McMegan comments on the lack of originality in modern-day Hollywood, holding up Dunkirk for contrast.
This bit jumps out:
Naturally, such valuable properties cannot be left to the quirky whims of some individual; studios have intervened more and more heavily to ensure that no director goes too far off the rails.
Same thing with tech startups.
Once Upon a Time™, you could launch a Silicon Valley startup with, basically, pocket money. A few thousand dollars and a few months of the founders' time, and there might (might, I say) be a functioning company with a product coming on the market. Been there, done that*. The stakes weren't too high, and if the company failed**, the founders were out a few months' savings and had to look for regular jobs again until the next opportunity came along.
Now, though, the stakes are much higher. Just renting work space for a few people takes serious money, and savings are thin***. So startups have to go looking for institutional money - meaning that the founders are left with only a small stake in the venture! - and that means dealing with institutions.
And the venture capital isn't controlled by gimlet-eyed gnomes deciding where to invest their own money, oh no indeed. It's controlled by committees of twentysomethings with business degrees, managing money lent to them by other financial institutions, which in turn are managing it on behalf of labor unions and whatnot.
And what does a committee of businessy twentysomethings want to hear? Something so original that there's no basis for assessing the risks and returns? Hah! You need an elevator pitch, and said pitch had better be of the form It's like ${currently prominent, massively funded, pre-IPO company}, only with ${minor distinguishing characteristic that may negate the entire concept if thought about too hard}!
Which is how we get massive clusters of me-too startups, all fully buzzword-compliant, and all chasing the same rainbow. Monoculture!
Getting back to the Hollywood thing, and to publishing in general: expect fragmentation. Making a blockbuster movie with big-name talent costs a lot of money... but making a more modest feature film with actors recruited from the local community theater doesn't. And video equipment the studios could only dream of a couple of decades ago is now within the reach of a modestly-funded group. Getting a movie into the theaters takes influence; getting it onto a streaming service doesn't.
We could start seeing a lot of streaming-only movies that could have been better with professional supervision, but with a lot of originality, and with good-enough production values. They won't be the unifying cultural experience of the One Big Summer Blockbuster of the Year, but art will find a way.
And publishing books has gotten cheap. I've read a few good e-books lately; generally, they needed some industrial-strength proofreading (as, alas, do many of the professionally-published books), but they're original, quirky, and good. And a committee-driven, herd-following, institutional publisher just wouldn't be interested.
* Bit over a decade ago, that was. Things were different back then.
** It did.
*** In terms of liquidity, I seem to be one of the rich ones around here - excluding (maybe!) those who have actually made it big. And I'm far from rich, in terms of actually having money available for stuff like investing in a venture, taking time off from the rat race to work on it, etc.
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