Price Point 015: What Do We Lose When Hollywood Goes Pass/Fail?

Hollywood used to get a graded report card — every morning in TV, with overnight ratings, and every week in movies, with the weekend box office report.

Your life depended on it. Your favorite table on the left side of the room at The Palm — Beverly Hills’ Beverly Hills — depended on it! The studio gate guard’s approving wave depended on it!

Everyone in town could see who was doing well — in black and white. There was no hiding.

But things have changed. Now, looking mainly at execs and producers, who can know who is really successful? And what impact does this have?

In the public data era (most of Hollywood history), we can observe that the tendency of producers and execs to generate hits was quite unevenly distributed. Just like in sports or stock trading, there were always a few people who were consistently great, some people who were good, and a large bucket of people who were average or worse. We can assume this is still true.

The people who got the big bucks and the best bungalow on the lot were the few people who put up the best numbers. I have never met Joel Silver so I have no idea whether he’s personable but Silver Pictures didn’t get Building 95 at Warner Bros. — the best bungalow in town — because he was personable or not personable. He got it because they ran the sprockets off of 48 Hours, Lethal Weapon, Predator, Die Hard, The Matrix and all their sequels and he was a high octane hit machine.

Today, particularly in the streaming context, we have less insight into what is working, and almost none into what has made economic sense once you take the costs into account. Almost everything in some sense, according to some metric, if you look at it a certain way at a particular time of day just so by the seashore, is some version of a beauty.

There is the occasional show that inarguably stands out, like, say, House of Dragons or Yellowstone. But, for the rest, it is pretty hard to say, and it is hard to refute the spin that everything did fine.  

So who is the most successful comedy exec in TV? Who is Hollywood’s hottest up-and-coming movie producer? Who is pumping out so many hits at Hulu that they’re going to have to make room for that person or they will jump?

Anyone? 

These days no one is visibly killing it and no one seems to fail. Certainly in TV. There have been financial layoffs to be sure, but no one is stealing stellar execs from the competition. And there do seem to be some programmers with only ok results who just stay on. So whoever is the new Jamie Tarses, or Brandon Tartikoff, or Joel Silver, we just don’t know.

The new “limited data” system insulates execs from scrutiny, making things feel less personally competitive. There may have been a net reduction of existentialism and Citalopram on the 405, but both mediocrity and success are obscured. Development execs can get press because they’re interesting or bien pensant, but not so much because fans are lining up to see their shows. This is bad for the person who is great at this because it is harder to shine. For the average or worse, it is an improvement on the old system.

So how do you become a successful executive in this context? This dynamic makes social cohesion rather than market success a more important metric for career progression than it was, and perhaps the key metric. People with high social cohesion tend to be agreeable, gregarious, open to compromise, highly communicative, and supportive of team consensus. They’re team players!

In the new scenario, relatively less authority and budget will get allocated to hit makers. We will therefore not get whatever string of shows and movies those people would have greenlit or made. Maybe we just won’t get the next Matrix. 

There are exceptions, particularly in theatrical film and particularly for talent, where it’s clear how people are doing. We know that Kevin Feige has done a good job. We know that Taiki Waititi is talented. We know that things are going right around Jason Blum. But it’s as if we used to have detailed stats on every player in baseball and now we have a high level exec sum that has details on six pitchers. 

This brings the culture of the business closer to something like academia or government. Whether you are recognized and acknowledged can, in New Hollywood, depend on various factors other than whether you brought in the last five huge hits.  

But all the audience cares about is the hits. That’s what we are here for.

This cultural change should reduce the industry’s effectiveness and profitability because making compromises and relying on consensus is how you wind up watching the Emmys and Oscars from home. Compromise, cohesion and consensus are just not how great movies get made. Because if you compromise and make a great movie 15% less great, you now have an average movie. Great movies and shows are delicate creatures. It is easy to push them off course, which is why they are rare. Great movie mindset is much closer to Ahab/white whale mindset than consensus mindset.

The best shows and films inspire the most internal disagreement because they are bold, new and different. Great new shows are often rule breakers. They break new ground. People disagree with you when you propose them. They lead to arguments. You have to have vision to greenlight Breaking Bad. Everyone passed on Transparent. Mrs. Maisel had many skeptics. The Boys had skeptics because it was not holding back. Before Game of Thrones there had never been a successful fantasy series — and they had to scrap the original pilot and make a whole new one. Yellowstone is basically a western. Mad Men. The Sopranos. True chef’s kiss originals.

Almost every truly great new show will first greet you in disguise as a bad idea and will be non-intuitive. Recall that Fox (brimming with confidence) conceded to George Lucas the merch rights on Star Wars. The Squid Game script bounced around for ten years. This is not a movie, but Confederacy of Dunces took twelve years to get published. Seinfeld season one got a paltry five episode order! If you have a new show and there haven’t been any arguments about it and you have zero fear about it, that’s when you absolutely should be concerned. You don’t think there were any debates about greenlighting Birdman or Pulp Fiction?

To buck the skeptics and advocate for your creators and their unusual idea, you need (a) incentives to do so, (b) personal conviction, and, within reason, (c) you cannot shy away from disagreement. None of that sits well with consensus culture.

At the end of the day, Hollywood looks like a team sport, but it really is not. We are not making widgets. We are not making cookies. We are making art. We don’t need a bureaucracy. We need to empower individual visionaries to bring unique and contrarian visions to life.

When you have a staff that feels safe and is incentivized to get along, you have a bureaucracy that will tend to settle on the ideas that are least objectionable — sequels, spin offs, middle of the road shows that are treacly and anodyne. And without the discipline of the market, the rationale for show choices, casting, and story decisions can quickly lose their immediate and urgent tie to commercial reality.

I think we have seen signs of bureaucratic consensus culture in recent network and studio output. Do you notice how hard it is to do an original screenplay these days? And, as I have discussed elsewhere, I think we are seeing a lot of less bold and more middling content in general.  

Consensus mindset is not optimal for entertainment because only the outlier titles actually matter. Contrarian mindset leads to success. Consensus mindset leads to mediocrity because art is either plagiarism or revolution. We are not paid to get along. We are not paid to send messages. We are not paid to get good driver discounts on our car insurance. We are paid to start revolutions.

Lincoln had a successful cabinet because it was a team of rivals. That is much closer to what works in art. We are looking for bold ideas that we do not all agree on. It isn’t critical that we foster consensus. It’s critical that we have autonomy and that when people are right a lot, they are rewarded. That system works.

To get better and more daring shows and films, put the public scoreboard back on the field and let people compete. We need to see — and reward — those who are creating success.