The death throes of an industry

I was literally 90% done with my Kill Hollywood RFS application when I saw Paul's tweet about this article and it stopped me dead in my tracks. Can anyone tell me that the Kill Hollywood is about making the world better and not simply about revenge?

I just finished ranting like a lunatic on twitter (sorry Paul), but I'm going to try and be nice here. Keep in mind that you are attacking my very livelihood. I've been working in the film industry for my entire adult life. I recently quit my job at Paramount, a key member of the "most unscrupulous of all the industrial conglomerates" and rampant exploiter of "artists they pretend to represent."

I'd like to offer my perspective as a humble filmmaker. Are there any other filmmakers here... any? I highly doubt it, the amount of ignorance I see tossed around on the subject of Kill Hollywood is simply staggering. When will I see ANY balanced perspective? One real solution? One real alternative? I can promise you that it won't happen unless Silicon Valley is willing to at least talk to a damn filmmaker about these issues. Here's my email: odnamra@gmail.com. Hell, here's my cellphone: 323-963-4433. You want to kill Hollywood, call me anytime.

First, everything the RIAA and MPAA has down is WRONG. As a filmmaker whose future is on the line, I can tell you that it affects me more that it affects you. It's my livelihood, but only your inconvenience.

Now, on to the article. The author makes two technical points: sharing is easy, and storage is abundant. My response is… well, duh!

Here's a hint, killing Hollywood is NOT an engineering problem. All of the engineering problems have been solved, the technology already exists! We can instantly share a movie to all devices anywhere. We can store every type of media ever created. Thanks. It isn't helping.

The author also offers one pseudo solution about marketplaces. I hate to tell you this, but distribution is already a marketplace! Sure it might be inefficient, sure it is mostly dominated by a few key (evil) players, but it DOES exist. Paranormal Activity was made by one solitary man. It then went through a series of marketplaces and eventually pulled in $200 million dollars. I know the guy who made the film, we met when I helped make Paranormal Activity 2 and 3 (he's a former videogame developer fyi), and I can tell you that his "blood, sweat, energy and tears" paid off pretty damn well, thank you very much! Question: Can this marketplace be improved? Answer: Yes, but… here's a snapshot of what this mythical marketplace would have to replace:

Total industry size $90 billion. New movies enter the market through theaters, generate $30 billion, then proceed through windows rental>cable>VOD>DVD/Blu-ray>streaming>etc. The order can sometimes be different, what's important is that there are relative amounts of money made at each stage. A distributor might pull in $7 per ticket PER PERSON at a theater (how many friends do you take to the movies with you?), $5 per DVD/Blu-ray, and only 50 cents on streaming. [source: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-forecast-online-demand-fo...] Can your solution replace three friends going to a movie theater and generating $21 for the distributor with three friends watching Netflix and generating 50 cents? Also consider the fact that you may see a movie in theaters, then buy it on dvd, then buy a blu-ray, and THEN watch it on Netflix over the span of several years. Also, marketing is a huge problem, the cost of marketing that movie worldwide is amortized across the entire lifecycle, and is heavily front-loaded. If you skip straight to digital streaming, for example, you skip out on huge amounts of advertising. Don't believe me? Name five indie movies that came out this year. Now name five Hollywood movies. Lastly, and this is important, what Jacques fails to realize is that the cost of making new movies REQUIRES all of these windows to exist. I personally don't want to live in a world where the only movies I can watch are kickstarted documentaries. You tell me we can crowdfund a $500 million dollar Avatar without using the hedge fund approach of a major studio, and I will change my mind.

P.S. income from ALL DIGITAL is currently ~$3 billion of the $90 billion pie, why would Hollywood be in a hurry to abandon scarcity?

Ignoring everything I've said, what happens when you get your wish? I can promise you that if cut out theaters so you can stream Ironman 4 (the documentary) to your retina display iPad while sipping lattes on Powell St., the whole system will come crashing down.

Clearly the MPAA and the RIAA are assholes that need to be destroyed, but consider what you destroy along with it. Some of the greatest living storytellers on this planet are filmmakers. Tell me what you are offering James Cameron, creator of the 1st and 2nd highest grossing films of all time (almost $5 billion dollars worth of customer validation) in exchange for the theater, his medium of choice?

I believe there are solutions, LOTS of them, but we need to work together to create them.

/rant complete

When I was a kid, I set up zsnes on the computer at my after-school program, downloaded a bunch of ROMs, and taught the kids the key-mappings. I became the Guy Who Made Video Games Run on the PC. I did it at home, rampant pirate that I was.

But do today's kids actually have an unlocked PC available to them? Do they have consoles whose games come in self-contained cartridges so that piracy becomes imaginable? I don't think so.

They have consoles and handhelds that work mostly via their connections to proprietary company servers. They have iPods and phones and tablets locked down with company DRM. They have Windows 7 or OS X computers at home, at school, at after-school, and in offices with actual security models that stop kids from messing around installing whatever they like. Pirating a game now involves torrenting several GBs of ISO, mod-chipping your console or installing a game crack, and then installing a crack/workaround for the network log-in based DRM (thanks, EA and Ubisoft). It's often easier just to buy the damn thing off Steam, but then you have to ask Mom and Dad for money to buy games. What kid wants to go through that ordeal?

We grew up in a Wild West playground of open personal computing where little was locked, locks could be picked, and there weren't any security guards. I fear today's kids have grown up in a walled garden guarded by men with flaming swords.

Generally went something like this.

"Our consoles are so much cheaper than your PCs"

"Yes but our games are free"