Putting the Joy of Storytelling in a Tech Bro Chokehold

Anyone who makes and sells a product will tell you that the perfect business model is one where you don’t have to spend the money to make the product unless and until you have a customer standing by ready to purchase that product.

But this is not how the real world generally works. Companies, particularly those which manufacture and sell physical products, often make enormous investments in plant, materiel and employees before they ever sell their first actual unit. This calculus can be even more daunting when what you manufacture, market and sell are not things, but ideas… stories… “content”, in the parlance of our time.

If there is an industry which exists on the polar opposite end of the continuum on which we find the ideal commercial arrangement with which I opened this essay, it is the big studio movie business.

Making movies is not a business… not really.

It is a leap of faith.

For all the changes which have roiled the movie business over the last 50 years, the basic process has remained essentially the same. Creative artists drive to a motion picture studio and meet with a “creative executive.” In that meeting the artist pitches their vision for a movie. Afterwards, the executive goes to his or her boss and re-pitches a thumbnail version what they were just pitched. Maybe the two executives kick around some ideas… “we could get Nolan, or Taika… maybe even Tom Cruise”, they might dream together. And sometimes, after all the dreaming has come to an end, the boss takes that leap of faith and says “yes, let’s develop that idea.” But again, remember what William Goldman said… “nobody knows anything”… so at the end of the day, that “yes” is delivered with a shrug… at best.

Thus begins a process in which tens of millions of dollars will be spent without the guarantee that there will be even a single customer willing to pay for the resulting product.

There was a time when the senior executives doing the shrugging had great instincts for what the audience wanted and got the “shrug” right more often than they got it wrong… but we no longer live in that world. The corporatization of Hollywood brought a new business sense to the art of making movies. And by “business sense” I mean an instinct for cost-cutting, a willingness to default to “no” rather than “yes” and the desire to always choose the sure thing over the artistic gamble. Over time, experience running widget factories in the “legitimate” business world, or time spent on the money side of the Hollywood machine became a more important metric for hiring studio bosses than whether or not the candidate had ever greenlit a hit movie before. “No one knows anything” has never been more true, and the Shrugers have never been more scared… never less sure of their instincts.

Enter the Tech Bros, led by Netflix and Amazon.

The promise of the tech-oriented streamers was that through the magic of the algorithm, no one would ever have to make a movie again until they were sure the audience already wanted it. And so far, the movie business has been lapping this promise up, despite a distinct lack of tangible results.

This is not a new pitch in Hollywood. Dreamers and Con Artists have been claiming to have cracked the code for successful movie-making for generations. If you doubt that, read about the rise and fall of Relativity Media and its charismatic founder Ryan Kavanaugh, in which employees showed up to work one day to find the doors locked after being told the night before that the algorithm was working just fine.

But everyone in Hollywood is a sucker for a good story, and so here we are forcing ourselves to re-learn this painful lesson all over again. This time, the story we are being told is much grander, the promises bigger and more alluring, because that is the way of such things, isn’t it?

The new Hollywood tech dream is one that is so ephemeral it can’t yet be safely spoken aloud for fear it will be laughed out of the room. It can only be whispered in studio hallways like a fragile secret… something like Marcus Aurelius’ dream that was Rome from “Gladiator.”

But you see it speculated about in the industry press. You heard it whispered on the WGA strike lines, like kids describing the monster under the bed. And you see it discussed openly, mostly to cheers and general approval, on social media. That dream is this… that we are very close to a Hollywood version of that perfect business model I described in the opening paragraph. That using the alogrithm and emerging AI filmmaking techiniques, we could soon be able to create and deliver the exact bespoke movie an individual audience member wants at the exact moment they want it.

There’s only one problem with this dream. It assumes something that isn’t true… that the audience knows exactly what it wants. Many of the greatest and most profitable movies ever made were movies the audience didn’t know they wanted until they saw them.

Does anyone believe that in 1977 audiences were sitting at home thinking “you know what I’d like? I’d like a movie about a man who becomes so obsessed with lights he sees in the sky that he abandons his wife and family and runs off with another woman to find out what they are… oh and I don’t want it to be depressing in any way, I want it to be fun, beautiful and inspirational”? Obviously not… but how lucky are we all that the “Shruggers” at Columbia Pictures took that leap of faith when Steven Spielberg came calling with a pitch called “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”?

But it’s not only original movies that audiences can’t always know they want until they see them in a theater. Sometimes even the sequels which seem obvious in retrospect aren’t so obvious when the studio executive is sitting in his or her office waiting for that shrug.

I like “Top Gun”, I might even love it. But by the time “Maverick” came out almost 40 years had passed. If I ever had a deep connection to the original, its intensity had long since faded. Nevertheless, I went out to see the sequel when it was released. I remember coming home, my wife asking me “what did you think?”, and saying “I didn’t realize that after all this time, I needed to know that Pete Mitchell turned out OK.”

I didn’t realize it until I saw it.

That’s the magic of unexpectedness… and it can happen anywhere, even in a sequel or a reboot. The joy of being surprised is something the algorithm, or AI, will never be able to replicate. Surprise is, in fact, the enemy of the algorithm, since what the algorithm seeks to deliever is not surprise but certainty.

And just as in Mudville, there is no joy in certainty.

The famous tech slogan “move fast and break things” is fudamentally incompatible with any artistic endeavor, but it is perhaps more incompatible with the art of filmmaking than any other… since filmmaking is an endeavor in which the time and space to get it right are the most important commodities available, even more so than money. But it’s becoming clear to me that we will not get a chance to rebuild Hollywood into a successful movie-making system until the Tech Bros are finished breaking the one that has worked so well it has spun off many billions of dollars for nearly a hundred years.

My fear, as a lifelong fan of the movies, is that this time we will have broken the model beyond repair.

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