Originally Posted by DaneMcCloud
It's an interesting time in the entertainment business and in discussions with people in nearly every aspect of the industry, it's a bit scary.
You've got old school directors like Scorsese and Coppola slamming "Comic Book Films" as not being "Cinema", there are streaming wars and studio consolidations that will change how business is done (and unfortunately, will also dictate wages, which are going down all over town) and there's technology available (e.g, LED systems on set doubling for Blue & Green Screens) which in theory, should benefit the directors, cinematographers, gaffers and actors but in some ways is doing the opposite.
The Justice Department has been asked, by the studios of course, to reverse what are known as the "Paramount Consent Decrees", which is a Supreme Court decision in 1948 that regulated how movie studios distribute films. That law prevented the Studios like Disney, Warners, Paramount, et al, from owning movie theaters. The ruling made it illegal for the studios engage in "block booking" and circuit dealing (the lone exception being the Disney owned El Capitan Theater, which also doubles as Jimmy Kimmel's studio).
The studios have already begun dealing direct with the customer through streaming, with more to follow (NBC's Peacock and WB's HBO Max are on deck, both of which debut next year). Allowing these same studios to own and operate movie theater chains would be yet another step in the direction of the type of monopolization that ruled Hollywood from the turn of the 20th Century, which was not a good era for 95% of the "talent" in terms of wages, profit participation, etc.
That system was essentially in place for more than half a century and it wasn't until George Lucas, who couldn't find financing or a studio for the original Star Wars movie, took things into his own hands and self-financed, created ILM and Skywalker Sound, kept all of the merchandising and set his own Distribution Rates, that the industry began to change.
I may or may not have talked about the "Race to the Bottom", something that began around 2014 and has become rather egregious in the past two years, but it's become rampant. What that means is that people are so willing to "establish" themselves that they'll work for next to nothing and in many cases "For Free", just to get a gig. Sure, the music isn't composed or produced as well as in the past, commercials look "cheap" because they hired underqualified gaffers (the people that set the "lighting" on sets for each scene), cinematog's and directors because budgets have become so restricted due to these massive takeovers and "budgetary restructuring". The problem with people that engage in that practice is that they've set their own rate, "Cheap or Free", while the rest of us, in some cases, take less work so that we don't "Under Value" our work.
I was talking to a close friend this whose company parent company was purchased 2 years ago but just recently, was acquired by Private Equity Groupy that's buying up studio space from Hollywood to Manhattan Beach to Long Beach, who have zero experience in the entertainment business, and just look at the business as an equitible asset. Netflix has a massive amount of debt yet there's a new 13 story building that's nearly finished which sits across the street from their existing building on Sunset, with another campus set to open next year that's about a mile west and just south of Sunset on Cahuenga & Delongpre. Netflix is notorious for underpaying animators, composers and others in the business while never revealing, to anyone outside of a few in the company, how many times each series or film is streamed, which makes it clearly impossible to pay everyone according to union and guild rates, let alone, us composers.
My apologies for the verbosity so in a word, I would say "Bad".
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