Something Larger Going On?

I've been following the writers strike. Everyone is predicting a long one. If it doesn't get resolved quickly - and it shows no signs of it - the TV season will be completely cancelled. After that, there are even fewer incentives to get the thing resolved.

But beyond those little details, something larger and more pervasive seems to be happening...and I'm such a newcomer to this, I'm just barely beginning to understand it. Hollywood used to run like a company town. Everyone knew each other through a network and to get anywhere, you had to know people who knew people and so forth. In the past, strikes pitted producers against writers and although these two were at odds over who would get paid what, the two sides were of the same Hollywood ilk...they all were movie people who wanted to make movies and loved making movies and were just coming at it from different angles.

But something larger seems to be at stake today. It is a combination of the historical and the new. Historically, it is the same Hollywood story of the writers getting the financial shaft...the latest incarnation was a horrible deal they negotiated over DVD revenues. It is occuring at a time when multinational corporations have completely taken over the movie business and they operate like a tiny, vanity element of a huge company. What is a studio mogul today? They are a hot shot VP of a giant corporation. That's it. They answer to someone above them who answers to someone above him who answers to a board who answers to the share holders. And then there's the internet and what happened to the music industry. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is people stopped buying CDs and got free music and itunes instead. Labels lost TONS of money and I'm sure had to massively scale back and restructure. What happens when the same thing happens to Hollywood? When customers can watch a new, HD quality movie on a home projector for $1, what happens to movie theaters? What happens to development companies? What happens to marketers? What happens to writers/actors/directors/producers? Who gets paid what? How will deals be structured? How will movies get made?

We live in interesting times.