Netflix Buying Warner Would Be a Disaster w/ AS Hamrah

Paris Marx is joined by AS Hamrah to discuss the proposed Netflix-Warner Bros Discovery merger and what it might mean for the state of decline already facing modern cinema.

AS Hamrah is a film critic at n+1 and the author of Algorithm of the Night and Last Week in End Times Cinema.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• AS Hamrah wrote the piece Time to Face Reality on reality television, and this piece on the state of modern cinema
• New York Magazine published a feature on the Ellisons and their vision for Hollywood after taking over Paramount
• Here’s the latest on the Netflix-Warner deal
• Here’s more information on the ruling on Paramount Consent Decrees

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Whether they live in a city that's exciting like New York City or, you know, Chicago or Los Angeles, I don't know where, wherever they've chosen to live, it doesn't matter anymore because they've been working all day and they're tired and they just want to sit at home and watch something at home. You know, I don't think that's laziness. I think it's a form of a miseration.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is A. S. Hamrock, but I'll be referring to him as Scott. He's a film critic at N Plus One and the author of Algorithm of the Night and last week in Endtime Cinema, two books that came out very recently. I'm sure you've heard the news that Netflix is planning to buy Warner Discovery, which of course holds one of the storied Hollywood cinemas, Warner Bros. and the vast archive of film and television that company created and owns the rights to. And now that might all be owned by the streaming giant, Netflix. What is it going to do with that? What is it going to mean for the future of Hollywood cinema and of cinema more generally? Is this really the direction that we want to be going? These are some of the things that I wanted to talk to Scott about, to really understand how he feels streaming and these broader kind of changes in the business of how movies are made has really meant for film, how we consume it, what type of film we actually receive, and what it has meant for the broader culture to have these transformations happen. That doesn't mean that this is a story just in the past decade, but comes from a much longer history of how things have been developing. One of the things that I have really enjoyed from reading Scott's work and some of the pieces that I've read of his over the years talk about how the use of technology to transform the way that films are made and to shift the power in the film industry is not something that just comes in the last like two decades, right? But it's something that has been happening for a very long period of time as more digital and computerized techniques have been implemented in order to make sure that directors and later producers have even more power over the final product and can, you know, overrule things and change things in post-production, regardless of what was actually filmed during the period of time where images were actually being captured to go into that film. And now, as we have these streaming giants like Netflix controlling more and more of what film is, that is meaning, you know, the use of more and more AI tools and generative AI tools in particular, the changing of the, you know, the type of content, I guess if we even want to call it that, that is made, that, you know, is really oriented not toward making something that is going to challenge you or making good art, but like, you know, what is going to keep you engaged, what is going to keep you watching, even potentially as you're looking at your phone while you're supposedly watching this thing that is on your bigger screen, and what is that going to mean for the way that we transform the way that uh, you know, this type of media and culture is made. And I think that has a load of detrimental impacts. And Scott has so much more to say about this in this conversation. I was really happy to talk to him and to get his perspective as someone who has been paying such close attention to film, you know, as a critic for such a long period of time and has so much more insight into any of this than I ever will. So I was really happy to have Scott on the show. I think you're going to enjoy it. If you do, make sure to leave a five-star view on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making Tech Won't Save Us every single week, so we can keep having these critical, in-depth conversations to challenge the way that people see the tech industry and to give you more informed opinions to enrich your own criticism of this industry. You can join supporters like Emmett in Winnipeg, Leo from New York, and Anoid in Japan by going to patreon.com/slash TechWon't Save Us, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Scott, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. I'm I'm really excited to chat with you. You know, I always love having people on the show who can talk about film and everything that is associated with it. I have to admit I haven't seen as many films recently because I've been busy the past year, which is always disappointing to me. I feel like I made a big list like over the holidays of everything I missed and wanted to catch up on. And of course, only unfortunately got to got to knock a few of them off of my list. But I I guess to start off, I'm curious what it is like to be a film critic and especially a film critic today, with the kind of discourses that are happening around film and the medium and people talking about, you know, whether cinemas are dying and all this kind of stuff. What is it like to be doing the work that you do? I guess what impact do you hope to have with it?

SPEAKER_01 5:00

It's more and more difficult to make a living as a film critic, of course. And for me, I don't have a full-time staff job anywhere. I'm the film critic for N plus one, but I'm just a freelance writer. You know, they pay me per piece that I write. I'm not on staff. I'm not getting a salary from them. I am in the National Society of Film Critics, which is a body that you have to be voted into. Unlike a lot of these things like that give out things like the Critics Choice Awards or whatever. You know, I vote with other professional film critics who, many of whom have full-time staff positions at places from the trades like Variety and the Hollywood Reporter to the New Yorker to uh, you know, local newspapers. There's a great difference between people like me who are freelance and people who maybe are in the staff of New York magazine or something getting a salary to be a film critic. And also I've I moved out of New York City not that long ago. So I'm living in the woods now, basically. So I don't get to go to as many press screenings and things like that. I mean, I've always preferred to see movies with a paying audience after they are released instead of before they're released. I don't feel a lot of pressure to be able to write about a film before it comes out, which is a pressure that people with staff jobs face. I think it's bad for film criticism and for the cinema in a way to force everyone to opine about films as they're released. You know, that's not the case with books and other forms of art, but in filmmaking, in uh especially in Hollywood studio cinema, it's very important that these reviews come out the day the film comes out. I don't feel any of that pressure. But as a result of all that, I make far less money as a writer. And, you know, of course it's getting harder to survive as a writer and the way prices are going up, especially rent and food, you know. And what what I my goal, it's hard to say what my goal is as a film critic. The kind of writing I want to do is film criticism. So some people want to be fiction writers, some people want to write about, you know, their lives. This is just the form of writing that attracted me the most as a writer. It's a compulsion in some ways. So there's a psychological element to it that I try to not examine in a way.

SPEAKER_00 7:12

I completely understand that. Yeah, it completely resonates. And it's interesting you say about like the pay of being a writer today. I think there's a lot of people who are writers who can who can empathize with that. And it just brought to mind I was reading this book about the history of Conde Nest last year, and some of like the rates that they used to pay, that the magazines used to pay, like back in the heyday of it all, was just like mind-boggling to see how it used to work.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

Well, today, as a freelance writer, oftentimes I'm asked to write things for the same amount of pay that people in the 1920s were getting. Speaking of Conde Nest, so oftentimes I'm asked to write things for 10 or 20 cents a word. Now I mostly say no to those things, but I do say yes to them sometimes, you know, for various reasons. Maybe it's about something I'm very interested in or I like the editor or something like that. But I believe in if you're going to be a writer and a film critic, you should do it professionally. By that I mean you should get paid. I don't write on letterboxed or anything like that.

SPEAKER_00 8:10

It's interesting to hear how you approach the work that you do, right? Because for me at least, I think it's important to have people like yourself who can actually look at something that is such an important part of the culture that shapes so many of the discussions that we have, you know, even though we've had these debates about what the future of film is going to look like. And I'm sure that they have been happening since the beginning of film itself. But this medium still does have such an impact on, you know, I feel like the way that people see the world, the way that people understand the world, understanding different people. And there's often a lot more to it than than what maybe the average viewer often takes away from it. And so uh, you know, I find the stuff that that you do, the stuff, the work that other film critics do very, very valuable in that way.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

Well, in past decades, there was more there was more of an approach that linked television culture to society. And although film criticism and criticism of television and other media has become very pedantic or didactic, maybe, or very concerned with social issues, it has also lost a certain kind of analysis that I associate more with maybe the 1980s and 1970s. That kind of got absorbed into academia and isn't read by most people now. But I think that, especially in the 21st century, we've seen the way that movies and television have affected, you know, the Trump administration, for instance. Trump comes from reality television, Secretary of War now, Pete Heggseth, comes from television. The the bleed between politics and television is more pronounced than it's ever been. And I do think that if there had been more real analysis instead of just fandom of reality television, people might be a little smarter now in some ways. Not that I think it's my job to educate people. But I don't know if you read the piece I wrote on reality television that's an algorithm of the night. It's called Time to Face Reality, that kind of is about this. Because I used to work I used to work in television as a semiotic brand analyst for for many years. And I had to watch every kind of every new TV show during that period that I did that. And I had to meet with a lot of television executives all the time. So I really began to understand the relationship between the CEO class and reality as we experience it. My job was to kind of study audiences and meaning in the products that were put onto network television, cable television. But as I had that job for longer and longer, I realized that the people we should be studying were not the viewers or the fans, but the CEOs themselves, who often didn't watch their shows, who often had very strange ideas about how the world should work, and who were determining what everyone saw without having any kind of reflection on what they were doing, besides at that time looking at Nielsen ratings, which don't really matter that much anymore because of streaming.

SPEAKER_00 11:08

Of course. Even as you say that, like it brings to mind a lot of the discussions that we have in the tech side of things as well, right? And being focused on the CEOs and what they think of the world and what they're doing because of the way that they can exert their power through all these products that we use and depend on and things like that. So it doesn't surprise me that in the television space, that would be a really important part of shaping what the general public consumes and then the way that they see the world as a result of that, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

Right. And a lot of people who are CEOs of television networks and film studios now don't necessarily come from the world of television culture or from the world of loving movies, even or loving television. They the one guy was the former CEO of Coca-Cola. He was also the former CEO of a basketball team. This kind of Baudrillardian ball of content is created from these people. And that extends to every kind of media, whether it's film, television, sports, news, everything that we consume televisionally is now created and determined by this class of person.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

How do you see that evolving with like the shift to streaming as well? Because obviously we had this moment way back where film, you would need to kind of go to the cinema to see a film. Eventually, you know, you get the television, you can see films at home, you know, on a very small screen in the way it was presented at the time. But of course, then you have the development of television as you're talking about. And then of course, now you have the shift over to streaming where it feels like the incentives are shifted. It I don't know, it feels to me like you have even more of kind of what you're talking about, where you have these executives being focused on having enough content to keep people engaged, being like kind of the you know most important thing to the business, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 12:51

Well, the most important thing to their business is subscriber numbers, not necessarily the amount of content that they create. In fact, I think there's going to be less and less content created by them. The main issue that I see in this kind of consolidation, because all they care about is consolidation, is the way that they've pushed out other forms of cinema. Throughout the 90s and into the 21st century, independent cinema and foreign cinema was very important in US cinematic culture. That's become, over the last couple of decades, that's become less true for the average viewer. I actually think it's made kind of a comeback in recent years. We see movies like The Secret Agent kind of dominating talk at the Academy Awards, the way that Parasite did in 2019, right before the pandemic. I do think other kinds of filmmaking are coming to the fore again now. But during the pandemic and during the streaming era that was parallel to that, people were stuck at home and became kind of obsessed with watching things at home. And this really helped out places like Netflix. And now Netflix is trying to consolidate the industry in a way that's going to be very harmful to filmmaking in in this country or filmmaking in Hollywood. And it's important to understand that there's a difference between Hollywood filmmaking and the cinema in general. These are two different things. And Hollywood is a form of cinema. But the streamers and the uh studios, as they merge, are trying to make it so that everyone understands that what was cinema is something that now comes to you through your computer or your television at home. It's very atomized. You can watch it alone, you can do other things while you're watching it. It's now become a cliche to talk about people folding laundry while they watch uh movies. That's funny and that's true. But the larger issue is that now they're going to control everything that we see, and they're going to own cinemas past too. If Netflix and Warner Brothers Discovery merge, they will now own Netflix will now own the entire Warner Archive, which consists of all the classic movies made by not just Warner Brothers, but by MGM, Paramount, RKO, et cetera. And I don't think that a company like that should be in charge of the legacy of this art form or the American wing of this art form. I think that's very bad. And I think these places should be regulated and broken up, not consolidated further. I definitely agree with that.

SPEAKER_00 15:14

And looking back at the past, you can see how important those measures were to, it feels to me, you know, you would know it better than I do, but to cinema and to visual culture, right? The the Paramount Decrees and later the the FinCIN rulings in kind of television or the FinCIN rules in making sure that there was some limits on this degree of consolidation. I wanted to pick up on a few of the things that that you said. First of all, is around the forum film. Like I have found it really interesting. I I'm in Canada, right? So I'm not 100% sure how if you've seen the same thing in the United States. But one of the things that I've noticed in Cineplex, which is our big cinema chain, you know, multiplex chain in Canada, is that since the pandemic, there are a lot more forum films being shown because they are trying to kind of fill their screens and they've recognized that people actually want to see those things, right? In part, obviously we have a very diverse population in Canada, as you would in the United States from many different parts of the world. So we get a lot more kind of Chinese films and Indian films and all these sorts of things.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

I do think it's different in Canada than the U.S. I live near Canada and I often drive into Canada to see movies. You know, I joke that when Paul Schrader made the movie Oh Canada, I actually had to drive to Canada to see it. There is a difference in the kinds of content that appear on Canadian screens and American screens. One of the reasons for that is Canadian content rules. But what you've identified is true. The studios are now not making enough films to fill all the screens that exist. So this has opened the door in the U.S. to a lot of Bollywood films and to a lot of films by Angel Studios, which are often very conservative and Christian, I would say Christian nationalist films. Those could be, you know, movies about child trafficking or animated Bible stories or whatever, a biopic on Reagan. Those kinds of things are starting to dominate screens because the major chains in the US will not show films by the smaller boutique studios. Although they occasionally show films by Neon or and by A24, of course. Things below that level will not be shown in those for reasons that I don't fully understand. Since they are showing Bollywood films or Angel Studios films, that means they could also show more films by places like Mubi Neon and uh A24 and what have you, but oftentimes they won't show those. I mean, they'll show A24 horror movies, don't get me wrong. So the the fact that there's not enough product to fill screens from Hollywood has led to what Manny Farber in the 1960s called a loosening of the bowels. And these things are showing up more on screens, on big screens. He was talking about all different kinds of films, like avant-garde films, you know, very obscure foreign films, all kinds of cinema at that time in the late 60s when he was writing, were all of a sudden appearing on screens in regular movie theaters like Chelsea Girls by Andy Warhol or something. That's not happening now, but there is a kind of loosening in the farbarian terms also happening. But it's in it's in the opposite direction from what was in the late 60s. It's not towards the avant-garde, it's towards the opposite of the avant-garde. The kind of official cinema represented by Angel Studios, which reflects the beliefs and desires of the current MAGA administration.

SPEAKER_00 18:28

I feel like we don't see that as much in Canada. I I haven't noticed as many of those kind of films being shown up here.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

And you know, some of those are documentaries too, like you know, that that movie Am I Racist, or is I can't remember, it's I think it's called Am I Racist.

SPEAKER_00 18:41

Oh, yeah, the Matt, what's his name?

SPEAKER_01 18:43

Uh yes, Matt uh but that was like the number one documentary in the country last year, I believe. Really? Wow. And people, you know, the mainstream media, so-called, doesn't report on this in that way because there's so little reporting on what happens in the cinema now. You know, the trades might mention that in the kind of even kind of a perfunctory way, but there's not a lot of writing or analysis on that area of cinema production.

SPEAKER_00 19:05

Aaron Powell And I guess like you get the focus on how the right has taken over radio and increasingly moved into cable television and taken over the newspapers and things like that. But yeah, it feels like you haven't had that same analysis of what has gone on in the cinemas, right?

SPEAKER_01 19:19

Trevor Burrus, Well, the Ellisons at Paramount represent this. And you mentioned the Paramount Consent Decrees of 1947, I believe. It's very important that people understand that there was a long period until the first Trump administration in this country where you could not control film production and theatrical exhibition of films. Because the studios were trying to force theaters to show certain films, whether they wanted to or not. They wanted to uh make them show films that were not going to make them any money, along with films that would make them money, because they were making these films and they wanted them in theaters. Now, this is kind of happening again because a judge during the first Trump administration decided that because of streaming or whatever, that the Paramount Consent Decre didn't matter anymore. In fact, they mattered more than ever, because now one streaming service can control the way all film production comes into your home. And if that is also the studio making the films, as it is with Warner Brothers Discovery and HBO, for instance, with uh Disney, they also own Fox, this is a monopolistic practice that, you know, for years and years was just illegal. Now we see Netflix owns movie theaters. There's going to be more of that going on, I think.

SPEAKER_00 20:34

I remember thinking it it was wild to see that decision because it felt like if anything, that should be extended to the streaming services rather than obliterated completely, right? For for the reasons that you say.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

Of course. Yes. And you know, the streamers don't want theatrical exhibition to continue necessarily. You know, and this puts them kind of in control of its future because they don't own the theater chains. And the theater chains, the big theater chains, I'm talking about AMC, Regal, you know, Cinemark, these are being run in a way that is not perhaps in the best interest of the future of theatrical exhibition. They're not in the right places. They're often in dead malls. The amount of stuff between the c the viewer and the movie now is getting bigger and longer. So it's harder to buy a ticket. You have to buy it online, you have to pick out seats. If you want to buy a ticket at the theater, there's usually a line because they only have one cashier. The cashier's not even in the ticket booth anymore, they're at the candy counter. Then you get into the movie and there's a half an hour of ads for television shows. At Regal, that's called Newview with Maria Menunos. This is all before you get to the trailers. So the show times are inaccurate in most movie theaters. You know, if I go to a movie in a in a big Regal cinema where I live now, the showtime is a half an hour after they advertise it. You know, fortunately that's not true in New York City. I think there'd be riots I think there would be riots if that was the case in New York City. But most of the country it's Like that. So the theatrical experience has been diminished greatly.

SPEAKER_00 22:04

Yeah. I even found it really interesting in the piece that you wrote in the New York Review of Books, how you know you were talking about this kind of narrative that we often have that young people don't have an attention span, young people don't like movies, young people don't go to the movies. And like I found your kind of reframing of that really fascinating, and it made a lot more sense to me. And I was wondering if you could kind of describe why you think that that is the wrong way to see it.

SPEAKER_01 22:28

So that piece was called A Total Breakdown of All the Easter Eggs. And it was in the New York Review of Books, but it's also the introduction to my book, Algorithm of the Night. And I started that piece by talking about how a film critic that I met, who's uh older, but you know, Silent Generation or Baby Boomer, I'm not sure which, basically told me there was no point writing film criticism anymore. After reading my first book, The Earth Dice Streaming, which he said he liked, but then he told me, but there's no reason to do this. And, you know, then I in the piece compared that to the way that so many baby boomers now are so adamant in insisting that no one goes to the movies anymore. And I quoted Bill Maher's interview with Woody Allen on this. He was basically yelling in Woody Allen's face that there's no point in making movies for this the movie screen anymore. And Woody Allen was kind of sheepishly, I don't even know why he went on this show, except that he's getting further and further away from reality as he gets ancient. You know, Woody Allen said, Well, I like to make movies from movie theaters. That's that's what I do, that's my job, that's what I love. Marr was just so angry at him for saying this. And in my own life, I've experienced this with people in my own generation and with baby boomers who as soon as even if you say, Well, I just saw a movie, you know, I went to see one battle after another or something, they will immediately say, Well, you know, Scott, nobody goes to movies anymore. You know, it's like a reflex that people have developed. Uh, and it's just it's kind of a certain class of people. They're talking about themselves, but they apply it to everyone. The fact is, as we've seen, uh attendance by millennials and younger has increased 25% in the last year or so. Now, a lot of that might be people going to see the Minecraft movie or something like that, but it is increasing. Something like Letterboxd, which where the average age is about 20, I think, has supposedly 17 million users. So this all speaks to a world in which many people want to go to the movies, many millions of people want to go to the movies, but for various reasons they can't. They watch them on their computer, they bit torrent them, that they you know, they do various things to get around going to movie theaters. And the the gerontocracy, essentially, that consists of the baby boomers and silent generation people, are insisting to them that no one does this thing that they like to do and want to do. And it's very self-interested to do that because these are the people that control the media, even if it's not someone who works in media saying this, obviously. That's you know, that's not what I mean. And they have a vested interest in making it so that half of the world population can't go to the movies. That's what a big part of that piece was about.

SPEAKER_00 25:03

I thought it was really insightful, and you know, you hit the nail on the head with it, right? I think it made a lot of sense to me. And I was even thinking back to like when I was younger. Obviously, it was pre-streaming, but we could still watch a lot of stuff at home. Obviously, not as soon as it came out or anything. But even then it was like, one, you had to think about the money to go to the movies. You had to think about how you were going to get to the movies because I wasn't somewhere like New York City. Uh, you know, you had to get a ride to the movies somehow. And if that wasn't possible, then it was out. The kind of theatrical experience, especially at the multiplex, feels like it has just become so much more hostile over time. It's not like this inviting space. There was a period of time this year, even where I was traveling a lot for work, and so uh I hadn't been able to go to the cinema to see anything. And when I went back, because unfortunately where I live, we only have a Cineplex, so I have to go to the multiplex. There's no kind of like independent cinema. But the prices had like jumped several dollars just to go see a movie. And I was like, what is going on here?

SPEAKER_01 25:58

Well, I mean, yes. I mean, overhead has gone up everywhere. I'm I mean, in New York City, they're I don't understand why, but most of the movie theaters don't own the places where they are. You know, they're paying rent, which is insane. That's why so many of them go out of business. And a lot of a lot of the I you say where you live, there's no independent cinema, where a lot of new independent cinemas are opening up in places like New York and Los Angeles, Chicago. But in the rest of the country, they're closing because the people that run them are getting old and they don't do a good job of community outreach. They don't have newsletters, they're not trying to get younger people in in the way that they should, although of course a lot of younger people do find their way to those places. But they're kind of relying on an aging audience and they're not, they haven't really updated their skill set to get a new audience in into the theaters.

SPEAKER_00 26:47

I was wondering if we could pivot back to kind of the Netflix Warner Discovery uh story, I guess, briefly. If Netflix is able to buy Warner Discovery, as you were saying before, you know, this original film studio that has such a legacy, but also has such an archive of films that it kind of controls. What do you think the broader effects of that would be? We've already seen Disney capture Fox and consolidate in that way. We've seen other consolidation happening within the industry, but it really feels like this would be a major step in a direction that we don't want to go in.

SPEAKER_01 27:21

I just don't want Netflix to own Warner Brothers. I just think it will be very bad for the cinema. Warner Brothers is perhaps the greatest film studio that's ever existed in America. You know, they've been responsible throughout the decades, for a hundred years now or more, for uh many, many great masterpieces of the cinema. And Netflix has made basically zero masterpieces of the cinema, you know, and they're not even interested in the cinema. They're interested in television. Netflix is a television brand. So when Netflix makes films that are good, be it The Irishman Roma, May December by Todd Haynes, Nouvelle Vague by Richard Linklater is a Netflix film, they are not interested in exploiting these things theatrically. The Knives Out films are another example. They will maybe play them for a week or two in non-real cinemas. Uh, they don't play them long enough. They're not interested in promoting them as things that are in the cinemas.

SPEAKER_00 28:15

I remember when um Frankenstein came out recently. I really wanted to see that one in the cinema, but I was busy in like the week that they were showing it or whatever, and I was really disappointed.

SPEAKER_01 28:25

Yes, and so filmmakers like Link Later and Guillermo del Toro have made these deals with Netflix in order to make films. You know, Martin Scorsese was very canny in the way that he got Netflix to pay for a very expensive movie, which I think was a great movie, The Irishman, and then did the same thing with Apple TV. He got them to pay for Killers of the Flower Moon. This was at a time when the Hollywood studios weren't going to finance those alone. So it's good that those films were made, but then they kind of get trapped into this void, which is streaming. It's a void in a way, because people don't want to sit down necessarily and watch a film that's that long and that's that demanding of concentration. So Criterion Collection will put some of these films out, you know. Killers of the Flower Moon is coming out through Criterion, and they put out Power of the Dog, you know, the Jane Campion film that Netflix did, which is great. But, you know, ultimately Netflix is just doing this stuff for prestige because they want to win Oscars. And they know that their catalog is not compelling to people. No one's going back to see what films Netflix made in, you know, 2016, really. Whereas when you have the Warner Archive, people are going back to look at films you made in 1936 or whatever year.

SPEAKER_00 29:36

And I believe already, like if I remember the stats correctly, a lot of the most popular stuff on Netflix is non-Netflix stuff that they that they have licensed from the studios, right? Well, it's like friends, you know, stuff like that. On the TV side, but even like the movies, I think it's definitely not Netflix movies, right?

SPEAKER_01 29:51

No. And um, you know, Warner Brothers Discovery has done a very poor job of shepherding their back catalog. They have this great brand in Turner Classic Movies, which during the cable television years was a staple of so many people's lives. But now it's very hard to find. You can't watch it separately, you have to have HBO Max to watch it. It's it's confusing as to how you even see Turner Classic movies in a lot of ways. You have to be very diehard to go through all that. And they've under-budgeted the you know what used to be a television network so much. They it it was never really properly budgeted. You know, it's just like four guys or something running that thing with Robert Osborne as the host, and then you know, now Ben Mankowitz. But they they've never really given it the kind of care and attention it needs, and they certainly haven't done that since Zaslav took over. His salary is far larger than the entire budget of Turner Classic movies. It's ridiculous.

SPEAKER_00 30:45

Yeah. And and even if you look at like the amount of money he's trying to pull out of this deal, too, like you can see the main reason he wants to do it is trying to get his big payday, right? Like this is this is what motivates this man. As you were saying before, this is not an executive who cares about cinema necessarily. This is a guy who who wants to make money, right?

SPEAKER_01 31:03

He wants to make money, but his main goal in life is consolidating the industry in order in order to make that money. There's other ways to make money besides ruining studios and consolidating the industry. And there have been ways to make money in filmmaking in the past before the streaming era. So, you know, Zaslav wants to make money a certain way. And that way is not by producing films necessarily. Although, again, he he's very concerned in some ways with making sure that Warner Brothers does make films that are prestige films that will get Oscar nominations and so on. One battle after another is an example of that. And we, you know, many people saw Zaslev sitting at the one battle after another table during the Golden Globes, you know, which is kind of a fake award show. But there he was. And you know, industry wags, I guess you would call them, pointed out that no one thanked him in any of their speeches when when one battle after another won awards during the Golden Globes, even though he was sitting right there. Yeah, good.

SPEAKER_00 32:05

At least he gets that kind of snubbed.

SPEAKER_01 32:07

Yeah. So it it's it's very unclear what kind of films people like David Zaslev want to make. Now the Ellisons at Paramount have basically gone all in on IP and franchise films. They've essentially declared that Paramount is in the business of only making those kinds of films. So whether it's better if Paramount buys Warner Brothers or Netflix does, who knows? I kind of think Paramount is better, but the Ellisons are such freaks.

SPEAKER_00 32:32

Exactly. You know, you'd really prefer it just not to happen at all. And yes, yes, yeah. I was interested as well, you know, because you were saying earlier about, you know, the the archive that Warner Brothers has, right? And one of the things that is certainly sustained independent cinemas, but even that you see more at the multiplexes now is them showing these older films, right? Showing films that are popular or even that just have an anniversary that so people might want to come out and see them or something like that. And I know Disney has long kind of kept guards on its film archive. And after it bought Fox, it became a lot more difficult for cinemas to get access to the Fox archive to be able to show those. Are you concerned that if Netflix takes hold of Warner Discovery, that so much of that catalog is also going to be much harder to access and to show theatrically?

SPEAKER_01 33:19

Well, that's already true for independent movie theaters. It's it's harder for them to get films from the studios now, to get prints of the films, especially, to get 35mm prints. Something that I mentioned in the piece that you mentioned before, which is the introduction to my book, is that when they do re-release films like Jaws or Revenge of the Sith or something that has an anniversary, an older film, it does very well at the box office. Lots of people go to it, they sell out the shows.

SPEAKER_00 33:47

I just saw a story, they're they're showing The Lord of the Rings again, I think for an anniversary or something, and it's already made five million in like pre-sales.

SPEAKER_01 33:55

So Ted Sarandos can only exist by pretending this isn't happening. The evidence doesn't support his contention that people don't like going to the movies anymore. And the studios themselves will never admit that the part of the reason people aren't going as much is because the movies aren't that good. Or they're not marketing them properly, or they're not advertising them properly. You know, those those kinds of things used to be done regionally. Now they're trying to make everything done on uh social media through influencers and so on. That's not the market. That's not the market. And so when when movies fail that are good movies or don't do as well as they would like them to, they often blame the critics and so on. And when movies like Zootopia 2, for instance, make tons of money, they take that as a signal that that is the only kind of film they should be making. And those kinds of films, obviously, in the future will be easy to make using AI. If everything goes according to what the people in charge of AI say about it. And their hope is that audiences will be so kind of used to this kind of kiddie family entertainment, you know, sequels and IP content, that they won't care if it's done with no real voice actors anymore, or if it's not done with real animators anymore. It's become very expensive for Disney to make movies. And you know, they see this as a way to cut labor costs and you know bring the audience along because the audience has been educated to like this kind of stuff already. I'm like, I don't think that will work. But again, I'm not the audience for Zootopia too.

SPEAKER_00 35:30

Even as you bring up AI and the kind of attempts to bring it into filmmaking that that we're seeing, obviously, you know, Netflix is one of the big pushers of this and and the early adopters of saying, you know, we are using AI in different capacities and whatnot. But it actually brings to mind a piece of yours that I read a few years ago where you were talking about how the implementation of some of these technologies in filmmaking over the years has worked to kind of take control away from the people making the film itself, you know, even from the director sometimes up to the higher kind of echelons to give these kind of executives more control over the filmmaking process and what comes out at the end. I wonder on how you reflect on how that has developed over the years and the effect that it's had on film.

SPEAKER_01 36:17

Well, digital cinema has given producers more power than they've ever had. And we are living through a time now in which producers and studio heads, but when I say producers in this case, I mean people that work for the studios, producers and studio heads have more control over any given film than they've ever had in the past. In the classic era, producers like Thalberg or Selznick or Daryl Zanek or whoever, Harry Cohn, might have had a lot of say in what films got made, but when it came down to shooting the film and cutting the film, they were often not involved in that process because they there was only a certain amount of film that was shot. And there's famous stories where producers completely ruined movies like The Magnificent Ambersons. But that generally is not the case because whether the films are good or bad, they could not mess with them as much as they can now. So someone like John Ford or or Alfred Hitchcock, they were known for shooting as little film as possible. So that the producers could not then mess with it by cutting it in a way that used angles that they didn't like, by having scenes that they didn't think were important to the film, and so on. Now when an entity like Netflix produces a film, they just shoot tons and tons of stuff so that it can all be manipulated in post, which is why films like superhero films, especially Marvel superhero films I'm thinking of specifically, look so bad. It's just bunches of people in the middle of the frame. They look so muddy, they look like Anselm Kiefer paintings to me sometimes. This has really changed the nature of film production. Uh I I happen to see a couple of episodes of Stranger Things during this last season of it. That's exactly what they look like. They're just groups of people sitting around in the center of the frame or standing around the center of the frame talking. And it's all plot points, and you know, it doesn't seem cinematic. Even as they tout the cinematic look of a lot of these things. It's interesting that, you know, someone like Lars von Trier made a point of shooting, you know, some of his films with like many cameras at once, so that he could do this very thing. But he was doing it himself. He was doing it as an auteur. He was the producer of his own films, but he wasn't trying to ruin the films because of some weird idea he had of what audiences want or how films should be. It was an artistic practice, but now it's become a form of control. And more and more we see, like I was talking about before, how you know streaming, television and cinema has become a form of control of artists, uh craftspeople, people that they're trying to eliminate from the from the process. And then the audience gets what they get. And there's no competition. So what they get is what there is. You know, this is the goal of this industry now.

SPEAKER_00 39:06

And I feel like so often, like, you know, whether it is in the broader tech industry that we talk about on the show, or even if you look at the way that technology has been deployed, digital technology in particular, in the film industry, there's often talk about how you know these new technologies are going to allow freedom and flexibility and improve things for the viewer and make things more easy and affordable and all these sorts of things. And then you look on the flip side of it, and actually, as you're saying, it's more control. Often things actually do get more expensive as a result, but you know, power accrues higher and higher up and away from those who are actually making the film or or want to enjoy it or whatnot, right?

SPEAKER_01 39:43

Right. This is the shell game that's always performed in the industry since the days of Super 8. You know, now you could make a film, you know, in 16 millimeters, say, and it's a professional film, and it can be shown in theaters. Well, that was true for a certain amount of years in the 50s and 60s. But then, no, not anymore. You can make a film on an iPhone now, yes. And there are people that do interesting work in that way, but those films are not getting shown in any of these kinds of places that are controlled by the streamers or by theatrical exhibitors. The idea that uh Danny Boyle shoots one of his zombie movies using an iPhone is not really the same as you know the way that Sean Baker made films on an iPhone when he was doing that before Enora, say, before Red Rocket. It's completely untrue. The average person making films at that level has no way to get into uh exhibition through the studios or streamers.

SPEAKER_00 40:40

It's unfortunate, right? Because on the one hand, there are tools that do make it easier for people to experiment, right? But on the other hand, the the way that it's framed and the way that it's packaged is just so distant from the actual effect that it ends up having, right?

SPEAKER_01 40:53

Aaron Powell Right. Well it becomes it becomes in some sense a gallery art. It's no longer made for theatrical exhibition, even in the way that 16 millimeter films were. You know, when Andy Warhol could show his films in an actual movie theater, the equivalent of someone like that now is probably not going to be allowed to show those in an actual movie theater unless it's a unless it's like Metrograph in New York or places like that. Anthology film archives, spectacle, these kinds of places may do that kind of thing depending on the film. But, you know, it's not like it can emerge out of that so much now. That's much, much harder now. And it's because of this digital consolidation. You know, these things, as you know, all work in tandem. You know, government regulations, studio filmmaking, digital cinema, they all are the state apparatus, essentially, as it as it used to be called.

SPEAKER_00 41:47

I want to touch on that, on that briefly, but I want to go back to one other thing that that you mentioned before I kind of move on to the final thing that I wanted to talk to you about. And that is, you know, you talked earlier when you were talking about being a film critic, how you like to see these films in a cinema with an audience to have that experience, right? And I feel like, you know, as you've described, there has been this push for a long time that has really accelerated with these streaming companies to get us out of the cinemas and to get us watching at home and increasingly watching by ourselves and not even with other people. What does that do to how we experience films and and what's the effect of that?

SPEAKER_01 42:23

Okay, well, for me, before the pandemic, I didn't really watch anything on streaming. I might have watched uh DVDs or Blu-rays at home, but I didn't really participate in streaming very much. I had the Criterion channel, that was it. And because I'm a writer and a freelance writer, you know, that work is performed in my home. It's performed on a laptop at my house, my apartment, whatever. So if I've been on a a laptop all day writing or answering emails or doing all the various things you have to do, then at night I don't want to sit in front of my laptop or a television screen. I want to get out of the house. I want to do things out of the house, which for me includes going to the movies, because that's the you know the most important thing to me in a way as as a writer. So if I just had to sit in my house all day and look at a computer screen and then look at it more at night, this is an immiserated existence for me. Now for other people, it's the opposite. They maybe have two jobs to live or three jobs, or they have to work crazy hours in an office because they're on uh on salary, their boss won't hire enough people or whatever. Okay, so they're they're living a kind of immiserated existence in their work life, as we all are, or most of us. So now their day is over. They just want to go home. Whether they live in a in a city that's exciting, like New York City or you know, Chicago or Los Angeles, I don't know where, you know, San Francisco, Portland, wherever they've chosen to live, it doesn't matter anymore because they've been working all day and they're tired and they just want to sit at home and watch something at home. You know, I don't think that's laziness. I think it's a form of immiseration that is hard to overcome because it costs so much to live now. So seeing movies in a movie theater is a better experience. That's how they're meant to be seen. And if the projection is good, whether it's a DCP or on film, it's gonna look good. It's not gonna look as good as if it's on film if it's a DCP, but it can look great still. But if you're living the life that I described where you have more than one job or you have to work crazy hours, that doesn't of that matters. Because you don't want to go out at night to do that stuff. And it's sad that people, you know, people when they're young, they move to cities because they want to have a vibrant, exciting life in which they achieve things socially as well as in their work life. Going to movies has always been part of that since the movie started pretty much. But it's becoming not that way anymore because society is very atomized and people it's not that they can't afford it even. It's that they're just too exhausted. So, you know, keeping people in this state of precarity is anti-cinema. And and that's the problem that we face. Now, you know, I I traced all these things in the newsletter that I did, which is called Last Week in End Time Cinema, that I did for one year, that I I I've now put into a book that semiotext has published. You know, I followed all that week by week, all all this stuff about consolidation and what's going on in theatrical exhibition and you know, all this kind of stuff. I stopped doing that because I always I only wanted that to be a year-long project. And also it got very depressing towards the end to do that. It got depressing, especially because of the wildfires in Los Angeles. And also the death of David Lynch uh I found to be kind of too depressing for the newsletter in a way. You know, those are reasons that I stopped doing it, but the way that I traced that was so different than how it's done in entertainment journalism. You know, a lot of people found it and liked it. And there's not a lot of criticism or, you know, even kind of a framing that's correct on this stuff in newspapers and magazines anymore. You know, e even the New Yorker writes just kind of cheerleader stories about a place like A24 or something like that. You know, I I was glad to see the New York Magazine cover story about the Ellisons in Paramount that Reeves Wideman wrote, because you know, New York magazine seems to be doing a little bit better with this stuff, although they're not as hard-hitting as they might be. At least they're bringing this stuff up and covering it in a serious journalistic way. So in in some ways, I think that people are on to the con now more than they were, you know, during the pandemic and the couple of years after the supposed end of the pandemic.

SPEAKER_00 46:41

I appreciate you outlining how you know one of the problems that cinema faces is just like a larger systemic one, right? Is the way that our society is structured to really have us like kind of on this hamster wheel, right? And and to make it difficult to even think about having time to go out and enjoy our lives. And, you know, even then when we do, you know, the multiplex experience has been kind of degraded over the years, especially as you say, as the cost of running these things is where it is. You know, the the projection at the one I go to is not the greatest, but you know, I still put up with it because I I like to go to the cinema, right? It's unfortunate. And I wanted to pick up on one other thing that we were kind of touching on in our conversation because it really stood out to me in the in the introduction of um algorithm of the night, right? Which is you were talking about 2019 as kind of a turning point in film, and you were talking about that in particular around the politics that we're seeing, the way that obviously right-wing politics has has taken over the United States, but the way that that's also reflected in a medium like film. I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about that. You know, it's something that the listeners are certainly very interested in.

SPEAKER_01 47:51

In that piece, I I kind of position 2019 as a year that will be looked at in the future as one of cinema's golden years, the way that 1939 is also seen now. 1939 is the year that the Wizard of Oz came out and gone with the wind, and not just those big Hollywood movies that I'm not, you know, I'm not crazy about Gone with the Wind, you know, and the Wizard of Oz is the Wizard of Oz. But all the other films that came out that year, the John Ford films, the rules of the game by Jean Renoir, Mizaguchi films in Japan. Everything that was going on in cinema at that time was interesting and vibrant. Only Angels Have Wings by Howard Hawks came out that year. There are a lot of good films came out that year besides the most famous ones. And it's seen as this kind of high watermark of a certain kind of classical filmmaking in America and Hollywood. I think that 2019, the year before the pandemic, is also kind of emerging as that kind of a year. Although I recall certain film critics in 2019 saying it was not a good year for films. That was the year that you know Parasite came out, The Irishman Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, uh, Uncut Gems, Little Women, and Joanna Hogg's film that year, The Souvenir came out in the U.S. Ash is Purest White by Gigi Jean Cook came out that year. The tide was changing in 2019 towards O'Tour cinema again. Barry Jenkins grew out of Gerwig famously. And then the pandemic came. Even as not 2019, the the Avengers Endgame was the movie that's made the most money in the history of cinema, that came out that year. That was a peak and a kind of the beginning of a decline for a certain kind of franchise or IP cinema, you know, the Marvel Studios version of cinema. Counter to that, you had Uncut Gems, you had uh The Irishman, you had Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, you had these smaller films by people like Joanna Hogg. And then the pandemic came and washed all that away. You know, the streamers were already positioning themselves to do this in 2019, but they didn't really know how yet until people got trapped at home. So now we can look back at that year as a certain kind of high water mark in the same way that 1939 was. And it seems like a very long time ago now to me in some ways. And I think for young people, especially it seems like a long time ago. There's always this fight in the cinema between, you know, these two forces, the forces of consolidation and control versus, you know, making films that people actually want to see because they're made by someone who's thinking about what they're doing. And I think this year we've kind of returned to that a little bit. You know, Marty Supreme is like that, you know, even though it's a higher budgeted kind of thing than other films that the Safties have made. I think a lot of the good films this year were like that. Not all of them were seen as much as they should have been. You know, in 2019, this narrative hadn't yet come to the fore about, oh, this film didn't make enough money to justify its existence. You know, the the it's never going to make back its P and A. You know, the the audience today is supposed to know about all this stuff that does not matter to seeing the film or whether the film is good or bad. For some reason, the industry has convinced like the average person on social media to become involved in whether a studio is going to make a profit on any given any given item that it releases. That's got nothing to do with anything. Some of the best films in the history of cinema made no money when they came out, were reviled when they came out. I was thinking about um Jean Vigot's film La Talante from 1934, which was released in a cut version, only played for a week or two, made no money, got bad reviews, and you know, now it's arguably the best film made in the 1930s. You know, so the the consciousness of that possibility is being erased by things like Penske Media, who are constantly trying to get us involved in whether any given film made enough money to justify its existence somehow.

SPEAKER_00 51:51

And Penskey, which owns the big uh the big trades, right?

SPEAKER_01 51:54

Yes, they own Hollywood Reporter Variety, IndieWire, Deadline, it's the Golden Globe, South by Southwest, etc. You know, this is not the business of the audience. The audience is just is supposed to go and see a movie and decide for themselves where they like it or not. Not sit around going, well, my neighbors didn't go to see it. The whole point of cinema is to be counter to your neighbors in in some ways within the confines of a mass medium. That's been lost somewhat. Well, I think it came back a little this year.

SPEAKER_00 52:22

Do you see the political moment being reflected in the rise of right-wing politics being reflected in cinema, or do you feel like that that's coming?

SPEAKER_01 52:32

I mean, it's already here. I mean, Eddington was an example of that. Whether people liked it or disliked it, and a lot of people hated it. I actually I liked it. I saw it late in its run, and I was primed to dislike it, but then I was shocked by it. One battle after another is like this. They're kind of two sides of the same coin. One is uh happier and more optimistic in some ways, the other is very negative. But in general, I think this kind of analysis is penetrating film drama now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:01

It definitely seems like, you know, it's penetrating everything, right? And as you were saying earlier, you know, you see it reflected in the films, but you also see it increasingly reflected in the control over even a major studio like Paramount and moving into the multiplexes. And it feels like we're just going to be seeing more and more of whatever this is going to look like, whether it's films responding to it or films that are kind of made in this kind of system to reflect these politics, right?

SPEAKER_01 53:26

Right. And, you know, an interesting aspect of this is the way that the push towards AI is anti-star. So there's been this argument the last few years that like the millennials have not produced any big Hollywood stars. No one can hold the screen in the way that you know Robert De Niro could in the in the 70s and 80s, or the way that Leo DiCaprio can, or who whoever you want to name, Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock. I think part of the part of what's interesting about the success of Marty Supreme is that Timothy Chalamet is a star who's emerged from an age in which there are not supposed to be any stars. So, you know, his attitude towards his work, I think, is right for his uh generation. But most people aren't like that. I mean, they can't afford to be like that. He's been working for a long time since he was very young. So, you know, it's it's interesting that these things come back despite what the industry wants or what the trades working with the industry predict.

SPEAKER_00 54:22

No, I I think that's a really good point. I would obviously highly recommend that people check out your two new books coming out back to back, Algorithm of the Night and last week in Endtime Cinema, you know, for more of those insights and of course to follow your work. Scott, it's been really great to talk to you and to get your insights on all this. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.

SPEAKER_01 54:39

Thank you, Paris. It's great to meet you.

SPEAKER_00 54:44

A Tamara is a film critic at M Plus One and the author of Algorithm of the Night and last week in End Time Cinema. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kyla Houston. Tech Won's Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.