[COLUMN] Art is Not a Service Industry | by Darren Mooney

Over the past couple of decades, there has been a marked shift in how people talk about mass media entertainment. However, it might be more accurate to say that there has been a marked shift in the consequences of how people talk about mass media entertainment.

Mainstream media production has always existed in a delicate equilibrium between artistic and financial concerns. It is certainly true that show business has always been a business. Movies and television shows need to make money. Hollywood has always attracted investors and owners from outside the filmmaking fold. However, it increasingly feels like the production of film and television has been entrusted to people who don’t actually care about film and television.

Around the time that David Zaslav took control of Warner Bros. as part of its merger with Discovery, the new mogul moved into the famed Hollywood house owned by legendary Paramount Head of Production Robert Evans. “We didn’t strive for commercial,” Evans once boasted of his legendary run that produced Rosemary’s Baby, The Godfather and Chinatown. “We went for original. We fell on our asses on some of them, but we also touched magic.”

Zaslav has demonstrated that one need not go for original to fall on one’s ass. Zaslav’s stewardship of Warner Bros. has been nakedly commercial. “It’s not show friends — it’s show business,” Zaslav famously argued at a group of studio executives demanding to know why the studio was still making Clint Eastwood films. Zaslav famously destroyed completed movies like Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme for the tax write-off. These weren’t artistic projects. They were fuel for the furnace.

This is because Zaslav’s priority was not to make art. It was not even to secure the long-term viability of the studio. Zaslav’s top priority was simply to generate cash flow, because his own compensation is tied to that metric. Zaslav did this by forsaking other indicators of a healthy company, revenue and profit. The general consensus is that Zaslav is preparing Warner Bros. for a possible merger, and so prioritizing making the studio attractive to buyers rather than sustainable on its own merits.

This was not always the way. Gulf+Western bought Paramount Pictures in October 1966. As director Peter Bogdanovich opined of Gulf+Western owner Charles Bluhdorn, “He liked movies, he liked quality, he liked good work.” It was Bluhdorn who hired Evans. Indeed, Bluhdorn would even leverage his other financial interests in service of the studio, allowing William Friedkin to shoot Sorcerer in the Dominican Republic, which was “pretty much a subsidiary” of Gulf+Western.

In the modern landscape, media has come to feel disposable and forgettable. Movies and shows quickly disappear into the streaming ether, as objects costing hundreds of millions of dollars evaporating from the collective consciousness upon impact. This ephemeral quality is obvious even in the language used to talk about media. Movies are no longer screened for “theatre patrons”, but streamed “direct-to-consumer.” It is no longer film and television, it is now all “content.”

“As recently as fifteen years ago, the term ‘content’ was heard only when people were discussing the cinema on a serious level, and it was contrasted with and measured against ‘form’,” wrote Martin Scorsese in the pages of Harper’s. “Then, gradually, it was used more and more by the people who took over media companies, most of whom knew nothing about the history of the art form, or even cared enough to think that they should.”

There was an increasing sense of equivalence between media. A streaming series becomes “an eight-hour movie.” Television writers forget how to structure a single episode as a basic unit of storytelling. E.T. spawns a sequel in a “short film” that doubles as an Xfinity commercial. Thanks to the wonders of vertical integration, movies are no longer distinct artistic objects with individual value, but a service delivered within the framework of a larger international conglomerate.

Tied to that shift, it feels like there has been a significant change in how people talk about and think about media over the past decade. It is perhaps fanciful to talk about film and television as art, but they have at least historically been considered creative media. For that process to work, somebody has to be creating. The people who make film and television spent decades struggling to be recognized for their work. Auteur is just a fancy word for “author.”

The industry has grown increasingly hostile to the people who do this creative work making film and television. In June 2017, under Toby Emmerich, it was reported that Warner Bros. would shift its strategy away from its long history with filmmakers like Clint Eastwood, Stanley Kubrick and Christopher Nolan to “avoid auteur directors who want final cut.” During the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strike, Disney CEO Bob Iger insisted the writers and actors were not being “realistic.”

It increasingly feels like audiences have been conditioned to think of media as a service industry, and to think of creative talent as service workers who exist to satisfy their own expectations. If audiences have evolved from patrons to consumers, it makes sense that a lot of the popular discourse around media effectively amounts to an articulation of the philosophy that “the customer is always right.” There is a priority placed on satisfying the customer’s expectations above all else.

George R.R. Martin is the creator of the Games of Thrones franchise. However, he has yet to complete the series of novels. He has been stuck on the latest entry, The Winds of Winter, for almost a decade now. It should go without saying that this happens. Creativity does not work to a schedule. It cannot be forced or rushed. It is entirely possible for a creative individual to embark upon a creative process that they do not complete.

Fans who bought copies of Martin’s published work were not making a long-term investment in the franchise’s future; they were not placing a down-payment on a future novel that Martin has yet to produce. Martin’s novel is a physical or digital good. It is not a service. Customers handed over their cash for a novel, and they received that novel in exchange for that cash. Nobody has been cheated. Nobody is owed.

Martin has been subject to extended harassment for his failure to deliver that intangible sequel. Fans complain about everything else that Martin does, as if he owes them hours behind a typewriter rather than the book that they bought. On discovering a chocolate treat styled after himself, the author pondered, “So many people are cross with me because of how long it is taking me to finish The Winds of Winter. Will they be buying chocolate me by the thousands and biting off my chocolate head in their wroth?” At events, he’s had to state, “You guys don’t have to pester me about it.”

After all, fans should know how hard it is to end Game of Thrones, given the difficulties facing the television adaptation in its final season. Many fans were dissatisfied with the ending. This is fine. Endings are tough. Many films and shows end badly. However, there was a strange entitlement underpinning those criticisms. Fans launched petitions demanding that the final season be remade. Banners were flown over football matches.

To be fair, this is the inevitable outcome of a certain strain of entitled fan discourse which took root in the turn of the millennium internet and which is typified by temper tantrum headlines like, “Iron Man 3 Ruined the Mandarin and Real Fans Should be Pissed.” This sense of entitlement was only encouraged by studios that clumsily pandered to fans with substandard product. Whenever a bad franchise film came out, it was inevitably “for the fans.” No wonder fans felt ownership.

There is an increasing sense that fans are “owed” something, that they deserve to be validated and empowered. Anything else is secondary, even the well-being of the person doing the work. “Nothing disappoints Hunter x Hunter fans more than the fact that they haven’t gotten new content since 2018,” wrote Comic Book Resources in March 2022. “[Yoshihiro] Togashi’s current hiatus is the longest in the series’ history and continues to disappoint fans who fell in love with the characters.” Togashi had taken that hiatus due to severe back issues from writing and illustrating the manga.

In a broader sense, the traditional barrier between creative and audience has broken. Social media has given audiences immediate access to creative talent, superseding mail and online bulletin boards. Actors now film individualized Cameos for customers, occasionally in character. Celebrities now operate their own subscriber model on OnlyFans. Of course, most of these performers are forced on this service by economic necessity, a consequence of the larger structural shifts in the industry.

The companies producing media are increasingly beholden to appeasing consumers. Bob Iger asserted that Disney needed to eschew creative vision and instead “need to be entertaining.” This philosophy is not unique to Hollywood. One studio insider working on the hit anime Demon Slayer reportedly opined, “Our generation has realised that anime is entertainment; it’s not art.” There are reports of studios hiring “a specialized cluster of superfans” to set the direction of their franchises.

In this context, it’s no wonder that so many of the technocrats colonizing Hollywood are pushing for generative artificial intelligence as the future of media. Avengers: Endgame director Joe Russo, who sits “on the board of a few AI companies”, promises a near-future in which consumers will be able to generate a movie based on a command like, “Hey, I want a movie starring my photoreal avatar and Marilyn Monroe’s photoreal avatar. I want it to be a rom-com because I’ve had a rough day.”

Of course, the dirty little not-so-secret of artificial intelligence is that these large language models cannot create anything new. They can only recycle existing content. Then again, that arguably makes them perfectly suited to a cultural landscape decorated with the detritus of decades of nostalgia. Combined with new digital effects technology that allows studios to more-or-less convincingly resurrect dead actors, these models can produce an ouroboros of recycled nostalgic iconography.

What these models can also do is generate large quantities of content very quickly, which is helpful in this climate of “cultural fracking”, where studios are primarily motivated to “mine” as much intellectual property as quickly as possible to create “always on slates” of intellectual property to maintain subscribers for their streaming services. This approach has the benefit of never generating anything new, and so are unlikely to risk upsetting those fans who have difficult processing change.

The truth is that fans don’t actually know what they want. The same fans who complained about the casting of Michael Keaton in Tim Burton’s Batman salivated for his return in the feature-length shareholder’s memo The Flash. The same fans who tried to stop Nicolas Meyer from making Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan now regularly vote it the best Star Trek movie. Indeed, it is a small irony that the Star Trek franchise has spent decades trying to emulate The Wrath of Khan.

“My approach to writing is never ‘give the audience what they want’ because the audience don’t know what they want,” stated legendary comic book writer Alan Moore. “That’s why they’re the audience.” This is not just good creative advice. It’s necessarily for long-term financial stability. As cruise ship designer John McNeese argued, “if Henry Ford canvassed people on whether or not he should build a motor car, they'd probably tell him what they really wanted was a faster horse.”

The creative arts are not and never have been a service industry, and attempts to transform them into one fundamentally misunderstand how the process has always worked. The irony is that the real loser from this “customer is always right” model is the customer themselves.