Paving the Road to Somewhere

Everyone knows Hollywood is broken. It's time to start the conversation on fixing it.

Photo by Diego Jimenez on Unsplash

Well we know where we're going
But we don't know where we've been
And we know what we're knowing
But we can't say what we've seen

And we're not little children
And we know what we want
And the future is certain
Give us time to work it out

We're on a road to nowhere
Come on inside
Taking that ride to nowhere
We'll take that ride

Unless you’ve lived in a cave since the election of Ronald Reagan, you’re filling in the rest of the song in your head — and David Byrne’s voice will be ringing in your ears for the rest of the day.

In 1985, when Byrne and Talking Heads first released Road to Nowhere, absolutely no one would have thought it applied to Hollywood. Back to the Future was burning up the box office, Dallas, Dynasty and The Cosby Show owned the Nielsen Ratings (each with twice the audience of today’s top-rated shows), and Ronald Reagan was beginning his second term as president — the first uneventful presidential transition since the beginning of the second Eisenhower term in 1957. Even Reagan detractors breathed a sigh of relief at the seeming return of some semblance of normality.

What a difference four decades makes.

Today it seems like Road to Nowhere describes just about every aspect of civilization everywhere in the world. The Internet has quite literally democratized everything to where even teenagers can’t keep up with the rapidity of change. Chaos reins, and not in a good way. For most, however, these changes have entered their lives involuntarily. Hollywood, by contrast, has embraced its road to nowhere with the fierce determination of Thelma and Louise soaring off the cliff. The difference being that Thelma and Louise genuinely believed they had no choice but the cliff… and Thelma & Louise is a movie.

The problem in Hollywood is that the people presently driving the entertainment industry down the road to nowhere and toward the cliff keep telling themselves that they, too, have no other choice… and that there is no cliff. Neither contention is true.

Those of us who have watched this impending disaster unfold — slowly since about 2005, rapidly since about 2015 — have mostly stayed quiet and kept our opinions to intimate circles. What percolates on film sets, in the halls of agencies, in whisper-groups after screenings and even among higher level executives in the confidence of people who haven’t the authority to fire them, never actually makes it to the people who most desperately need to hear it. If it did, we wouldn’t be where we are.

Put simply, the entertainment business is broken and desperately needs fixing. It’s time to admit it, to shout it from the rooftops and begin the crucial conversations as to how we fix it.

My contribution to this conversation begins today, here, on this Substack. Please subscribe if you want to be a part of it — a one-sided conversation is no conversation at all. Problem solving requires dialogue, and dialogue requires engagement. If this prompts more such blogs and Substacks to emerge and amplify more voices and more solutions, so much the better. In the end, we have to recognize that audiences, artists and even the Wall Street and Silicon Valley interlopers whose meddling is at the heart of so much of the present dysfunction are all served by the same goal: great storytelling.

We’ve been there before. It’s not an unknown destination. A lot of us know the way. Come on along. Join the road to somewhere.

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