From the book "Bullshit Jobs" by D. Graeber, on the movie industry.

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I'm currently reading D. Graeber's book "bulls*** jobs" and, in chapter 5, he has a very interesting, and thought-provoking, discussion on the current state of the movie industry and why so many movies suck. I copy the relevant chunk of text below. What do you think?


===========
How did this happen? And what happens when an idea is accepted? One current Hollywood scriptwriter was kind enough to send me his insider’s analysis of what went wrong and how things now play out:
Oscar: In the Golden Age of Hollywood, from the 1920s to the 1950s, studios were vertical operations. They were also companies headed by one man, who took all the decisions and who banked his own money. They were not yet owned by conglomerates, and they had no board of directors. These studio “heads” were far from intellectuals, or artists, but they had gut instincts, took risks, and had an innate sense about what made a movie work. Instead of armies of executives, they would actually hire armies of writers for their story department. Those writers were on the payroll, supervised by the producers, and everything was in-house: actors, directors, set designers, actual film stages, etc.
Starting in the sixties, he continues, this system came under attack as vulgar, tyrannical, and stifling of artistic talent. For a while, the resulting ferment did allow some innovative visions to shine through, but the ultimate result was a corporatization far more stifling than anything that had come before.
Oscar: There were openings in the sixties and seventies (New Hollywood: Beatty, Scorsese, Coppola, Stone), as the film industry was in complete chaos at the time. Then, in the 1980s, corporate monopolies took over studios. It was a big deal, and I think a sign of things to come, when Coca-Cola purchased Columbia Pictures (for a short while). From then on, movies wouldn’t be made by those that liked them or even watched them. (Clearly, this ties in with the advent of neoliberalism and a larger shift in society.)
The system that eventually emerged was suffused with bulls*** on every level. The process of “development” (“development hell,” as writers prefer to call it) now ensures that each script has to pass through not just one but usually a half dozen clone-like executives with titles such as (Oscar lists some) “Managing Director of International Content and Talent, Executive Managing Director, Executive Vice President for Development, and, my favorite, Executive Creative Vice President for Television.” Most are armed with MBAs in marketing and finance but know almost nothing about the history or technicalities of film or TV. Their professional lives, like that of Apollonia’s boss, seem to consist almost entirely of writing emails and having ostensibly high-powered lunches with other executives bearing equally elaborate titles. As a result, what was once the fairly straightforward business of pitching and selling a script idea descends into a labyrinthine game of self-marketing that can go on for years before a project is finally approved.
It’s important to emphasize that this happens not just when an independent writer tries to sell a script idea to a studio on “spec,” but even in-house, for writers already inside a studio or production company. Oscar is obliged to work with an “incubator,” who plays a role roughly equivalent to that of a literary agent, helping him prepare script proposals that the incubator will then pass to his own network of top executives, either within or outside the company. His example is of another television show, though he emphasizes the process is exactly the same for movies:
Oscar: So I “develop” a series project with this “incubator” … writing a “bible”: a sixty-page document that details the project’s concept, characters, episodes, plots, themes, etc. Once that’s done comes the carnival of pitching. The incubator and I propose the project to a slew of broadcasters, financing funds, and production companies. These people are, purportedly, at the top of the food chain. You could spend months in the vacuum of communications with them—emails unanswered and so on. Phone calls are considered pushy, if not borderline harassment. Their jobs are to read and seek out projects—yet they couldn’t be more unreachable if they worked from a shack in the middle of the Amazon Jungle.
Pitching is a strategic ballet. There is a ritual delay of at least a week between each communication. After a month or two, however, one executive might take enough of an interest to agree to a face-to-face meeting:
Oscar: In the meetings, they ask you to pitch them the project all over again (although they’re supposed to have already read it). Once that’s done, they usually ask you prewritten one-size-fits-all questions filled with buzzwords … It’s always very noncommittal, and without exception, they tell you about all the other executives that would need to approve the project in case it would be decided to move forward.
Then you go, and they forget about you … and you have to follow up, and the loop begins anew. In fact, an executive will seldom tell you yes or no. If he says yes, and then the project goes nowhere or else gets made and bombs, it’s his responsibility. If he says no and then it succeeds somewhere else, he will get blamed for the oversight. Above all, the executive loathes taking responsibility.
The game, then, is to keep the ball in the air as long as possible. Just to option an idea, which involves a mere token payment, typically requires approval from three other branches of the company. Once the option papers are signed, a new process of stalling begins:
Oscar: They will tell me the document they optioned is too long to send around; they need a shorter pitch document. Or suddenly they also want some changes to the concept. So we have a meeting, we talk it over, brainstorm.
A lot of this process is just them justifying their jobs. Everybody in the room will have a different opinion just for the sake of having a reason to be there. It’s a cacophony of ideas, and they talk in the loosest, most conceptual terms possible. They pride themselves on being savvy marketers and incisive thinkers, but it’s all generalities.
The executive loves to talk in metaphors, and he loves to expose his theories about how the audience thinks, what it wants, how it reacts to storytelling. Most fancy themselves corporatized Joseph Campbells32—with no doubt, here again, an influence from the corporate “philosophies” of Google, Facebook, and other such behemoths.
Or they’ll say “I’m not saying you should do X, but maybe you should do X”; both tell you to do something and not to do it at the same time. The more you press for details, the blurrier it gets. I try to decipher their gibberish and tell them what I think they mean.
Alternately, the executive will totally, wholeheartedly agree with everything the writer proposes; then as soon as the meeting is over, he’ll send out an email instructing her to do the opposite. Or wait a few weeks and inform her the entire project must be reconceived. After all, if all he did was shake the writer’s hand and allow her to get to work, there’d be little point of having an Executive Creative Vice President to begin with—let alone five or six of them.
In other words, film and TV production is now not all that entirely different from the accountancy companies mis-training employees to stall the distribution of PPI payments, or Dickens’s case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The longer the process takes, the greater the excuse for the endless multiplication of intermediary positions, and the more money is siphoned off before it has any chance to get to those doing the actual work.
Oscar: And all this for a (now) fifteen-page document. Now, extrapolate that to more people, a script, a director, producers, even more executives, the shoot, the edit—and you have a picture of the insanity of the industry.
At this point, we are entering into what might be termed the airy reaches of the bulls*** economy, and therefore, that part least accessible to study. We cannot know what Executive Creative Vice Presidents are really thinking. Even those who are secretly convinced their jobs are pointless—and for all we know, that’s pretty much all of them—are unlikely to admit this to an anthropologist. So one can only guess.
But the effects of their actions can be observed every time we go to the cinema. “There’s a reason,” says Oscar, “why movies and TV series—to put it plainly—suck.”
===========
Last edited by OutOfThePast; 06-15-22 at 03:25 PM. Reason: Movieforum seems to censore a word, so I follow suit.



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Originally Posted by OutOfThePast
I'm currently reading D. Graeber's book "bulls*** jobs" and, in chapter 5, he has a very interesting, and thought-provoking, discussion on the current state of the movie industry and why so many movies suck. I copy the relevant chunk of text below. What do you think?


===========
How did this happen? And what happens when an idea is accepted? One current Hollywood scriptwriter was kind enough to send me his insider’s analysis of what went wrong and how things now play out:
Oscar: In the Golden Age of Hollywood, from the 1920s to the 1950s, studios were vertical operations. They were also companies headed by one man, who took all the decisions and who banked his own money. They were not yet owned by conglomerates, and they had no board of directors. These studio “heads” were far from intellectuals, or artists, but they had gut instincts, took risks, and had an innate sense about what made a movie work. Instead of armies of executives, they would actually hire armies of writers for their story department. Those writers were on the payroll, supervised by the producers, and everything was in-house: actors, directors, set designers, actual film stages, etc.
Starting in the sixties, he continues, this system came under attack as vulgar, tyrannical, and stifling of artistic talent. For a while, the resulting ferment did allow some innovative visions to shine through, but the ultimate result was a corporatization far more stifling than anything that had come before.
Oscar: There were openings in the sixties and seventies (New Hollywood: Beatty, Scorsese, Coppola, Stone), as the film industry was in complete chaos at the time. Then, in the 1980s, corporate monopolies took over studios. It was a big deal, and I think a sign of things to come, when Coca-Cola purchased Columbia Pictures (for a short while). From then on, movies wouldn’t be made by those that liked them or even watched them. (Clearly, this ties in with the advent of neoliberalism and a larger shift in society.)
The system that eventually emerged was suffused with bulls*** on every level. The process of “development” (“development hell,” as writers prefer to call it) now ensures that each script has to pass through not just one but usually a half dozen clone-like executives with titles such as (Oscar lists some) “Managing Director of International Content and Talent, Executive Managing Director, Executive Vice President for Development, and, my favorite, Executive Creative Vice President for Television.” Most are armed with MBAs in marketing and finance but know almost nothing about the history or technicalities of film or TV. Their professional lives, like that of Apollonia’s boss, seem to consist almost entirely of writing emails and having ostensibly high-powered lunches with other executives bearing equally elaborate titles. As a result, what was once the fairly straightforward business of pitching and selling a script idea descends into a labyrinthine game of self-marketing that can go on for years before a project is finally approved.
It’s important to emphasize that this happens not just when an independent writer tries to sell a script idea to a studio on “spec,” but even in-house, for writers already inside a studio or production company. Oscar is obliged to work with an “incubator,” who plays a role roughly equivalent to that of a literary agent, helping him prepare script proposals that the incubator will then pass to his own network of top executives, either within or outside the company. His example is of another television show, though he emphasizes the process is exactly the same for movies:
Oscar: So I “develop” a series project with this “incubator” … writing a “bible”: a sixty-page document that details the project’s concept, characters, episodes, plots, themes, etc. Once that’s done comes the carnival of pitching. The incubator and I propose the project to a slew of broadcasters, financing funds, and production companies. These people are, purportedly, at the top of the food chain. You could spend months in the vacuum of communications with them—emails unanswered and so on. Phone calls are considered pushy, if not borderline harassment. Their jobs are to read and seek out projects—yet they couldn’t be more unreachable if they worked from a shack in the middle of the Amazon Jungle.
Pitching is a strategic ballet. There is a ritual delay of at least a week between each communication. After a month or two, however, one executive might take enough of an interest to agree to a face-to-face meeting:
Oscar: In the meetings, they ask you to pitch them the project all over again (although they’re supposed to have already read it). Once that’s done, they usually ask you prewritten one-size-fits-all questions filled with buzzwords … It’s always very noncommittal, and without exception, they tell you about all the other executives that would need to approve the project in case it would be decided to move forward.
Then you go, and they forget about you … and you have to follow up, and the loop begins anew. In fact, an executive will seldom tell you yes or no. If he says yes, and then the project goes nowhere or else gets made and bombs, it’s his responsibility. If he says no and then it succeeds somewhere else, he will get blamed for the oversight. Above all, the executive loathes taking responsibility.
The game, then, is to keep the ball in the air as long as possible. Just to option an idea, which involves a mere token payment, typically requires approval from three other branches of the company. Once the option papers are signed, a new process of stalling begins:
Oscar: They will tell me the document they optioned is too long to send around; they need a shorter pitch document. Or suddenly they also want some changes to the concept. So we have a meeting, we talk it over, brainstorm.
A lot of this process is just them justifying their jobs. Everybody in the room will have a different opinion just for the sake of having a reason to be there. It’s a cacophony of ideas, and they talk in the loosest, most conceptual terms possible. They pride themselves on being savvy marketers and incisive thinkers, but it’s all generalities.
The executive loves to talk in metaphors, and he loves to expose his theories about how the audience thinks, what it wants, how it reacts to storytelling. Most fancy themselves corporatized Joseph Campbells32—with no doubt, here again, an influence from the corporate “philosophies” of Google, Facebook, and other such behemoths.
Or they’ll say “I’m not saying you should do X, but maybe you should do X”; both tell you to do something and not to do it at the same time. The more you press for details, the blurrier it gets. I try to decipher their gibberish and tell them what I think they mean.
Alternately, the executive will totally, wholeheartedly agree with everything the writer proposes; then as soon as the meeting is over, he’ll send out an email instructing her to do the opposite. Or wait a few weeks and inform her the entire project must be reconceived. After all, if all he did was shake the writer’s hand and allow her to get to work, there’d be little point of having an Executive Creative Vice President to begin with—let alone five or six of them.
In other words, film and TV production is now not all that entirely different from the accountancy companies mis-training employees to stall the distribution of PPI payments, or Dickens’s case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The longer the process takes, the greater the excuse for the endless multiplication of intermediary positions, and the more money is siphoned off before it has any chance to get to those doing the actual work.
Oscar: And all this for a (now) fifteen-page document. Now, extrapolate that to more people, a script, a director, producers, even more executives, the shoot, the edit—and you have a picture of the insanity of the industry.
At this point, we are entering into what might be termed the airy reaches of the bulls*** economy, and therefore, that part least accessible to study. We cannot know what Executive Creative Vice Presidents are really thinking. Even those who are secretly convinced their jobs are pointless—and for all we know, that’s pretty much all of them—are unlikely to admit this to an anthropologist. So one can only guess.
But the effects of their actions can be observed every time we go to the cinema. “There’s a reason,” says Oscar, “why movies and TV series—to put it plainly—suck.”
===========

And now you have layers of "sensitivity editors" and DIE nonsense to get through.



Then again, great cameras are out there for cheap. Great editing software is out there. Video hosting platforms are out there. You just need motivated creators to network and make their own thing.