Daniel Bessner's New Article in Harper's

Daniel Bessner's "The Life and Death of Hollywood" is exactly what journalism ought to be but all too rarely is--a deeply informed piece of reporting that goes beyond mentioning some facts or passing on some impressions to putting together a picture of its subject and explaining how things stand to the reader with, in this case, the analysis of Hollywood's development in recent decades, especially as seen from the standpoint of its writers, benefiting greatly from its combination of critical perspective, historical background and attentiveness to contemporary economic fact.* In this piece Bessner quite rightly explains Hollywood as undergoing its own piece of the broader neoliberal turn, affecting it in the same way that it has affected the rest of America's economy and society. Just as has happened elsewhere, the convergence of deregulation (in this case, particularly the collapse of antitrust enforcement under the Reagan administration, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 under Clinton), combined with creditist monetary policy to produce an extraordinary concentration of ownership, production and market power, and a triumph of speculation and short-termism, that has had catastrophic effects for the workers involved and society at large as the game became one of "winner take all." Thus did the early '00s see a half dozen vertically integrated giants (Disney, Time Warner and the other usual suspects) "raking in more than 85 percent of all film revenue and producing more than 80 percent of American prime-time television," while the ultra-loose monetary policy Ben Bernanke ushered in enabled further concentration as a mere three asset-management companies (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street) to concentrate in their hands the ownership of, well, nearly everything ("becoming the largest shareholders of 88 percent of the S&P 500"), with the media giants no exception to the pattern. (As of the end of 2023 Vanguard "owned the largest stake in Disney, Netflix, Comcast, Apple, and Warner Bros. Discovery," while also having "substantial share[s] of Amazon and Paramount Global.") Indeed, even the talent agencies supposed to represent the writers to those companies similarly became an oligopoly of a few giants in turn owned by asset management firms.

In the wake of the reduction of film and TV production to an oligopoly owned by a few financial firms, and the inevitable ascent of a pseudo-efficiency-minded short-termist control freak mentality among studio executives, it was no accident that, in line with his cite of Shawna Kidman, the share of "franchise movies" in "studios' wide-release features" surged from 25 percent in 2000 to 64 percent in 2017--the age of "multistep deals" and "spec scripts" increasingly a thing of the past, exemplified by the crassness of Disney, and perhaps especially its Marvel operation, which "pioneered a production apparatus in which writers were often separated from the conception and creation of a movie’s overall story." (Thus did the writers have to generate a whole season of scripts for WandaVision without knowing how the season was supposed to end, because the "executives had not yet decided what other stories they might spin off from the show." Thus did Marvel bring the TV-style "writer's room" into filmmaking--if one calls the result filmmaking--as the TV networks replaced their writer's rooms with "mini-writer's rooms" offering those who work in them still less.) Amid the declining readiness to support the development of many ideas in the hope that one would pay off (thirty scripts to get one which might be made into a movie in the old days), amid the declining creative control and bargaining power of writers ever at a disadvantage in relation to the executives whose media courtiers celebrate them as "geniuses" (as with a Kevin Feige), amid the studios playing the old game of exploiting technological changes to contractually cut writers out of any share in the profits (in this case, streaming and its revenues, as Bessner shows through the case of Dickinson creator Alena Smith), writers lost in just about every way. Moreover, the post-pandemic economic shock has dealt them another blow as media companies that had, however exploitatively, been funding a lot of production retrenched, and all too predictably won the labor battle of 2023--at the end of which they may be said to have imposed an at best thinly veiled Carthaginian peace, with what is to come likely to be worse.

Given all that Bessner naturally declined to end his story on a note of false optimism, instead going from the "Life" to the "Death" part of his title. As he notes one could picture various palliatives helping, like government regulation of asset ownership (or indeed, mere application of antitrust law here), but all this seems unthinkable--precisely because what is happening here is so much of a piece with what is happening in all the rest of the economy, and it is all too clear how that is going. Indeed, one can picture things becoming even worse still in the fairly near term if the Hollywood executive class manages to realize its fantasies of using artificial intelligence to dispense with its workers entirely in even a small degree--or even in spite of the technology's inadequacies, simply tries and fails to do so, but destroys a lot of careers and "disrupts" the industry in all the wrong ways in the process.

* Reading Dr. Bessner's biography I found that he is not a reporter but a professor of International Studies--and cannot help wondering if that did not make all the difference for the quality of the item, especially where the avoidance of the hypocrisy of "objectivity" and the contempt for context that characterizes so much contemporary journalism are concerned.