No One In Hollywood Seems To Learn Anything

Hollywood excels at creating and using a plethora of futuristic effects in movies , but when it comes to creating a future vision for its business model, Hollywood remains stuck in the past.

In a recent op-ed, Robert W. Cort, a film producer and author of "Action!," a novel, comments on Hollywood's inability to reshape it' s archaic distribution business model.

Coming soon: conversing cars; psychic superheroes; sinking ships. This week's release of "Mission: Impossible III" kicked off Hollywood's summer movie season, and once again filmmakers have spun enough dazzling fantasies and futuristic visions to keep moviegoers feasting until Labor Day.

But when it comes to futuristic visions for the movie business, Hollywood is extraordinarily timid. During my three decades in the industry, I've seen film executives try to shun every innovation from VCR's to digital editing. Ultimately, they've accepted and profited from these new technologies but, by waiting years longer than they should have, left a lot of money on the table. And now studios are committing a far costlier error by refusing to release DVD's and downloads of movies at the same time they make their premieres in theaters.

Read "Straight To DVD".

One inane way Hollywood is contemplating dealing with lost TV revenue caused by those of us who have DVR's(Digital Video Recorders) or PVR's(Personal Video Recorders) and who fast forward through commercials is to adopt a new technical standard — M.H.P., for multimedia home standard — which would enable broadcasters to insert special signals to immobilize the remote control during commercials....UNLESS the viewer PAID for the right to skip commercials!

Read " SomeOne Has To Pay For Tv. But Who? And How?"

Related:

Hollywood In The Digital Era
Summer Magic Disappears
Hollywood Vs.America