I am breaking a personal vow to keep my personal opinion from infecting this site, which I want to remain as objective as possible. But….
I have been reading many wonderful and well written books about Hollywood, the motion picture industry and runaway production. Many, if not all, of these people know much more than I about Hollywood. And given my relative ripeness as a student of Hollywood, the people that I have been learning from have had much more time to think about the issue of Runaway Production than I.
That said, I am uncomfortable with the complacency in the literature that argues Hollywood, the physical place, is unthreatened by runaway production. I recognize that Hollywood (greater LA) remains the decision making center in the movie-making world and that the level of post-production services based in the area are unmatched. I know that Hollywood has more square footage of sound stages than all of Canada and most of the rest of the Unites States does combined.
Such complacency, it seems to me, borders on arrogance. As comedian Bill Maher recently said of the United States, “our shit is dingy.” Fareed Zakaria offered the following in a recent interview:
“I thought America was unstoppable too, that our position in the world was assured. But then I began noticing things that a short time ago were unimaginable. The richest man in the world lives in Mexico City. The tallest building in the world is in Taipei, and Dubai is building a taller building. The next-tallest building in the world will be built in Dubai a year and a half later. The largest factory in the world is in China. The largest refinery is in India. I was in Las Vegas one day and thought, At least we have this. It turns out we don’t. The largest casino hotel in the world now is the Venetian in Macao, and Macao just overtook Las Vegas with the largest gambling revenues in the world. Shopping, America’s great leisure-time activity? The last time I was in Beijing they showed me the largest mall in the world, which has since been eclipsed by another Chinese mall. It turns out the top 10 malls in the world are all outside the United States. Just three years ago almost every category I gave you would have been topped by America. The change is fast and has only just begun. It’s still true there’s only one superpower, but things are changing in every dimension other than the military.”
Hollywood, this nation, is assured of nothing, much less ongoing supremacy. Then again, I could just be buying into irrational fear and my lack of complacency may stem from my own ignorance. One of things I like to say to people about myself is this: “The more I learn, the more I realize how little I actually know.” For me, that philosophy defines intelligence.
