Also media Welcome to Take Back and Hear, a podcast about the consolidation of capital into increasingly centralized forms and how it's ruining your life.
I am your host, Mia Long and with b today to talk about how the consolidation of media monopolies has ruined many, many, many many things for many years. Is Vicky Osterweil, friend of the show, author of forthcoming April fourteenth, twenty twenty sixth, The Extended Universe, How Disney killed the movies and took over the world.
Vicky, Welcome to the show.
Thanks, it's so great to be back. Thank you, Mia. I'm excited to talk about something a little less depressing than the things we could be.
Talking about, right, you know, like this is a story, obviously, the story that we're talking about here foremost is Paramount's acquisition of Warner Bros.
Or forthcoming acquisition.
Since Netflix has backed out, it technically still could fail, but seems very very unlikely to. And you know, you could tell things are going great in the news where this is the fun one, and the fun one is us. Before we started recording, talking about who we think the sort of Nazi commis are they're going to put in charge of CNN. It's going to be there very wise, So things going very good.
You can tell.
Oh, God, but you you.
Had the most cursed name that I've heard, so fun.
Oh yeah, Tim, Tim Poole, I think is probably the most cursed. Yeah, that would be the most it's a dark horse candidate. I don't know whether were the numbers on poly market. Should we look who's.
I know.
They they've probably that's probably up now. Yeah, I hate I refuse to track polling market. Even if I could no facts ahead of time, I simply will not. They can't make me.
God, but we're not talking about insider trading war crimes. We're talking about insider trading intellectual property. So that's that's pretty good.
Yeah, yeah, okay, So to start, let's go back a ways and do you want to talk about I guess sort of the beginning of the history of what we're talking about here, which is the consolidation of all media into a handful of increasingly large conglomerates.
Yeah, absolutely, so, in a way like consolidation is the entire history of the movie business. So obviously what's happening here with Paramount, which is one of the oldest, one of the old five studios merging with Warner Brothers. That leaves Disney and Paramount, Warner Brothers and Sony as the three companies that released movies.
Is this good? A twenty four is gonna get bonded three weeks from now?
Yeah? God, and that's like an Amazon or the news of other studios and Netflix was in competition for this and with true as you said anyways, but like one of the things that the very beginning of the Hollywood system, Hollywood starts because Thomas Edison. So now we're going way back right the eighteen nineties.
Oh god, yeah, yes, speaking of it, speaking a dude who ruthlessly consolidated their power, He's like that.
Were intellectual, propercisely, dear God. So Thomas Edison is credited in the US with inventing the movie camera. He is one of five or six people in the world who came up with the technology around the same time. It's just not linearly possible to name any of them as the inventor of the movie camera. But he gets that credit because he sued the shit out of everyone who tried to make a movie for fifteen years. Jesus right, right, So he puts patents on the movie camera. He puts
patents on his stuff. And then and this is in New York. He's in New Jersey. Menlo Park famously is where his lab is. And what he starts doing other than making really really boring movies, he's a mid film producer. His movies are not that exciting. And at this point a movie is fifteen seconds to about a minute, often seen in a nickelodeon, like in a really small screen, or like in a small room. These are short films. Ninety nine percent of them are loss of time. Can't
we can't even watch these movies, right. But one of the things that he would do is he, because he had the patent on movie cameras, anyone who tried to film a movie, he would sue them. So it's eventually too hard to maintain this. So what he did is he teamed up with the other large Independence and Eastman Kodak, and they formed a thing I think it's called the Motion Picture Company, which is unreferred to as the Trust, quote unquote, and the Trust just did this at scale.
So now instead of it just being him fighting against his competitors, it's all the leading movie filmmakers, all the leading filmmakers, and the literal film company will come down sue you sometimes even beat you up and like and shatter your cameras if you if you try to make a movie without their permission, without a license from them, and without their equipment.
Right, this is such a good system, by the way, Like I just like, like just the system of property rights, so good, no problems, he.
Exactly, So what happens? So what happens? A bunch of filmmakers move to this new land development out in California called Hollywood. You know, it's nineteen oh seven. They're really far away from New Jersey lawyers at Edison goons, right, they're as far as possible. So Hollywood is founded by a bunch of movie pirates, basically, right.
That's incredible.
We're violating you know, Edison's copyright because they're sick of the of his of his legal harassment.
So it's some real The mountains are high in the Emperor's far away shift.
Yeah yeah, I mean exactly, literally, how far can we get away while still being on the continent, Like that's you know, let's do it from New Jersey, which, like many such cases, many people. Yeah, yeah, I can get that far away from New Jersey before. But uh, you know, so jumping forward into the classical Hollywood period are more
familiar with. There are sort of five major studios and one of the ways that the major studios worked is that they had something called vertical integration, which is something we should all know about as we are living through times and monopolies. Amazon is a classic example of vertical integration, as is Google. What vertical integration means is that you own everything in the pipeline for movies. You have the
offices where the producers work. You own the sound stage, you employ all the people who work on it, You employ the actors. You also then own the film that gets made. You own the cameras, You own the company that produces the film. Sometimes although those instas, they didn't always own those companies, those chemical companies. This is on board, but you know, and then you own the movie theater where it showed. Right, So like movie theaters before the forties,
you would go to a RKO Pictures House. Arko is one of the early big ones, or a United Artists theater, and they would only show United Artists movies, right, so they would be an active competition with one another. So your neighborhood would have. You know, there'd be an MGM, there'd be an RKO, and you would go based on what movie was where. Then there's antitrust a done in the forties that breaks up these studios. The studio system sort of slowly collapses. They also then loses a lot
of market share to television. This is a really pot into history, but I'm trying to give it as much as possible. So basically, so by the sixties or seventies, what you have is a lot of independent producers. So the studios just become a brand and a sort of pot of money and often a sound stage. They keep the sound stages right. But then like distribution, becomes independent actors, and like directors, they all are independent. They all have agents, right.
It used to be that they would be hired by a company and they would just work for that company. That's why you know classical Hollywood director would make like sixty movies because they would just churn them out. They would just be like directing them. Show up, do it for two weeks, show up on the next one, do
for two weeks, et cetera. Just the studio system. So then by the sixties and seventies, it's starting to look more like what you have now, which is the studios are basically they're the homes of all the producers, the producers and people who connect the money and the talent, you know, and put it altogether and package a deal then market it right, and that process. It seems like
it's sort of a losing proposition. The business isn't doing super well until the emergence of the blockbuster with Star Wars, right, so, Star Wars and Jaws and a bunch of other movies in the seventies. We're going so fast right now and trying my best, but I'm sorry, this.
Is no e'ree.
This is like I was like, here, let's talk about like one hundred and fifty years of history.
So anyways, with the emergence of the blockbusters, one of the other things that happens is that the way blockbusters work is that they are released everywhere in the country at once. Film comes on used to come on literal physical objects, and you can only have so many and they can only be so many places at once, right. So the way film used to work is they would make a certain number of film reels if they thought
it was going to be big. There was a star, but the studio was always gambling on how many how big it would be, how many people would pick it up, and then they had to sell it to the movie theaters, right, and then the films would circulate when they did well the print more so, movies would circulate for like a year, right, two years sometimes even. But with Star Wars and the day and date system that we have now, what they started doing was just putting it in every movie theater
in the country. You also get the emergence of multiplexes, white flight in the suburbs. I'm really going faster up trying. But the result is that movies get both more potentially valuable, but that value gets more and more concentrated in the early period of the release, right in the early window. Opening weekend was not very meaningful until the eighties really, you know, late seventies, early eighties. As that happens, do you suddenly need more financing and you can make more
money off of bigger gambles. Simultaneously, the rest of the economy is going through financialization, right, which is a process that you've talked about on the show before.
I can't get into that, but yeah, we can't.
And then Reagan deregulates everything, right, Reagan refts a part of the FCC in many ways, deregulates media ownership stuff. This is a big move. And then across the eighties the home market opened, so you start getting VCRs and this completely transforms the business another time, because movies can flop in the theater, but you can guarantee rentals, right, So so for like the eighties and the nineties, the big studios kind of could print money because it was
pretty hard to lose money on a movie. Now the people who lost money on movies were like, you know, dentists from the Midwest who they get to invest and they'd be like, oh yeah, you need sorry, like those arcane deals. People still got rinsed. Obviously it was Hollywood. It was shady as well. But as so with the deregulation and with all this money flowing and with the integration of the home market, suddenly technology companies like Sony and the emergence of of like Lucasfilms that they also
get really into computers. Lucas Turgeocus famously is into like the computer side of the business. All these different technologies get brought into the cinema at the same time as you get to see regulated, so companies start snatching up these other film studios, right and so, where once there were five studios, and then the same season seventies, you actually got a ton of independent studios, a lot of really small ones, and they start getting gobbled up by
these bigger conglomerates. You know, Sony is the one that was also a mega corp in the eighties already that that would eventually go on to own to buy out a bunch of movie companies. The same thing is happening though with radio with TV. The main thing that happens under the SEC regulation stuff is that they loosen up whether a movie studio can own a TV studio. They used to be fully separate. And then and and broadcast
rules changed. Broadcast rules changed, so studios could own a movie theater or you could own a movie company, a radio station and a TV station.
All oh good God.
And as you can imagine, that is how things started to alerate. You get like the ABC Disney merger in the late eighties, NBC Universal mergers and acquisitions become the big thing. You know, the stock market is booming. Then you get other big corps buying them out. And then we're just in the classic phase of consolidation where bigger and bigger fish eat up the small ones.
And this is how I guess importantly for this story, suddenly like all of the television news media is owned by these giant ass movie companies, which exactly, surely.
That's like we'll go wrong.
Well, yeah, we and we come to you here from iHeart Radio, which you know is a lovely.
Bread of kind of making.
We are iHeart Media, Okay, excuse me, a technically distinct company, I think. Actually, don't ask me to explain exactly how that whole right I heard media I Heart Radio split works.
But exactly, you know, so media consolidation, this is you know, consolidation is the story of capitalism famously right like that, Like you know, an industry builds, lots of new entrepreneurs come into the space, people figure out what's possible with the industry, has more and more money flows in, a few winners come and consolidate. We've seen it happen in tech as well. But yeah, it has particularly perverse effects when we're talking about the visual culture, the audio culture,
and the news media. The way information is spread all, so I wouldn't you know, I would argue that the effects are still pretty perverse from the way social media and tech giants have control things. I think that's pretty pretty obvious.
Oh yeah, it is extremely bad, I would say, you might.
Say it's extremely bad. You know, a lot of people are very upset about the news that David Ellison, who is the NEPO baby to end all net bo babies, because he's not a Hollywood netbo baby. He's not the son of a previous He's just the son of a rich guy who wanted to be in movies. So he bought his way into like acting roles, and then he like just threw money around until he got sky Danced Global, which is this company that you know, he's been in
Hollywood for ten years. Technically he's like an experienced producer. This man is forty three years old, which for like, you know, the CEO of a billion you know, he started with a generous loan from Daddy Larry. Let's just say. And yeah, you know, I think people are very upset obviously because he's a Trump ally, right, the Allison's or Trump allies. He has literally said I'm gonna make more right Wing movies, you know, like you know, the Daily
Daily Wire. You know, they were all washing out, but now they'll probably have contracts or whatever. You know, who knows, Like it's going to be money. But a lot of people are also saying that this is just for CNN, and that's actually not true. So a thing that is important to know is that the cable part of this deal Netflix was going to spin off the cable. The Discovery channel at CNN was going to spin off all
the cable. So if he just wanted CNN, he could have waited for the Netflix deal to go through, and he could have just bought it on the market for
a steal. Because the thing about cable is it's losing money if you look at Okay, this is a really dark fact and I apologies everyone, but if you look at the rate of cable subscription costs, if you look at a meta aggregate data of it, the price of the annual subscription to cable goes up by the distributed out of the previous years subscription costs that were lost.
By boomers dying Jesus Christ.
So basically, it is a literally dying It is a literally dying market. The only people who still pay for cable other than institutional forces are like people above sixty and they're just literally dying, and the price goes up as more and more of them dying. It is, it is over as a business cable. Even ESPN. Disney is trying to get rid of ESPN, right, Even sports are valueless now, not valueless, I means some billions of dollars obviously, but to.
These yeah, yeah, you know, if you look at what ESPN's like trying to do about this, they're like just turning into an influencer factory, yeah, with just like rich eyes and then like all these fucking unhinged dipshits exactly.
So anyway, so people are pretty like despairing about it because I think it's about CNN. But if it was just about CNN, like I said, they could have just waited and gotten it for a song. David Ellison really thinks he's a he's cosplaying as a movie producer, but because he has so much money, he's succeeding. Yeah, of the movies. He's pretty that you might like, although I didn't like it, and a lot of people like top Gun Maverick like it's fun.
I guess, like everything about that movie. Suddenly just like clicks into focus.
It's like, yeah, oh, I just want you to know that Top Gun Maverick is the greatest work of art that he produced by some extreme margin. This guy's responsible for Terminators five and six that would be a dark Fate and Genesis. Oh no. He produced on Geostorm, which you may remember came too late to capitalize on the disaster thing. In twenty seventeen, he made the Gemini Man movie, which is what Will Smith fought Will Smith with weird yet aging technology.
Oh I remember seeing TV correction.
It kind of killed Will Smith's marketability as a star. Like that was kind of the film like after Earthly Chad. But he's responsible for ending Will Smith. He did this the Spy Kids reboot which my Kids Armageddon from twenty twelve. Way no, this guy Jesus has made just really bad movies.
All of these weird right wing people are all like the thing they want to do is make movies. This is like what's like killing the Daily Wire is that they decided to be a movie company and it turns out they can't make movies. But it's like this guy is like what if you had that but backed by like the entire tech capital apparatus, and your dad was fucking Larry Ellison, the Oracle guy, like one of the richest test fascists who's ever lived.
Then you can do it. Then you can just buy yourself a movie studio, and you can do it because the thing movies need is money.
And then you can keep buying all their movie studios.
But and this is a bit contrarian. I'm not sure that this is worse for movies than Netflix getting it, because Netflix would have likely sabotaged what was remaining of WB's theatrical business model, right, Like, Netflix doesn't like the theater now, they've been trying to get into theatrical because that's like, you know, it's cash on the table. You know, it's how you build. It's the greatest marketing on earth. Right, And you when you have a big hit film, then
that's a franchise. You get TV shows, you get theme parks, you get you know, lunch boxes, you know, toys, t shirts, you get resales, you get a reboot ten years down the line, right, you get licensing. So they want that. But but Netflix is really, i mean, they hate movies. Netflix literally has a production design a design philosophy of making movies that are designed for people who aren't looking at them, so that the characters say what they're doing.
I mean, there's a big article that came out about this a few weeks ago, Like, yeah, Netflix is a nightmare company, so it's a real it's a real Cilly in Caribtis kind of situation. Yeah, right, Like you've got this fascist creep, but at least he like really thinks he likes movies, you know, Like I don't know anyway, the plaint being people are very upset about this news because it's happened to you because he's a Trump Ally, there's this political angle they were making all this noise,
they were begging Trump to do it. Y'all are thirty years late to this being a problem, Like I'm not trying to be like I'm not trying to be like that whatever, Like no, yeah, but we are well, but like having three movie studios instead of two, like you're already doing pretty bad. Like in the thirties, as I gave you in that little pot of history, in the thirties, Hollywood was so brutally integrated that they literally the federal
government literally broke it apart. At the height, at the height of the studio system, the biggest company at the time, which I believe was MGM, was the big studio controlled eighteen percent of the market of the film market, which is massive. I mean the market of anything. Eighteen percent of my market is obscene hideous. Yeah, Disney in a bunch of the past years has run forty percent of
the market worldwide, worldwide. Not so like we are already at this level of concentration, like the fact that it keeps going, Like, yes, it does mean there will be fewer and fewer movies, It does mean more layoffs. It means things are getting worse. But you know, we've been here, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, I think it's actually only thirty seven percent.
Thirty seven Oh wow wow, yeah, three percent.
Sorry, I'm sorry about that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, And this is something I think gets back to one of the sort of political answers that I've been seeing to this is like, you know, this return from kind of like the left of the Democratic Party to being like, oh, we should talk about like anti monopoly and we should do like trust busting again. It's like probably, yeah, but we did this right, Like we did this we got rid of the.
Monopolies and then they came back. It's like, this is you know.
This is this is the problem is that this is this is basically a structural problem of capital is this kind of resolidation. And you can break up the monopolies, but they'll just reform. It requires you to win the battle forever. And all the monopolies have to do is get like one fascist elected or get like like all.
They need is one Ronald Reagan and you just lose everything.
Yeah, it's like, okay, like this this is a problem that can't be solved just by tinkering on the edges of the system. You have to actually destroy the conditions that make it possible. And those are regulatory conditions. Those are hold on why are people allowed to own this shit?
Yeah, And I think that's exactly right. And I think, you know, one of the things about monopoly of the station, which is famous, one of the things that even capitalists don't like about monopolies is that the quality goes down. Famous, Yeah, right, because you don't you don't know, you don't have to compete whatever, there's literally no reason to try and make
the product good. But like, one of the things about the concentration of IP, and like one of the things that's like sort of scary about it's consolidation in general. And this is the fact that's really important to understand. When you own a bucket of intellectual property. Let's say you own Sesame Street, right, which is one that's not owned.
So it's a good example to use because it's weird when you own Sesame Street, and if you start to make products of Sesame Street, it means that every idea that isn't Sesame Street but threatens to become more popular than Sesame Street is a threat. So it is if you own, if you own enough IP, it is in your logical material interest to stop new ideas from being made,
because every new idea is competition. If you own the back catalog of Bob Dylan, for as like some of these investment firms, do you think he's I think he has sold to Hypnosis or one of these big there are these big music investment firms that own the rights to all of these old songs. If you guys, If y'all remember in twenty eighteen twenty nineteen, all movie trailers suddenly started having weird sad girl covers of like sixties
and seventies pop songs. Do you remember this era? Oh yeah, yeah, the sad utograph and I was just like what happened in like Hollywood, was there like some weird trend. No, what happened was these investment firms got hold of it, and if they can release a new cover version of a song, they hit the property rights twice, so they get it on the new they get it on the new play, and then people go back to the old ones they're reminded of it.
Yeah, because it's worse too, because the.
God and and this is only possible because of the way that the streaming services got consolidated and that they pay per play, because pay per play, as everyone knows, completely screws artists. There's just no way to make any money off that. But if you own a massive library like the UM, like the BMG or Sony Universal, if you own a library like that, you do nothing and you make billions a year, right, so it becomes this permanent,
perfect rent that you never have to worry about. So all you have to do is buy enough musical IP and then try and get new artists who are hot to cover your old ip. So this is like this really weird esoteric seeming. You know, it's bailed on the division between particular recording uh copyrights and the copyrights of
like individual song of the songwriting. It's like built on the sort of weird esoteric structure of intellectual property law, which like when you start talking about it, people's eyes literally roll in the back of their head, right like a daisy. They fall over in a daisy popstup like
the cartoon. They're just dead. That's not interesting. But like because of that, for five years, when you went to the grocery store, you would be in a weird, uncanny valley where you were hearing a song that you thought you recognized but was like slightly different.
Yeah.
Right, So the entire material structure of the world, like the psychic structure of the world, gets transformed by these weird exploits over like financial loopholes by the worst people on earth, whose goal is to never let you hear a new song, right, Like they'd never want you to
hear new music again. They just want the boomer tracks to play forever with like new versions by you know, like they just want Charlie XCX to record fucking Jefferson Airplane, Like that's there, that's their wettest dream, you know, and all that shit is going on in the background of your life, right, Like, I mean it's not, it's it's but it's affecting the psycha atmosphere. It's producing nostalgia, it's producing all these affects that are rife for fascism. It makes people want to go back.
Yeah, it's like, Okay, what happened the last time we saw like the completely unhinged like concentration of all capitals, some monopolies. It's like, well, all that capital was liquidated by World War Two. There was World War One as well too, right, these were both to a larger extent. And this is something that you know, if you go back and read anyone who's doing any political analysis about World War One in the lead up to it and as it's happening, the thing everyone is talking about is
is the consolidation monopoly capital. And I think you can argue maybe that the early eighteen hundreds had like a larger consolidation just in the sense of, like I'm questionable as to whether this is just because it's too expensive to literally run a country, but like we haven't quite returned to like the East India company has an army and they conquer countries periodically.
But like I think it's just because that's too expensive and you'd rather just to the state.
But it's less farther than you think, less far than your thing, because yeah, the part of the way that it outsources to the state, and this is in this is this is all stuffer from my upcoming book which you can preorder.
Now, that's true.
The World Trade Organization. One of the things that it did when you joined the WTO, and this was done by lobbyists, mostly film and pharma and chemical lobbyists from the US sense, if you join the WTO, you have to accept you don't not only have to accept their copyright and piracy law, you have to agree to build copyright courts and copyright police in your country Jesus Christ, so that if say Apple sees you making a fake iPhone, they have a literal legal procedure domestic to your country
to force you to stop. To smutch those pricis. Major corporations can get police in Vietnam to go in and light a warehouse on fire because it's full of faked goods, like without ever leaving the US right, So yeah, yeah, the company's more contigutive through these world trade organizations.
Well, they did the order liberal thing of where we're using the supra state apparatus to negate the sovereignty of the state by creating the super state which we run.
Yes, so I mean I'm obviously interested in the ip and the cultural angle. This is the only law like this in any of these agreements. All the rest of the trade agreements, like they can negotiate. But like, part of what's so obscene about Trump's tariffs is that the US already had this. It was called the Priority watch List.
They just have this list in the White House where they could just say you're not doing a good job enough stopping piracy, and it gives the White House unilateral capacity to create trade embargoes on people without going to Congress. Like this was all the tariffs, which also hurt your economy obviously, but even if they worked the way Trump imagines they do, like he already had that power and
like other presidents have been using it for decades. Big visible sanctions what they put on Iran or Venezuela are a much more dramatic upscale, but the Priority watch List they can just threaten to upgrade you from on the watch list to a priority country on that and you will watch countries fold entirely on trade policy, Like it's crazy. So, like one of the things that's interesting about this moment and about the Trumpet moment is that they're ripping apart
their own infrastructure. Yeah, because they literally just don't understand how it works.
No, it's it's like that you headed to an aircraft carrier and they're ripping out the copper wires and trying to sell it, and it's.
Like, you have an aircraft carrier, what are we doing?
Yeah?
God, exactly.
You know. So again, like I think there is this talk about the consolidation of culture, and I think, like, you know, people like the Ellison's are just they're just vulgar at it. Yeah, Like the thing is, like Mike Eisner was better at it. Like Bob Iger is, who is the CEO of Disney currently other he's about to step down. Bob Iger saw them through the acquisition of Marvel and Star Wars and all that. He is an incredible I mean, you know, or whatever his team and
he himself is a pretty unimpressive guy. But like, you know, like other than internal politics, which is what all CEOs are good at anyway. You know, like these these these companies were already good at this, and like what has happened is that a wing of the capitalists who are really bad at it and really resentful because they're all
sort of like the David Allison's in the world. They're all the resentful fail sons of wealth who you know, they want more power and more respect and they don't appreciate how much their shit is already built on the very thing they claim to want to do.
Yeah, well, and I guess it is to some extent a kind of funny, like the election to Trump and also just sort of Ellison just like devouring this is what it is, like Third Studio that he's eaten in like five years, and like all all these forces being devoured by this. This is like well, yeah, like this is what happens when you set up a system like this.
Eventually there's going to be a bigger fish who's just going to devour you because they have, for example, Oracle behind them, which is just an amount of capital that like outside of like Disney, you can't have that kind of capital, right, And like with Trump, it's like, yeah, you find you finally created a monster that is large enough to shatter the extremely delicate and complicated system that you did.
And it's also just doesn't understand it.
Yeah, exactly. And I think, like, if you want to see what the future of Hollywood looks like, I mean, you know, you can go worse than to look at China. Right, China is the most dynamic film market. It overtook the US as the number one value of the box office in twenty twenty two. I think I think it did in twenty twenty one, but that was still COVID shutdown affected ye twenty two or twenty twenty three. China became an actual the actual plurality of ticket sales in the
world by dollar, if not by number. By numbers, they've already long surpassed the US.
Yeah.
But the way that Chinese film companies work is like they're all pretty nakedly financial companies like ten Cent and Ali Baba, right, and like like these are companies they're just already from other sectors and they're just like we have cash, we use the cash to make movie, yeah, which is what the studios always did too. Right. I want to be really clear, like I don't want to romanticize, but like you know, that's where it always was, right, And it's just that like in the turn of the
century when Hollywood was being made, industries were just more divided. Yeah, the reason to talk about all of this business stuff on some level, I mean, it's interesting on its own as history, it's interesting as a critique of capitalism. But I think it's also interesting because it affects the aesthetics,
like of what the movies that get made, right. And I think when we think about when people think about fascist propaganda, you know, we think about the Nazis, right, obviously, because the Nazis had the longest running fascist propaganda machine in the world. They had the Ministry of Culture under your Gerbils, right. And I think when we talk about Nazi propaganda, we think about trying for the will, and we think about stuff like Juden's right, like extremely horrifying
anti Semitic bullshit, extremely horrifying anti Semitic movies. There were two of them in the ten years that Gerbels ran the UFA, which is the film company that made movies for Germany. The vast majority, the vast majority of films under the life were frothy comedies and musicals and adventure stories because the principle that Gerbels operated on was called the orchestra principle, and he believed that you should just
actually art should just be reduced to creating feelings. It should be totally de intellectualized, and then very little of that art remains. Those movies are mid. You know. The movies made by Utha are not good, like even the ones that are not offensive. They're just mid. But they all do the same thing. They all work together around a principle of certain principles around family and romantic love and domestic life, most of it inoffensive in and of itself.
And so I think when we think about Ellison taking over, I think we imagine, you know, as we were joking about at the beginning, shit like the Ellie Wire, anti woke Cinderella or whatever the fuck. Yeah, and I allowed to cuss. I'm doing so.
Much of it.
Yeah, I tour all the time. Okay, thank god we are not regulated by the FCC.
Let's go no one these days.
I mean, I guess we technically are, but we're we're not under the radio regulation, so we can say whatever we want.
Perfect love that, but like fascist filmmaking has not looked like that for the most part in the history of it. Fascist filmmaking looks like family adventure fair often. And I think we have been so blinded to the way that this happens that we imagine that Allison taking over is suddenly going to mean that now there's gonna be fascist movies in theaters. But like, have y'all been to the movies? Yes, Like have you all seen what Warderwrollers did with like the Snyder verse, Like.
Yeah, like, did you did you watch The Beekeeper?
Right?
Speaking of Netflix, Like that was the most fascist movie I have.
Ever seen exactly.
It is literally it is a movie that is just a guy shooting a bunch of people, and then the background superstructure is an explanation of what the furor is, which is like the force that is outside of the order, that is able to violate the rules of the order in order to in order to create the order itself. Except it's a guy called the bee Keeper and he just shoots people like.
It's it's that's pretty bad.
That's like that.
Yeah, I did not watch that one, and I like, state.
It's really unhinged. I watched it with my family nightmare. Holy shit, it's going insane.
Yeah, things are so bad that Like there was a movie, Nobody with Bob Odenkirk that came out in twenty nineteen, and it was basically a parody of those like Liam Neeson, you know, the John Wick movies and like Liam Neeson like Dad then taking stuff right, Yeah, and it was a parody you maybe you could be clued in by the fact that it was Bob Odenkirk and it was fillsed with comedians. Maybe you could be clued in by the fact that he's fighting because they took his daughter's
Hello Kitty bracelet. Like there's a pretty like dry, but it's a dry plays a very dry.
Yeah.
Every single professional film critic reviewed it like it was dead serious, like Bob was to become the next Liam Neesen. And part of that is because they shot good action sequences, Like he did a good job with the satire. But then what happens, what happened next is that now there's a Nobody too, and it's completely forgotten the joke and it's not good either.
So like Jesus Christ, Yeah, and Bob won and.
Kirk just like he had this one window where he could really sell that, he couldn't sell it in this sequel. It doesn't matter.
It's it's the Doorhead sequels right exactly.
But like we're just in a time of extreme literalism, where like everything is really really like script driven. It's really on its face, it's really textual. Everything is just selling something else. Everything can possibly be sequel. Nothing really changes, politics only exists as bureaucracy. These are all deeply fascist concepts. They're just more subtle than goose stepping SS, you know
for it. You know. Yeah, part of what's so funny about The Daily Wire is it's like like they come for Disney, like you can't do anything to make them more fascist pop Like Disney entertains people and makes the fascist populous. Like they're just bad filmmakers and that kind of matters.
Yeah, I think there is a chance that like I don't know, Ellison is such a dumb ass that he just tries to do it anyways, Like he just tries to be like fuck it. Well even then, like he hasn't really made like a stereotype of Nazi movies. He's made like actual Nazi movies. Just to say, the fucking top gunn Baverrick.
And people loved Top the Mavericks. People were like, yeah, I guess it's maybe kind of a problem about it, like but we love you know. It's like that movie is like literally propaganda for the Air Force. Like I thought it was fun. Yeah, don't get me wrong, but like people are have been really trained to not see that stuff.
Yeah, and it's like we're like now fighting the war at that movie was propaganda for yes, exactly, like we literally we literally are fighting.
We've made it to road like or we're bombed a ride at all.
That fifteens went down so the first time of the Gulf War.
Yeah, because they got shut down by Allies Air defenses.
You know what, we didn't have Maverick, we didn't have Tom Cruise training them. And that's what Allison's gonna do. That's why I'm happy he's merging it, because our brave boys and the Skies are going to be safer.
God.
So yeah, anyways, I don't know where I'm going with this because obviously things are bad and anyone betting against things getting worse over the last ten years has lost
their pants, right, But things can get worse. But like, also there is the actual object, the actual film object exists, and like part of what has been hard about Hollywood, the reason they have built these monopoly structures, the reason they've built these pea structures, is because because audiences are fickle, and that's annoying, and you can't just like force stuff down their throats and they're not gonna like buy something for sure every time, and you have to sort of
seduce them, right like, it's it's you have to you have to make something they want to see. Right The MCU was unstoppable until it stopped, and now no one likes it and it's really annoying, right like, and they still make their money back on the MCU, like they're doing fine. No, do not play a violin for for Kevin Feige. He's doing fine. You know, he's crying on
his third shot, you know. But like, but so, I guess what I'm saying is that, like, is that like, as we enter into more and more naked versions of this, what it should help us do you, rather than think, oh my god, all is lost, is to reflect on how we got here already. How often we were already here under liberalism, under Biden, under just regular capitalist conditions. How often we've already been here, reevaluate the way we think about what good culture could look like, and then start to move.
Yeah. I want to come back to something I said a few years ago when we did a show with Gare about the People's Joker, and.
I saw on the TV glow.
Yeah, I saw it.
I was about to say, the one about the egg has the bad ending and never transitions.
Yes, the horror of you about not transitioning yet.
Yeah, Yeah, I think there is an extent to which, you know, there was a really brief attempt to sort of sublimate transness into film for like one year. But you know, like we are the people who've been spat out of this, but also trans people are making movies at a rate that has never happened before. Ever, There's
never been anything like it. And you know, like the Wachowskis like have a studio now where they're pumping out a bunch of trans movies, and like, you know, we're getting like Manhunter, and we're getting like a whole bunch of other stuff. And you know, the thing I said a few years ago I think is even more desperate and true now is that, like transfilm is one of the last things, fighting for the existence of film as a medium and not as a way to sell you toys and like fifteen dollars popcorn.
Hey, they also tell you all expenses paid, vacations, you have to go into debt for it. Okay, it's good. Yeah, good support trans film, support local film. And the thing about movies is that movies are bad. But the other thing is that movies are good. So it's hard.
The dialectic emotion.
Yeah, yeah, Look, I will say this, there has been for many thousands of years a second dialectic operating. And then it's a dialectic between labor and capital. That's probably I probably backdated capital too far, but you know, fuck it, I don't know. We could resolve We could resolve movies good in movies bad by resolving the other dialectic of capital and labor, by simply destroying the categories and ending the class system. I believe in us we can make
a movie good again. Movie has never been good. There could be a new future were a movie good.
Yeah, that's right, exactly, Yeah, yeah, I believe.
One final thing, VICKI, where where can people find your book?
Yes, it's being put up by Haymarket, So you can go to their website. I also have a link to my bookshop page via Blue Sky. I'm vicki acab on blue Sky. So if you want to watch me posting through it, you know, come hang out. I guess yeah, you ar talk to libraries about it. Ask a local if you have a local bookshop, asking them that stuff
really helps make a huge difference. And yeah, I would really appreciate any of that if you're if you're interested in how Disney destroyed the world and in the ways that we've been talking about here today, can read way more about it.
Yeah, and I don't know Vicky. Vicky's Book's good.
Can confirm have read the good?
Thanks n.
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