Hollywood is Run by Cultural Vandals

By Kayleigh Donaldson | TV | June 27, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | TV | June 27, 2023 |

It seems as though a week cannot pass without Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav committing another act of entertainment jackassery. Not content with merely strip-mining one of the film world’s most important studios for parts and tax write-offs, he has now set his sights on ripping TCM to shreds. Film Twitter pushed back, and even directors like Martin Scorsese protested the move, which included major layoffs at the channel and the decision to close down the UK version next month. For many film lovers, Turner Classic Movies is a lighthouse in an increasingly dark cultural landscape, a gateway to old cinema that the industry has never seemed interested in developing. Zaslav tried to placate his doubters, but there’s a reason nobody believes him, not when entire films and TV series are being pulled from streaming services for the purposes of profit in the midst of a writers’ strike.

David Zaslav is a cultural vandal, a figure of astonishing impunity who views one of our most important artforms as little more than a series of knickknacks in a vault he can pick apart for pennies. What he has done to Warner Bros. is nothing short of embarrassing and the doors it has opened for his fellow executives to follow suit will have shocking long-term consequences. But he’s not the only player in town engaging in this twisted game. He’s simply the latest - and loudest - example of one of the industry’s proudest traditions: self-hatred and mindless greed.

Since the beginning of Hollywood, the people who run it have shown a proud lack of concern for their own history. When the film industry was in its infancy, it was viewed as a passing fad that would never be able to compete with the likes of vaudeville or serious theatre. Even as it grew in popularity, many viewed it with suspicion, a frivolity that couldn’t and shouldn’t be taken seriously. The studios who made these films often took a similar attitude and quickly discarded many of their own films for simple reasons of cost and storage space. Some studios recycled the film for its silver content. A lot of early nitrate film was destroyed in fires. According to Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, more than 90% of American films made before 1929 are lost. Destruction was intentional, historical and cultural importance of no consequence. Alas, that point-of-view doesn’t seem to have changed much in recent years. Indeed, it’s grown more callous than ever.

The current industry model is built on denying access to audiences. They don’t want you to buy a DVD of your favourite film. They want you to pay a monthly cost to access it via a streaming service, one where prices are always rising and there’s a not insignificant possibility that they’ll still remove it from their platform if they feel like it. this business strategy only really applies to newer ‘content’, if only because most streaming services seem to forget that people made movies before 1980 (Netflix is especially guilty in this regard.) Access to golden age cinema is frequently dependent on whether you can find it on a niche service like MUBI or if a physical copy is available, something also more dependent than ever on outside distributors like Criterion and Arrow. There are swaths of classic and historically important works that just aren’t available to most people. If there’s no billion-dollar payday to be had by releasing it then most studios won’t even bother. At best, you can hope for an enterprising pirate to fill in the gaps.

The industry has shoved the onus onto viewers, forcing them to engage in an exhausting algorithmic grind in order to ‘save’ the films and shows they enjoy. As I discussed before in this piece, being a fan of TV has never been more intolerable. How is one expected to endure this endless and unwinnable race in the hopes of appeasing a service whose goalposts for victory are always moving? I don’t want to have to watch something I like over and over again within the first ten days of its premiere because not doing so means it’ll not only be canceled but erased from the platform altogether. Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies didn’t satisfy Paramount’s unfeasible commercial desires, so it now, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. Then again, at least some people got to watch it, unlike Batgirl.

The scavenge for short-term gains from people like Zaslav, Bob Iger, and Ted Sarandos is craven and so hungrily capitalistic that it’d be impressive if it weren’t so destructive. The money they’re earning through tax write-offs and corner-cutting will not balance out the inevitable financial losses that will follow when filmmakers refuse to work with them, audiences reject their slop, and everyone goes back to binge-watching The Office again. That might be the point of it all, of course. How often have we seen big money acquisitions give way to the slow decimation of what made those places so special in the first place, all because infinite growth is impossible yet demanded?

Zaslav has, of course, now decided to double down on AI content, with Warner Bros. announcing earlier this year their plans to use Cinelytic to ‘leverage the system’s comprehensive data and predictive analytics to guide decision-making at the greenlight stage.’ In case you thought his prior machinations were too subtle a display of his utter contempt for the craft of film and TV, this hammers it home rather thoroughly. It’s not just him. Again, they’re all doing this. He’s just the biggest bully in a room full of them. Together, they’ve made it abundantly clear that no sacrifice is too big in the name of maintaining their CEO bonuses. If they aren’t stopped, who knows how it will all end. No hyperbole: Nothing is safe.

If you’re a fan of film and TV, there really isn’t much to do to combat this, unfortunately. My advice to invest in physical media when and where you can always stands, more so now than ever. But how does that work for stuff that was intended to be streaming-only? Well, let’s just say that the pirates aren’t exclusive to the seas of the Caribbean …