Law, Films, and Tech Makeovers
In these first years of the 21st century movies are opening and screening across the planet in shopping mall cinemas from Bangkok to Boise.
But less noted is the recent growth in the marketing clouds that surround all Hollywood studio movie releases.
The marketing and advertising budgets of many movies now exceed by far the costs of production.
What is happening here? It can be argued that there is a great change coming.
It is a change that can be investigated first by comparing the metamorphosis in production and distribution of American movies in the 1950s with the upheavals in the audio recording industry in the late 1990s continuing to present day.
The source of the change in 1950s Hollywood was a 1948 Supreme Court decision, United States Vs.
Paramount Et Al, ordering the Hollywood studios to divest of their holdings in movie theaters for showing movies.
Since their beginnings the major Hollywood studios like FOX, MGM and Paramount owned theaters all over the USA.
The product created by any one studio would be exclusively distributed to that Studio's own movie house.
The Loews Theater chain was owned by MGM.
The Twentieth Century Fox studio owned the Fox theater chain.
In economic legalese the studios were "vertically integrated" controlling not only the means of production, but also the distribution of product.
Under the Sherman Antitrust act of 1890 this was a de facto form of monopoly and illegal.
In fact, the studios did not own all the theaters across the USA, but they owned enough to control.
That is, their movie houses accounted for about 45% of all revenues of motion pictures.
The studios scrambled to mutate by selling off their theaters ending their sure-fire revenue sources.
The major studios financed their yearly production slate by giving the Bank of America a lien on their library titles.
More importantly the major studios sought and poured money into new, desperate methods like Cinemascope, Vistavision or other gimmicks to market their products.
By the end of the 1950s, independent features became a way of doing movie business in Hollywood mirroring British and European financing and other production models.
But there was another factor: television.
In a sense network television became the tail that wagged the dog and eventually television networks and cable companies became owners of many of the Hollywood studios.
Variations on this trend were the purchase of Universal by NBC, which in turn was owned by General Electric Company.
Now look at the record business.
Since its beginnings in the 1920s, the recorded music business was a murky field of seedy characters and almost organized crime types.
The 1930's brought better quality recordings and radio made the music for many without players.
In the 1950's technology gave vinyl records a boost with Stereo LPs.
Then later in the 1980s digital music came to prominence with CDs.
And the record business made a lot of money through the 1950s up until 1998.
That was the year of the MP3, and the year of the passing by the US congress of the Millennium Copyright Act.
The next year came Napster and the long, bloody legal wars leading to our present Internet music model.
The record business was changed forever by the Internet and file sharing.
It is my belief that the movie business is soon to follow.
Looking over the last one hundred years, the entertainment business as a whole charts regular highs and lows over a ten or twenty year cycle.
At the close of each era the powerful studios churn out new highs of money for marketing their products.
This swan song of distribution methods coupled with rare events like the 1950s transformation in film production and distribution or the 1990s near destruction of the record business portends a great technologically based upheaval in visual media.
The changes are evident on our iPods and iPhones, and on our PDAs and Playstations.
Not to mention lap tops everywhere.
The technology for sharing of visual media files is well established.
In this new century of ubiquitous WiFi, the bandwidth is not a problem.
It is still not too late for the creators to control visual media worldwide.
Follow the iTunes Model that is working well for music, movies and TV shows.
Or find another way of generating a little money for your movie.
There are numerous web sites dedicated to distributing independent films.
The future of distribution for all forms of entertainment is here, now.
Filmmakers of the world unite, create and distribute.
But less noted is the recent growth in the marketing clouds that surround all Hollywood studio movie releases.
The marketing and advertising budgets of many movies now exceed by far the costs of production.
What is happening here? It can be argued that there is a great change coming.
It is a change that can be investigated first by comparing the metamorphosis in production and distribution of American movies in the 1950s with the upheavals in the audio recording industry in the late 1990s continuing to present day.
The source of the change in 1950s Hollywood was a 1948 Supreme Court decision, United States Vs.
Paramount Et Al, ordering the Hollywood studios to divest of their holdings in movie theaters for showing movies.
Since their beginnings the major Hollywood studios like FOX, MGM and Paramount owned theaters all over the USA.
The product created by any one studio would be exclusively distributed to that Studio's own movie house.
The Loews Theater chain was owned by MGM.
The Twentieth Century Fox studio owned the Fox theater chain.
In economic legalese the studios were "vertically integrated" controlling not only the means of production, but also the distribution of product.
Under the Sherman Antitrust act of 1890 this was a de facto form of monopoly and illegal.
In fact, the studios did not own all the theaters across the USA, but they owned enough to control.
That is, their movie houses accounted for about 45% of all revenues of motion pictures.
The studios scrambled to mutate by selling off their theaters ending their sure-fire revenue sources.
The major studios financed their yearly production slate by giving the Bank of America a lien on their library titles.
More importantly the major studios sought and poured money into new, desperate methods like Cinemascope, Vistavision or other gimmicks to market their products.
By the end of the 1950s, independent features became a way of doing movie business in Hollywood mirroring British and European financing and other production models.
But there was another factor: television.
In a sense network television became the tail that wagged the dog and eventually television networks and cable companies became owners of many of the Hollywood studios.
Variations on this trend were the purchase of Universal by NBC, which in turn was owned by General Electric Company.
Now look at the record business.
Since its beginnings in the 1920s, the recorded music business was a murky field of seedy characters and almost organized crime types.
The 1930's brought better quality recordings and radio made the music for many without players.
In the 1950's technology gave vinyl records a boost with Stereo LPs.
Then later in the 1980s digital music came to prominence with CDs.
And the record business made a lot of money through the 1950s up until 1998.
That was the year of the MP3, and the year of the passing by the US congress of the Millennium Copyright Act.
The next year came Napster and the long, bloody legal wars leading to our present Internet music model.
The record business was changed forever by the Internet and file sharing.
It is my belief that the movie business is soon to follow.
Looking over the last one hundred years, the entertainment business as a whole charts regular highs and lows over a ten or twenty year cycle.
At the close of each era the powerful studios churn out new highs of money for marketing their products.
This swan song of distribution methods coupled with rare events like the 1950s transformation in film production and distribution or the 1990s near destruction of the record business portends a great technologically based upheaval in visual media.
The changes are evident on our iPods and iPhones, and on our PDAs and Playstations.
Not to mention lap tops everywhere.
The technology for sharing of visual media files is well established.
In this new century of ubiquitous WiFi, the bandwidth is not a problem.
It is still not too late for the creators to control visual media worldwide.
Follow the iTunes Model that is working well for music, movies and TV shows.
Or find another way of generating a little money for your movie.
There are numerous web sites dedicated to distributing independent films.
The future of distribution for all forms of entertainment is here, now.
Filmmakers of the world unite, create and distribute.