Reflecting on the Writers Strike, The State of the Industry, and The Value of Art

Lengthy car rides tend to translate into plenty of time getting lost in thought

Inspired by consecutive podcasts weighing in the mess that is the present day American Film Industry, I started to think back to the 2010’s, which was really when the whole streaming thing started to become a thing. Initially I was all in, being the one who was going around telling my friends to check out Netflix. It wasn’t that long after though that I started to question the way things were going, observing some of the ways it was “disrupting” the industry. I worried about it because I love film and care about the industry deeply, even living north of the border (as they say although our industry is unique, we are still very much operating in extreme close relationship to the AFI). I see art, and film as an artform, as an important and necessary facet of our lives, and more importantly our lives together. We are formed together through art, and art informs the way we are formed together.

Thus, around the mid part of the 2010’s I made a significant shift in my perspective based on what I was seeing and reading, going from Netflix advocate to the publically anointed “anti-netflix” guy. By and large, in nearly all of the places where I was attempting to raise the alarm bells I was dismissed as a crazy, hopped up on hyperbole and made to be synonymous with “old man yells at the cloud” memes (among other more vile things).

My theories were simple back then. Training people up to expect instant access any time they want at one low cost through a singular space that has exclusive rights to the art is not good for the art, the artists, or the industry. Further, training people up on forms of distracted viewing would lead to devaluing the artform and the decline of theaters. Along with that I suggested that, even if we like the convenience, the way streaming was disrupting the industry was not sustainable. The main response I got, and almost uniformly across the board, was people reminding me of the old system being something that needed to go and that this new system would figure things out.

I eventually backed out of the discourse to a large degree and sort of defaulted to the most reasonable expectation I could find, which was the potential of emerging services creating competition and hopefully accelerating necessary change, even if it meant needing to fight back against the expectations of viewers that the habits of streaming created in the first place. While it made some differences, it wasn’t nearly enough to tame the storm. Thus, especially after Covid, I doubled down on the only real support I felt I could genuinely give- going to the theater.

What I didn’t predict, although the likes of Spielberg did once upon a time, is the insanity that would follow the reopening of theaters. Never in my life had I experienced so many theater releases releasing on a weekly basis. Even seeing three a week I couldn’t keep up. I assumed this was a byproduct of the delays incurred by closures. And yet the trend has persisted, only now it seems to be by design, a response to an increasing number of box office failures, monetarily speaking. A perpetuating cycle that is not sustainable and is not good for the art, the artist and the viewer, even in a landscape that continues, in some respects, to make an astronomical number of films each and every year. It is easy for the few success stories to dominate the headlines (think Super Mario) and to cloud the plethora of struggles behind it (think Elemental).

Which brings me back to today and my long drive. What struck me is that here I was listening to the same pundits who spent years supporting the very same system they were now criticizing while wondering how it was that we got to where we are today. The signs were clear. None of this should be surprising. The present mess is a long ways to go just to come back to some of the basic value systems that we know to be true- systems that uphold necessary support for the art lead to greater appreciation for the art/artform, and greater appreciation for the art/artform is the best way to combat the sorts of expectations that streaming has created while also supporting artists/creatives (fair compensation being necessary) and investing in a landscape that is able to support smaller, independent players along with a whole industry filled with currently struggling creatives doing the creative work on the ground, writers included.

I am certainly standing in solidarity with the writers, whom typically have been the ones most likely to suffer from the present state of things. And their voice is simply representative of the larger systemic problem. I’m still afraid, and somewhat convinced, that the casualties will be large and significant on the other side of the shutdown, and more importantly largely unnecessary given how clear these issues were. But I’m also hopeful that smaller players (like A24 for example) can help lead the way to a healthier future. This is long past the streaming versus theater wars, which was such a shortsighted mantra. It’s not about anti anything. Rather, it’s about building an integrated system that genuinely supports the art, the artists, and the artform/industry.