The Calendar section in the Los Angeles Times used to be thick Monday through Saturday, and then near book-length on Sundays. So many ads promoting released and soon-to-be-released films, and so many articles about the movie industry that has long animated business activity in Los Angeles.
The Calendar section, and surely Variety to a smaller but much more substantive collection of industry insiders, fed Hollywood and broad excitement about it. It was in Calendar sometime in the early 1980s that I was introduced to Michael Ovitz as the most powerful person in Hollywood. It sparked a lifelong fascination with Ovitz, and a review (here) of his eventual memoir that I didn’t want to end.
Notable about Ovitz is that while at CAA he morphed from agent to advertising maven to investment banker. In modern times, Ovitz has taken his talents to Silicon Valley where he invests in and mentors the technology visionaries of today and tomorrow. Which is kind of the point. And it’s an unfortunate one for those long fascinated by the Hollywood of old.
While the movie industry remains big and rich, they’re getting much richer up in northern California. One reason is that in seeding a golden age for television most notably, Silicon Valley has so minutely segmented audiences (while making information consumption an online endeavor) that the days of big network television shows, major movie releases, and thick Calendar sections/Variety issues are largely in the past.
Quick: name five famous directors today. Five producers. Except for the film stars essentially grandfathered (directors and producers too) into the segmented present, name several modern male and female movie stars.
About what you’ve read, it’s not a total lament. Progress can’t be lamented, and this is progress whereby something better replaces the past. The number of movies and television shows that entertain a wide range of audiences anytime and anywhere is surely bigger than ever. Still, it’s hard not to miss the grandiosity of the Hollywood of old, of the studio executives, producers, directors, actors and actresses that so many were so familiar with, along with the relentless efforts by their would-be replacements to take their spots at the top.
All this throat-clearing is seemingly necessary as a jump-off to director, producer and actor Ed Zwick’s (Thirtysomething, Glory, Shakespeare In Love, Under Siege, My So-Called Life, and many more) excellent and insight-driving new memoir, Hits, Flops and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years In Hollywood. While I haven’t seen all or even half of what Zwick created, he’s long been a successful somebody in Hollywood. As someone who devours Hollywood histories and memoirs, I wasn’t going to miss Zwick’s.
I’m glad I didn’t firstly because Zwick has a very interesting story to tell, but I’m also glad because there’s a case to be made that audience segmentation will render the Hollywood memoir much less of a thing in the future.
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