Democratizing Hollywood
Dec 20, 2005
by Erik Lokkesmoe (bio archive)

The apocalyptic sidewalk prophet wearing a hand-painted sandwich board along Wilshire Boulevard is correct: truly, the end is near.

Don’t look toward the heavens, mind you. This is no Tim LaHaye unmanned-cars, pile-of-clothes, rapture-any-minute premonition. Instead, look toward a different sign, a word in all caps perched on a hill overlooking the most influential city in the world.
Indeed, the end of Hollywood is near.

Here’s why: Technology is changing everything in the entertainment industry. In ten years, Hollywood as we currently know it will be as foreign as a Frederico Fellini film. The old model that relies on big studios, big stars, and big budgets to draw audiences will hold all the appeal of a Sly Stallone blockbuster about arm wrestling. In 2015, a USC film studies class will look at today’s industry with the same intellectual curiosity and amazement as we do today when screening Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights.

Hollywood is going democratic, and that is good news for conservatives. As paranoid film studio dolts green-light banal re-makes, sequels, and “important” movies (leading, of course, to the biggest drop in ticket sales in twenty years), they face a new threat: teenage filmmakers armed with laptops, digital video cameras, and Final Cut Pro 5. the rest