Because Hollywood Always Adapts (Eventually)

BY SAM WASSON

Hollywood is the most fragile and powerful industry in the world, always ending, always re-becoming — and only when it has a gun to its head. When The Jazz Singer surprised everyone, except Warner Bros., and proved talk was the next thing, Hollywood, hotbed of FOMO then as now, jumped to its feet and started wiring itself for sound; when the first cries of unionization reached Louis B. Mayer, he gathered fellow leaders of the industry and, with wounded dignity, conceived The Academy of Motion Picture

Arts and Sciences; when the Catholic Legion of Decency cried out against sin onscreen, Hollywood, clasping its hands in feigned contrition once again, adopted the Production Code. Television? They ran from it. And no one predicted Easy Rider. How could they?

Hollywood is basically scared — always. That’s what stalls and propels us. For all the talk of ego motoring the industry, I never met an executive who wanted to be the first, who wouldn’t cop to being wrong, who wouldn’t cop to being anything, if it got her on the bandwagon to a hit. Morality? This is America: We give the people what they want. The question is, as always, what do they really want — not just today but deep

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down? That’s where the real gold is: buried in them thar hills , the zeitgeists of tomorrow.

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When do we change? In Hollywood, we watch and wait, like a soldier with a gangrenous appendage. No, we will not amputate. No, we will not amputate. OK, now. Do it now.

Then we walk again.

The motion picture is the greatest means of mass communication ever devised, and as far as anyone can tell, nothing is ever going to top it, and frankly, nothing ever should. Its arrival was necessary and inevitable and therefore pretty much a spiritual essential from here to as far as the eye can see. As long as Hollywood regularly produces a product that’s better than you or I could make on our iPhone, that means, even if we have to crawl to find them, there will still be an audience for it. So do I despair about the new threats forever beyond the horizon, our emptying theaters, the intellectual and emotional laziness of the algorithm audience, the total constriction of the studios, our lack of visionary leadership? Yes, I despair. But I always have: Even at the height of the studio system, when Louis B. Mayer was the highest-paid man in America, we were always an endangered species.

Sam Wasson is the author of The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story.

Speak now: The Jazz Singer (1927), with Al Jolson and May McAvoy.