Part
of what makes the shift to the home-entertainment market
so
significant is the shift in audiences that goes along
with it. By far the
most important segment of the studios’ home-entertainment
audience in
2003 was children and teens, who use television sets
for hours on end, either
to watch programs on cable channels and networks or
to play movie
videos, music videos, and games. These younger consumers,
prized by advertisers since they heavily influence their
parents’ purchases, also buy
many of the toys and much of the clothing and other
paraphernalia licensed
by the studios.
The six entertainment companies’ sway over—and
interest in—this
young audience goes beyond the home-television market.
They publish
most of the books read by children, they record most
of the music listened
to by children—Disney alone accounting for 60
percent—they
own most of the theme parks visited by children on their
vacations, and
they license most of the characters whose images appear
in the toys,
clothes, and games consumed by children. To capture
this valuable audience,
studios no longer focus on making films that appeal
mainly to
grown-ups, as their predecessors from the studio-system
days did.
By 2003, all six Hollywood studios had adopted the strategy
first foreshadowed by Walt Disney sixty-six years earlier,
when Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs appeared—making
films specifically aimed at youth.
While Disney’s animation process cleared the first
path to this young
audience, the digital revolution of the new millennium
has widened
that path to a thoroughfare. The new elite of computer-graphic
establishments
includes Industrial Light & Magic (the postproduction
house
owned by George Lucas, director-producer of the Star
Wars movies),
Lightstorm Entertainment (the company owned by James
Cameron, director
of Titanic), and Pixar Animation Studios (led
by Steve Jobs,
founder of Apple Computer). With its proprietary computer
programs
and loose networks of computer wonks, this new generation
of technology
consumes an increasingly large share of the studios’
budgets. Beyond
the financial implications, the new division of labor
between the camera
and the computer is also changing, for better or worse,
the aesthetics of
movies themselves.
Consider
the movie that won eleven Oscars that night in 2004,
including
the one for the Best Motion Picture of 2003: The
Lord of the Rings: The
Return of the King. The celebration that the studios
had invented for their
own validation was now dominated by a children’s
fantasy movie. Time
Warner’s wholly owned subsidiary, New Line Cinema,
had produced it
not as a single entity but as part of a franchise, a
trilogy with The Lord of
the Rings: The Two Towers and The Lord of the
Rings: The Fellowship of
the Ring, all of which had been shot simultaneously
in New Zealand in
late 1999 and early 2000 and then released separately
in 2001, 2002, and
2003. The triple production cost $281 million. Unlike
Gentleman’s Agreement, which, like almost
all other films in the studio system, was created by
camera operators photographing actors, The Lord
of the Rings: The Return of the King was created
mainly by computer animators. More
than one thousand separate shots in the film—over
70 percent of the
total number of shots—were not filmed by a camera
at all. These parts of
the movie were created by digital technicians working
for autonomous
computer-graphics houses in far-flung parts of the world.
Some shots
were created from scratch, while others combined live
acting with digitally
created layers. Unlike the single crew—thirty-nine
technicians in
all—who filmed the actors in Gentleman’s
Agreement in close enough
proximity to see and hear them on the set, most of the
digital compositors,
inferno artists, rotoscope artists, digital modelers,
digital wranglers,
software developers, and motion-capture coordinators
working on The
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King were
separated in both time
and space from the action on the set and had virtually
no personal contact
with the actors, director, production staff, or even
one another. While the
process in this case yielded stunning results—attested
to by those eleven
Oscars—it also augured a future for Hollywood
that would be much more
dependent on the manipulations of the computer than
on those of the
camera.
This shift has not gone unnoticed by outside critics,
who berate the
studios for wasting money on lavish productions and
extravagant advertising
campaigns, suggesting that Hollywood’s studios
fail to appreciate
the “logic” of their own industry. But the
studios may understand more
than their critics give them credit for. Even though
they lost more than
$11 billion in 2003 on movies shown in theaters, they
more than made up
that deficit from licensing products from those movies
to the global
home-entertainment market. They have now all come to
realize—as Disney
did a half century earlier—that the value they
create lies not in the
tickets they sell at the box office but in the licensable
products they create
for future generations of consumers.
F. Scott Fitzgerald noted, in his final, unfinished
novel, The Last Tycoon,
that most people in Hollywood had at best only a fragmentary
understanding
of the movie business; “not a half dozen men,”
he wrote,
“have been able to keep the whole equation of
pictures in their heads.”
By
the dawning of the third millennium, the “whole
equation” of what
had replaced the studio system had become even more
complex. At the
heart of it is a sexopoly: six global entertainment
companies—Time
Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal, and Disney—that
collude
and cooperate at different levels to dominate filmed
entertainment. It is
these six companies that choose the images that constitute
a large part of
the world’s popular culture, and it is these six
companies that will continue
to shape the imagination of a universe of youth for
generations to
come. Nostalgia for the old studios notwithstanding,
their Hollywood is
the new Hollywood.
Not surprisingly, the decisions of these six companies
about the
movies they make—the logic of the new Hollywood—is
largely driven
by money. But economic considerations are not the whole
story. Social
and political logics—involving status, honor,
solidarity with stars, and
other, less tangible, considerations—also form
a critical part of the equation.
If the big picture continues to remain elusive to the
outside world,
shrouded in self-generated myths and misplaced nostalgia,
that is not accidental.
The major studios, for example, go to considerable lengths
to
conceal the revenues from their moviemaking enterprise
from investors,
financial analysts, and journalists—even though
they make this data
available to one another through their trade organization,
the MPA (on
condition that the MPA keep it secret from the public).
They manage this
concealment, even in their own financial reporting,
by combining their
movie earnings with those of unrelated businesses, such
as licensing television
programs (or even, in the case of Paramount, theme parks).
The
rationale given by one savvy top studio executive for
this “blurring” is “to
avoid showing Wall Street how volatile the movie business
is and how
tricky are its profit margins.” Studios are willing
to camouflage shortterm
losses on their movies because movies, not television
sales or theme
park operations, are their principal source of prestige
and satisfaction in
Hollywood. In more ways than one, today’s movie
business works to keep
its audience—and, to some extent, its own players—in
the dark.
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