Creative destruction, the movie

US President Donald J. Trump, a man known neither for modesty nor forbearance in rounding on his enemies,  has good reason to wish ill on the showbiz celebs who not only spurned his Inuaguration but whose leading lights signalle their virtue by denouncing him  at every opportunity. Big mistake, one would have thought, as Hollywood’s accounting practices are notoriously rubbery and closing the loopholes through which it darts and operates would be an efficient means of letting a troublesome industry know that its truculence  is not appreciated. If Trump fancied inflicting further punishment, US copyright law stands waiting to be loosened.

They are things he might do — but probably won’t  have to do, as Tinseltown is doing a fine job of humbling itself. As Nick Bilton reports in the latest Vanity Fair

[Hollywood] workers feel as if they are in safe harbor, given that the production side of a project is protected by the unions—there’s the P.G.A., D.G.A., W.G.A., SAG-AFTRA, M.P.E.G., and I.C.G., to name just a few. These unions, however, are actually unlikely to pose a significant, or lasting, protection.

Newspaper guilds have been steadily vanquished in the past decade. They may have prevented people from losing jobs immediately, but in the end they have been complicit in big buyouts that have shrunk the newspaper industry’s workforce by 56 percent since 2000. Moreover, start-ups see entrenched government regulation, and inert unions, not so much as impediments but as one more thing to disrupt. Uber and Lyft have largely dominated unions and regulators as they have spread around the world. Unions did not impede Airbnb from growing across American cities. (The company has 2.3 million listings in 34,000 cities.) Google, Facebook, ad-tech giants, and countless others have all but stampeded demands for increased privacy online from groups such as the A.C.L.U. And that’s just to cite the most obvious examples.

In the 1950s, the movies were the third-largest retail business in the U.S., surpassed only by grocery stores and car dealerships. Look what Silicon Valley has already done to the other two sectors.

Bilton’s only slightly premature eulogy to Hollywood-as-we-know-it can be read in full via the link below.

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