Atlanta Film Festival 365

The moment of truth in the nation's automotive bailout debate might have come this week. As the CEOs of GM, Ford and Chrysler begged Congress for federal aid, a Detroit radio talk-show host asked whether Michigan, as well as the car companies, should get assistance. The state is being hit by an economic hurricane, he said, just as New Orleans was hit by a natural hurricane.

Yesterday, congressional leaders gave the car companies until Dec. 2 to come up with viable business plans and renew their request for aid. - Wall Street Journal

America is a unique country in that the stereotype that we like to do things bigger, faster and louder is much more true than it should be. No more is this true than in the automotive and movie businesses.

Although the two industries make two profundly different products, both the movie and automotive industry have trended large in the last 30 years. When it comes to structure, the vertical and lateral integegration has been profound.

The automakers have become bankers in their own right with their own credit companies and have snapped up fellow automakers left and right, resulting in mega-congloms. 

For studios, they've created speciality shops (that have all mostly gone kaput), created pipelines that take a film from theatrical to home market to tv and have expanded to include television and music arms. To be fair, unlike the automakers, some of the studios have gained brothers and sisters because their parent companies decided an acquistion made sense and not because the studios were clamoring for one. (I'm pretty certain that, in hindsight, a majority of studio execs would have prefered to keep their operations much more streamlined.)

One of the great fears was that companies would become so large and unwieldly that they would crush those at the lower end of the economic ladder. Over the last 10 years, I'm not sure if it can be said that's true--the entrie economy seems to be doing that. However, what can be said is that for many large companie, once they reach a certain tipping point, they almost seem destined to collapse in on themselves and indeed they have.

Hollywood has responded by consolidating their operations and partnering with each other to fund and produce as well as promote and distribute. Unfortunately, a lot of this is still just a mirror of the old system of doing things bigger, faster and louder, only now the risk is distributed across multiple companies and not just shouldered by one company alone.

Today's Hollywood is pretty much a dead entity walking. In a world of increasing audience control over how and what they consume and the increasing number of niches where any one audience member can find their entertainement. It's ony a matter of time before studios, like the automakers won't be able to keep up. The time it takes a project to work its way through the system, the amount of bloat a project accumilates from turnaround to distrbution and marketing will be too much for all films, regardless of budget. (Let's see what happens to the film Australia this holiday season.)

If the system is to survive, it has to get smaller and more fractured. Scary for sure, but if one looks at the glory days, either financially or creatively, media has always been more profitable and effiecent when things were smaller.

Smaller in Hollywood and Detroit terms is all relative. Yet, in a decade or so, it's almost guaranteed that Detroit won't be nearly as large has it was in its heyday. And, while the overall number of those working in film and television probably won't change much, the large studios will definitely be a thing of a past.