What I’m Thinking About

I’m middle-aged now, which means I’m officially old enough to start complaining about how things are different than when I grew up, while hopefully being self-aware enough to know that doesn’t mean things were better when I was growing up.

My generation was the internet generation. We were children when AOL brought the silicon network to the masses. High-speed broadband connected us all through high school and college. Facebook came online while we were earning our degrees, and we graduated into the world that the iPhone made.

Things changed in Hollywood at an equally dizzying pace. When I was at Boston University for screenwriting, TV was the place to go for an actual career. Regular work, regular pay, year-round employment. And if you were lucky enough to be on a show that hit syndication? Baby, you were set!

By the time I moved to Los Angeles, Netflix and Hulu had already started streaming online. House of Cards dropped within a year of my arrival. Cable channels already had their eyes on limited series and prestige TV, and the “Golden Age of Television” was in full swing.

Networks still had major shows (my beloved Person of Interest comes from this era), but I could already tell that something was in the air. Mini-rooms, uncertain employment, and the death of the pilot soon followed, and then the streaming wars wiped us all out.

I feel like we’re on the cusp of another change. Like many this week, I watched Amazon spiking the almost-finished OpenAI movie with concern. It was difficult to avoid the conclusion that Amazon was sacrificing a film on the altar of making nice with one of its biggest compute clients.

For the last decade and a half, Silicon Valley has loomed large over the San Fernando Valley. It’s not always been as obvious as spiking a movie that hurts a client’s feelings. SV business practices and disdain for standard metrics of success fueled the Streaming Wars and, arguably, were an even more destructive force.

Streaming subscriptions were always a lousy business model for entertainment, yet the Streaming Wars happened anyway. Now we’re back at ad-supported TV and film, just like we started.

But I am a big believer that Big AI is a bubble, one that Big Tech has leveraged heavily. The fortune of Larry Ellison – father of new Paramount owner David Ellison – is closely tied to that of his company, Oracle. Oracle leveraged itself to OpenAI to an unbelievable degree, and if OpenAI can’t meet its payment promises (and given their recently leaked financials…) oof.

The lesson here, though, is not to prepare for a world where Big Tech doesn’t exert so much influence (because they turn back into normal software companies). The lesson is to always expect change. It’s the one constant.

After all, I’ve spoken to my parents and grandparents. The world I grew up in isn’t the world they grew up in, either.

What I’m Working on Now

Just finished up my latest pass on the Curtain Call pilot and sent it off to my partner for a final pass through and spell check. Once we’re satisfied, I’ll put the first 10 – 15 pages up on my website for anyone who wants to give it a read.

And now, as promised, I move on to my Creepypasta! I’ve been noodling around with it as a feature for a year, and I’ve decided it needs to be road-tested first- what better place than on Reddit’s r/nosleep? This will be a simplified version of the feature – I’m thinking of it as the prequel to the main movie.

I’ll keep you updated on my progress; hopefully the first of four parts will be up by the next edition of this newsletter.

Cool Things

The wife put on Nightcrawler the other night, and goddamn, is that a fine movie. Moody, dark, a love letter to the nastiest part of Los Angeles, helped by the performance of Jake Gyllenhaal’s career.

I’m embarrassed to admit that, as an intern, I passed on that script. I just didn’t get what it was going to be without Jake’s performance, which brings it all alive. It’s available for free on Tubi, so if you haven’t seen it, you owe it to yourself to enjoy a watch.