Don't Give Them What They Want

Working through some ideas about creators and audiences

Photo by Felix Mooneeram on Unsplash

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Henry Ford apparently never actually said this, which is a shame because most of the things he did actually say were awful, and this one is at least useful and interesting. I'm going to trot (ouch) this "quote" out again, because it is nevertheless a good platform from which to begin.

I'm working some stuff out as I go here, scratching an itch, so let's see where we get to. I'm attempting to bring together two ideas; that creativity demands a degree of independence from authority, and that the authority, in the case of today's entertainment industry, is deeply flawed and might just be heading off a cliff.

Let's illustrate the point with a common enough scenario; a screenwriter is in a meeting with an exec. The screenwriter, afraid of silence, asks "What kind of things are you looking for?" It's an innocent enough question. It might even seem like a sensible ask; if they know what they want, why not give it to them?

That question is, in fact, the root of all evil. OK, not ALL evil, but it's certainly the doorway to a lot of bad stuff...

Screenwriting exists in this weird space between art and craft and commerce. Novelists, painters, photographers etc mostly create work that is delivered directly, or nearly directly, to the audience. They express themselves and that self-expression is the end product. The end product of screenwriting is a screenplay, which is a stage in a bigger process but it is not an end in itself. Can that be considered Art with a capital A? I'm not sure (and I certainly cringe when any of us self-identifies as an Artist). What I do know for certain, though, is the process of creating a piece of artistic self-expression does not start with asking "What kind of things are you looking for?".

It's a stupid question anyway, because no one knows the answer even if they think they do (see "faster horses" above), but asking stupid questions is not a crime. Acting on the answer, however, might be.

"We're looking for procedural cop shows." 99.9% of the time, this is the answer you're going to hear in a TV meeting. If, as a result, you go away and start coming up with an idea for a procedural cop show, you may no longer lay any kind of claim to artistry because you're an idiot and a hack.

You're a hack because you just asked for instruction; if you need to be told what story to tell, you're not a storyteller. You're an idiot because you just got the same answer everyone else gets, which means that there are hundreds of other writers out there at any given time trying to devise a procedural cop show. I don't like those odds and neither should you.

But even beyond that, and here we're back to that fake Henry Ford quote, you assumed the person you asked this question of knows what they want. They don't, they never have. What they MIGHT just know is what their boss is asking them to find, but then we examine the boss, and the boss's boss, and the boss's boss's boss and so on up the line and we discover that William Goldman was right: "No one knows anything." This has always been true but, if possible, it is truer now than it has ever been.

And this is where we come to the second idea, that of the flawed authority. I have a dim enough view of anyone asking what they should write about, but now let's look at just where the answer might be coming from...

When Goldman said "no one knows anything", he was writing at a time when the movie industry made films, put them into theatres and hoped to sell enough tickets to recoup costs (for television, swap out tickets for advertising). It wasn't an easy business, but the basic idea was pretty simple; bums on seats.

Later on, when home video became a thing, a secondary market appeared; maybe you wouldn't make bank on ticket sales, but you might pick up the difference on video and DVD. The need to please an audience, by which I don't mean to "give them what they want", but to give them what they might not know they want (The Godfather, Jaws, Star Wars, Pulp Fiction, The Matrix etc etc) was paramount. You might have had wildly varying success at that, but it was pretty easy to tell the difference between a hit and a flop - you just counted the receipts (and then lied about the results so you didn't have to share profit with any of the creatives). And if you wanted to make a movie that you suspected had a limited audience, well then you did the math and worked out how cheap you had to make it to give the thing a chance at recouping the investment.

This is all simplistic, obviously, and I don't mean to make out that the industry wasn't still rife with idiots and cowards back then, because it surely was. But compared to today, it's starting to look like everyone was Leonardo Da Vinci.

The last few years has seen the so-called "streaming revolution", for which we can read "the Spotify-cation of film and television". As with the music business, selling an individual item (a ticket or a DVD or a music CD) to audience members now comes a distant second to feeding "content" into a machine that makes its money from the subscription model. Theoretically, the mysterious "Algorithm" (which is nigh-on worshipped, despite the fact that it's just a glorified ratings system that attempts to predict the future by looking at the past) can tell us what will be a hit and what won't.

Hence the industry now spends hundred of millions of dollars on action movies that were apparently written in crayon, starring people called Chris, directed by project managers. The fact that these are mostly pieces of shit is evident to anyone with eyes and ears. Whether they are hits or flops, however, is now obscured by the fact that no tickets needed to be sold for the companies involved to, in theory at least, profit from them.

This is an existential problem, because our job as creators is to put on the show and then to learn, both from the number of ticket stubs and the reaction of the audience, how to do our job better next time. Right now, we are standing on the stage, doing our bit, but we have no way of telling if there is anyone out there in the dark, let alone whether they are laughing or gasping or applauding.

All art is a conversation with the audience. Right now, we can't hear or see the audience. Allegedly, the execs can, because they have "data". But data is bullshit. Data is not feedback, data is not a crowd of people on a Friday night, mesmerised by a light flickering in the dark. Data doesn't know if you were paying attention to the story, or if the TV show was just on in the background while you were scrolling Instagram. We're not getting the feedback we need.

We're also not being motivated. Our share of those ticket sales was the reward for making popular entertainment. In the absence of a massive cheque, some of us might very happily settle for valuable feedback from our "tribe"; those like-minded individuals for whom we had crafted our story - we knew there weren't many of them, but we hoped to reach them and move them in some way. But the streaming model takes away the profit participation (just as Spotify has done to music - no one even expects to pay to hear music any more) AND it mutes the conversation.

And so maybe this is why we ask "What kind of things are you looking for?". Because the audience is invisible to us now, and so these execs have become the surrogate audience. But they are not the REAL audience, they are just misinterpreting numbers and saying "Faster horses, please". And I don't even think these execs are the real bad guys; they've been hired to do a job and, in the current climate, they're just trying very hard not to get fired. They are victims of this new industry, just as much as the creators and the audiences are.

For all its flaws, the movie and television industries used to at least pretend to be a place for mavericks and risk-takers. As detailed in The Big Squeeze: Why Everyone in Hollywood Feels Stuck, the culture has changed in recent years and the younger, more dynamic execs are no longer gifted with the authority to make decisions or to take risks. The longer this goes on, the more Darwinism comes into play; the natural risk-takers leave the industry for more interesting pastures and those that stay behind are less and less equipped to trust their guts or to be bold, even in the unlikely event that they were to be let off the leash.

Meanwhile, the people at the top are steering the industry in a dangerous direction. In thrall to Wall Street and the promise of huge payouts, we even hear of moguls in once-liberal Hollywood hoping for a Trump win next week, because they think he will be more amenable to their proposed creation of anti-competitive, anti-creative monopoly businesses. Like the mortgage brokers of The Big Short, these guys (they're all guys, of course) want to package up a bunch of shitty movies and TV shows and sell it to you as a premium subscription opportunity. And it's a lot easier to do that if they've first made sure that you have nowhere else to get your entertainment from.

Am I losing the thread? Let me try to grasp it again; we have creators over here and we have the audience over there. These two groups, theoretically, enjoy a sympathetic relationship; one provides entertainment, the other provides reward and feedback. And in the middle, we have a mechanism that USED to broker that relationship; it paid for the product and it took its cut of the proceeds. It wasn't a perfect system, but it mostly worked. Now that middle-man is deliberately blocking the signal between creators and audience; it's attempting to fleece the audience of its money and it's trying to force the creators into a subservient position by making us all fly blind.

The internet once held the possibility of making niche audiences huge; a sci-fi show on national primetime television might not be a good bet, because the percentage of the audience in any given nation that was into sci-fi was not big enough. But scale that percentage up to the whole world and suddenly you have a number large enough to make your sci-fi show viable. That should have been where this went. But instead, the tech-bros decided to spend all the money on someone who used to play a superhero blowing shit up. And the novelty of that, initially, had us all signing up for a subscription. They gave us the good stuff, then once we were hooked, they started cutting it with the mental laxative of cheap true-crime documentaries and disaster shows. There's still good stuff, of course there is; it’s the bundle that’s the problem.

But audiences are smart, and they're restless. There's only so much time you can sit on the couch watching bullshit before you crave something better. The industry at large may or may not realise and adapt to this. But creators absolutely need to get ahead of the curve. We need to be making things that WE want to watch and read and listen to, secure in the knowledge that if WE like it, there's a good chance that other people will like it too. The conversation with the audience needs to be rekindled; that interaction is the whole past, present and future of what we do.

As the streaming Empire constructs its Death Star, there will be inevitable pushback from the Rebel Alliance. Independent film and TV companies will start to have successes with stories that have been developed and produced outside the mainstream; big box office hits, or shows on "legacy" TV networks that do surprisingly well. Even within the streaming models, there may be movies and shows that are outlier successes, which change what the algorithm looks for, or even helps demonstrate the flaw in the notion of its omnipotence. Competition is key here. A few streaming services dominating everything is no good for anyone but the shareholders, who will move on anyway when the whole thing crashes and burns. A range of companies, making a range of products, competing for eyeballs is the system that best serves audiences and creators alike.

As members of the audience, we help bring about change by refusing to engage with the bad stuff - data is everything to these guys; they can see exactly when you bailed on a show; so if it's bad, bail on it. Don't watch a shitty movie to the end because you can't be bothered to turn it off; they'll think you liked it and they'll make more of them. Hit the "stop" button; think of it as an instruction to them to stop making this stuff.

And as creators, we can improve the situation by writing the stories we want to tell, the way we want to tell them, by acknowledging that we are both author and audience, that what interests us interests others. Timothy Snyder, in his book "On Tyranny" sets out rules for how to avoid authoritarianism. The first is "Don't obey in advance" (Jeff Bezos, please note). "What kind of things are you looking for?" is a question asked by someone looking to obey. That's not who we are supposed to be. We are supposed to be inventing the Model T Ford, the aeroplane, the iPhone.

No one needs a faster horse.