Clueless Hollywood: The State of The Very Rich and Uninformed
"The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery."
— Veteran of a firm now free-falling out of the Fortune 500 - Cluetrain Website
This past week as marked several events which are showing everyone in the technology world just how uninformed the Hollywood executive set are.
Mom always said, "Money is no replacement for an education or experience." And damn she was so right! The recent rounds of Senate Subcommittee meetings and townhall meetings, Roundtable meeting and articles, stories and press releases in the media involving CARP and the DMCA show us just how little they know and how dangerous this lack-a-knowledge can really be.
From where I sit it's long overdue for these Hollywood executives to get an education or stop playing dumb. They can't have it both ways.
For years Hollywood has been courting the computer industry in an effort to make the work and costs of productions better and cheaper. The courting and wooing of Silicon Valley and the technical centers of this country by Hollywood was a past time that has gone on for the past 15 or more years. I know because I was there. I have been a designer, witness and a participant to the process.
Over 12 years ago I wrote up a short paper on the Convergence of Digital Media outlining in general details the use of computers and digital storage for audio, video and film transfer. I outlined how peer-to-peer direct connection products could and would make it possible for someone like me, who hates the drive in and out of LA, would be able to work from my home studio with others in their home studios all by way of a proper high-speed internet connection. Nearly everything but "finaling" a piece could be done in this manner. This would save vast amounts of production costs and make it possible for work to be done by the best people wherever they were living. .
For me it was ideal and from my point of view the idea was nothing remarkable. The concept was just a logical extension of the way I had worked before on parts of a production using the internet or closed network service. I had done it before-- but we'd really never told anyone. We just did it and kept our word that nothing would ever get out into the public were it didn't belong.
However when I published the paper online, you would have thought I'd committed blasphemy.
Why? Because I dared to take the "control" of a production out of the realm of the "post house." I was advocating that editors, special effects people and directors could work better remotely and alone in the post production process without the direct supervision and control of a post house. Post houses who are very highly capitalized digital editing facilities rent a considerable amount of space to production companies while producing a television, audio or film product saw this "idea" as a threat to their gravytrain and did nearly everything possible to kill it.
Or so they thought. ...And the Hollywood executives remained clueless by choice.
Byting the Hand the Feeds You
 Over the past several years, since I vowed never to drive into LA again for work, I've taken projects that allow me to edit only if I can do the work remotely in my bunny slippers at home. Meetings are normally over the phone and occasional trips into the studios are made for the important, but rare, face to face meeting. And I'm not the only one doing it! Literally hundreds of video, film and audio professionals work everyday at home recording, tweaking, cutting and logging thousands of hours of music, film, graphics and video from the sanity of their home or home studio in an environment where they want to work-- and work very productively.
Over 75% of the tools we use are stock, off the shelf software and compression codecs, like Mp3s and video formats. And we transfer our work to one another by FedEx or using the internet.
The funny thing is: every DMCA crazed Hollywood executive knows we do it. So how do you propose we put the genie back into the bottle?
There isn't a beancounter in LA who will tell an executive straightfaced that we remote-working folks aren't saving Hollywood money. Between us and the Vancouver productions, we are the reasons why Hollywood has been laying off the large in-house staff people who once ran up their payroll. The exec's like Eisner love that we use this technology to give him better profit lines.
So who's he kidding? Oh yeah-- it's a matter of control.
Eisner and his Hollywood cronies want to control who has the technology. That who is YOU the customer. It's a shame he still hasn't learned the lesson on how to put the genie back into the bottle. Because-- you can't.
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6:12:24 PM 
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