest and pricing power to sustain the programming.) John August, a screenwriter with a great blog and podcast and a geek at heart, has made the observation that talented writers are starting to prefer working with TV (channels such as HBO, Showtime, AMC, FX, etc.) as they're given more latitude to tell their stories than they are in a feature length film for a studio. So, if you were to ask me for a prediction (and you didn't), that is the way I imagine the industry going with Amazon, Netflix, etc. picking up some of those shows as well. Those, along with live sports, will continue to draw audiences as they provide topics of conversation for the majority of society. (Obviously you and your group of friends are too sophisticated for that and discuss philosophy and indie rock but you're a small segment of society.) You can never please everybody. And you'll likely go broke trying.
- wj 13y ago
  Also, I forgot to mention that everybody looks at the past with rose-colored glasses. There were plenty, PLENTY, of films in the whatever era you view as the greatest that you would consider terrible. You're not aware of them as they died the death of irrelevance.
- mikecane 13y ago
  >>>Other people didn't want to watch Rubicon Just want to say I appreciate that mention, having been a fan of that series.
charliecurran 13y ago
Hey everyone, I just got out of the editing bay and was really happy to see such a well thought out discussion playing out amongst the community. I wanted to take a moment to clarify my argument and respond to some of your comments in the hopes of furthering the conversation. The major criticism I noticed was that I somehow misunderstood Graham's argument or that it functioned in such a way that subsumed mine. As I understood Graham's call to arms to kill Hollywood, he was soliciting entrepreneurs to start thinking about how to disrupt Big Media's grasp on the entertainment market. While I am whole heartedly against the practices of a Hollywood we all can agree is in a current rut (e.g. SOPA, DMCA takedowns, etc.) I do not believe that Hollywood has peaked, nor that his prescriptions for hastening its demise are feasible. I took his call as soliciting two options for responding to Hollywood: a.) By creating more entertaining offerings that would create a zero-sum trade off with Hollywood's offerings ultimately rendering their products irrelevant. b.) Leveraging technology to create alternate production and distribution mechanisms including new media and interactive programming offerings. My argument takes a historical approach to examining how Hollywood has previously addressed similar disruptions citing the emergence of television and the rise/collapse of the studio system to begin thinking how one might approach “eating Hollywood's lunch”. Against alternative forms of entertainment and distribution mechanisms, one thing has remained consistent and that is the power of cinema be it in episodic television content or feature length material to consistently survive industry transformations and reorganizations. I think this historical pattern is owed to the nature of the medium itself which satisfies a very human need which is the transmission of stories. I believe that film more than any other medium has refined this craft, and in many ways developed the visual language through which we understand contemporary storytelling. Other mediums will of course tell stories, but I think only filmmaking for the foreseeable future will have the ability to tell stories with the richness and complexity we've evolved as a species to receive and share. I think it's misguided to place a technologist's view of industry disruption before an examination of the medium's history because I believe it discounts the power of narrative and how we've found ourselves in this particular position. Despite Hollywood's current rut the market for film exhibition has only grown with foreign markets and alternative distribution mechanisms expanding the potential reach of Hollywood's content. I think what is needed now is a leveraging of technology to push film to its inherent potential to tell meaningful stories, what Hollywood once understood, rather than view it as a tool to destroy an industry. A few of the comments that I thought particularly interesting/pertinent to respond to. @Nileshtrivedi I am assuming that the basic format of narrative television and features will remain a constant, due to the historical evolution of the form into its current iteration. Initially conceived films were exhibited at nickelodeons which served up customers short form content though it failed to evolve beyond a mere novelty that soon went through its own bust. It was Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount Pictures, who championed the format as we currently know it drawing on his understanding of how storytelling dating back to Plato, Aristotle, and the great play-writes of yesteryear stumbled on a nearly universal structure for telling effective stories. @KaiserPro I absolutely agree the current pipeline of monetizing Hollywood's offerings is fundamentally broken and has to be done away with. Theatrical distribution demands enormous costs guaranteeing that we will only see low-risk content that has proven to be Hollywood's undoing. The internet and Video on Demand offers a chance to remove these costs in many ways and generate riskier fare delivered straight to the consumer. @Walshemj and Djloche Coming up through film school witnessing the rise of crowdfunding and the widespread adoption of digital filmmaking and editing, the costs must and absolutely can come down. These film's budgets assume a pipeline that requires enormous spends on development, production, distribution, print/advertising, and studio overhead. I think Vice offers a great example of how low-cost content paired appropriately with relevant niche markets can provide compelling entertainment alternatives to Hollywood's current offerings. @Paulsutter I am not by any means ruling out the inevitable evolution of entertainment offerings we'll see over the next twenty years, but I think to assume film will go away is a hard position to defend. I think it's far more likely that a medium which has demonstrated serious lasting power will evolve and adapt rather than be dismembered by dying conglomerates or new media offerings which will be in their infancy. Far more likely I believe we'll see something similar to the era of New Hollywood in the sixties and early seventies repeat itself. @Betterunix The claim that the vast majority of Hollywood's movies are terrible is really a subjective view. For every Transformers there are independent alternatives and risky studio films that sneak through the development pipeline. However, I do agree that the current system of exhibition necessitates a system of tent-pole event films that will inevitably sink the industry if left as it exists now. Look no further than what George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had to say about the sustainability of the current Hollywood model. http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/is-hollywood-model-doomed-steven-spielberg-and-george-lucas-think-so-20130815 http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/is-hollywood-model-d... @Guard-of-terra Absolutely, the star system underwent a fundamental shift with the introduction of television though its ability to adapt to the new pipeline I believe displays its lasting power. A really great read on the transformation the star system underwent with the introduction of television is “Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame,” by Ty Burr. A short excerpt that might address your comment. “The essence of the broadcast revolution is simple: it offered a literal home theatre. No longer did you have to go out to see the stars and be entertained. Now they came to you. This affected the kinds of stars who were created from the 1950s on, in the sense that the people you let into your house are different from the people you pay to see in a theatre. They're more like you and me, for one thing, which also means you and I are more like the stars. For decades – until, arguably, the arrival of nighttime soaps in the 1970s and '80s – the most celebrated figures on the small screen evoked not glamour but ordinariness. They acted out comic and dramatic versions of our own dilemmas, or they filled history with life-sized personalities rather than the bigger-than-life stars of film.” @Hayesdaniel While I absolutely feel for you and everyone I know in the Visual Effects industry who has been clearly mistreated in the current system of studio filmmaking, I don't believe that the resolution of that issue is the most fundamental problem facing contemporary filmmaking. I think it's a symptom of larger ills that will need to be resolved. Ultimately I believe if we can't disrupt the model in its current form collectively secured bargaining rights and organization similar to how other industry groups such as the Screenwriter’s Guild or the Directors Guild of America could go a long way towards negotiating fair pay for visual effects studios and subsequently their employees. @MaysonL I didn't by any means set out to ignore the success of the video game industry or Pixax, but for my argument I didn't believe them wholly relevant. I think that Pixar offers a really great example how well crafted storytelling above all can be film's savior. They go to incredible lengths to develop and protect their stories, and it shows. However, I don't think that they are the answer to saving the industry either. I have a real fondness for everything Pixar is doing, one of the best storytellers I had the chance to know at film school now works there, but I think the trend of Pixarification of films is actually a threat to the kinds of film that will ultimately usher in a new era of Hollywood. You might enjoy what Danny Boyle recently said on this point. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz6W0h3r30k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz6W0h3r30k I know this will be a controversial statement, as I get into this argument with my friends who are game design majors on a regular basis, but I do not believe that video games will supplant film as the highest form of narrative storytelling. The industry is relatively young and as such most likely won't create its own Citizen Kane for quite some time. I think far more likely is that a reinvigorated hollywood will become far more intertwined. Looking to Microsoft and Spielberg's recent collaborations I think is telling of where these trends will head with narrative filmmaking supplementing and expanding upon franchises, and video games working more closely with Hollywood to infuse their games with the level of storytelling audiences have grown to expect from their entertainment.
teeja 13y ago
Great, provocative thinkpiece. I'd add that considering the number of expensive flops this summer, the audiences' responsiveness to the massive CGI-spectacles and remakes of recent years might be beginning to wane. To make film No Country for Old Men again might require not 'beating' the man but replacing spectacle with heartfelt passion. Pay more attention to why gay-rights are unstoppable.
charliecurran 13y ago
Lets play devils advocate - How might VR change the nature of narrative storytelling, and what would that evolution look like? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6280754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6280754

116 points by charliecurran 13y ago

"instead we see Youtube desperately trying to go Hollywood, offering lucrative contracts to production companies and celebrities to create branded content for the site" Last time I've saw the TV it had feature films about wild life and a lot of youtube videos about pets but not one "celebrity" in sight. The word "celebrity" makes me want to vomit. Can we please ignore that and instead disrupt just that part of Hollywood and TV that doesn't make us vomit? And don't touch the other part with 5 meter pole.

dasil003 13y ago
That part that makes all the money?
- guard-of-terra 13y ago
  Bundleware toolbars for IE that fake search engine choice make pretty money, malware that steals money - too. Not a reason to enter this business. You aren't getting that money until you shrug off what you have left of your moral values, so the only feasible thing is that part that doesn't offer easy money. Instead offering real product and real satisfaction.
  - anon1385 13y ago
    >Bundleware toolbars for IE that fake search engine choice make pretty money, malware that steals money - too. Not a reason to enter this business. Paul Graham disagrees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059806
mikecane 13y ago
Then you haven't looked very closely at YouTube. You can pay to watch movies there now too. http://www.youtube.com/user/movies http://www.youtube.com/user/movies

paulsutter 13y ago

Charlie Curran's mistake is thinking the entertainment of the future will be just like the entertainment of the past. pg's essay was a challenge to find what the future will look like. He wasn't excluding any possibility. He wasn't predicting the demise of every single aspect of Hollywood, or even, of any specific aspect of Hollywood pg was just pointing out that entertainment will continue to evolve, that change is the only thing that's for sure, and that like all industries, Hollywood is not immune to outside challenges.

lisper 13y ago
Yes, but Silicon Valley's mistake (not necessarily PG's mistake) is thinking that what will kill Hollywood is technology. It isn't. What will kill Hollywood is the marriage of technology and the new content creation and distribution models that the technology enables. Curran's point is just that cute cat videos will only get you so far. It's what comes after that that no one seems to have figured out yet. The current approach is desperate attempts to access or reproduce Hollywood's content, and that surely won't work.
- nileshtrivedi 13y ago
  > cute cat videos will only get you so far. Aren't we already spending more time watching videos on YouTube / CollegeHumor and funny pics on Reddit than we do watching films? One might think that we have solved the content / attention problem. What remains to be solved is monetization.
  - lisper 13y ago
    Yes, just that one little detail to work out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts
  - KaiserPro 13y ago
    At what time of day? The main problem that people fail to grasp is that nobody really cares about the technology, unless it gets in the way. People only care about content, look at the signal to noise ratio on youtube, it's astronomically high. American TV has a lower s/n ratio, but not much lower. (I'm british so fortunately we have a stream of relatively HQ TV without the shitty twitter gimmicks that plague things like discovery.) In short, there is no problem with monitization really, netflix has it nailed.

lisper 13y ago

When I clicked on this link the anchor text was "Why Silicon Valley will never beat Hollywood" (or something like that). When I came back, it had changed to "You have to beat the man to be the man," which is the title of the piece. But IMHO the original title (presumably the one written by the submitter) was much better and more descriptive. I don't think I would have clicked on this link with the current title. There seems to be a lot of this headline-rewriting going on on HN nowadays. IMO it's going a little too far.

MarcScott 13y ago
Also, the title on the front page is different from the title in the comments. I don't think I've seen this before, but maybe I'm just not very observant. edit: They're the same now. Confused.
- charliecurran 13y ago
  Hey, just came back to hacker news and noticed the change as well. Very confused as I didn't edit the title after I had posted it.
dylandrop 13y ago
"Why Silicon Valley will never beat Hollywood" inaccurately summarized the piece (see the bottom of the article, where the author says the industry could go either way). Also, IMO, having inflammatory titles beginning with "Why..." is way too common on HN and is way more of an annoyance than headline-rewriting.
- lisper 13y ago
  So change it to "Why Silicon Valley may have a hard time beating Hollywood" or something like that if you really want to be that anal about accurate summarization. But the current title tells me absolutely nothing about what the article is actually about.
  - dylandrop 13y ago

guard-of-terra 13y ago

"the basic formula of pairing known stars with compelling stories has not and will not change" Didn't it change with the advent of the modern TV Shows? How big were Schwimmer, Laurie or Cranston as stars before their show made a hit? Laurie was locally known but not that much. With modern show, you have select good actors for their role, not stars from an universal pool, and that's what changed. And I fail to name terribly many films in the last ten years that can be compared to the best TV shows which are a plenty.

sliverstorm 13y ago
What applies to TV shows doesn't necessarily apply to movies. The thing TV has going for it? A pilot is twenty minutes long, instead of a hundred and sixty. To me, as far as actor career trajectory, TV seems to be like a minor league that some actors use to help launch their overall career.
- guard-of-terra 13y ago
  We no longer have to care about actor career. We care about whether the show is good as a whole. Movies are subpar compared to TV shows with a tiny number of exceptions.

KaiserPro 13y ago

There are several reasons why Y combinator is unlikely to kill hollywood. The Author touches on part of the problem. To make a good movie you need: 1) an excellent script (if it reads like shit, its going to look worse, if the pitch is "its like X but...." its a fail) 2) a significant amount of captial ($1million) 3) quality actors 4) ridiculously good organisation skills (you'll be organising 40+ people hundreds and thousands of pounds worth of equipment for around 40 days (or a lot more)) that's just first part. You then need to wrangle all the footage, and massage it into a cohesive and flowing narrative, something most "film" buffs fail cataclysmically ally at. (why do you think most youtube videos are only 3 minutes top?) Once you've spent three years of your life doing that, you then need to get your movie seen. That means persuading people who think you are worse than dogshit to watch a movie that they really couldn't care about, much less actually pay you for. This will take you the next 3-6 years. It also costs a lot.

nileshtrivedi 13y ago
You're assuming that the content has to have the same format as movies. Short videos (like the ones produced by CollegeHumor) can have a good script and quality visuals without involving a big budget. The market isn't "films". It is "entertainment".
- Spearchucker 13y ago
  I like feature-length movies. Short films are a way to fill an idle minute, but otherwise bore me. No one I know spends 2 hours straight just watching short clips or movies on YouTube.
  - drblast 13y ago
    My wife and I spend quite a bit of time watching 22 or 50 minute TV shows in succession on Netflix. I think that format is in many ways more interesting, as you can develop a story in much more depth than you could with a 2 hour movie.
    - 13y ago

kumarski 13y ago

Netflix was started in Los Gatos, California. Silicon-Valley-ish. Gumroad sells documentary films. They've grown. Funded by Silicon Valley Kleiner Perkins VC fund.

nawitus 13y ago

>since the days of Adolf Zucker I think he is referring to Adolph Zukor.

gergles 13y ago

The real reason a VC company isn't going to kill hollywood is because there's not enough money in it. The author throws around $65 billion industry as if that's some sort of impressive number. FB alone is worth $100B. We could liquidate FB and buy the entire industry and shut it down if we really wanted to. Compare that to LNKD, EBAY, GOOG, hell even CRM. We have hit after hit after hit that are worth more than the entire film industry after a few years' worth of nurturing. No, the reason that a VC-funded company won't kill Hollywood is because there's not enough money there - not because Hollywood has some sort of monopoly on how to entertain people.

vehementi 13y ago
Sounds like there's an untapped $65 billion market that other VCs won't touch. What opportunity!
JackFr 13y ago
Ummmm, not quite. Fox, Disney, Universal all have market caps larger than FB at P/E's 20 times lower. I think the $65 billion he's talking about is revenue.
tlb 13y ago
$65B is Hollywood's annual revenue. $100B is Facebook's market cap -- its revenue is $5B (2012). Hollywood's revenue is a plenty big enough prize to chase.
robin2 13y ago
It rather depends what you count as "killing Hollywood". Back in the late 90s, I used to get rather perplexed by the way geeks railed against DVD zoning, DMCA, etc. Yes, the entertainment industry was acting in fairly nasty ways to defend itself, but then drug dealers can be unpleasant too. My view was the debates around DRM circumvention didn't even touch on the root cause of the entertainment industry's power. Michael Ventura once summarized the meaning of entertainment: "You go from a job you don't like to watching a screen on which others live more intensely than you." On that view of things, something like meetup.com is more of a threat to Hollywood than youtube could ever be.
13y ago

rdxm 13y ago

i like this post/article/statement. it reminds me that as technologists we tend to want to reduce things to algorithms. that just doesn't work when you get to aesthetics and the human side of the equation.

betterunix 13y ago

"At the very heart of the film industry’s longevity is the art of narrative storytelling which has been refined continuously" The overwhelming majority of Hollywood movies are terrible, shallow stories with formulaic development that are designed to grab money from specific demographics. There is hardly anything artistic left. It may be what people want, but let's not pretend that great works of art are what keep Hollywood profitable. "you have to remember this is a sixty-five billion dollar a year industry that has survived multiple world wars and the great depression" The typewriter industry also survived those wars and the great depression, and where is it now? Times change, and businesses that adapt poorly to a changing market will be replaced.

diminish 13y ago
Here comes the formulaic HN movie, two hackers decide to kill movie industry.....
dylandrop 13y ago
People always enjoy escapes from reality. This is what makes Hollywood so successful. And while artistic movies might not be the biggest money makers, there are still plenty of respectable titles that earn a large amount of money and are tasteful/fascinating to watch. In regards to your second point, I think you didn't read the full article. The point is that Hollywood historically HAS been a VERY successful industry at rebounding, most specifically in the era of the TV (which is probably most applicable here).
jmduke 13y ago
The overwhelming majority of Hollywood movies are terrible, shallow stories with formulaic development that are designed to grab money from specific demographics. There is hardly anything artistic left. This argument is not necessarily in conflict with what you quoted.
larrys 13y ago
Typewriter industry didn't continually have to be creative through those time periods. Hollywood did. It has to be creative and constantly come up with new "merchandise" in order to survive. IBM just had to come up with the "Selectric" or make slight improvements to satisfy what amounts to almost a cash cow type business in a more or less stable market. Hollywood is in the entertainment business. They have adapted well to (as a business venture and to make money) the entertainment business over time. Movies aren't made the same way they were in the 30's, 50's or 70's. While they certainly make their share of mistakes (with flops and not knowing necessarily what will be the next blockbuster) so do VC's and angels. They just try to match the best pattern they can and spread the money around. Hollywood does a version of the same. But Hollywood has been much more successful (at scale that is) than the "startup" industry has been. (Even taking into account VC investing prior to the Internet). "Disrupt" hasn't been around that long. Hollywood has. People buy the product.

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lists 13y ago

I don't think the author is responding to Graham appropriately. Graham's argument is against the power structure of Big Media, not the enduring value of narrative. Hence Graham's post beginning by pointing to the industries' push for SOPA signaling that they're running out of ideas, not on how to entertain people, but to constrict people to being entertained on Big Media's terms. This has a negative effect on quality of narrative, as many have noted. I think the nature of the confusion is that Graham hints at his personal preferences on how people should spend time ("It would be great if what people did instead of watching shows was exercise more and spend more time with their friends and families" [0]) right besides endorsements for products that shift demand for screen narratives ("new media", "things... that have little in common with movies and TV except competing with them for finite audience attention" [0]). But even with that said, Graham's view is ultimately inclusive of Curran's. Graham: >"There will be several answers, ranging from new ways to produce and distribute shows..." [0] Curran: >"The internet has paved the way once again for a vertically integrated system of production and distribution, and we know that today’s youth is hungry for stories that matter to them. Whomever is the first to put that together will win." [1] Screen narrative was never in question. Edit: Forgot to add links [0]: http://ycombinator.com/rfs9.html http://ycombinator.com/rfs9.html [1]: http://charliecurran.com/you-have-to-beat-the-man-to-be-the-man/ http://charliecurran.com/you-have-to-beat-the-man-to-be-the-...

hayesdaniel 13y ago

This article seems to ignore one of the biggest, most basic issues facing hollywood right now - the demise of innovation in the VFX industry. Studios have carefully orchestrated an incredibly hostile working environment for people creating the biggest cash-cow it has left. For profit colleges are pumping out scores of young people every year with just enough training to get a low-paying job in whatever tax-incentive location is paying the most at any given time. Then you work 80-100+ hour weeks for a few months and are kicked back out on the street to start over in a new city (or country) at a new company, probably for even less money. It's a HUGE crisis and causing a massive exodus of mid and senior-level talent, myself included. Check out www.vfxsoldier.com or effectscorner.blogspot.com for more info. All the while, film budgets go up, ticket prices go up, profits go up. My point is that there IS a huge potential for disruptive influences in filmmaking, television and VOD, but it will likely come from the people that have been straddling the line between innovative technology and entertainment for longer than anyone - the VFX people. It's happening already. Now if only I could find some time to work to work on that side project...

hayesdaniel 13y ago
Here's another awesome breakdown of where we're at by former Digital Domain CEO Scott Ross - http://www.awntv.com/playlists/scott-ross-fmx-11-presentation-future-vfx-industry http://www.awntv.com/playlists/scott-ross-fmx-11-presentatio...

thinkersilver 13y ago

I disagree with Paul Graham's notion that we need to find a better way to entertain ourselves. The narratives of films are powerful and are not always fun and entertaining yet people will go watch them; even if they walk out a bit disturbed. Hollywood creates content. I think to beat Hollywood, would require a platform that enables the film production process to happen outside the Hollywood system. Youtube, Netflix already have the distribution end. Movie stars are not a requirement for a good film, they can be replaced with good upcoming talent, (visit any major drama school). A large budget is not a requirement either, principal photography has never been cheaper. So what does Hollywood have that makes it special? It has the network which connects and coordinates all the key players (actors,writers,cameramen,animators etc). That's the problem that Silicon Valley needs to solve (not entertainment). It(we?) need to provide a platform to streamline the process of making film. Perhaps Paul Graham should have thought of an Incubator for Filmmakers. Demo night could be a short film.

MaysonL 13y ago

Of course, Mr. Curran totally ignores Silicon Valley's two major successes in entertainment: video games and Pixar.

deleted 13y ago

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ChuckMcM 13y ago

I thought this was a great read, clearly the author has thought through is argument and does a good job of describing his reasoning about the challenges the tech community faces with regard to Hollywood's livelyhood. The only weakness for me was that it is hard to argue from a point too far removed from the sources of your arguments. Specifically if you are arguing the future of "entertainment" then Hollywood is but a piece, similarly if you argue too closely to the source such as the future of "movies" then technology is but a piece. So finding a place in the spectrum where one point of view and dominate another isn't a very solid way of making your point. :-) That said, it made me wonder if computer games will go through the 'star' system (clearly some of that has happened with titles like "Sid Meir's Civilization") or if it will be different for programs. At the 'top' (or most diffuse?) point of the spectrum you can take examples from music, books, games, movies, and television as ways people tease dollars from consumers. And following that line of reasoning lead me to thinking about the fundamental question, is it money or is it art? There are two parallel universes in most entertainment systems, the one that is designed to extract the most money (consumer focused) and the one that is designed to express the artists intent most faithfully (artist focused). The latter occasionally makes a lot of money, the former occasionally makes very little money. The "space" is a blend of the two. Many of the developers I know are "artists' where they have very strong feelings about how their programs should work, and I believe we see a lot of that here on HN. But I also know engineers who are focused more on the "business" where they write code that makes them the most money, period. And they are often harshly judged in fora such as this one. So where does that leave us? I think it makes it important to fix the context before we debate, as that affects the persuasiveness of the different points of view. It also suggests that Paul's call to action could be interpreted more literally to be "Work on the 'consumer focused' side of tech for entertainment harder." If you think of Entertainment as a giant pie of dollars, getting more of those dollars can be achieved either by being better than other players in your wedge, or by increasing the size of your wedge relative to the other players. Looked at in that context, it isn't about "beating" Hollywood so much as making Hollywood less relevant.

araes 13y ago
Or by doing something like Nintendo or Blizzard in the last gaming generations, where you increase the size of the pie itself.

peteforde 13y ago

Great article with sound reasoning. I love reading op-ed style pieces that legitimately educate me on something just outside of my radar. Two points to add: 1. I disagree that Netflix can't win by trying to out-HBO HBO, because as I understand Netflix' strategy is closer to Amazon Prime. Amazon loses money on Prime shipping (although with volume, not as much as you think) but in exchange they become the default place that customers come to buy just about anything they need, which means that loss in shipping was actually a massive reduction in marketing. They tilt the customer acquisition cost lower and the LTV higher. If Netflix succeeds in creating content that most consumers can only get in one place, it will dramatically increase the size of the iceberg under the surface. 2. One of the most interesting and successful tech/media hybrids I'm aware of is hitRECord, which is spearheaded by the brilliant Regular Joe aka Joseph Gordon-Levitt. This is a stunning example of crowd-sourcing and community collaboration working. http://www.hitrecord.org/ http://www.hitrecord.org/ - check out "Morgan M. Morgansen's Date With Destiny" on the Greatest Hits page: http://www.hitrecord.org/greatest http://www.hitrecord.org/greatest It's silly to speculate whether YC will or will not fund the evolution of entertainment. It's also not an interesting debate.

cmbaus 13y ago

I'd consider NetFlix to be a prototypical Silicon Valley start-up and they are showing the way forward with House of Cards, which I thought was fantastic. It might be a Hollywood formula, but they are bypassing traditional distribution channels.

wj 13y ago

I think many, if not most, of the people in this conversation really are forgetting that taste is subjective. What you view as a terrible film is often what millions of people enjoy. What you view as great cinema millions of others would find boring. As an antidote most people I know do not share the same tastes as me (I find the 30s-50s as my golden age of cinema and love Humphrey Bogart) as I with them. While my wife can't stand black and white movies (with a few exceptions) I also really dislike most modern romantic comedies (with a few exceptions such as Love Actually). Of course she says she enjoyed the black and white movie that I made. :) This also holds true to television as well. I don't want to keep up with the Kardashians or see which C-list celebrity has the best dance moves. Other people didn't want to watch Rubicon or don't want to watch Portland Timbers soccer. (I also think I'll be much worse off with unbundling of cable channels as the niche channels are often included in packages with more popular channels and will likely die off without enough interest and pricing power to sustain the programming.) John August, a screenwriter with a great blog and podcast and a geek at heart, has made the observation that talented writers are starting to prefer working with TV (channels such as HBO, Showtime, AMC, FX, etc.) as they're given more latitude to tell their stories than they are in a feature length film for a studio. So, if you were to ask me for a prediction (and you didn't), that is the way I imagine the industry going with Amazon, Netflix, etc. picking up some of those shows as well. Those, along with live sports, will continue to draw audiences as they provide topics of conversation for the majority of society. (Obviously you and your group of friends are too sophisticated for that and discuss philosophy and indie rock but you're a small segment of society.) You can never please everybody. And you'll likely go broke trying.

wj 13y ago
Also, I forgot to mention that everybody looks at the past with rose-colored glasses. There were plenty, PLENTY, of films in the whatever era you view as the greatest that you would consider terrible. You're not aware of them as they died the death of irrelevance.
mikecane 13y ago
>>>Other people didn't want to watch Rubicon Just want to say I appreciate that mention, having been a fan of that series.

charliecurran 13y ago

Hey everyone, I just got out of the editing bay and was really happy to see such a well thought out discussion playing out amongst the community. I wanted to take a moment to clarify my argument and respond to some of your comments in the hopes of furthering the conversation. The major criticism I noticed was that I somehow misunderstood Graham's argument or that it functioned in such a way that subsumed mine. As I understood Graham's call to arms to kill Hollywood, he was soliciting entrepreneurs to start thinking about how to disrupt Big Media's grasp on the entertainment market. While I am whole heartedly against the practices of a Hollywood we all can agree is in a current rut (e.g. SOPA, DMCA takedowns, etc.) I do not believe that Hollywood has peaked, nor that his prescriptions for hastening its demise are feasible. I took his call as soliciting two options for responding to Hollywood: a.) By creating more entertaining offerings that would create a zero-sum trade off with Hollywood's offerings ultimately rendering their products irrelevant. b.) Leveraging technology to create alternate production and distribution mechanisms including new media and interactive programming offerings. My argument takes a historical approach to examining how Hollywood has previously addressed similar disruptions citing the emergence of television and the rise/collapse of the studio system to begin thinking how one might approach “eating Hollywood's lunch”. Against alternative forms of entertainment and distribution mechanisms, one thing has remained consistent and that is the power of cinema be it in episodic television content or feature length material to consistently survive industry transformations and reorganizations. I think this historical pattern is owed to the nature of the medium itself which satisfies a very human need which is the transmission of stories. I believe that film more than any other medium has refined this craft, and in many ways developed the visual language through which we understand contemporary storytelling. Other mediums will of course tell stories, but I think only filmmaking for the foreseeable future will have the ability to tell stories with the richness and complexity we've evolved as a species to receive and share. I think it's misguided to place a technologist's view of industry disruption before an examination of the medium's history because I believe it discounts the power of narrative and how we've found ourselves in this particular position. Despite Hollywood's current rut the market for film exhibition has only grown with foreign markets and alternative distribution mechanisms expanding the potential reach of Hollywood's content. I think what is needed now is a leveraging of technology to push film to its inherent potential to tell meaningful stories, what Hollywood once understood, rather than view it as a tool to destroy an industry. A few of the comments that I thought particularly interesting/pertinent to respond to. @Nileshtrivedi I am assuming that the basic format of narrative television and features will remain a constant, due to the historical evolution of the form into its current iteration. Initially conceived films were exhibited at nickelodeons which served up customers short form content though it failed to evolve beyond a mere novelty that soon went through its own bust. It was Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount Pictures, who championed the format as we currently know it drawing on his understanding of how storytelling dating back to Plato, Aristotle, and the great play-writes of yesteryear stumbled on a nearly universal structure for telling effective stories. @KaiserPro I absolutely agree the current pipeline of monetizing Hollywood's offerings is fundamentally broken and has to be done away with. Theatrical distribution demands enormous costs guaranteeing that we will only see low-risk content that has proven to be Hollywood's undoing. The internet and Video on Demand offers a chance to remove these costs in many ways and generate riskier fare delivered straight to the consumer. @Walshemj and Djloche Coming up through film school witnessing the rise of crowdfunding and the widespread adoption of digital filmmaking and editing, the costs must and absolutely can come down. These film's budgets assume a pipeline that requires enormous spends on development, production, distribution, print/advertising, and studio overhead. I think Vice offers a great example of how low-cost content paired appropriately with relevant niche markets can provide compelling entertainment alternatives to Hollywood's current offerings. @Paulsutter I am not by any means ruling out the inevitable evolution of entertainment offerings we'll see over the next twenty years, but I think to assume film will go away is a hard position to defend. I think it's far more likely that a medium which has demonstrated serious lasting power will evolve and adapt rather than be dismembered by dying conglomerates or new media offerings which will be in their infancy. Far more likely I believe we'll see something similar to the era of New Hollywood in the sixties and early seventies repeat itself. @Betterunix The claim that the vast majority of Hollywood's movies are terrible is really a subjective view. For every Transformers there are independent alternatives and risky studio films that sneak through the development pipeline. However, I do agree that the current system of exhibition necessitates a system of tent-pole event films that will inevitably sink the industry if left as it exists now. Look no further than what George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had to say about the sustainability of the current Hollywood model. http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/is-hollywood-model-doomed-steven-spielberg-and-george-lucas-think-so-20130815 http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/is-hollywood-model-d... @Guard-of-terra Absolutely, the star system underwent a fundamental shift with the introduction of television though its ability to adapt to the new pipeline I believe displays its lasting power. A really great read on the transformation the star system underwent with the introduction of television is “Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame,” by Ty Burr. A short excerpt that might address your comment. “The essence of the broadcast revolution is simple: it offered a literal home theatre. No longer did you have to go out to see the stars and be entertained. Now they came to you. This affected the kinds of stars who were created from the 1950s on, in the sense that the people you let into your house are different from the people you pay to see in a theatre. They're more like you and me, for one thing, which also means you and I are more like the stars. For decades – until, arguably, the arrival of nighttime soaps in the 1970s and '80s – the most celebrated figures on the small screen evoked not glamour but ordinariness. They acted out comic and dramatic versions of our own dilemmas, or they filled history with life-sized personalities rather than the bigger-than-life stars of film.” @Hayesdaniel While I absolutely feel for you and everyone I know in the Visual Effects industry who has been clearly mistreated in the current system of studio filmmaking, I don't believe that the resolution of that issue is the most fundamental problem facing contemporary filmmaking. I think it's a symptom of larger ills that will need to be resolved. Ultimately I believe if we can't disrupt the model in its current form collectively secured bargaining rights and organization similar to how other industry groups such as the Screenwriter’s Guild or the Directors Guild of America could go a long way towards negotiating fair pay for visual effects studios and subsequently their employees. @MaysonL I didn't by any means set out to ignore the success of the video game industry or Pixax, but for my argument I didn't believe them wholly relevant. I think that Pixar offers a really great example how well crafted storytelling above all can be film's savior. They go to incredible lengths to develop and protect their stories, and it shows. However, I don't think that they are the answer to saving the industry either. I have a real fondness for everything Pixar is doing, one of the best storytellers I had the chance to know at film school now works there, but I think the trend of Pixarification of films is actually a threat to the kinds of film that will ultimately usher in a new era of Hollywood. You might enjoy what Danny Boyle recently said on this point. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz6W0h3r30k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz6W0h3r30k I know this will be a controversial statement, as I get into this argument with my friends who are game design majors on a regular basis, but I do not believe that video games will supplant film as the highest form of narrative storytelling. The industry is relatively young and as such most likely won't create its own Citizen Kane for quite some time. I think far more likely is that a reinvigorated hollywood will become far more intertwined. Looking to Microsoft and Spielberg's recent collaborations I think is telling of where these trends will head with narrative filmmaking supplementing and expanding upon franchises, and video games working more closely with Hollywood to infuse their games with the level of storytelling audiences have grown to expect from their entertainment.

teeja 13y ago

Great, provocative thinkpiece. I'd add that considering the number of expensive flops this summer, the audiences' responsiveness to the massive CGI-spectacles and remakes of recent years might be beginning to wane. To make film No Country for Old Men again might require not 'beating' the man but replacing spectacle with heartfelt passion. Pay more attention to why gay-rights are unstoppable.

charliecurran 13y ago

Lets play devils advocate - How might VR change the nature of narrative storytelling, and what would that evolution look like? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6280754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6280754