As a result, this son of a Silicon Valley CEO is now the most powerful person in Hollywood. So I watched with interest when David Ellison appeared on CNBC to talk about his plans for the future.
I’m still in a state of shock—because he speaks a language that, a few years ago, nobody in the creative community would even have understood.
You might think that Ellison would talk about making great movies or bringing audiences back to theaters—or, at a minimum, creating entertainment for the masses, if not something more artistic.
But that’s not what he has in mind.
Instead Ellison boasts: “We are positioned to win in every single vertical that we operate in….We have the greatest content engine with marquee intellectual properties. You’re immediately getting to scale in streaming” he adds; and then there’s his “incredibly profitable linear portfolio.”
Of course, it wasn’t easy to get to this point. Ellison recalled his previous visit to CNBC. “We launched the hostile on your show,” he tells the host, “so coming full circle today is quite remarkable.”
Have people in the creative world ever talked like this? Did Picasso win in every vertical? Did Shakespeare brag about his “content engine”? Did Beethoven ever achieve a “profitable linear portfolio”?
But those saps were losers by today’s standards. Maybe they should have launched a hostile, instead of wasting so much time on their craft.
I still remember the first time I heard someone describe different vocations and livelihoods as verticals. That was right before the dotcom bubble burst, and I’d been called in to help a web business that, a few weeks later, went broke. The people who spoke in such a cavalier way were soon unemployed.
I felt sorry for them. But I viewed that obfuscating way of speech as a contributor to the problems that brought them down. I still feel that way. I just can’t trust people who talk like this. It’s like they just took a Voight-Kampff test, and failed miserably. I fear I’m talking to replicants, not human beings.
Judging by the news stories out of Hollywood, there are a lot of replicants in the film business nowadays.
On the other hand, I’ve talked to hundreds (or maybe thousands) of artistic people over the years. Against long odds, they somehow manage to make a living in creative pursuits. That is their vertical, so to speak. Sometimes they don’t even want to talk about how creativity happens—it seems almost magical, and the process is very fragile, even for the greatest artists. [...]
You might think that Ellison would talk about making great movies or bringing audiences back to theaters—or, at a minimum, creating entertainment for the masses, if not something more artistic.
But that’s not what he has in mind.
Instead Ellison boasts: “We are positioned to win in every single vertical that we operate in….We have the greatest content engine with marquee intellectual properties. You’re immediately getting to scale in streaming” he adds; and then there’s his “incredibly profitable linear portfolio.”
Of course, it wasn’t easy to get to this point. Ellison recalled his previous visit to CNBC. “We launched the hostile on your show,” he tells the host, “so coming full circle today is quite remarkable.”
Have people in the creative world ever talked like this? Did Picasso win in every vertical? Did Shakespeare brag about his “content engine”? Did Beethoven ever achieve a “profitable linear portfolio”?
But those saps were losers by today’s standards. Maybe they should have launched a hostile, instead of wasting so much time on their craft.
I still remember the first time I heard someone describe different vocations and livelihoods as verticals. That was right before the dotcom bubble burst, and I’d been called in to help a web business that, a few weeks later, went broke. The people who spoke in such a cavalier way were soon unemployed.
I felt sorry for them. But I viewed that obfuscating way of speech as a contributor to the problems that brought them down. I still feel that way. I just can’t trust people who talk like this. It’s like they just took a Voight-Kampff test, and failed miserably. I fear I’m talking to replicants, not human beings.
Judging by the news stories out of Hollywood, there are a lot of replicants in the film business nowadays.
On the other hand, I’ve talked to hundreds (or maybe thousands) of artistic people over the years. Against long odds, they somehow manage to make a living in creative pursuits. That is their vertical, so to speak. Sometimes they don’t even want to talk about how creativity happens—it seems almost magical, and the process is very fragile, even for the greatest artists. [...]
But I can’t just blame David Ellison, because he’s not alone. Business and finance jargon is now the only language spoken among the people who make the final decisions on almost every aesthetic or artistic matter.
So when the head of Warner Bros music gets asked about AI, he describes it as “an incredible value creation opportunity.” Say what? But at least that’s better than the CEO who praised AI’s ability to “eliminate lower-value human capital.”
The brutal reality is that we have reached the stage where artistry can be discussed without any consideration of the artist—who is now an inconvenience in the value chain.
And that value chain is all that matters anymore. [...]
Nowadays the decision-makers have other priorities. They have verticals to dominate. If they could, they would do it with bots instead of artists.
We deserve better stewards for our creative culture.
It’s not clear that we will get them. I’ve predicted that tech will eventually swallow up almost the entire creative economy—and I shudder to see how rapidly that forecast is coming true. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve called for creators and fans to support alternative channels.
We need to create our own parallel ecosystem—and as fast as possible. We’re fortunate that some people and organizations are already working on it.
So when the head of Warner Bros music gets asked about AI, he describes it as “an incredible value creation opportunity.” Say what? But at least that’s better than the CEO who praised AI’s ability to “eliminate lower-value human capital.”
The brutal reality is that we have reached the stage where artistry can be discussed without any consideration of the artist—who is now an inconvenience in the value chain.
And that value chain is all that matters anymore. [...]
Nowadays the decision-makers have other priorities. They have verticals to dominate. If they could, they would do it with bots instead of artists.
We deserve better stewards for our creative culture.
It’s not clear that we will get them. I’ve predicted that tech will eventually swallow up almost the entire creative economy—and I shudder to see how rapidly that forecast is coming true. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve called for creators and fans to support alternative channels.
We need to create our own parallel ecosystem—and as fast as possible. We’re fortunate that some people and organizations are already working on it.
by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more:
Image: Picasso, Three Musicians[ed. See also: When Did Everyone Start Talking Like a Hollywood Windbag? (NYT):]
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There’s a little phrase that has been creeping further into American speech over the past decade. That’s how it seems, anyway, based on the ever-growing number of complaints about its use. Online, people grumble that it’s all over podcasts, movie podcasts in particular...The phrase in question is: the X of it all. We have to talk, somebody might say, about the renovating-the-Kennedy-Center of it all, or the Dolly Parton’s nephew of it all, or the Greta Gerwig of it all. The “X” can be replaced with any noun or noun phrase you like: This is the kind of plug-and-play template that’s often called a snowclone, like “X is the new Y” or “the mother of all X’s.” “The X of it all” is the whole gestalt of that thing, all its baggage and implications, in the present context. [...]
This would hardly be the first bit of language to hit the entertainment industry and then spread — partly through that industry’s public mockery of its own smarmy, jargon-spewing suits — to everyone else... This is an industry whose language revolves around story, producing narrative shorthand so familiar that young people on TikTok sometimes describe their own lives in terms of seasons, casts, canon events, lore. Its “executive-ese” may seem gauche, reductive or laughable at first — but if it’s efficient shorthand, it will probably reach you eventually.
