Hollywood isn't dead, according to a producer you've never heard of but once saw Ryan Gosling perform "Genie in a Bottle."

How to stay level-headed when it feels like all hope is lost.

Hollywood isn’t dead.

Once upon a time, there were 15,000 movie theaters in the United States. Nearly 40% of our nation’s population went to the movies every single week. But then something happened, and less than 20 years later, the movies lost nearly half their audience, from a high of 90 million moviegoers all the way down to 47 million moviegoers in just a nine-year span.

New content that was cheaper to produce started dominating the marketplace, despite it being considered B-level content (or worse!) by creative elites. Studios fell into a steep decline, talent could no longer command the same rates, and during one three-year stretch, over 30% of the workforce was out of a job.

And worst of all, this new lowbrow content was free.

This story, of course, is not about how AI, Covid, YouTube, or Netflix completely changed the course of Hollywood history.

It’s about the rise of the TV.

The above story, which is told in Joel Kotkin and Paul Grabowicz’s 1982 book California, Inc. illustrates how quickly we forget, a mere 74 years (or one Bill Murray ago) that TV was the big bad. An existential crisis for Entertainment. How would Hollywood survive if content was cheap to produce, available en masse, void of artistic quality, and worst of all, delivered to consumers without cost?

Spoiler alert: Still here, even though we took the idols, smashed them, and got left with some nobodies.

If we’ve learned anything from Rashomon or Real Housewives (take your pick) it’s that there’s three sides to every story.

Is Hollywood struggling right now? Yes!

Has Hollywood struggled before? Also yes!

Does that mean it’s dead? Is the killer ever actually dead?

You may have noticed that as a society, we’ve shifted a teeny bit away from nuanced takes, but this take is about as mild as a watered down salsa pack from the Del Taco drive-thru after another night of tequila soda-ing your Hollywood Sorrows away at Barney’s Beanery (LA’s 3rd-favorite sport behind Pickleball and insert whatever LA sports team is car flag-worthy here).

The Entertainment Industry will be, uh, fine? (*Ducks*)

Before you go Del Scorcho on me, allow me to explain. I do, in fact, believe that this is the worst time we’ve seen in entertainment in the last 25 years. 2008 was bad. 2010 was bad. This is both of those combined injected with a healthy dose of The Substance.

Never have I ever seen more people out of work, wondering how to pay their bills, or even crazier, turning to LinkedIn (guilty) in search of answers as to what went wrong.

But the answer is same as it ever was, all that’s missing is an AI-generated Buggles to belt out “Instagram killed the HBO star” to lament the rewriting of material on new technology. Wait, they already lamented that?

They took the credit for your second symphony.

The answer we know to be true is that our industry will evolve, just like it always has, it’s just that you might not like what the evolution looks like, or perhaps more likely, you already hate what the evolution looks like because it looks like nothing like the version that you love. (It’s true, in the end, the maniacs blew it up. Damn them all to hell and/or New Mexico, where their next studio gig awaits.)

We’re all allowed that feeling that change is bad, and that things are now worse than they used to be. We’re all a sucker for nostalgia, right?

In an era where it feels like content is loaded into a digital confetti canon and fired at our synapses with reckless abandon (may the best algorithm win!), I lament that nothing will ever feel the same as it did when I crammed myself into a sold out theater in New Hampshire, saw American Pie for the first time, laughed hysterically with 300 other moviegoers, mustered up the stupid youthful courage to email one of the lead actresses, Shannon Elizabeth to see if she needed help with her website, get a reply, and found myself living in L.A. a year later working a charity event for Shannon and watching a pre-pre-pre “I’m Just Ken” Ryan Gosling playing acoustic guitar singing “Genie in a Bottle.”

That’s the Hollywood that sparks my soul and reminds me why I parked all of my earthly belongings into a 1992 Plymouth Voyage and drove 3,000 miles only listening to Elliott Smith’s Figure 8 on repeat.

Shoot. Maybe Hollywood is dead, and the version I romanticized is merely just somebody that I used to know.

(Or maybe that was just my Dark Night of the Soul beat.)

If we’re plotting out the downfall of the Hollywood as we knew it, I am one of the guilty parties.

For the past 20 years, I’ve produced reality television. If you’re scoring at home, reality TV comes shortly after Blockbuster Video was about to kill the movie theater but before DVDs were actually going to kill the movie theater on the entertainment industry apocalypse timeline.

When I got started in reality, it was a job that nobody wanted. You worked in reality TV because scripted hadn’t worked out for you (YET!). I worked a graveyard shift on The Real World, where thanks to my hard work and dedication, they made me the designated sex tape logger, which meant I’d watch cast members have sex on grainy spy camera footage and make notes on what happened (they were having sex) so that the producing team could decide what went into the episodes (not that much sex).

Growing up, The Real World was the first show that I considered my TV show. It wasn’t for my parents or grandparents, it was for me.

Not only was it a look into the lives of people whose age I was about to be, it was a mirror into people with backgrounds, experiences, and lives that I had never seen before.

The Real World was important because on my life’s timeline, it was one of the first pieces of mainstream content to give a real (not scripted) voice to those who did not have a voice. It taught me about race relations, consent, women’s reproductive rights, and gave me an understanding of HIV/AIDS. True story.

The funny thing about Reality TV, is that like everything that came before and everything that has come since, there was significant fear at the time that scripted would be harmed by nonfiction television.

In reality, for the next 20 years, both exploded and there were more than enough jobs to go around, and reality TV evolved from job that your scripted buddies mocked you for while they toiled away on their screenplay while mainlining Tikur Anbessa’s at Intelligentsia to job their wives would corner you for hours over in hopes that you’d tell them why, in fact, Vanderpump did Rule.

I’m an optimist at heart but a realist by nature, so when folks ask me what I think is next, they don’t always like the answer.

The future of Hollywood is not physically located in Hollywood.

In the past 130 years (or one Jack Benny ago) we’ve gone from the silver screen to the TV screen to the pocket sized screen and from long form to half-hours to quick bites (LOL) and from channel flipping to content swiping.

It’s easy to forget (well because most of us weren’t alive at the time) that while Los Angeles was the hub of the movie industry, it largely took the TV industry from New York, as Kotkin and Grabowicz remind the readers of California, Inc.

In modern terms, we’d say that Los Angeles was playing TikTok to New York’s Game of Thrones-era HBO, dishing out an endless stream of subpar disposable content while the true artists fought the good fight. So while the industry currently gives off serious Red Wedding vibes, the truth is that Hollywood is the original mass appeal content machine, 74 Years B.H.T. (Before Hawk Tuah).

History repeats itself on an infinite loop.

At a certain point “I’ve got a bad feeling about this” becomes relevant data point and I don’t need to cite the numerous sources that have Los Angeles production down by (*checks notes*) infinity thousand percent to tell you that we already know what comes next. Because we can look to the past.

The future of the industry is no longer in just California. Great jobs and markets will appear (or continue to appear) in Arizona, Georgia, New Mexico, Nevada, and Texas. And on the plus side, some of those commutes are still closer than driving from Burbank to Playa Del Marina Vista.

The future of the industry is no longer in just the United States. Spin a globe (or just swipe your Google Maps app really fast if you don’t have a globe) and point.

The metaphorical Hollywood wave is coming, and it’s everywhere.

About a year ago, I was contacted by a production company based out of Thailand. They’d been commissioned by HBO (RIP-ish) to produce a Housewives-style reality show about a fantastic famous group of Thai celebrities. They wanted to bring on an American producer, for lack of a better way of putting it, to teach them how to make a docuseries.

At that time, there had been virtually zero Reality TV produced in Thailand. Remotely, from a corner of my home in Burbank, I taught the team how to build a TV show from the ground up. And like Real Housewives before them, they employed the talented producers and editors of a struggling genre - soap operas - to help tell Reality TV stories.

That show, Deane’s Dynasty was one of the most satisfying endeavors of my personal career. The opportunity to teach people the skills that will lay the foundation for the next 20 years of documentary television in Thailand was a joy that no amount of ratings will ever replace.

I know it doesn’t feel like this now, but when the dust settles, I believe there will be more entertainment jobs than ever. We live in an incredible era where there’s opportunity for storytellers from all over the world to share important stories, and there’s less barriers for us, the titans randos of the industry to share our own stories or teach the next generation of storytellers how to make their mark and/or receive a borderline inappropriate amount of applause when their movie premieres at a film festival.

Dare I say it? I’m excited for what comes next.