Quote:When I was a whipper snapper, my big dream was to work in Hollywood. I didn’t want to be famous or any of that. I wanted to work on big-budget films, where you had the time and money to take hours on a set-up instead of minutes. I was fascinated by the creative part of the industry, not the glitz and glamor part. I wanted to be part of a creative process that made meaningful things.

So, I went to Hollywood after high school, at the tender age of 17. I ended up fleeing for my life after six months. The drug culture there was all-encompassing—constant parties with giant smorgasbords of pills, plants and powders. I felt myself losing touch with reality amid constant sexual harassment. All the young’uns were expected to drop trou for all the old’uns if you wanted work on the Next Big Project.

I should have been clued in. My first break was in New Mexico, on the way to LA, on a film called Convoy (1978), ostensibly directed by Sam Peckinpah. What an opportunity, I naively thought. Peckinpah was never on the set, though. He was waylaid in his trailer on a twinkle trip, while James Coburn, who was supposed to be 2nd Unit director to get his DGA card, ended up doing most of the film.

I did get to hang out with Ernest Borgnine and Ali McGraw, though, so all was not lost.

All of this is to say that Hollywood has been a moral cesspool its entire existence. From the Fatty Arbuckle scandal in 1921 (he was acquitted after three trials), to the latest gossip headlines, Hollywood has been widely known as a Caligula-level bordello that single-handedly kept South American countries afloat. The amount of money that flows through that town boggles the mind, and the Olympic-scale corruption that goes with it would leaves mere mortals playing with their toe jam in padded rooms.

Over the past 10 years, however, Hollywood has pioneered all new depths of degradation and decay. Not only has its products descended to the quality of basement-made fan films with eye-watering budgets, but the denizens of doom have arrogated to themselves the role of lecturing us lowly rubes on the depravity of capitalism and the virtues of Stone-Age lifestyles, while they themselves swim in the luxuries of Inner Party Membership.

Over the last century, the arts have become democratized in ways no one could have imagined in the 1800s. The rise of garage bands over 100-piece orchestras spread access to music out of the stodgy concert halls and into the beer halls. Self-publishing killed the pulp industry, which itself fought off the exclusivity and gate-keeping of the publishing industry. The internet slayed the newspaper, and now video streaming hubs have slaughtered TeeVee networks in much the way TeeVee and video recording decapitated the studio empires.

What we are witnessing now is the looting of Hollywood. It violates all laws of economics that half-billion dollar budgets buy minor performers, grade-school level writing, and amateur production values. The products (no longer films) can’t even compete with Soviet-era agitprop. By comparison, Leni Riefenstahl’s films are masterpieces of state-worshipping propaganda. Modern Hollywood can’t even do that right.

So where is all the money going?

I suspect those huge budgets are being laundered to overseas sweat shops that spit out sub-standard computer-generated crap for pennies on the dollar, and the remainder gets funnelled into private pockets and NGO coffers. Hell, I was producing better computer graphics for corporate videos in the late 90s. Nothing else explains the rubbish shovelled in our faces 30 years later.

So, Hollywood is being dismantled and folks are carrying off anything of value. It’s like watching the innards of a melon get scooped out, waiting for the husk to deflate and rot when it can no longer support itself. The old studios and brands are being bought up by indies looking primarily to own the archives and franchise names, than anything else.

In the meantime, we rubes are subjected to sub-standard slop. The writing is less compelling than AI-generated random monkey text. The lighting is practically non-existent to hide the amateur CGI and incomplete set designs. Shooting begins before there’s even a story to tell, using a technique called “scrapbooking,” with footage that can literally be slotted into any product, and in some cases the final cut is shelved forever and written off (tax fraud too?) because the end product isn’t even worthy of the severely curtailed expectations of “modern” audiences.

Hollywood is dead. Sure, the carcass is twitching and writhing, but it can not be revived. Putrefaction has set in. Content production (I don’t use the word film here) is being democratized, with once-exclusive and wildly expensive tools now widely available, the way synthesized harmonics (I don’t use the word music here) have made high-quality concert instruments into collectors’ items.

I’m not really sorry to see Hollywood go. It had the septic seeds of its own destruction sewn into the industry’s fabric. Sure, it produced films that defined genres and generations, but those days are long gone. Where once we got filet mignon, we now get highly processed lab-grown protein slime. The system itself stifles creativity in the name of gutting the corporate coffers. It’s become so toxic that no life can take hold in what has become an artistic superfund site.

The future lies elsewhere. The performers are digital masks that have never drawn a breath. The writers are phantom marionettes that have never felt a heart beat. There are no grips or gaffers or carpenters, no directors, cinematographers or designers. Just a few prompting lines, and POOF, product minutes later. The new stars will never age, but can assume any visage required. Millions (maybe billions) of “channels” will compete for clicks. No more audience catharsis; no more striving for perfection; no more collaborative inspiration.


Andy Warhol was famous for saying, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,” yet he often denied creating the phrase while often repeating it. Warhol was the prototype of today’s culture—famous for being famous without a shred of talent.

Is it hopeless? Not at all.

In the future (this is my own creation), our time will be known as the Neo-Tenebric Age, or even the Tenebricene Epoch (see Latin word for “darkness”). It will be followed by the Neo-Chóngshēng and the Neo-Vozrozhdéniye, basically the Sino-Russian counterparts to the French and Italian Renaissance.

Human creativity can not be suppressed forever. The history of our species, and even the Neaderthal is littered with artistic endeavors, from handprints to fat female figurines. It won’t be long before “guaranteed human” becomes a selling point. Mark my words.

So, Hollywood is dying and that’s just fine. It’s best years are long past. Let the corpse lay to rest. The time has come to focus on new outlets for human creativity, away from corporate corruption, demographic pandering, and moral decay. We don’t need movie stars lecturing us and large-scale agitprop. Art is the pinnacle of human endeavor, and should elevate mind and spirt, not track mud all over them. Time for commentators like Nerdrotic and Doomcock to stop fretting over the collapse of the old and rotted, and start looking for the new and uplifting.

Stop looking at the building that collapsed, and start looking at the empty lot waiting to be filled.

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The early 1980s saw a rash of films on the topic of mass media gone foul, in which I include Sidney Lumet’s masterpiece Network (1976), but for today’s rant I think a double-feature of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), with Michael Crichton’s Looker (1981) is just the ticket. Not only are these well-crafted stories from master storytellers, they feature excellent performances (including James Coburn) by real humans, with great practical effects—guaranteed human (no CGI). Enjoy!