It seems ironic that on Hollywood’s biggest day, when the stars and artists and money-men come out to honor their industry’s best work, that a number of articles, when put together, spell to me the end of the movie business as we know it. The first that caught my eye is Tom Forenski’s item entitled “Silicon Valley Has Become Media Valley…Someone Should Tell NYC.”
Tom suggests that the balance of power in the “media” business has shifted 3,000 miles westward from NYC to Silicon Valley.
Some of Silicon Valley’s largest companies are media companies: Google, Yahoo, EBay, for example are media companies—they publish pages of content and advertising around it.
Some of the most interesting and most valuable new Silicon Valley companies, such as Youtube, Facebook are based here in Northern California. So is Craigslist, the seventh largest online media company in the English language world (in terms of traffic).
While Tom is talking mostly about the newsgathering side of the media world — newspapers, TV news networks, magazines — his statement is just as true of the entertainment business, which has also traditionally been largely run by executives in New York. But now Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and even WalMart are technically, if not economically, just as much in the movie distribution business as Time Warner or Paramount is.
Even more to the point, Neal Gabler has this opinion piece in today’s Los Angeles Times entitled “The Movie Magic is Gone.” Gabler comes at the issue from a different perspective, arguing that movies don’t matter much anymore as cultural touchstones, but he identifies the same basic culprit — Internet technology.
Today, movies just don’t seem to matter in the same way — not to the general public and not to the high culture either, where a Pauline Kael review in the New Yorker could once ignite an intellectual firestorm. There aren’t any firestorms now, and there is no director who seems to have his finger on the national pulse the way that Steven Spielberg or George Lucas did in the 1970s and 1980s. People don’t talk about movies the way they once did. It would seem absurd to say, as Kael once did, that she knew whether she would like someone by the films he or she liked. Once at the center, movies increasingly sit on the cultural margins.
Web-based entertainment and social networking sites are taking the place of movies in society, Gabler argues, because they’re turning millions of individuals into “stars,” and avatars are fulfilling the escapist needs once fulfilled by Cary Grant or Bette Davis. Moreover, the “audiences” for Internet entertainment outlets are far bigger than the viewers for any given movie.
Popular websites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, in which the user is effectively made into a star and in which content is democratized, get far more hits than movies get audiences. MySpace has more than 100 million users worldwide, and Fortune magazine reported that 54 million of them spend, on average, 124 minutes on the site for each visit, while 11.6 million users spend 72 minutes a visit on Facebook. YouTube’s most popular videos attract more than 40 million hits, which is substantially larger than the audience for all but a very, very few movies.
Most importantly, the Internet, unlike television (which was also supposed to kill the movies) represents a shift in entertainment consciousness. “Television never questioned the very nature of conventional entertainment,” Gabler writes, while the Internet is creating something quite different. It’s not just a box in the living room that delivers the same kind of scriptwriting, acting and escape that movies provide.
The entertainment industry’s geographic shift toward Silicon Valley will be writ large tonight during the Oscars by what will no doubt be the most talked-about commercial that airs during the event: an ad by Cupertino-based Apple that will introduce the iPhone, a groundbreaking device that won’t even hit the market until summer.
Will we look back 20 years from now and view full-length films hyped by powerful studios as quaint vestiges of old-fashioned entertainment? Probably not. As Gabler points out, “film will no doubt” withstand technology’s assault, and Hollywood will adapt along with the rest of us. After all, live theater was deemed “dead” in the 1960s, but has come roaring back with the revival of musical theater and tourist-oriented spectacles.
But one thing is clear: the bi-coastal entertainment industry axis of Hollywood and New York is breaking apart, giving way to a Hollywood-New York-Silicon Valley power-sharing split. Technology, as much as talent and money, is driving the new era of media, film and entertainment.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:00 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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