It's an interesting proposition to kill Hollywood, but I don't exactly think it's going to be killed so easily, or that it's anywhere remotely resembling close to being "dead". Just examining the profit margins from this year alone paints a picture of a vibrant and healthy industry and overall employment in the industry is actually doing quite well considering the state of the economy. Although, full disclosure, I do work in production as a media producer (reality TV, variety TV, single-camera, digital magazines, games, social media, features, etc.). I was also very fortunate to be mentored by one of the former ranking executives of MGM.

That mentor taught me a great deal, but one of the most fascinating things I learned was that these executives do not understand how the internet works, at all. Their days are scheduled down to the letter so they simply don't have time to figure this kind of shit out. So they pay their lawyers to figure it out for them and that's the source of the cancer of misinformation in Hollywood studios, Copyright/IP lawyers. Their jobs have evolved to depend solely on finding 'infringement' wherever they can and then making it seem as terrifying as possible to the execs that employ them. These are the people responsible for outright lies such as "100 billion in lost revenue".

This misinformation eventually became the dogma of the entertainment industry. I can't tell you how many people I've worked with in the industry, wildly intelligent people, that honestly believe piracy is the single greatest threat to the entertainment industry. What's worse is that they conflate basic concepts like file-sharing with the selling of boot-leg DVDs in some back-alley market in Calcutta. The disconnect with fact and reality is just truly astounding.

That's why the first line of defense should be to open a dialogue with Hollywood. Before we vote any Congresspeople out and before declaring "War on Hollywood" there needs to be an open campaign to combat the lies that are pervasive in Hollywood itself. Because honestly, after all we've been through in the last 10 years, do we really need more wars? Is that the lesson we're going to take away from Iraq and Afghanistan?

The people who work in Hollywood are fellow humans and fellow Americans. They aren't malicious invaders, they're people who are just irrationally scared for the future of the industry they love. If you declare "Let's Kill Hollywood", you immediately become part of the "Them" to Hollywood's "Us". You fire the first shot of a War that you never had to fight in the first place and one that will only hasten the urgency with which even more draconian legislation would be pursued. All of which could be easily avoided.

Creating effective channels for communication between the informed members of the tech industry and Hollywood should be the first priority of any initiative that was realistically and maturely seeking change to the kind of legislative agendas being advocated by groups like the MPAA (the RIAA is a different story, that's a case of rats on a sinking ship trying to prevent anyone else from getting on the ship so that they can make money off of the glass-botton tours.)

That being said, I'm not against (in any way) the idea of funding start-ups to explore exciting new maxims of entertainment or helping to shrink the cost of production for film/television/gaming. That's brilliant and deserves praise for being supported. However, it's the call the War I find so very unsettling.

I think I've made those points clear enough so I'll follow-up this post with some ideas to kick around that would help bring production costs down for smaller-scale film/television production along with some notes concerning certain realities surrounding the different aspects.

EDIT: Grammar