State of the Showbiz Union: Hollywood Is Dead. Long Live Hollywood
The corporate era is over. What comes next depends on us
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, recently explained why artificial intelligence is misunderstood.
He said people complain about how much energy it takes to train an AI model. But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human.
“It takes like 20 years of life, and all the food you eat before that time, before you get smart,” he said.
The fair comparison, he argued, is how much energy it takes for ChatGPT to answer a question versus a human to answer that same question. AI may already be more efficient. And so — he seemed to imply — shouldn’t we be asking whether humans are not the real waste of energy?
That worldview is not some fringe Silicon Valley thought experiment. It is the philosophy that steers the companies that now own, consolidate and shape Hollywood.
When people tell you who they are, believe them.
If you’ve been wondering how we got here — the endless mergers, the suffocation of the industry’s middle class, the replacement of storytelling with “content,” the quiet acceptance that entire studios can be swallowed whole — there you have it.
Since I’ve been doing these addresses, since I’ve stood before you as your duly elected columnist, the state of our union has never gotten to a particularly fun place. Some years, it almost seemed on the brink of hitting bottom.
Then, it inevitably got worse.
So rather than add one more declaration of oblivion onto the back catalog, this year I’d like to get you there by way of a story, or to be more precise, the words of someone who knows much better than I.
Within the last year, I found myself in an off-the-record conversation with a titan of this industry — someone whose name you would know, someone not given to melodrama. We were talking about the state of things, the pressures, the shrinking margins — the usual woes of the poobah class. But as we talked, the titan’s tone grew increasingly grim.
At some point, I interrupted and asked this person to look me in the eye and tell me that everything would be okay.
“Okay?” the titan said. “Okay for who?”
“The industry,” I offered. “You know. Hollywood.”
"Hollywood?" The titan replied and then summed it up for me, the answer I had been holding at bay for a long time now. "Hollywood is dead."
I gasped. The small group around us gasped. And then I spent months arguing with it in my head.
The problem is that the ecosystem is being dismantled in plain sight.
And almost no one with the power to stop it seems particularly interested in trying.
Once you see that clearly, everything else starts to make sense.
