Of Robert Iger and "Unsupervised" Film Directors

Robert Iger, who seems scarcely able to open his mouth without disgracing himself, recently did so again with a silly statement about the lack of "supervision" on the set of The Marvels as the supposed cause of the film's failure.

It is another shabby instance of the old propaganda of the media business that the "creatives" are floopy-brained idiots who can produce nothing of value without the Practical People playing the strictest of strict parent to them--being, to use that awful cliché beloved by a certain kind of ideologue, the "adults in the room." (Consider, for instance, the lame script used to destroy the leading lights of the New Hollywood over and over again in succession. "Oh, they're a perfectionist!" "Oh, they can't stay within a budget!" "Oh, these artists and their visions!")

Just as before that propaganda has been dutifully, respectfully, passed on to the public by the entertainment press--because its members, courtiers by profession and indeed instinct, know that when they must choose from among those to whom they usually suck up, it is safest to go with the executives rather than the artistes. And the public believes them because, apart from usually believing what it is told, the prevailing schema of values has society respecting businesspersons infinitely more than artists. (It is one reason why artists, even when attaining great wealth as artists, seek renown as businessmen and businesswomen as well, pursuing such recognition like some latterday patent of nobility. "I'm not just an actor! I'm a businessperson!" Because I slapped my name on some crappy products.) It is all so pervasive that even people who ought to know better seem less cognizant of the pattern than they ought to be. (Thus did the usually very incisive Peter Biskind not call it out in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, all too often presenting much more conventional morality tales about talents ruined by their own hubris when recounting the shattering of those careers.)

It seems to me--and if I may so, a great many others--that the folks in Hollywood really in need of supervision--in need of adult supervision--are the ones who think that because they have big offices and wear expensive suits they are adults who know what they are doing, even as all they really seem to know how to do it is put holes in their company's balance sheets.