Film Futurist

In Jeffrey Katzenberg’s recent interview with Fortune  (watch the full interview video below) which has garnered some media attention over the last couple of days, he lambasts the “showbiz” for being too much biz and not enough show. He thinks almost every film this year so far “sucks”. While I wouldn’t entirely disagree with the Dreamworks’ CEO’s point of view, I do think he remains overly optimistic about the medium itself.

…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.