Over the last two years, I have circled the landscape surrounding the art and business of film in this blog. It was my way of thinking through a transition in the future of a medium I had spent nine years of my life learning, pursuing, loving, hating and finally understanding.

I had moved to Los Angeles like many people, to make films. I was living in New York before that, and like most New Yorkers, hated Los Angeles as a point of pride. I admit I grudgingly saw that everyone who wanted to make it in “the biz” worked extraordinarily hard. Sure, you might not consider buttering up an established producer or director hard work but actually it is, take it from me. Humiliation is hard work.

There was a kind of “dream contract” that everyone signed when they arrived in Los Angeles. And it was indeed beautiful to be part of a world of people who worked hard and had a shot at the dream. Dreaming is after all, what we ALL came to do. Some of us did it with a camera lens, or a pen and paper, and others, with their hands and a can of paint, and many countless people with their bodies and faces.

The dream is seductive, and brave in its true American-ness. Everyone knew someone who suddenly went from waiting tables to starring in a movie. Guys like Jon Hamm, who was still working crappy jobs to pay the bills past his prime, until someone invented a show he was born to lead–were more common in the biz than you would think. Sure, there are many more who never get their Mad Men but that promise is the stuff of dreams. And those of us who dream in Technicolor are seduced, and all desperately want a piece of that promise.

The perfume of that desire was strong in the room of students at a prestigious film school in New York where I spoke some months ago. I felt cruel inserting some truth into their hopeful twenty year old minds, but it had to be done. I started by telling them I graduated from film school in 2004 and asked them what important event marked that year. They scratched their heads for a few minutes, and slightly skeptically came up with the correct answer: Facebook. “That was a very unfortunate year to be launching a film career”, I told them. Why? Because once the currency of content hinged on engagement, however casual/social, and film as we knew it died. A raise of hands in that very room revealed that this next generation spent two-thirds less time engaging with film than they did with other media, particularly of the immersive variety.

This generation – the millenials, are not quite social-digital natives who will inherit a world in which trees and ipads are learned as equal inevitabilities of life, but they themselves describe their younger siblings as precisely those people. Given that, we can assume there is roughly a 10-15 year maturity gap before the entire focus of entertainment will shift to serve their needs. Right now, I told my stunned new young friends, we are operating on the cache stored from another era – all those film dreams are artifacts of a bygone era. And as powerful as the facade may feel to them standing on the outside looking in, it is worth considering that even for institutional legends like Louis B. Mayer (once the highest paid man in the US), once the time comes one can be humbled by changing times.

I know, you’re thinking: blah, blah everyone’s been writing film’s epitaph since television was created and it’s still here. Well, it is, and it isn’t. For the first time this year, we saw box office numbers decline despite the best efforts of studio marketers; I myself saw fewer than 10% of the films on most top 10 lists of the year and the ones I did see were filled with audiences of mostly middle-aged people. That, is what I think of as the nostalgia factor – filmgoing is a tradition we love, and there will hopefully always be a place for that good feeling. But I can no longer see what the “future of film” is. In my mind, it is a dream passed, a brilliant and grand one which, like opera has seen its day.

Without making any grand proclamations of what the future holds, I can say I know after the two years of writing this blog that it has a whole lot less to do with film than I could have imagined. I have been watching the zeitgeist – both anecdotally and statistically – and what I see is a future in which the gorgeous seductive artifice once traditionally the domain of film can be anywhere. My dream to make films was only a heightened extension of the audience experience of dreaming in a dark room. But the dreaming space is no longer in one place, whether we like it or not. Our job as professional dreamers, is to keep dreaming for collective enjoyment and though we are still muddling through the forms, visions will emerge, clear as they were when the magic of film materialized through the flickering light of a projector.

Without knowing where on earth the most fertile visions will take hold, I can only say it will be unexpected, and will not follow the rules we all memorized when entering into the well-established world of film art and business. I myself decided to root in New York because the soil here is full of raw promise and the farmers are eager experimenters in the business of the future. For my part, I have planted my company AINA MEDIA, and founded STORYCODE a nonprofit to support immersive/crossmedia storytellers. Needless to say, 2011 has been a rather busy planting season. I look forward to the crop of goodness that the coming years will bring to storytelling, the future of visual entertainment and most importantly to dreaming. In my mind “Hollywood” remains at its purest, a standard of rare openness, possibility and the vastness of mind it takes to dream.

I will soon launch a new blog related to new endeavors. In the time being, you can follow my real time musings at @ainaabiodun.

From my vantage point, it seemed to this point that the weird ways of “the biz” eluded the tech giant – an oddity for a behemoth used to conquering all things. The question on everyone’s mind was: will Google acquire an entertainment company? A studio? Well, they’re obviously not that stupid…we all know the profit models for entertainment are sketchy at best, no matter the product. So it was with great interest that I observed the acquisition of not a company, but an individual – Netflix veteran Robert Kyncl, whose job as VP of Content Partnerships would solder that soft link between the two worlds of tech and entertainment. As the blog AllThingsD noted back in September, Google “needs someone who can talk to Hollywood and big media companies; many of the folks who have done that work for it in the past have moved on, including Jordan Hoffner (IAC), Dave Eun (AOL) and Tim Armstrong (AOL, too)” Well, they were right, in a way…but talking is only half the battle.  Content is the other half, and well, even these industrious folks mentioned in the article haven’t exactly emerged as the kings of content.

On the YouTube blog, Kyncl posted a blurb about the new program (which includes lots of celeb-owned or driven content proferred by Madonna, Jay-Z, Amy Poehler and more) pitching the program as:

channels created by well-known personalities and content producers from the TV, film, music, news, and sports fields, as well as some of the most innovative up-and-coming media companies in the world and some of YouTube’s own existing partners. These channels will have something for everyone, whether you’re a mom, a comedy fan, a sports nut, a music lover or a pop-culture maven.

YouTube thus far has been pretty much “something for everyone”. I gather then, that this is just a higher quality version of what we previously knew to be YT. If, as the Wrap says the program is “expected to generate about 25 hours of new programming a day on YouTube”, I wonder how that will differ from the hundreds of hours of unwatched cable programming I zip by every day on the remote control. I’m not sure how that ultimately challenges the cable TV experience, except that it’s free.

So this may just be an exercise in how much ad revenue so called premium content can command online. But of course I keep wishing that Google– which has the resources to innovate–would actually take on the challenge not only as a means to find the frontier, but also to speak to the growing shifts in our own consumption interests, which I contend here, may not be as passive as Hollywood wishes it would be, and as easy to solve with a pocketful of celebrities.

Podgnosticast 006 – Aina Abiodun: Who’s Who in Transmedia.

An interview about the beginnings of Transmedia NYC and where we’re headed next.

Shakespeare understood more clearly than most that there was a fine line between politics and theater; in fact most of his work was a response to or comment on both the politics of the day, and the political nature of human behavior. Sure, his Kings and princes were from an era we no longer can imagine with our modern democracies and anti-monarchic stances but we are fundamentally unchanged – it is after all, no stretch to posit Gaddafi as a modern day Macbeth. Shakespeare’s truth is always in behavior – what we, as human beings will do with power when given the chance.

Berlusconi, a media magnate prior to becoming Italy’s prime minister, is no slouch when it comes to the theatrical; and no matter how badly he runs the country, his continued presence is the result of widespread popular support, which he cultivates with ease. American’s who scoff at ignorant Italians for being susceptible to the fake tan and toupee of an aging politician should take a long hard look at the narratives we are cultivating in our own political universe. Though the apparent moral polar opposite of the Italian Prime Minister, over here we’ve got Glenn Beck, whose charisma compels many to follow him, and Sarah Palin, who though apparently not running for office, starred in a reality show, sells out book-signings and remains a heavily covered media personality.

I call this kind of character a MEDIA CANDIDATE. They vie for your attention the same way Tony Soprano did, and the same way Simon Cowell now does. When the political candidates running for *real* elected office fail to energize us, we turn to characters, heroes, those other voices readily available to us in the media. Humans think in terms of stories; we always have, and we always will. So whose narrative will compel in 2012? I have a sneaking feeling it’s not going to be a political candidate; it will be a media candidate, and you will vote with your eyeballs.

…a movie experience is a passive experience.  The storytelling narrative is something that I think is still a unique and interesting, and valued experience by people around the world.  And whether it’s done in a movie theater or in your home, or on your laptop, or iPad, or whatever the device is, people love that passive experience.  And we see it, again, there’s more and more consumption of it. What all of these devices and social networking things do is they’re going to actually force Hollywood to make better products, because today the thing that is probably most askew in Hollywood is the issue of marketability versus playability.

Katzenberg’s contention is of course, that the stories Hollywood is shilling lately are simply bad art–and that’s why consumption of passive entertainment is declining. Meaning, of course that the root cause of our widespread cultural preference to play around on social networks as opposed to watching movies is simply a content issue, and not a changing habits issue.

For those of you who read my blog, you know I’m a huge proponent of raising the quality of film, and innovating within the medium, so I should be the biggest proponent of the Katzenberg theory on this…but I’m not. Why?  Because I think the ship has sailed. By the time (if ever) the movies come around to being better again, audiences will have developed different habits, and the coming generation of digital natives will not understand the meaning of “passive entertainment”.

Among many arguments for the evolution of consumption behavior changing rapidly is the neurological one posited by writers such as Nicholas Carr, whose book Shallows suggests we are rewiring our neural pathways through digital age behavior. A recent article in the Scientific American concurs, quoting studies that suggest the inevitability of this change.

There’s also the very simple fact of cultural tastes changing with the times, and the introduction of more highly interactive forms of entertainment simply draws people away from the more passive forms. When guys like Katzenberg and his generation who came of age in a kind of golden age of cinema talk about the possibilities of film making a comeback, some part of me feels like I’m hearing my grandfather talk about the days before everyone had a telephone, and people actually talked to each other, face to face. I’m sure it was an awesome experience, and had its merits, but we can’t stop the change from happening. Along with massively world changing inventions like vaccines and and moon travel come these other cultural changes, many of which we are less in control of than we’d like to believe.

So while I applaud Katzenberg for having the balls to say that the emperor has no clothes on (I concur that the sequel nonsense is a dead-end game), I’m not so sure he should be as sanguine about our future willingness to rediscover this elusive LOVE of passive entertainment.

Boy, I sound like such a bummer today! But  really, I have faith in our ability to guide cultural/creative change in a meaningful way into the purely digital era. It’s just that I don’t think it’s ever going to be like the good old days.

Visit me at www.ainamediainc.com