Hello!

Michael McQuarrie finds another good Internet Archive item. It’s an episode of the old PBS TV show Frontline. To explain, PBS was this great public-supported TV station that presented all manner of education and public interest programming, including original productions like Frontline that offered fine documentaries with journalistic integrity. Exactly what happened to public broadcasting is an entire different discussion.

The beautifully produced The Monster That Ate Hollywood is about the ‘corporatization’ of Hollywood. Produced in 2001, the process had been underway for decades, but it’s nicely spelled out, with excellent celeb interviews and relevant film clips.

Frankly, it’s hard to imagine anything produced about Hollywood that’s this good — most studio-based projects are so thoroughly corporatized, that anything not selling a product is pushed aside. We should know, having worked on video featurettes and docus for so long … starting in the late ’90s, the attorneys kept a close watch on was shown and spoken. What you wanted to say didn’t matter, what the piece said about their product did.

These are not just companies, says Peter Bart, they’re Nation-States, that want ‘Risk-Averse’ movies.

The final joke is the writer’s credit on the show …. Alan Smithee.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson