With So Much To Do, Where Do We Begin?

Or maybe that doesn't matter in the slightest! The final episode of all that is Bad with the Cinema Ecosystem currently.

Over about ten posts, I’ve tried to take a 10,000 foot view at our cinema ecosystem. I’ve found over 200 candidates for things to address. And a few things to outright celebrate too. As I’ve said, I don’t think this is a complaint list. It is closer to a “To Do” list. These are things to address, to fix. It gives us all purpose. Let’s leave this ecosystem better than we found it, yeah?

there’s always another hill to climb

My apologies that this took so long. What can I say, every rug I looked under had another lion under it.

I’d be curious if you could synthesize it down, what would be your top ten to address? What if you had to limit to those that we could solve or significantly address this year? And without a small fortune? Any recommended tactics?

While you ponder, let me finish this list. Thanks for reading.

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Problems With The FKATheFilmBiz, 2024, #202- 218 (S-Z)

202. Symbolic Registry: In the west, our collective subconscious is ruled by Judeo-Christian symbolism, the nobility of suffering, and the myth of the individual hero. We think in cause and effect terms and rarely holistically. It is the system our narrative tools and inspirations are both slave to and mine from. And of course it is self-reinforcing. It shapes the cinema we make and consume and most mistake as something other than cultural indoctrination.

203. Tax Credits: Like subsidies, tax credits for the arts is both job creation and a fantastic way to create a better life for all (alright, maybe after universal health care, free education, public transportation, and peace on earth).

204. Tech’s Takeover Of Hollywood: I once thought this might be a good thing as I though Hollywood itself was behind the times. Turns out I was wrong. With the sale of Paramount now in the hands of Oracle’s offspring, is Hollywood more tech than not? Amazon/MGM, Apple, Netflix, Paramount vs Sony… and what is WBD beyond a Wall St frankenstein?

205. Temp Scores: Other than the dictates of a capitalist society, the Global Streaming Platforms’ comfort food centric programming bias, society’s symbolic registry, and our industry’s utter neglect of the necessary operational improvements to support ambitiously authored cinema, there is probably no other culprit as guilty for our descent into mediocrity than how our industry relies on temp scores. Okay, perhaps I exaggerate a wee bit for the sake of emphasis, but I am still eager to read that dissertation on how so many scores are derivative of the score they were cut to. Sure we generally hire composers too late in the process and can’ t afford to pay them to sketch stuff so early, but by now I’d like to think we had a few more solutions in our pocket.

206. Theatrical Exhibition: When it comes to the big chains in America, they may have learned what good projection, sound, and sight lines are, but they ruin the experience with commercials and their focus on the sell. We need to give our cinema the context it deserves.