Where Did the All the Filmmakers Go?

Rick Beato is a musician, songwriter and rock producer with a very popular YouTube channel in which he analyzes popular music in a way that appeals both to amatuers like me as well as aspiring professional musicians. His series entitled “What Makes This Song Great” was the inspiration for my own series of essays on the great Hollywood movies, which I call “When Hollywood Did It Right.”

Rick also spends a lot of time analyzing the business side of the Rock N’ Roll music industry which, as you may have noticed, isn’t doing so well these days outside of a small handful of aging mega-acts. His latest video, “Where Did All The Bands Go?” seeks to explain why bands have been almost completely replaced on the song and album charts by solo artists.

If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, Rick’s explanation boils down to two basic points.

First, great art takes time… worse, no one, not even the artists themselves can tell you exactly how much time. To a corporate record company, which needs product to push out into the marketplace so they can make payroll and turn a profit, this has always been a terrifying reality.

Bands are notoriously unreliable. They fight, they have creative differences, sometimes they drink to excess or do drugs and they have a nasty habit of dying young. Creative inspiration, if it comes at all, never arrives on schedule and there is no such thing as a guaranteed hit. Def Leppard’s most popular album, “Hysteria”, took two years to write and record, and during all that time, corporate cash was flowing out the front doors of the record company in a great green tide.

What Rick suggests is that, in an effort to put creativity back on some kind of a schedule, the record labels stopped signing bands in favor of solo artists, whom they would then pair up with a producer who was also a songwriter. A solo artist, the theory goes, is easier to control than an entire band. And if the songwriter/producer arrives at the studio with an album’s worth of pre-written songs, then there should be no reason to have to wait two years for a new album.

Plug-and-play… quite literally.

The second problem, as Rick tells it, can be laid at the feet of advancing technology. In 2024, one talented person can write and record an entire album on a laptop using AI and other technological tools without ever having to form a band, or sign with a record label, or even know how to play a single instrument. And the songs these solo artists produce can pull in tens of millions of online listeners, completely eliminating the need for bands, managers, promoters, recording studios, engineers, producers, session musicians and even record labels altogether.

This has been catastrophic for the music business labor market, to say nothing of the quality of the music we’ve been subjected to.

In aviation when the nose of a plane rises too high and the airspeed begins to bleed off, the wings lose their ability to produce lift. The plane then enters what is called an aerodynamic stall and falls from the sky like a stone. Modern airliners have fail safe systems to prevent stalls from happening. Systems like Stick Shakers which activate when the plane senses that a stall is near, but has not yet fully developed.

While it may be too late for the rock business, which long ago stalled and crashed into the ocean, perhaps Rick’s video can serve the same function as a Stick Shaker on an airliner and save the movie business from the same fate before it’s too late… because as I look around at the Hollywood landscape, I see the same fatal trends beginning to take hold of the movie business.

In Hollywood too, great art takes time.

The producers of “Forest Gump” would laugh at any music executive complaining that it took two years for Def Leppard to record “Hysteria”… after all, it took eleven years to get “Gump” from book to screen. Other movies have had gestation periods that lasted even longer. This fact of life was something the Studios used to deal with by buying many more movies than they actually made. Multi-studio bidding wars for the latest hot spec script were a weekly affair, and it wasn’t unusual to see ratios of 30 movies in development for every 1 movie produced on an average studio slate. This allowed movie studios to be more deliberate about the development process and helped to ensure that as few movies as possible went before the cameras until they were truly “ready.”

But here in the streaming era, audiences expect a constant stream of new content and so the name of the game is “churn and burn” and the streamers’ policy has become “we make movies, we don’t develop them.” The streamers want fully-packaged movies, not scripts. Release dates take precedence over development and the schedule holds sway over all. If, for instance, Disney needs a new Star Wars project for a particular release date, then they will damned well make and release one, ready or not.

Is this good for the movies we make? Is it good for the audience? In the end, it doesn’t seem to matter. Streaming content is meant to be disposable and as long as the audience can quickly move on to the next movie or show, they don’t much care if one particular movie doesn’t entirely deliver.

As for Rick’s second point, technology is becoming a problem in Hollywood, too… a crutch, really. Precise artistic work once done by dozens of union craftsman with real world physical skills under the creative supervision of a visionary director is now mostly done inside computers. Nowhere has this had a more outsized effect than on the physical environments where Hollywood movies are made.

Take a look at the movies of the 70’s and 80’s… early Spielberg films like “Close Encounters”, “Jaws” and “E.T”, but also “Poltergeist”, “Taxi Driver”, “Dog Day Afternoon”, “Three Days of the Condor”, “The Verdict”, “Dirty Harry”, “Serpico” or “The Exorcist”… these stories felt like they were happening in the real world… real houses, real city streets, real neighborhoods, real courthouses and police precincts, real banks, real college campuses… because they were.

Most studio blockbusters these days feel like they take place inside a wholly manufactured reality, because they do, and that makes them more difficult for audiences to connect with. Much like bands populated by big personalities, the real world is messy and impossible to control. Much easier, and better for the release schedule, if the studious can set their films in a manufactured CGI-based uncanny valley where every inch of the screen can be controlled utterly.

Just as bands have begun to disappear, so too have great filmmakers. Like the real world, auteur filmmakers are also difficult to manage and impossible to control. The creative process of a visionary director runs contrary to the concept of churn-and-burn. And so, just as bands have been replaced by pre-packaged solo artists, auteur filmmakers are slowly being replaced in the world of streaming content by men and women who, under tremendous time and budget pressure to deliver product, often act more like project managers than true auteurs. That audiences are struggling to connect with the movies the streamers are producing under these conditions, should surprise no one.

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