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.

…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.

After I wrote my last post about the dearth of innovation in film, I happened to read Anthony Lane’s New Yorker piece on Pixar, “The Fun Factory”. It made me slap my forehead in an “of course!” way. Lane starts out as a skeptic, ready to debunk the myth of Pixar as the den of awesomeness that everyone says it is. After a tour of the mind-blowingly fun facilities that comprise the Pixar campus (including a pool and beach volleyball courts), Lane asks: “Is there not, in short, a dark underbelly to the Pixar state of bliss?” By the end, he has totally drunk the kool aid.  He quotes Pixar head John Lasseter: “The people at Pixar are my best friends. Not only do I want to see them every day–I can’t wait to see them everyday…when my wife, Nancy and I make a list of whom we are going to take on vacation, the top group is Pixar.”

I’m a pretty cynical bastard myself. I don’t believe in workplaces where people hold hands and sing kumbaya because well, mainly I’ve never had one. But as I re-watched Finding Nemo this past weekend, I couldn’t help but think that this utopian multiple hit-making machine is the real deal. The secret sauce? The founders and original artists fought for innovation in the early days of the company. Now they are the standard in animation that thrills children and thoroughly engages adults. Before Pixar, mainstream animation (mostly proffered by pre-Pixar Disney) was the stuff of facile kid fantasies, and not anything I could stand to look at for more than a minute. While the perfection of 3D animation lies at the core of Pixar’s creative approach, there is also an approach to story that soars sometimes sadly, sometimes sweetly but always smartly.

Put simply, these guys are masters of story.

Lane takes a stab at what makes Pixar stories great:

The key to Pixar, I came to realize, is that what it seeks to enact, as corporate policy, and what it strives to dramatize, in its art, spring from a common purpose and a single clarion call: You’ve got a friend in me.

In cinema, as in fiction, friendship is a more durable substance that we give credit for, and often more resilient than love. Indeed, it may be the hardiest strain of love that we possess, untroubled by erotic fragrance; once Huck Finn and Jim–to take the most obvious ancestors of Woody and Buzz–meet on Jackson’s Island, they don’t declare their friendship to one another, or let it disturb their sleep. They just get on with it. That practical momentum, conservative in its emotions but radical in its taste for adventure, runs through Westerns, Andy Hardy movies, “The Flinstones,” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” before landing in the land of Pixar.

I would add that because we live in an era of extreme disintermediation as a result technology and other social forces, the narrative of friendship becomes an even more vital mythological pull, one which will be studied for some time to come. And I am sure that when history judges this era in American film,  Pixar films will emerge as the thematic and aesthetic masters of our day.

In the mean time, why aren’t we tinkering away at more models like Pixar?

Most of the younger folks in the biz express frustration that the “system” is resistant to change, particularly the type of change that might render some people’s entire professions obsolete. And I get it – the fear of change is natural in every entrenched industry. No one wants to be faced with the possibility that large amounts of human and cash capital investments might be lost.

But I think what saddened me the most is that the creative people – writers, directors, producers – people shaping the content are so terrified of the forces of the market (and audiences) that they seem to be more conservative than ever in their creative choices. I’m sure the same was true of the artists who worked in silent films, when talkies came along, and of the unrivaled film industry when television came along, and on and on…

When I consider what has driven change in entertainment over the years, I see seismic shifts due to technology or social disruption that the industry then hobbles to catch up to. Very rarely do I see an instance of the business innovating from the inside. And I’m not talking about 3D technology either. I’m talking about creative shifts – experimentation WITHIN the medium of film.

The French New Wave changed film in a very radical way; it was a push within the medium that spoke to the era. And it changed the way in which storytelling in film had functioned until that point. This is an example of artistic innovation within the medium – introducing new ideas into the lexicon and pushing the possibilities of film further. I acknowledge that the movement came from outside the “establishment” and only slowly seeped into the way mainstream films were later made and viewed; BUT the movement was a real, working consideration of film as a process and a form, as art that evolves.

We are in a very different predicament today.  Filmmaking itself as we know it may be approaching obsolescence and there is little happening inside the medium that is a direct response to this issue. The fact that blockbuster movies are looking and sounding a lot more like videogames is a strong indication that without meaning to, the medium will experience inevitable, perhaps accidental change. However, without the minds of artists whose job it is to think these ideas through and experiment with what film *could* be in the future, we will accept a mishmash that is little more than the residue of innovation in other kinds of creative endeavors like gaming and interactive play.

As those who follow me know, I am a huge proponent of platform agnostic storytelling – I am after all, a transmedia storyteller. But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate and respect the specificity and art of each individual medium. I love reading books and I adamantly believe that the experience is like no other. I don’t read because there’s nothing to watch. I read because I love *to read*. I play games when I want that experience. I go to concerts when I feel like I want to be surrounded by the energy and life of the audience and band.  So while I am fully committed to working with connective storytelling, I am still a filmmaker who would like to find a space in which filmmaking as an art can grow deeper, more meaningful and expansive as a medium.

If film is to survive, we need to aggressively experiment creatively with the medium. That is our job as artists, and for the folks who make money off the work, they too must understand that innovation is not a choice – it’s that, or perish.

It seems one such incarnation of Internet Evil made its way to the Toronto Film Festival, in the shape of Trust, directed by the actor David Schwimmer. I only viewed the trailer as I am not at Toronto but from what I can surmise, it’s a Facebook predator story with a good cast, but less-than-promising B-movie premise which simply replaces the neighborhood predator with online predator – which cleverly and tastelessly allows the victim to be older and more sexually appealing to an audience. (See first trailer below)

Then my keyboard travels took me to the controversial and potentially less tacky Catfish, the Sundance sensation of last year which is a documentary that the distributor Universal calls “A reality thriller that is a shocking product of our times…a riveting story of love, deception and grace within a labyrinth of online intrigue.” Again, I haven’t seen it either, and it sure sounds like the “shocking product” of our times they are pitching is basically the old adage “if it seems too good to be true, then it is”… with the added extension: “on the internet”. Ever get those offers for free money in your email that sound too good to be true? This isn’t much different, in my opinion. It’s an elaborate blind date that probably turns out to be as disappointing as blind dates tend to be, on or offline. (See second trailer below)

And then the giant spaceship landed–the REALLY BIG KAHUNA, evil so pleasantly benign that it comes in the form of the baby-faced Jesse Eisenberg, playing the “real life” story of Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. I will admit a certain glee at the prospect of watching this one (which again, I have yet to set my eyes on) simply because the story contains a certain level of intrigue that defines the way the internet and its attendant “evils” truly manifest themselves in these times. Is it a big Boogeyman? No. But depending on how you view this kind of social network and other products of the closed web age, the potential evil is exponentially more terrifying than an online predator. And watching the ruthlessness of its beginnings is dramatic, even if the danger seems less horrific, or thrilling to the viewer. As I am a futurist, it remains my duty to remind: Lest we forget, many great and devastating world events began with a person, usually persuasive, highly intelligent and supremely capable of a kind of logic that seems measured in their time. Incidentally, that’s how great stories also begin.

TRUST

CATFISH

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

I know it sounds preposterous but I didn’t make these numbers up. These are real data reported from the Hollywood Stock Exchange, where you can buy and sell stocks and bonds based on real people and projects in the entertainment industry. HSX is a fairly recent acquisition of brokerage house Cantor Fitzgerald, and the precursor to the proposed Film Futures Exchange about which there has been much mumbling, grumbling and gnashing of teeth. On the HSX, which has been around since 1996, you can buy and sell stocks and bonds with funny money called $H — essentially betting on the value of stars, opening movies and now, shows like American Idol. It’s great interactive entertainment. I have friends who are obsessed with the exchange, buying stock in an actor, director or movie literally the minute the project is announced. (By the way, it’s worth noting that these friends are IN the movie business, in which everyone knows everything and no one knows anything.)

So, you might ask yourself, after reading that Cantor Fitzgerald was ready to get into REAL trading of movie futures and then seeing the ensuing bruhaha about Congress possibly banning it, what’s the big deal? Why are Senators Lamar Smith, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein and the MPAA, DGA, WGA  getting their panties in a twist over some good gambling fun? Well, precisely that – they seem to agree that this kind of gambling, albeit in “futures” form, will destabilize the entertainment business.

Hmmm, let me think about that for a second: I’m a producer and I pitch RED MENACE, my giant menacing alien ladybug epic to five investors. I show them a historical list of box office stats on ET, Jaws all the way to District 9 and I say: “It’s a home run. Obviously.” They hesitate. I say: “I’ve got Tom Cruise in the title Ladybug role and he always brings home the dough” They start coming around. I say: “And, I think I could get JJ Abrams to do it.” They seem more convinced. “I can see the sequels now”. One of the greedy bastards is still not convinced, then I say: “We’ll roll out the red carpet for you at the Oscars. Angelina Jolie will be there.” SOLD!

What part of that conversation seems financially sound? or sane?  If we are to be honest, none. We producers are snake-oil salesmen selling vanity and greed – two very compelling motivators in the gambling business. Just spend 20 minutes at the Bellagio in Vegas and you’ll get my drift. So dare I ask, what is so crazy about buying and selling “innovative” financial products to and about a business patently comfortable with gambling? Ok, I get it: we’re still digging our way out of the hole created by immensely “creative” bankers and their dodgy derivatives. But let’s get to the bottom of this particular product that is being proposed and make a distinction. Felix Salmon explains the trading system simply in his insightful NYT op-ed:

The proposed contracts are simple: they would allow traders to bet on the total box-office receipts of movies in their first four weeks of release. A contract on “Iron Man 2,” for instance, might be trading at $390, meaning that the market is expecting the film to gross $390 million in its first four weeks. If you think it’s going to make more than that, you would go long, or buy the contract; if you think it’s going to make less, you would go short, or sell it. At the end of the four weeks, the contract would expire at whatever the four-week gross is. If you went long at $390 and the film ended up earning $450 million in its first four weeks, then you’d make $60 for every contract you bought.

Simple enough, and a gamble the average speculator could get into for fun (a la vegas) or in a larger stakes way as a method of hedging. And for the record, these are NOT derivatives. Sure, once studios get involved on a large scale, and begin hedging, there will be accusations of insiders “gaming” the system. That is to say if a studio sees more money to be made in sinking a movie and betting against it, they might be more inclined to sabotage a release. But to that I say: um, yeah… that’s being done even without a futures market – ask the long list of directors and actors whose projects got the cabash after a studio decided it would compete with something else they deemed more profitable.

As far as I’m concerned, the only issue that the Hollywood cartel, also known as the MPAA and their pupeteers have is the possibility that any measure of control might be lost to anyone outside of their little circle. Hollywood has been by and large a business of closed doors, secrets and power that benefits a select few. Which is why my friends who play the HSX enjoy their role so much: they are editors, production designers, gaffers – people who are locked out of the big cash that the cartel controls. But they have access to inside information that could earn them a few extra dollars and create a great deal of fun. So I say, why not let the wild cards in?

Hollywood gambles on other peoples money, but they won’t let other people gamble at their expense. “Get the hell outta here!” is what one of my pro gambler friends would say. I certainly took the humor in what a Naked Capitalism blogger suggests while lamenting the invention of film futures: that it is “Wall Street’s revenge on Hollywood” for all the money they’ve gambled and lost in it. I think that’s a little paranoid but funny, nonetheless. They love gambling. We love gambling. That’s all it is.

Let the games begin.

As suspicious as I naturally am of these Hollywood suits and their flawed business models and bad personal style, I’ve still kept one eye on Disney for as a possible game-changer. When High School Musical and Hannah Montana came out of what seemed like nowhere, blew up to become a couple of the most recognizable brands in kids/tween entertainment, who didn’t wonder how the hell that happened? I remember seeing images of tween girl throngs at a Miley Cyrus concert and being stupefied that such a phenomenon could grow out of an original Disney TV character and Disney Radio star.

Granted, we’ve always known that children’s entertainment is the monster of the box office, the DVD and of franchise merchandising because, as we’ve come to understand, children’s tastes are often quite bizarre, obsessive and well, lucrative. This has always been Disney’s “vein of gold”. And when Iger acquired Pixar, he took that idea to an even broader level by acquiring a wholly independent, well-run animation house that again, was in the business of original characters, stories and thus, more franchises. So, despite their public differences, Pixar and Disney have managed to create some of the most memorable, adult-friendly animation in recent history.

Fast forward five years, and Iger again makes a move for Marvel, whose trove hadn’t been completely pillaged and remains filled with lesser known action heros but come with built in fan bases, the possibility of both animated and live-action fantasy content with serious transmedia potential. These moves seemed practical, if expensive, and Iger pulled Disney out of the quaint Mickey-Mouse world into the Pirates’ of the Carribean era. Then as if that wasn’t enough to show Disney’s shareholders that he meant (profitable) business, he goes and fired a whole layer of senior executives (read: old-school) that had been running the company for years and replaces them with a variety of new people, some of whom have little experience in the business of film and TV.

And just as the articles were circulating about his madness, Iger goes and pulls the Alice in Wonderland move: telling theatrical exhibitors in the US and UK that he would shorten the window between the theatrical release of the upcoming film and the DVD release–a move which terrified theater-owners and diminished the grand status 0f the theatrical window. This of course led to some strong words from the UK distributors, threat of boycott and all such manner of protest. Oh, then there was his refusal to make a sequel of the $315 million grossing Sandra Bullock movie, The Proposal which many including LA Times blogger Patrick Goldstein viewed as bizarre, since Hollywood is after all, the sure-bet-sequel town.

This of course begged the question: Is Iger a fool or a maniac? To which I reply: Neither.

The most cynical view of this strategy would be the one taken by critics like Culture Vulture’s Claude Brodesser-Akner, who sees this direction as an aggressive move towards merchandising driven entertainment. But I’m not sure that analysis in entirely correct. While I could never argue that Disney’s responsibility to it’s shareholders to be increasingly more profitable isn’t a driving force in these radical changes, I see the strategy as a real response to the way social media, branding and convergent media are changing consumer/viewer behavior.

Sure, Pirates of the Carribean can have a theme-park ride whereas Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds are pure passive entertainment–but is Iger’s decision to stick with properties that have cross-media opportunities really THAT crazy sounding to anyone who hasn’t been asleep through the advent of social media, interactive entertainment and yes, Miley Cyrus? All this hand-wringing really shows a lack of understanding that Iger’s sharp assessment about the future of entertainment includes the stark reality that for any property to be profitable in age of bit torrent and audience involvement, there have to be multiple streams of revenue that take engagement into serious consideration.

So, no, he is NOT mad. And perhaps somewhere in the wings his largest individual shareholder, Steve Jobs is whispering in Iger’s ear to check out the looking glass of the future.