Reclaiming Creativity
From Hollywood's downfall to Rick Rubin's vision
One of the great joys of reading is that sometimes a theme emerges from two completely separate and unrelated reads. Earlier this week I read a long piece in Harper's, "The Life and Death of Hollywood1" by Daniel Bessner and a few days later, I happened to read Rick Rubin's The Creative Act. In both pieces, creativity is a central theme.
When I was younger, and living in Los Angeles, going to the movies was a joy. My friends and I would head into an air-conditioned theater on a hot summer day, and see something great for a reasonable price2. Chances were pretty good3 we'd see a non-franchise film. These days, tickets are expensive, it seems like nearly every movie I hear about is part of some franchise, it's hard to find good parking, and the concessions are still pricy. I don't go to the movies much anymore, because what made it a good experience--an original, creative film--is rarity these days.
To make up for this, theater chains do everything they can to distract us from what is on the screen. Fancy, reclining seats in case we doze off because we’re bored with what see. Beer and wine to aid in the dozing and dulling of our senses. Sound so loud that we are too overwhelmed to make sense of anything, and maybe we don’t notice the lack of creativity.
This isn’t to say that the writing, acting, directing and other elements of these movies are bad. They just seem overdone, as if we are in a creative rut that we can’t seem to get out of. I've often wondered what happened to the originality in Hollywood, until I read Bessner's piece and he explained a big part of the reason:
Executives, meanwhile, increasingly believed that they'd found their best bet in "IP": preexisting intellectual property—familiar stories, characters, and products—that could be milled for scripts. As an associate producer of a successful Aughts IP-driven franchise told me, IP is "sort of a hedge." There's some knowledge of the consumer's interest, he said. "There's a sort of dry run for the story." Screenwriter Zack Stentz, who co-wrote the 2011 movies Thor and X-Men: First Class, told me, "It's a way to take risk out of the equation as much as possible."
There is a lot more to the story, of course, involving networks buying studios and vice-versa, and streaming business models, and how writers are paid. What it comes down to is a winnowing of creativity. To make a buck in Hollywood, it seems, a writer must typically be willing to limit the scope of their creativity to what touches each of the "four quadrants"--something that appeals to all demographics. Writers have to make a living, so I get the tradeoff, but I lament the loss of creativity that results. I've seen similar things in the publishing world, where book deals are based on the idea that something might turn into a franchise, when all the power of that franchise IP can be brought to bear.
Still, as Bessner points out, there are diminishing returns to this strategy:
[I]n 2023, Disney's The Marvels fell more than $64 million short of breaking even, and its Indiana Jones sequel drastically underperformed. The Flash, for Warner Bros. Discovery, lost millions, and the company's Shazam! Fury of the Gods flopped. (In the case of Barbie—the loudest exception—the writers, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, were given extraordinary free rein.)
With this in the back of my mind, I sat down to read Rick Rubin's book The Creative Act: A Way of Being. I read it because I recalled listening to Rick Rubin on the Tim Ferriss podcast years ago and I was interested to hear what someone with Rick's extensive background working with music artists had to say about creativity. It came of something of a surprise that Rick's thoughts on creativity centered on the pure creative act, and not on how that creativity affects the bottom line. I liked it. In several places, he talked about how making art is not a competitive act. Something that obvious never really occurred to me, but it should have. Businesses that benefit from creativity make it seem competitive.
Rick called out "rules" as limitations, and argued that creativity should be free from rules. He gave, as two common examples, the conventional wisdom that a song should be 3-5 minutes long, or a movie should be 90 minutes over three acts. We can all think of exceptions to these rules, and I think the reason they stand out is not because they flaunt the rules, but because they bring the full power of creativity to bear on the art. Yet from a business standpoint, they are not sure things.
The business model described by Bessner is like a black hole, swallowing up creativity, and there is no easy way out. Bessner offers a few suggestions, but admits that none of them are likely to happen. How do we reclaim creativity in the popular art we enjoy? I wish I knew the answer. Rick Rubin offers one possible path, an action that each one of us can take, that, in concert, may ultimately lead to change:
"Curate the quality of what you allow in."
When I read this, I had to stop and think for a while. I thought about Bessner's piece on the life and death of Hollywood, on the role of IP in the flattening of creative peaks in order to satisfy every customer. It occurred to me that maybe it isn't just the big Hollywood conglomerates that are the problem. Maybe I am part of the problem. Maybe we are collectively part of the problem. We have come to accept lower quality art as the norm. If we raised our expectations, if we curated the quality of what we allow in, maybe we raise the bar just a little.
What is high quality art for me is almost certainly different from what it is for you. Art is subjective. But if we don't passively accept was is put in front of us, and demand better, maybe we'll start to see improvements. Maybe writers won't be held so rigidly to the four quadrants. Maybe risk-taking will be rewarded because the art is great, not just because it is there.
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Aside from the concessions, which were always expensive and have only gotten more so.
A 75% chance, in fact, according to Bessner.