The world is opening up again and across the industry, there’s a call to return to business as usual under the rays of sunshine!
But no, that’s not business as usual pre-COVID when, if you’ll remember, the industry was staring into the face of an existential crisis beset by the disruption of the streaming wars and multiple, rolling waves of social unrest that questioned the Hollywood Way of Doing Business.
No, certainly not! Who wants to get back to that! We’re pushing the clock back a little further. COVID’s fading, and tonight we’re going to confab like it’s 1996!
Thousands of miles apart, the great, the mighty, the expense accounted—and the reporters who love them—are getting the machine rolling again, up Sun Valley and down the Croisette. The crowd and the varieties of obtuseness vary from gathering to gathering, but when Rome is varying, pick up your fiddle and play whatever tune moves you.
It’s a tale of two retreats: each in its way, increasingly out of touch, impervious, playing their own sorts of master-of-the-universe games, swooned over by a well-fed press corps and lots of people happy to be out of the office and off Zoom.
Thus reporteth the Times of New York and National Public Radio.
So let’s start with that intimate, heartwarming gathering of friends at Sun Valley, Idaho.
You just wouldn’t have thought it possible that you could still throw a gathering of billionaires, where a group of older, wealthy, white men (still uniformly so) get together to congratulate themselves, wink to the press caged in the driveway about big deals in the works, and uncritically put their heads together to plot how to divide up the world.
But of course, these enlightened hypercapitalists did make token nods to the changes roiling civilization, taking a break from the bucolic scene to furrow their brows and posit, we should think about doing something about this. The NY Post captured the essence of these gestures in the unintentional or intentional transition/juxtaposition of the year, reporting on a session on crime in America:
The ongoing crime surge in cities may have dulled attendees’ receptiveness to calls for criminal justice reform, a second attendee said.
“A lot of people are coming in from New York and San Francisco where there’s been an increase in crime,” the attendee added.
After the discussion, attendees left the amphitheater and walked across the resort to enjoy a lunch of salad, glazed shrimp and fruit cobbler next to Sun Valley’s duck pond.”
All this taking place in this amoral dealocracy, where in the accounting of these things, the only people who count are the ones at the center of this week’s Next Big Deal.
As one Ankler friend wrote, “They just want to talk about deals, not the industry’s obligation to deal with social issues, as if BLM never happened. Size doesn’t equal vision.”
Left unexplored, to be sure, are whether any of these deals and mergers reshaping the industry are good for anyone other than the individual dealmakers.
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