The ongoing tug-of-war between the beancounters and the artists

I’m posting this here so I don’t end up totally derailing the thread I was posting in. Just by mentioning heavy metal I might have already done that.

I used to wonder why movies and other entertainment arts seemed to suddenly get better somewhere in the late 60's. It took me decades to find any information, and most of it came from a book called Easy Riders, Raging Bulls—an insider look at the filmmaking industry of that time. I had no idea, but all the big movie studios were on the brink of bankruptcy because they were run by aging old-school tycoons, in most cases the same ones who had started the companies in the 20’s or 30’s. Meanwhile there had been a massive upheaval in society known as the Hippie revolution. The younger generation didn’t relate to the old-fashioned movies (or music or anything) that were still being pumped out. I still remember those weird movies where they tried to appeal to the youth by having the aging actors like Rock Hudson with long sideburns and long hair, but they were wearing suits and shiny shoes and carrying briefcases, and their wives or girlfriends in the movies were hot 20 year-olds. Movies like Airport, on which the satirical Airplane series was based.

In desperation one of them decided they need to stop doing what used to work and hire one of the hotshot new directors who had just graduated from the first filmmaking school. They hired Dennis Hopper to make Easy Rider, and they didn't interfere at all, just let him do his thing in a drug-induced haze of what looked to them like complete madness with no method (reminds me of what Hopper would say about Brando’s Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now). The old-school tycoons couldn’t stand (or understand) the movie he made—they hated it—but the kids loved it and a new era of filmmaking was born along with a new industry model.

For the next maybe decade and a half or so those movie studios that wanted to survive had to follow the same approach—hire one of the New Hollywood directors (Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and a host of lesser-knowns) and let them work in their own way. It revived the industry and totally changed the way things were done. The venerable Hollywood Studio method that had been in use since the early 30’s went out the window and the directors were given free reign.

Entertainment art has always been a weird mix—on one hand it’s definitely a business and the companies need to stay afloat or there will be no jobs for the artists. But if the artists are too restricted and micromanaged the product will be pretty bland and uninspiring. This tug-of-war has always existed and tends to lean one way and then the other.

When the business entities get control we tend to get tepid, safe entertainment bound to restrictive rules written by businessmen who have no feel whatsoever for art. But when they’re forced to loosen the reigns and let the artists do their thing then you can end up with great some stuff, and also a lot of pretentious self-indulgent garbage.

Interestingly this was about the same time that radio went through something similar but for different reasons. It was the birth of FM that brought about the revolution there. AM stations were firmly under the grip of the industry—they decided what songs would be released as singles, how long songs would be, and what defines the pop sound. But FM stations were under no such restrictions, so ‘pirate’ stations sprang up and started playing the ‘deep cuts’ off rock albums—songs that ran sometimes to a full album side in length and that definitely didn’t fit the industry idea of popular music. But it became the new popular by a landslide. Until the 80’s that is.

Then one day I got a glimpse of what happened that brought movies and music once again under the iron control of the industry and its bean counters. I saw the movie Moneyball, directed by and starring Robert Redford. It’s about what happened to the baseball industry in the early 80’s. I don’t remember it all that clearly, but I got the gist of it, the parts that fit into this growing puzzle. Basically Redford played the owner of a failing team who was forced to take drastic measures or sell the team at a huge loss and end up bankrupt. He decided to hire a computer whiz kid who had already written algorithms that saved several businesses from certain death. Computers were new at the time, at least desktop models, and for the first time were available to the general public. Long story short, the snot-nosed brat saved his team and by the end of the season it had gone from the losing-est to the winningest, and all the other owners and coaches who had laughed at him now were forced to turn to computers as well or go bankrupt themselves. Once computers entered the fray everybody had to use them or couldn’t compete in the new game.

This made me realize it must have happened across the board at that time, not just in sports entertainment. As a result, today movies and music are made according to computer-generated algorithms rather than decisions made by people, at least to a large extent. They use things like focus groups, statistics, demographic studies, and questionnaires that are then fed into the computers, and from the results the next trend is decided on. In certain ways of course computers can make much better decisions than people, but not when it comes to art. And it seems these bean counters and executives all have business brains, not art brains. They don’t like or trust artists and like to keep them on a short leash. From time to time one will come along who gets it, who wants to see amazing art get made, and sets up a venue for it. But without such a venue there’s no monetary support to give artists free reign.