Speaker 1: Also media Welcome to Take Back and Hear, a podcast
Speaker 1: about the consolidation of capital into increasingly centralized forms and
Speaker 1: how it's ruining your life.
Speaker 2: I am your host, Mia Long and with b today
Speaker 2: to talk about how the consolidation of media monopolies has
Speaker 2: ruined many, many, many many things for many years. Is
Speaker 2: Vicky Osterweil, friend of the show, author of forthcoming April fourteenth,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty sixth, The Extended Universe, How Disney killed the
Speaker 2: movies and took over the world.
Speaker 3: Vicky, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4: Thanks, it's so great to be back. Thank you, Mia.
Speaker 4: I'm excited to talk about something a little less depressing
Speaker 4: than the things we could be.
Speaker 2: Talking about, right, you know, like this is a story, obviously,
Speaker 2: the story that we're talking about here foremost is Paramount's
Speaker 2: acquisition of Warner Bros.
Speaker 3: Or forthcoming acquisition.
Speaker 2: Since Netflix has backed out, it technically still could fail,
Speaker 2: but seems very very unlikely to. And you know, you
Speaker 2: could tell things are going great in the news where
Speaker 2: this is the fun one, and the fun one is us.
Speaker 2: Before we started recording, talking about who we think the
Speaker 2: sort of Nazi commis are they're going to put in
Speaker 2: charge of CNN. It's going to be there very wise,
Speaker 2: So things going very good.
Speaker 3: You can tell.
Speaker 4: Oh, God, but you you.
Speaker 3: Had the most cursed name that I've heard, so fun.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, Tim, Tim Poole, I think is probably the
Speaker 4: most cursed. Yeah, that would be the most it's a
Speaker 4: dark horse candidate. I don't know whether were the numbers
Speaker 4: on poly market. Should we look who's.
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 2: They they've probably that's probably up now. Yeah, I hate
Speaker 2: I refuse to track polling market. Even if I could
Speaker 2: no facts ahead of time, I simply will not. They
Speaker 2: can't make me.
Speaker 4: God, but we're not talking about insider trading war crimes.
Speaker 4: We're talking about insider trading intellectual property. So that's that's
Speaker 4: pretty good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, okay, So to start, let's go back a
Speaker 2: ways and do you want to talk about I guess
Speaker 2: sort of the beginning of the history of what we're
Speaker 2: talking about here, which is the consolidation of all media
Speaker 2: into a handful of increasingly large conglomerates.
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely, so, in a way like consolidation is the
Speaker 4: entire history of the movie business. So obviously what's happening
Speaker 4: here with Paramount, which is one of the oldest, one
Speaker 4: of the old five studios merging with Warner Brothers. That
Speaker 4: leaves Disney and Paramount, Warner Brothers and Sony as the
Speaker 4: three companies that released movies.
Speaker 3: Is this good? A twenty four is gonna get bonded
Speaker 3: three weeks from now?
Speaker 4: Yeah? God, and that's like an Amazon or the news
Speaker 4: of other studios and Netflix was in competition for this
Speaker 4: and with true as you said anyways, but like one
Speaker 4: of the things that the very beginning of the Hollywood system,
Speaker 4: Hollywood starts because Thomas Edison. So now we're going way
Speaker 4: back right the eighteen nineties.
Speaker 2: Oh god, yeah, yes, speaking of it, speaking a dude
Speaker 2: who ruthlessly consolidated their power, He's like that.
Speaker 4: Were intellectual, propercisely, dear God. So Thomas Edison is credited
Speaker 4: in the US with inventing the movie camera. He is
Speaker 4: one of five or six people in the world who
Speaker 4: came up with the technology around the same time. It's
Speaker 4: just not linearly possible to name any of them as
Speaker 4: the inventor of the movie camera. But he gets that
Speaker 4: credit because he sued the shit out of everyone who
Speaker 4: tried to make a movie for fifteen years. Jesus right, right,
Speaker 4: So he puts patents on the movie camera. He puts
Speaker 4: patents on his stuff. And then and this is in
Speaker 4: New York. He's in New Jersey. Menlo Park famously is
Speaker 4: where his lab is. And what he starts doing other
Speaker 4: than making really really boring movies, he's a mid film producer.
Speaker 4: His movies are not that exciting. And at this point
Speaker 4: a movie is fifteen seconds to about a minute, often
Speaker 4: seen in a nickelodeon, like in a really small screen,
Speaker 4: or like in a small room. These are short films.
Speaker 4: Ninety nine percent of them are loss of time. Can't
Speaker 4: we can't even watch these movies, right. But one of
Speaker 4: the things that he would do is he, because he
Speaker 4: had the patent on movie cameras, anyone who tried to
Speaker 4: film a movie, he would sue them. So it's eventually
Speaker 4: too hard to maintain this. So what he did is
Speaker 4: he teamed up with the other large Independence and Eastman Kodak,
Speaker 4: and they formed a thing I think it's called the
Speaker 4: Motion Picture Company, which is unreferred to as the Trust,
Speaker 4: quote unquote, and the Trust just did this at scale.
Speaker 4: So now instead of it just being him fighting against
Speaker 4: his competitors, it's all the leading movie filmmakers, all the
Speaker 4: leading filmmakers, and the literal film company will come down
Speaker 4: sue you sometimes even beat you up and like and
Speaker 4: shatter your cameras if you if you try to make
Speaker 4: a movie without their permission, without a license from them,
Speaker 4: and without their equipment.
Speaker 2: Right, this is such a good system, by the way,
Speaker 2: Like I just like, like just the system of property rights,
Speaker 2: so good, no problems, he.
Speaker 4: Exactly, So what happens? So what happens? A bunch of
Speaker 4: filmmakers move to this new land development out in California
Speaker 4: called Hollywood. You know, it's nineteen oh seven. They're really
Speaker 4: far away from New Jersey lawyers at Edison goons, right,
Speaker 4: they're as far as possible. So Hollywood is founded by
Speaker 4: a bunch of movie pirates, basically, right.
Speaker 3: That's incredible.
Speaker 4: We're violating you know, Edison's copyright because they're sick of
Speaker 4: the of his of his legal harassment.
Speaker 3: So it's some real The mountains are high in the
Speaker 3: Emperor's far away shift.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, I mean exactly, literally, how far can we
Speaker 4: get away while still being on the continent, Like that's
Speaker 4: you know, let's do it from New Jersey, which, like
Speaker 4: many such cases, many people. Yeah, yeah, I can get
Speaker 4: that far away from New Jersey before. But uh, you know,
Speaker 4: so jumping forward into the classical Hollywood period are more
Speaker 4: familiar with. There are sort of five major studios and
Speaker 4: one of the ways that the major studios worked is
Speaker 4: that they had something called vertical integration, which is something
Speaker 4: we should all know about as we are living through
Speaker 4: times and monopolies. Amazon is a classic example of vertical integration,
Speaker 4: as is Google. What vertical integration means is that you
Speaker 4: own everything in the pipeline for movies. You have the
Speaker 4: offices where the producers work. You own the sound stage,
Speaker 4: you employ all the people who work on it, You
Speaker 4: employ the actors. You also then own the film that
Speaker 4: gets made. You own the cameras, You own the company
Speaker 4: that produces the film. Sometimes although those instas, they didn't
Speaker 4: always own those companies, those chemical companies. This is on board,
Speaker 4: but you know, and then you own the movie theater
Speaker 4: where it showed. Right, So like movie theaters before the forties,
Speaker 4: you would go to a RKO Pictures House. Arko is
Speaker 4: one of the early big ones, or a United Artists theater,
Speaker 4: and they would only show United Artists movies, right, so
Speaker 4: they would be an active competition with one another. So
Speaker 4: your neighborhood would have. You know, there'd be an MGM,
Speaker 4: there'd be an RKO, and you would go based on
Speaker 4: what movie was where. Then there's antitrust a done in
Speaker 4: the forties that breaks up these studios. The studio system
Speaker 4: sort of slowly collapses. They also then loses a lot
Speaker 4: of market share to television. This is a really pot
Speaker 4: into history, but I'm trying to give it as much
Speaker 4: as possible. So basically, so by the sixties or seventies,
Speaker 4: what you have is a lot of independent producers. So
Speaker 4: the studios just become a brand and a sort of
Speaker 4: pot of money and often a sound stage. They keep
Speaker 4: the sound stages right. But then like distribution, becomes independent actors,
Speaker 4: and like directors, they all are independent. They all have agents, right.
Speaker 4: It used to be that they would be hired by
Speaker 4: a company and they would just work for that company.
Speaker 4: That's why you know classical Hollywood director would make like
Speaker 4: sixty movies because they would just churn them out. They
Speaker 4: would just be like directing them. Show up, do it
Speaker 4: for two weeks, show up on the next one, do
Speaker 4: for two weeks, et cetera. Just the studio system. So
Speaker 4: then by the sixties and seventies, it's starting to look
Speaker 4: more like what you have now, which is the studios
Speaker 4: are basically they're the homes of all the producers, the
Speaker 4: producers and people who connect the money and the talent,
Speaker 4: you know, and put it altogether and package a deal
Speaker 4: then market it right, and that process. It seems like
Speaker 4: it's sort of a losing proposition. The business isn't doing
Speaker 4: super well until the emergence of the blockbuster with Star Wars, right, so,
Speaker 4: Star Wars and Jaws and a bunch of other movies
Speaker 4: in the seventies. We're going so fast right now and
Speaker 4: trying my best, but I'm sorry, this.
Speaker 3: Is no e'ree.
Speaker 2: This is like I was like, here, let's talk about
Speaker 2: like one hundred and fifty years of history.
Speaker 4: So anyways, with the emergence of the blockbusters, one of
Speaker 4: the other things that happens is that the way blockbusters
Speaker 4: work is that they are released everywhere in the country
Speaker 4: at once. Film comes on used to come on literal
Speaker 4: physical objects, and you can only have so many and
Speaker 4: they can only be so many places at once, right.
Speaker 4: So the way film used to work is they would
Speaker 4: make a certain number of film reels if they thought
Speaker 4: it was going to be big. There was a star,
Speaker 4: but the studio was always gambling on how many how
Speaker 4: big it would be, how many people would pick it up,
Speaker 4: and then they had to sell it to the movie theaters, right,
Speaker 4: and then the films would circulate when they did well
Speaker 4: the print more so, movies would circulate for like a year, right,
Speaker 4: two years sometimes even. But with Star Wars and the
Speaker 4: day and date system that we have now, what they
Speaker 4: started doing was just putting it in every movie theater
Speaker 4: in the country. You also get the emergence of multiplexes,
Speaker 4: white flight in the suburbs. I'm really going faster up trying.
Speaker 4: But the result is that movies get both more potentially valuable,
Speaker 4: but that value gets more and more concentrated in the
Speaker 4: early period of the release, right in the early window.
Speaker 4: Opening weekend was not very meaningful until the eighties really,
Speaker 4: you know, late seventies, early eighties. As that happens, do
Speaker 4: you suddenly need more financing and you can make more
Speaker 4: money off of bigger gambles. Simultaneously, the rest of the
Speaker 4: economy is going through financialization, right, which is a process
Speaker 4: that you've talked about on the show before.
Speaker 3: I can't get into that, but yeah, we can't.
Speaker 4: And then Reagan deregulates everything, right, Reagan refts a part
Speaker 4: of the FCC in many ways, deregulates media ownership stuff.
Speaker 4: This is a big move. And then across the eighties
Speaker 4: the home market opened, so you start getting VCRs and
Speaker 4: this completely transforms the business another time, because movies can
Speaker 4: flop in the theater, but you can guarantee rentals, right,
Speaker 4: So so for like the eighties and the nineties, the
Speaker 4: big studios kind of could print money because it was
Speaker 4: pretty hard to lose money on a movie. Now the
Speaker 4: people who lost money on movies were like, you know,
Speaker 4: dentists from the Midwest who they get to invest and
Speaker 4: they'd be like, oh yeah, you need sorry, like those
Speaker 4: arcane deals. People still got rinsed. Obviously it was Hollywood.
Speaker 4: It was shady as well. But as so with the
Speaker 4: deregulation and with all this money flowing and with the
Speaker 4: integration of the home market, suddenly technology companies like Sony
Speaker 4: and the emergence of of like Lucasfilms that they also
Speaker 4: get really into computers. Lucas Turgeocus famously is into like
Speaker 4: the computer side of the business. All these different technologies
Speaker 4: get brought into the cinema at the same time as
Speaker 4: you get to see regulated, so companies start snatching up
Speaker 4: these other film studios, right and so, where once there
Speaker 4: were five studios, and then the same season seventies, you
Speaker 4: actually got a ton of independent studios, a lot of
Speaker 4: really small ones, and they start getting gobbled up by
Speaker 4: these bigger conglomerates. You know, Sony is the one that
Speaker 4: was also a mega corp in the eighties already that
Speaker 4: that would eventually go on to own to buy out
Speaker 4: a bunch of movie companies. The same thing is happening
Speaker 4: though with radio with TV. The main thing that happens
Speaker 4: under the SEC regulation stuff is that they loosen up
Speaker 4: whether a movie studio can own a TV studio. They
Speaker 4: used to be fully separate. And then and and broadcast
Speaker 4: rules changed. Broadcast rules changed, so studios could own a
Speaker 4: movie theater or you could own a movie company, a
Speaker 4: radio station and a TV station.
Speaker 3: All oh good God.
Speaker 4: And as you can imagine, that is how things started
Speaker 4: to alerate. You get like the ABC Disney merger in
Speaker 4: the late eighties, NBC Universal mergers and acquisitions become the
Speaker 4: big thing. You know, the stock market is booming. Then
Speaker 4: you get other big corps buying them out. And then
Speaker 4: we're just in the classic phase of consolidation where bigger
Speaker 4: and bigger fish eat up the small ones.
Speaker 2: And this is how I guess importantly for this story,
Speaker 2: suddenly like all of the television news media is owned
Speaker 2: by these giant ass movie companies, which exactly, surely.
Speaker 3: That's like we'll go wrong.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, we and we come to you here from
Speaker 4: iHeart Radio, which you know is a lovely.
Speaker 3: Bread of kind of making.
Speaker 2: We are iHeart Media, Okay, excuse me, a technically distinct company,
Speaker 2: I think. Actually, don't ask me to explain exactly how
Speaker 2: that whole right I heard media I Heart Radio split works.
Speaker 4: But exactly, you know, so media consolidation, this is you know,
Speaker 4: consolidation is the story of capitalism famously right like that,
Speaker 4: Like you know, an industry builds, lots of new entrepreneurs
Speaker 4: come into the space, people figure out what's possible with
Speaker 4: the industry, has more and more money flows in, a
Speaker 4: few winners come and consolidate. We've seen it happen in
Speaker 4: tech as well. But yeah, it has particularly perverse effects
Speaker 4: when we're talking about the visual culture, the audio culture,
Speaker 4: and the news media. The way information is spread all,
Speaker 4: so I wouldn't you know, I would argue that the
Speaker 4: effects are still pretty perverse from the way social media
Speaker 4: and tech giants have control things. I think that's pretty
Speaker 4: pretty obvious.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, it is extremely bad, I would say, you might.
Speaker 4: Say it's extremely bad. You know, a lot of people
Speaker 4: are very upset about the news that David Ellison, who
Speaker 4: is the NEPO baby to end all net bo babies,
Speaker 4: because he's not a Hollywood netbo baby. He's not the
Speaker 4: son of a previous He's just the son of a
Speaker 4: rich guy who wanted to be in movies. So he
Speaker 4: bought his way into like acting roles, and then he
Speaker 4: like just threw money around until he got sky Danced Global,
Speaker 4: which is this company that you know, he's been in
Speaker 4: Hollywood for ten years. Technically he's like an experienced producer.
Speaker 4: This man is forty three years old, which for like,
Speaker 4: you know, the CEO of a billion you know, he
Speaker 4: started with a generous loan from Daddy Larry. Let's just say.
Speaker 4: And yeah, you know, I think people are very upset
Speaker 4: obviously because he's a Trump ally, right, the Allison's or
Speaker 4: Trump allies. He has literally said I'm gonna make more
Speaker 4: right Wing movies, you know, like you know, the Daily
Speaker 4: Daily Wire. You know, they were all washing out, but
Speaker 4: now they'll probably have contracts or whatever. You know, who knows,
Speaker 4: Like it's going to be money. But a lot of
Speaker 4: people are also saying that this is just for CNN,
Speaker 4: and that's actually not true. So a thing that is
Speaker 4: important to know is that the cable part of this
Speaker 4: deal Netflix was going to spin off the cable. The
Speaker 4: Discovery channel at CNN was going to spin off all
Speaker 4: the cable. So if he just wanted CNN, he could
Speaker 4: have waited for the Netflix deal to go through, and
Speaker 4: he could have just bought it on the market for
Speaker 4: a steal. Because the thing about cable is it's losing
Speaker 4: money if you look at Okay, this is a really
Speaker 4: dark fact and I apologies everyone, but if you look
Speaker 4: at the rate of cable subscription costs, if you look
Speaker 4: at a meta aggregate data of it, the price of
Speaker 4: the annual subscription to cable goes up by the distributed
Speaker 4: out of the previous years subscription costs that were lost.
Speaker 3: By boomers dying Jesus Christ.
Speaker 4: So basically, it is a literally dying It is a
Speaker 4: literally dying market. The only people who still pay for
Speaker 4: cable other than institutional forces are like people above sixty
Speaker 4: and they're just literally dying, and the price goes up
Speaker 4: as more and more of them dying. It is, it
Speaker 4: is over as a business cable. Even ESPN. Disney is
Speaker 4: trying to get rid of ESPN, right, Even sports are
Speaker 4: valueless now, not valueless, I means some billions of dollars obviously,
Speaker 4: but to.
Speaker 2: These yeah, yeah, you know, if you look at what
Speaker 2: ESPN's like trying to do about this, they're like just
Speaker 2: turning into an influencer factory, yeah, with just like rich
Speaker 2: eyes and then like all these fucking unhinged dipshits exactly.
Speaker 4: So anyway, so people are pretty like despairing about it
Speaker 4: because I think it's about CNN. But if it was
Speaker 4: just about CNN, like I said, they could have just
Speaker 4: waited and gotten it for a song. David Ellison really
Speaker 4: thinks he's a he's cosplaying as a movie producer, but
Speaker 4: because he has so much money, he's succeeding. Yeah, of
Speaker 4: the movies. He's pretty that you might like, although I
Speaker 4: didn't like it, and a lot of people like top
Speaker 4: Gun Maverick like it's fun.
Speaker 2: I guess, like everything about that movie. Suddenly just like
Speaker 2: clicks into focus.
Speaker 4: It's like, yeah, oh, I just want you to know
Speaker 4: that Top Gun Maverick is the greatest work of art
Speaker 4: that he produced by some extreme margin. This guy's responsible
Speaker 4: for Terminators five and six that would be a dark
Speaker 4: Fate and Genesis. Oh no. He produced on Geostorm, which
Speaker 4: you may remember came too late to capitalize on the
Speaker 4: disaster thing. In twenty seventeen, he made the Gemini Man movie,
Speaker 4: which is what Will Smith fought Will Smith with weird
Speaker 4: yet aging technology.
Speaker 3: Oh I remember seeing TV correction.
Speaker 4: It kind of killed Will Smith's marketability as a star.
Speaker 4: Like that was kind of the film like after Earthly Chad.
Speaker 4: But he's responsible for ending Will Smith. He did this
Speaker 4: the Spy Kids reboot which my Kids Armageddon from twenty twelve.
Speaker 4: Way no, this guy Jesus has made just really bad movies.
Speaker 2: All of these weird right wing people are all like
Speaker 2: the thing they want to do is make movies. This
Speaker 2: is like what's like killing the Daily Wire is that
Speaker 2: they decided to be a movie company and it turns
Speaker 2: out they can't make movies. But it's like this guy
Speaker 2: is like what if you had that but backed by
Speaker 2: like the entire tech capital apparatus, and your dad was
Speaker 2: fucking Larry Ellison, the Oracle guy, like one of the
Speaker 2: richest test fascists who's ever lived.
Speaker 4: Then you can do it. Then you can just buy
Speaker 4: yourself a movie studio, and you can do it because
Speaker 4: the thing movies need is money.
Speaker 2: And then you can keep buying all their movie studios.
Speaker 4: But and this is a bit contrarian. I'm not sure
Speaker 4: that this is worse for movies than Netflix getting it,
Speaker 4: because Netflix would have likely sabotaged what was remaining of
Speaker 4: WB's theatrical business model, right, Like, Netflix doesn't like the
Speaker 4: theater now, they've been trying to get into theatrical because
Speaker 4: that's like, you know, it's cash on the table. You know,
Speaker 4: it's how you build. It's the greatest marketing on earth. Right,
Speaker 4: And you when you have a big hit film, then
Speaker 4: that's a franchise. You get TV shows, you get theme parks,
Speaker 4: you get you know, lunch boxes, you know, toys, t shirts,
Speaker 4: you get resales, you get a reboot ten years down
Speaker 4: the line, right, you get licensing. So they want that.
Speaker 4: But but Netflix is really, i mean, they hate movies.
Speaker 4: Netflix literally has a production design a design philosophy of
Speaker 4: making movies that are designed for people who aren't looking
Speaker 4: at them, so that the characters say what they're doing.
Speaker 4: I mean, there's a big article that came out about
Speaker 4: this a few weeks ago, Like, yeah, Netflix is a
Speaker 4: nightmare company, so it's a real it's a real Cilly
Speaker 4: in Caribtis kind of situation. Yeah, right, Like you've got
Speaker 4: this fascist creep, but at least he like really thinks
Speaker 4: he likes movies, you know, Like I don't know anyway,
Speaker 4: the plaint being people are very upset about this news
Speaker 4: because it's happened to you because he's a Trump Ally,
Speaker 4: there's this political angle they were making all this noise,
Speaker 4: they were begging Trump to do it. Y'all are thirty
Speaker 4: years late to this being a problem, Like I'm not
Speaker 4: trying to be like I'm not trying to be like
Speaker 4: that whatever, Like no, yeah, but we are well, but
Speaker 4: like having three movie studios instead of two, like you're
Speaker 4: already doing pretty bad. Like in the thirties, as I
Speaker 4: gave you in that little pot of history, in the thirties,
Speaker 4: Hollywood was so brutally integrated that they literally the federal
Speaker 4: government literally broke it apart. At the height, at the
Speaker 4: height of the studio system, the biggest company at the time,
Speaker 4: which I believe was MGM, was the big studio controlled
Speaker 4: eighteen percent of the market of the film market, which
Speaker 4: is massive. I mean the market of anything. Eighteen percent
Speaker 4: of my market is obscene hideous. Yeah, Disney in a
Speaker 4: bunch of the past years has run forty percent of
Speaker 4: the market worldwide, worldwide. Not so like we are already
Speaker 4: at this level of concentration, like the fact that it
Speaker 4: keeps going, Like, yes, it does mean there will be
Speaker 4: fewer and fewer movies, It does mean more layoffs. It
Speaker 4: means things are getting worse. But you know, we've been here,
Speaker 4: you know what I'm saying. Yeah, I think it's actually
Speaker 4: only thirty seven percent.
Speaker 3: Thirty seven Oh wow wow, yeah, three percent.
Speaker 4: Sorry, I'm sorry about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, And this is something I think gets back to
Speaker 2: one of the sort of political answers that I've been
Speaker 2: seeing to this is like, you know, this return from
Speaker 2: kind of like the left of the Democratic Party to
Speaker 2: being like, oh, we should talk about like anti monopoly
Speaker 2: and we should do like trust busting again. It's like probably, yeah,
Speaker 2: but we did this right, Like we did this we
Speaker 2: got rid of the.
Speaker 3: Monopolies and then they came back. It's like, this is
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 2: This is this is the problem is that this is
Speaker 2: this is basically a structural problem of capital is this
Speaker 2: kind of resolidation. And you can break up the monopolies,
Speaker 2: but they'll just reform. It requires you to win the
Speaker 2: battle forever. And all the monopolies have to do is
Speaker 2: get like one fascist elected or get like like all.
Speaker 3: They need is one Ronald Reagan and you just lose everything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like, okay, like this this is a problem
Speaker 2: that can't be solved just by tinkering on the edges
Speaker 2: of the system. You have to actually destroy the conditions
Speaker 2: that make it possible. And those are regulatory conditions. Those
Speaker 2: are hold on why are people allowed to own this shit?
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think that's exactly right. And I think,
Speaker 4: you know, one of the things about monopoly of the station,
Speaker 4: which is famous, one of the things that even capitalists
Speaker 4: don't like about monopolies is that the quality goes down. Famous, Yeah, right,
Speaker 4: because you don't you don't know, you don't have to
Speaker 4: compete whatever, there's literally no reason to try and make
Speaker 4: the product good. But like, one of the things about
Speaker 4: the concentration of IP, and like one of the things
Speaker 4: that's like sort of scary about it's consolidation in general.
Speaker 4: And this is the fact that's really important to understand.
Speaker 4: When you own a bucket of intellectual property. Let's say
Speaker 4: you own Sesame Street, right, which is one that's not owned.
Speaker 4: So it's a good example to use because it's weird
Speaker 4: when you own Sesame Street, and if you start to
Speaker 4: make products of Sesame Street, it means that every idea
Speaker 4: that isn't Sesame Street but threatens to become more popular
Speaker 4: than Sesame Street is a threat. So it is if
Speaker 4: you own, if you own enough IP, it is in
Speaker 4: your logical material interest to stop new ideas from being made,
Speaker 4: because every new idea is competition. If you own the
Speaker 4: back catalog of Bob Dylan, for as like some of
Speaker 4: these investment firms, do you think he's I think he
Speaker 4: has sold to Hypnosis or one of these big there
Speaker 4: are these big music investment firms that own the rights
Speaker 4: to all of these old songs. If you guys, If
Speaker 4: y'all remember in twenty eighteen twenty nineteen, all movie trailers
Speaker 4: suddenly started having weird sad girl covers of like sixties
Speaker 4: and seventies pop songs. Do you remember this era? Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: the sad utograph and I was just like what happened
Speaker 4: in like Hollywood, was there like some weird trend. No,
Speaker 4: what happened was these investment firms got hold of it,
Speaker 4: and if they can release a new cover version of
Speaker 4: a song, they hit the property rights twice, so they
Speaker 4: get it on the new they get it on the
Speaker 4: new play, and then people go back to the old
Speaker 4: ones they're reminded of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because it's worse too, because the.
Speaker 4: God and and this is only possible because of the
Speaker 4: way that the streaming services got consolidated and that they
Speaker 4: pay per play, because pay per play, as everyone knows,
Speaker 4: completely screws artists. There's just no way to make any
Speaker 4: money off that. But if you own a massive library
Speaker 4: like the UM, like the BMG or Sony Universal, if
Speaker 4: you own a library like that, you do nothing and
Speaker 4: you make billions a year, right, so it becomes this permanent,
Speaker 4: perfect rent that you never have to worry about. So
Speaker 4: all you have to do is buy enough musical IP
Speaker 4: and then try and get new artists who are hot
Speaker 4: to cover your old ip. So this is like this
Speaker 4: really weird esoteric seeming. You know, it's bailed on the
Speaker 4: division between particular recording uh copyrights and the copyrights of
Speaker 4: like individual song of the songwriting. It's like built on
Speaker 4: the sort of weird esoteric structure of intellectual property law,
Speaker 4: which like when you start talking about it, people's eyes
Speaker 4: literally roll in the back of their head, right like
Speaker 4: a daisy. They fall over in a daisy popstup like
Speaker 4: the cartoon. They're just dead. That's not interesting. But like
Speaker 4: because of that, for five years, when you went to
Speaker 4: the grocery store, you would be in a weird, uncanny
Speaker 4: valley where you were hearing a song that you thought
Speaker 4: you recognized but was like slightly different.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Right, So the entire material structure of the world, like
Speaker 4: the psychic structure of the world, gets transformed by these
Speaker 4: weird exploits over like financial loopholes by the worst people
Speaker 4: on earth, whose goal is to never let you hear
Speaker 4: a new song, right, Like they'd never want you to
Speaker 4: hear new music again. They just want the boomer tracks
Speaker 4: to play forever with like new versions by you know,
Speaker 4: like they just want Charlie XCX to record fucking Jefferson Airplane,
Speaker 4: Like that's there, that's their wettest dream, you know, and
Speaker 4: all that shit is going on in the background of
Speaker 4: your life, right, Like, I mean it's not, it's it's
Speaker 4: but it's affecting the psycha atmosphere. It's producing nostalgia, it's
Speaker 4: producing all these affects that are rife for fascism. It
Speaker 4: makes people want to go back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like, Okay, what happened the last time we
Speaker 2: saw like the completely unhinged like concentration of all capitals,
Speaker 2: some monopolies. It's like, well, all that capital was liquidated
Speaker 2: by World War Two. There was World War One as
Speaker 2: well too, right, these were both to a larger extent.
Speaker 2: And this is something that you know, if you go
Speaker 2: back and read anyone who's doing any political analysis about
Speaker 2: World War One in the lead up to it and
Speaker 2: as it's happening, the thing everyone is talking about is
Speaker 2: is the consolidation monopoly capital. And I think you can
Speaker 2: argue maybe that the early eighteen hundreds had like a
Speaker 2: larger consolidation just in the sense of, like I'm questionable
Speaker 2: as to whether this is just because it's too expensive
Speaker 2: to literally run a country, but like we haven't quite
Speaker 2: returned to like the East India company has an army
Speaker 2: and they conquer countries periodically.
Speaker 3: But like I think it's just because that's too expensive
Speaker 3: and you'd rather just to the state.
Speaker 4: But it's less farther than you think, less far than
Speaker 4: your thing, because yeah, the part of the way that
Speaker 4: it outsources to the state, and this is in this
Speaker 4: is this is all stuffer from my upcoming book which
Speaker 4: you can preorder.
Speaker 3: Now, that's true.
Speaker 4: The World Trade Organization. One of the things that it
Speaker 4: did when you joined the WTO, and this was done
Speaker 4: by lobbyists, mostly film and pharma and chemical lobbyists from
Speaker 4: the US sense, if you join the WTO, you have
Speaker 4: to accept you don't not only have to accept their
Speaker 4: copyright and piracy law, you have to agree to build
Speaker 4: copyright courts and copyright police in your country Jesus Christ,
Speaker 4: so that if say Apple sees you making a fake iPhone,
Speaker 4: they have a literal legal procedure domestic to your country
Speaker 4: to force you to stop. To smutch those pricis. Major
Speaker 4: corporations can get police in Vietnam to go in and
Speaker 4: light a warehouse on fire because it's full of faked goods,
Speaker 4: like without ever leaving the US right, So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: the company's more contigutive through these world trade organizations.
Speaker 2: Well, they did the order liberal thing of where we're
Speaker 2: using the supra state apparatus to negate the sovereignty of
Speaker 2: the state by creating the super state which we run.
Speaker 4: Yes, so I mean I'm obviously interested in the ip
Speaker 4: and the cultural angle. This is the only law like
Speaker 4: this in any of these agreements. All the rest of
Speaker 4: the trade agreements, like they can negotiate. But like, part
Speaker 4: of what's so obscene about Trump's tariffs is that the
Speaker 4: US already had this. It was called the Priority watch List.
Speaker 4: They just have this list in the White House where
Speaker 4: they could just say you're not doing a good job
Speaker 4: enough stopping piracy, and it gives the White House unilateral
Speaker 4: capacity to create trade embargoes on people without going to Congress.
Speaker 4: Like this was all the tariffs, which also hurt your
Speaker 4: economy obviously, but even if they worked the way Trump
Speaker 4: imagines they do, like he already had that power and
Speaker 4: like other presidents have been using it for decades. Big
Speaker 4: visible sanctions what they put on Iran or Venezuela are
Speaker 4: a much more dramatic upscale, but the Priority watch List
Speaker 4: they can just threaten to upgrade you from on the
Speaker 4: watch list to a priority country on that and you
Speaker 4: will watch countries fold entirely on trade policy, Like it's crazy. So,
Speaker 4: like one of the things that's interesting about this moment
Speaker 4: and about the Trumpet moment is that they're ripping apart
Speaker 4: their own infrastructure. Yeah, because they literally just don't understand
Speaker 4: how it works.
Speaker 2: No, it's it's like that you headed to an aircraft
Speaker 2: carrier and they're ripping out the copper wires and trying
Speaker 2: to sell it, and it's.
Speaker 3: Like, you have an aircraft carrier, what are we doing?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: God, exactly.
Speaker 4: You know. So again, like I think there is this
Speaker 4: talk about the consolidation of culture, and I think, like,
Speaker 4: you know, people like the Ellison's are just they're just
Speaker 4: vulgar at it. Yeah, Like the thing is, like Mike
Speaker 4: Eisner was better at it. Like Bob Iger is, who
Speaker 4: is the CEO of Disney currently other he's about to
Speaker 4: step down. Bob Iger saw them through the acquisition of
Speaker 4: Marvel and Star Wars and all that. He is an
Speaker 4: incredible I mean, you know, or whatever his team and
Speaker 4: he himself is a pretty unimpressive guy. But like, you know,
Speaker 4: like other than internal politics, which is what all CEOs
Speaker 4: are good at anyway. You know, like these these these
Speaker 4: companies were already good at this, and like what has
Speaker 4: happened is that a wing of the capitalists who are
Speaker 4: really bad at it and really resentful because they're all
Speaker 4: sort of like the David Allison's in the world. They're
Speaker 4: all the resentful fail sons of wealth who you know,
Speaker 4: they want more power and more respect and they don't
Speaker 4: appreciate how much their shit is already built on the
Speaker 4: very thing they claim to want to do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, and I guess it is to some extent
Speaker 2: a kind of funny, like the election to Trump and
Speaker 2: also just sort of Ellison just like devouring this is
Speaker 2: what it is, like Third Studio that he's eaten in
Speaker 2: like five years, and like all all these forces being
Speaker 2: devoured by this. This is like well, yeah, like this
Speaker 2: is what happens when you set up a system like this.
Speaker 2: Eventually there's going to be a bigger fish who's just
Speaker 2: going to devour you because they have, for example, Oracle
Speaker 2: behind them, which is just an amount of capital that
Speaker 2: like outside of like Disney, you can't have that kind
Speaker 2: of capital, right, And like with Trump, it's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you find you finally created a monster that is large
Speaker 2: enough to shatter the extremely delicate and complicated system that
Speaker 2: you did.
Speaker 3: And it's also just doesn't understand it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. And I think, like, if you want to
Speaker 4: see what the future of Hollywood looks like, I mean,
Speaker 4: you know, you can go worse than to look at China. Right,
Speaker 4: China is the most dynamic film market. It overtook the
Speaker 4: US as the number one value of the box office
Speaker 4: in twenty twenty two. I think I think it did
Speaker 4: in twenty twenty one, but that was still COVID shutdown
Speaker 4: affected ye twenty two or twenty twenty three. China became
Speaker 4: an actual the actual plurality of ticket sales in the
Speaker 4: world by dollar, if not by number. By numbers, they've
Speaker 4: already long surpassed the US.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But the way that Chinese film companies work is like
Speaker 4: they're all pretty nakedly financial companies like ten Cent and
Speaker 4: Ali Baba, right, and like like these are companies they're
Speaker 4: just already from other sectors and they're just like we
Speaker 4: have cash, we use the cash to make movie, yeah,
Speaker 4: which is what the studios always did too. Right. I
Speaker 4: want to be really clear, like I don't want to romanticize,
Speaker 4: but like you know, that's where it always was, right,
Speaker 4: And it's just that like in the turn of the
Speaker 4: century when Hollywood was being made, industries were just more divided. Yeah,
Speaker 4: the reason to talk about all of this business stuff
Speaker 4: on some level, I mean, it's interesting on its own
Speaker 4: as history, it's interesting as a critique of capitalism. But
Speaker 4: I think it's also interesting because it affects the aesthetics,
Speaker 4: like of what the movies that get made, right. And
Speaker 4: I think when we think about when people think about
Speaker 4: fascist propaganda, you know, we think about the Nazis, right, obviously,
Speaker 4: because the Nazis had the longest running fascist propaganda machine
Speaker 4: in the world. They had the Ministry of Culture under
Speaker 4: your Gerbils, right. And I think when we talk about
Speaker 4: Nazi propaganda, we think about trying for the will, and
Speaker 4: we think about stuff like Juden's right, like extremely horrifying
Speaker 4: anti Semitic bullshit, extremely horrifying anti Semitic movies. There were
Speaker 4: two of them in the ten years that Gerbels ran
Speaker 4: the UFA, which is the film company that made movies
Speaker 4: for Germany. The vast majority, the vast majority of films
Speaker 4: under the life were frothy comedies and musicals and adventure
Speaker 4: stories because the principle that Gerbels operated on was called
Speaker 4: the orchestra principle, and he believed that you should just
Speaker 4: actually art should just be reduced to creating feelings. It
Speaker 4: should be totally de intellectualized, and then very little of
Speaker 4: that art remains. Those movies are mid. You know. The
Speaker 4: movies made by Utha are not good, like even the
Speaker 4: ones that are not offensive. They're just mid. But they
Speaker 4: all do the same thing. They all work together around
Speaker 4: a principle of certain principles around family and romantic love
Speaker 4: and domestic life, most of it inoffensive in and of itself.
Speaker 4: And so I think when we think about Ellison taking over,
Speaker 4: I think we imagine, you know, as we were joking
Speaker 4: about at the beginning, shit like the Ellie Wire, anti
Speaker 4: woke Cinderella or whatever the fuck. Yeah, and I allowed
Speaker 4: to cuss. I'm doing so.
Speaker 1: Much of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I tour all the time. Okay, thank god we
Speaker 3: are not regulated by the FCC.
Speaker 4: Let's go no one these days.
Speaker 2: I mean, I guess we technically are, but we're we're
Speaker 2: not under the radio regulation, so we can say whatever
Speaker 2: we want.
Speaker 4: Perfect love that, but like fascist filmmaking has not looked
Speaker 4: like that for the most part in the history of it.
Speaker 4: Fascist filmmaking looks like family adventure fair often. And I
Speaker 4: think we have been so blinded to the way that
Speaker 4: this happens that we imagine that Allison taking over is
Speaker 4: suddenly going to mean that now there's gonna be fascist
Speaker 4: movies in theaters. But like, have y'all been to the movies? Yes,
Speaker 4: Like have you all seen what Warderwrollers did with like
Speaker 4: the Snyder verse, Like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like, did you did you watch The Beekeeper?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: Speaking of Netflix, Like that was the most fascist movie
Speaker 2: I have.
Speaker 3: Ever seen exactly.
Speaker 2: It is literally it is a movie that is just
Speaker 2: a guy shooting a bunch of people, and then the
Speaker 2: background superstructure is an explanation of what the furor is,
Speaker 2: which is like the force that is outside of the order,
Speaker 2: that is able to violate the rules of the order
Speaker 2: in order to in order to create the order itself.
Speaker 2: Except it's a guy called the bee Keeper and he
Speaker 2: just shoots people like.
Speaker 4: It's it's that's pretty bad.
Speaker 3: That's like that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I did not watch that one, and I like, state.
Speaker 3: It's really unhinged. I watched it with my family nightmare.
Speaker 3: Holy shit, it's going insane.
Speaker 4: Yeah, things are so bad that Like there was a movie,
Speaker 4: Nobody with Bob Odenkirk that came out in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 4: and it was basically a parody of those like Liam Neeson,
Speaker 4: you know, the John Wick movies and like Liam Neeson
Speaker 4: like Dad then taking stuff right, Yeah, and it was
Speaker 4: a parody you maybe you could be clued in by
Speaker 4: the fact that it was Bob Odenkirk and it was
Speaker 4: fillsed with comedians. Maybe you could be clued in by
Speaker 4: the fact that he's fighting because they took his daughter's
Speaker 4: Hello Kitty bracelet. Like there's a pretty like dry, but
Speaker 4: it's a dry plays a very dry.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Every single professional film critic reviewed it like it was
Speaker 4: dead serious, like Bob was to become the next Liam Neesen.
Speaker 4: And part of that is because they shot good action sequences,
Speaker 4: Like he did a good job with the satire. But
Speaker 4: then what happens, what happened next is that now there's
Speaker 4: a Nobody too, and it's completely forgotten the joke and
Speaker 4: it's not good either.
Speaker 3: So like Jesus Christ, Yeah, and Bob won and.
Speaker 4: Kirk just like he had this one window where he
Speaker 4: could really sell that, he couldn't sell it in this sequel.
Speaker 4: It doesn't matter.
Speaker 3: It's it's the Doorhead sequels right exactly.
Speaker 4: But like we're just in a time of extreme literalism,
Speaker 4: where like everything is really really like script driven. It's
Speaker 4: really on its face, it's really textual. Everything is just
Speaker 4: selling something else. Everything can possibly be sequel. Nothing really changes,
Speaker 4: politics only exists as bureaucracy. These are all deeply fascist concepts.
Speaker 4: They're just more subtle than goose stepping SS, you know
Speaker 4: for it. You know. Yeah, part of what's so funny
Speaker 4: about The Daily Wire is it's like like they come
Speaker 4: for Disney, like you can't do anything to make them
Speaker 4: more fascist pop Like Disney entertains people and makes the
Speaker 4: fascist populous. Like they're just bad filmmakers and that kind
Speaker 4: of matters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there is a chance that like I
Speaker 2: don't know, Ellison is such a dumb ass that he
Speaker 2: just tries to do it anyways, Like he just tries
Speaker 2: to be like fuck it. Well even then, like he
Speaker 2: hasn't really made like a stereotype of Nazi movies. He's
Speaker 2: made like actual Nazi movies. Just to say, the fucking
Speaker 2: top gunn Baverrick.
Speaker 4: And people loved Top the Mavericks. People were like, yeah,
Speaker 4: I guess it's maybe kind of a problem about it,
Speaker 4: like but we love you know. It's like that movie
Speaker 4: is like literally propaganda for the Air Force. Like I
Speaker 4: thought it was fun. Yeah, don't get me wrong, but
Speaker 4: like people are have been really trained to not see
Speaker 4: that stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's like we're like now fighting the war
Speaker 2: at that movie was propaganda for yes, exactly, like we
Speaker 2: literally we literally are fighting.
Speaker 3: We've made it to road like or we're bombed a
Speaker 3: ride at all.
Speaker 4: That fifteens went down so the first time of the
Speaker 4: Gulf War.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because they got shut down by Allies Air defenses.
Speaker 4: You know what, we didn't have Maverick, we didn't have
Speaker 4: Tom Cruise training them. And that's what Allison's gonna do.
Speaker 4: That's why I'm happy he's merging it, because our brave
Speaker 4: boys and the Skies are going to be safer.
Speaker 3: God.
Speaker 4: So yeah, anyways, I don't know where I'm going with
Speaker 4: this because obviously things are bad and anyone betting against
Speaker 4: things getting worse over the last ten years has lost
Speaker 4: their pants, right, But things can get worse. But like,
Speaker 4: also there is the actual object, the actual film object exists,
Speaker 4: and like part of what has been hard about Hollywood,
Speaker 4: the reason they have built these monopoly structures, the reason
Speaker 4: they've built these pea structures, is because because audiences are fickle,
Speaker 4: and that's annoying, and you can't just like force stuff
Speaker 4: down their throats and they're not gonna like buy something
Speaker 4: for sure every time, and you have to sort of
Speaker 4: seduce them, right like, it's it's you have to you
Speaker 4: have to make something they want to see. Right The
Speaker 4: MCU was unstoppable until it stopped, and now no one
Speaker 4: likes it and it's really annoying, right like, and they
Speaker 4: still make their money back on the MCU, like they're
Speaker 4: doing fine. No, do not play a violin for for
Speaker 4: Kevin Feige. He's doing fine. You know, he's crying on
Speaker 4: his third shot, you know. But like, but so, I
Speaker 4: guess what I'm saying is that, like, is that like,
Speaker 4: as we enter into more and more naked versions of this,
Speaker 4: what it should help us do you, rather than think,
Speaker 4: oh my god, all is lost, is to reflect on
Speaker 4: how we got here already. How often we were already
Speaker 4: here under liberalism, under Biden, under just regular capitalist conditions.
Speaker 4: How often we've already been here, reevaluate the way we
Speaker 4: think about what good culture could look like, and then
Speaker 4: start to move.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I want to come back to something I said
Speaker 2: a few years ago when we did a show with
Speaker 2: Gare about the People's Joker, and.
Speaker 4: I saw on the TV glow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I saw it.
Speaker 2: I was about to say, the one about the egg
Speaker 2: has the bad ending and never transitions.
Speaker 4: Yes, the horror of you about not transitioning yet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, I think there is an extent to which,
Speaker 2: you know, there was a really brief attempt to sort
Speaker 2: of sublimate transness into film for like one year. But
Speaker 2: you know, like we are the people who've been spat
Speaker 2: out of this, but also trans people are making movies
Speaker 2: at a rate that has never happened before. Ever, There's
Speaker 2: never been anything like it. And you know, like the
Speaker 2: Wachowskis like have a studio now where they're pumping out
Speaker 2: a bunch of trans movies, and like, you know, we're
Speaker 2: getting like Manhunter, and we're getting like a whole bunch
Speaker 2: of other stuff. And you know, the thing I said
Speaker 2: a few years ago I think is even more desperate
Speaker 2: and true now is that, like transfilm is one of
Speaker 2: the last things, fighting for the existence of film as
Speaker 2: a medium and not as a way to sell you
Speaker 2: toys and like fifteen dollars popcorn.
Speaker 4: Hey, they also tell you all expenses paid, vacations, you
Speaker 4: have to go into debt for it. Okay, it's good. Yeah,
Speaker 4: good support trans film, support local film. And the thing
Speaker 4: about movies is that movies are bad. But the other
Speaker 4: thing is that movies are good. So it's hard.
Speaker 3: The dialectic emotion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Look, I will say this, there has been
Speaker 2: for many thousands of years a second dialectic operating. And
Speaker 2: then it's a dialectic between labor and capital. That's probably
Speaker 2: I probably backdated capital too far, but you know, fuck it,
Speaker 2: I don't know. We could resolve We could resolve movies
Speaker 2: good in movies bad by resolving the other dialectic of
Speaker 2: capital and labor, by simply destroying the categories and ending
Speaker 2: the class system. I believe in us we can make
Speaker 2: a movie good again. Movie has never been good. There
Speaker 2: could be a new future were a movie good.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's right, exactly, Yeah, yeah, I believe.
Speaker 3: One final thing, VICKI, where where can people find your book?
Speaker 4: Yes, it's being put up by Haymarket, So you can
Speaker 4: go to their website. I also have a link to
Speaker 4: my bookshop page via Blue Sky. I'm vicki acab on
Speaker 4: blue Sky. So if you want to watch me posting
Speaker 4: through it, you know, come hang out. I guess yeah,
Speaker 4: you ar talk to libraries about it. Ask a local
Speaker 4: if you have a local bookshop, asking them that stuff
Speaker 4: really helps make a huge difference. And yeah, I would
Speaker 4: really appreciate any of that if you're if you're interested
Speaker 4: in how Disney destroyed the world and in the ways
Speaker 4: that we've been talking about here today, can read way
Speaker 4: more about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I don't know Vicky. Vicky's Book's good.
Speaker 2: Can confirm have read the good?
Speaker 4: Thanks n.
Speaker 5: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 5: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 5: cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
Speaker 5: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 3: You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 5: Can now find urs for It Could Happen Here listed
Speaker 5: directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.