THB #772: Death & The Alternative

My first cousin died this last week.

(Thank you for the condolences you don’t need to send me… I appreciate the thought. Truly.)

In my family, there is a set of cousins who are all at least 10 years older than me and then there is a set the youngest of whom is, I think, 5 years younger than me and of which the cousin we lost, Jason Merrick Solomon, was the eldest, 4 years older than me. We all love one another, but there really are 2 different teams.

I was adopted. I have been “an orphan” for a few years now. My dad’s been gone for 28 years. I have 3 sisters to lean on. I am friends with a great group of people, a bunch of whom are 20 (and more) years older than me. I have my wife and son. I am relatively healthy. I am a fortunate person.

It’s a weird thing to lose “one of ours.”

I’m at an age where losing “ours” is becoming more and more frequent. With friends in their 90s, the threat is always there. My circle has been lucky for years now. Fingers remain crossed.

I went to see Adam Sandler talk to Timmy Chalamet in a high school gym on Saturday night in an event that was somewhat shrouded in mystery… threatened to be odd.. was fairly conventional. Pleasant. Look for it on Vanity Fair’s social media soon.

Oddly, it was on Tik Tok the next day that I saw a clip from Letterman interview with Adam (that is coming to Netflix soon) that made me think. He was talking about leaving Saturday Night Live and not being able to watch the show the next season… having a hard time dealing with the show continuing on without him.

I guess that is part of the lesson we all start lingering on as we get older. We all lose friends and loved ones. As we and they get older, the losses are less shocking, less unexpected. And still, the carousel keeps turning. Sometimes offering us vital distraction. Sometimes painful and irritating, a mockery of our pain.

And such is the hysteria in the filmed entertainment business right now. If I read another headline about how everyone is sweating out this moment in the industry, I think I may go mad. (The most recent one landed in my inbox less than an hour ago when I started writing this… another within an hour of finishing this.)

I don’t remember who said it… geez… maybe I said it… unlikely. “What is the difference between a professional artist and a hobbyist?” “Intention.”

The black art of Hollywood is - and pretty much always has been - the illusion of the unintended. That, somehow, stuff just happens. That the success or failure of a film or tv show… that the very existence of such things is just a magic trick that some person called a Director does and that some Rich Studio Owner pays for it, and that audiences just show up or don’t show up because the film/show is good or great or lousy or unwatchable.

Educated people know that there are many people and many steps involved with the process of making a movie/show. But unless you have been through the process of that creation and marketing and publicity and delivery to theaters/television, you are unlikely to really understand the details of what went into the gestation and the birth.

Honestly, even people who go through it every day lose perspective on the parts to which they are not directly involved. God knows, losing the forest for the trees is a to-be-expected challenge within their work lives. Whether it’s Seth Rogen or Manohla Dargis, I have enormous admiration for people who are committed to their lanes in this weird little universe and raise their roles in it to the highest level by not being constantly distracted by everyone else’s job. (And that doesn’t mean you have to love or agree with their output… that is a different issue - taste - altogether.)

How many Academy (Motion Picture or TV) members really understand how to appreciate the editing of a film/tv show-series? I would say, the editing branch and maybe - maybe! - 30% of the rest of the other branch members. I can tell you that very few film critics know shit-all about editing. We can all see the “most” edited movies. We can all feel what we think is good editing… pace without distractions or showy work that tells us its great editing. But Anne Coates and Thelma Schoonmaker and Joe Walker are not the same as editors. They each do their own magic tricks as well as conforming to some basic rules. It’s like watching pro football and appreciating - or even seeing - the line play… or the constant work of 1st and 2nd basemen in baseball or non-scoring centers in basketball. You have to know where to look and how to look.

But I digress…

A friend of mine who is very smart and very veteran finally saw One Battle After Another this weekend… and watched it 3 times. Loved it. But he stills said, “Too bad nobody went to see it.” The movie has done $200 million worldwide and the media (aka The Fucking Media) has made the film seem like a commercial flop to him. “But it cost $130 million,” he continued. FUCK! Why is this smart person… a veteran actor… quoting back the alleged budget of the film to me… a movie he loved and that 5 - 6 million people have paid to see on big screens in America already…. even before award season becomes a marketing platform and there is a re-release, etc?

Why is anyone who knows anything about the industry - meaning, not just thinking like a Wall Street vampire - excited about the idea of Warner Bros being sold to any other company in the same business, taking the 5 Major Theatrical Studio business down to 4? It isn’t just a rhetorical question, so I will answer… they aren’t thinking about the ramifications of the layers and layers of Warner Bros Discovery and how the absorption of each segment will affect the entire industry.

Why don’t people think about Netflix’s role as more than a monolith? Of the Top 10 shows on the app yesterday, 5 of them were produced by large-scale, long-established producers and acquired by Netflix.

Nobody Wants This - 20th
Stranger Things - WB
The Bad Guys series - U/DW
Death by Lightning -Bighead Littlehead
Selling Sunset - Insider Entertainment

And there is nothing wrong with that. It is what a TV distribution business does. But the image people have is that Netflix “makes” every show and every movie… which no one can or does on a large scale. Even the broadcast networks, each owned by a major production studio, allowed to buy and air their own owned shows, also buy a lot of product from other sources.

Nobody Wants This could well have been on Hulu. Stranger Things could have been on HBO Max. Netflix wanted them and has them and has won with them. But every outlet and every major TV producer has those titles… hits they made for someone else because they didn’t want them or there was some other deal in place early. Normal.

A big part of the hysteria is the misguided notion that buying Warner Bros, for instance, makes you the home of Harry Potter. But Harry Potter: The Series is spoken for. And Harry Potter: The Theme Park rights are spoken for. And yes, a new buyer would get the financial benefits of those deals. But they don’t really control Harry Potter for 10 years or so.

Disney bought Lucasfilm and had a huge success with 4 Star Wars movies… and then had some real success on Streaming… and have now hit a wall they are trying to maneuver around. It happens. Public hunger is cyclical. And you need to feed it just the right way, which often involves dumb luck as much as great timing and execution. Owning IP is no guarantee that your use of that IP is an instant win or a win in the proportion of the original success of that IP.

There are no magic pills.

But flip side, there is no massive abyss into which the industry is falling, as is the current thinking in so many otherwise clear minds.

I’ve been talking about the regression the industry has now been in for 3 or 4 years for 7 or 8 years. It’s not because I am a genius. It’s because it was obvious if you were paying close attention to the math. The model for the launch of these legacy-owned Streamers could not work financially without a massive expansion internationally of highly paid household subscriptions that were the new financial opportunity. Wall Street supported these attempts for 6 months and have put the filmed entertainment industry in a box of irrelevance for 6 years since. Math. 2 in the hand is worth 4 in the tree. Unless you can grab those 2 new ones - not easy - stick to your successful 2 you have. And that is what we are just about done regressing back to… which is going to be forced to change too.

In fact, I am bored of saying the same shit for so many years. But most of it remains true… and truly obvious, if you are seeing the forest AND the trees.

In 2075, maybe all content is served through one provider… because the world changes. But people want films and television. People consume massive amounts of both, even as a bunch of journalists and industry people shrei about the end of it all. Real people are spending massive amounts of money on content every day… but when Streaming launched with all the legacy companies, they tried to imitate Netflix and every one of them failed in their own way. They are now cleaning up the mess, which was many billions of lost dollars… some on sensational content and some of pure shit.

Filmed entertainment will survive. The horror show at the movies is at $7.2 billion domestic so far this year… that’s not $11 billion, but it’s a lot of tickets sold. Streamers are bringing in somewhere over $100 billion in subscription fees alone. That is not enough to sustain the content pace of 2023… but it’s a lot of money… and now they are focusing less on subscription dollars and more on an insane amount in potential ad sales.

Not only is the boat not sinking… it’s not even changing as much as we imagine. The tech is different, but the goals remain very much the same. Tastes change, but they keep changing.

But the more you live in and rely on “the boat.” the scarier it is, because YOU might be thrown overboard. Not because the sky is falling, but because you - who have grown into so much success - are getting older and this industry doesn’t like old people more than a few days a year. Your clients are not making what they were. Your norms are being fucked with.

And if you are a traditional media journalist, the boats are all smaller and less kind (not that kind to start) and if you don’t like it, start driving Uber while you think of Sunstack posts to write. We can’t all be Nikki Finke, Bari Weiss, and Matt 6’ 4” Belloni. Many of us never wanted to be.

This is absolutely a volatile time… but it is also very, very normal.

Back to losing my family member…

It sucks.

And it sucks that it will not be an easier experience for his immediate family… much less me, one step removed.

I mourn his loss and I fear for the future losses in my family and in my community of friends. I worry for my own life and my still-young son and what losing me anytime in the next 20 years would mean to him. I worry about losing my healthy wife in some unexpected way.

But this is all normal. And every story is different. And every drama is personal as well as public.

Everything dies.

And until the asteroid that Bruce Willis can’t save us from comes, everything fights for life.

The level of privilege we all have - certainly all of us reading a Substack newsletter - is grand. And life is hard. And shit stinks. And we wallow in it every day. But, unless there is a health reason we cannot - we can choose whether to stew in the pot of shit or to seek the scent of roses and fresh grass and whatever is coming next.

I am thankful to be alive. I am thankful for all the obstacles of my life, from the minute I was born… because I am thankful that I am here today. I will complain and moan and screen and shrei… but if I can find a few moments every day just to be happy to be alive and to love and to mix it up… and to remember my cousin, who had a hard life and a great life and a mixed up life, but to hold his memory and his best self and even his worse self. He lived.

The hurricane is always coming. And it always has a calm eye. The bigger the hurricane, he calmer the eye. (That is actually true.)

Ride on, my friends. Ride on.

Until tomorrow…