'The Crown': Taking the Fun Out of Funerals
The former streaming queen mirrors Hollywood's geriatric atrophy.
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The final six episodes of The Crown were so resolutely geriatric and middle class that it was like having the annual costume ball at Blenheim that you've been so dazzled by for seven years — impeccable organization and settings; role-playing games and entertainment that were never dull; sharp banter with worldly, sometimes fascinating people who've witnessed or been the center of some of the most pivotal moments in recent history — that you've been anticipating the final event more keenly than any other show in recent years, only to have it moved at the last minute to a dreary gastropub outside Guildford.
It rained and the piper was the most scintillating person there.
When it broke on screens seven years ago, The Crown elevated all streaming shows to the level of premium cable, raising the bar both on production quality and spend — $12 million an episode! on a drama! — but here we are at the end of it, and the queen of modern streaming not only didn't go out with a bang of clashing cymbals, blaring trumpets and thundering kettle drums, she shuffled off to take a nap and died in her sleep off-screen.
It was so dull I found myself contemplating the details like Bette Midler wondering in her neo-Vaudeville revue Clams on the Half Shell what the Queen kept in that purse, “Subway fare?”
Almost ghoulishly, it echoed what it's like being here at the epicenter of filmed content, checking its pulse, poring over scans and lab tests looking for signs of hope, but the prognosis is troubling: overall work is down, what, ~30% for reasons not related to the pandemic or the strikes, simple contraction, which they want to believe is a correction and cyclical, a response to overspending on too much content, but if that's the case, other manufacturing industries would be suffering too, even more because entertainment is usually not affected by economic downturns, on the contrary.
Thing is, we're in the opposite of an economic downturn. The world is becoming rapidly more globalized, just ask the luxury goods conglomerates. Corporate Hollywood should set aside their super-embarrassing-for-me “what works for Kansas works for all mankind” American arrogance — what I’ve termed the American World Series Syndrome — and study the luxury market, which is in a slight slump while they pull back the inclusivity trend and reset to being a little more exclusive because, well, that’s the whole point of luxury.
Luxury brands share an overlapping demo with ticket buyers, especially those who used to be ticket buyers but are staying at home; why pay all that money for “visual Musak”?
There’s more original, engaging content from Korea to be found on streaming, and the price of a single movie ticket covers a month’s subscription, with change if you live in a major metropolis.
Luxury brands haven’t been afraid to shake things up by forging collabs with artists, actors and musicians. It’s been insanely lucrative for both sides: Kanye West’s Yeezy was worth around $4 billion until he blew it with the shenanigans and Adidas dropped him, and his net worth dropped from $2 billion to $400 million, with royalties and touring revenue bringing in a fraction of what the brands do; Rihanna took 7 years between her last album and the one before it while she raked it in $1.4 billion from her clothing brand, making her worth more than Beyoncé and Taylor Swift combined.
Yes, Kanye and Rihanna's successes are a major reason I’ve launched my own clothing, accessories and home furnishings brand.
Maybe if Hollywood made movies for the whole world rather than what they think Americans want — products that are now triple distilled through insane social-justice restrictions as long and detailed as the Constitution — and marketed them properly, they might find that people would spend money and return to the theater.
This survey I responded to on The Hill, a centrist political website covering Washington with an emphasis on Congress, paints a picture of how poorly corporate Hollywood is doing in making theatrical releases that people want to see. Just under 8.5 million respondents from the awards-fare drama demographic is a robust amount, painting a more accurate picture than any industry market research company could hope to achieve with post-screening questionnaires and focus groups:
SPEND IT OR KILL IT
Even one-fifth of the ballpark $100 million they spend on marketing a Potter or a Marvel would yield healthier returns on a well-crafted, thought-provoking drama that isn’t afraid to talk about the hundreds of aspects about the human condition that neither Hollywood nor indie New York will touch; if there’s no precedent, if the project being pitched isn’t in some way a remake of another film or show that was a hit, fuggetaboutit. If the project is reminiscent of a flop in even the vaguest way…
“Why are you wasting my time bringing me something like this?”
Corporate Hollywood would rather prove their own point that dramas don't work by allocating pittance for marketing, all but guaranteeing failure. In the case of some indie films, they expect producers to come up with their own financing for marketing.
"Let them eat organic grassroots social media campaigns!" That’s backwards: tentpoles and franchises are the kind of movies that can easily pull off grassroots campaigns without much P&A support — the marketing campaign for “This is Sparta!” 300 was done in the online SIM community Second Life. Original content needs every penny it can get.
It would help if execs didn’t think of audiences as “the lowest common denominator.” If they aren't as educated as execs, it's because they're not from Westchester or West End Avenue — that doesn't mean they're not smart. Build it, sell it, and they will come.
Even the Marvels are secretly receiving transfusions, transplants, and chemo these days. That hulking ghost ship, the Arclight Hollywood cinema complex, the de facto epicenter of the filmed content business, which used to hold the premieres for the majority of films that weren’t Potters and Marvels — those open in the tourist area around the Chinese Theater where the Oscars are held — is still closed, its reopening pushed further and further away.
If anything, the production pipeline should be overheated, but people are leaving the industry in droves, suddenly fed up with the abusive, exhausting, mercurial workplace environments and 60-hour weeks. Film sets are 70-hour weeks, assuming a five-day week. If it’s six days, it’s closer to 85 hours.
The pride in how difficult and terrible the entertainment industry is shouldn't be thought about as being so perversely noble; it’s hard enough being in the trenches making a movie, why does the process of getting it greenlit and funded need to be like climbing Everest with your bare hands, wearing flip flops? Why does the corporate side need to work that hard, in environments that sound like Navy Seal training grounds?
It doesn’t need to be like that. The British film business, which comes under ‘Hollywood’ when used as a synecdoche for the Anglosphere’s entire filmed-content industry, is the opposite: the actors, the crews, the post houses are all a delight to work with. And they churn out a superior product, like The Crown in its first four seasons, and the first four episodes of Season 6.
The way execs and creatives alike think of the hardships of filmmaking you’d think they were Habitat for Humanity volunteers building emergency homes for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
If you read the comments in Deadline and other trade publications on relevant articles, it's a massive "Fuck this shit!" The fogies respond with something along the lines of, "I've been working 60-hour weeks for 40 years now! That's the way the business is! It works!" It was working, even if it never had to be that way.
Those 60 hours are spent in a non-physical version of Squid Game. I suppose there is a certain kind of person who finds the malice, treachery, machismo and general abusiveness of the American filmed-content sector to be thrilling and addictive. To cap off the silliness, they’re out there leading the social justice parade, schooling and canceling others for social crimes that aren’t a patch on the ill behavior they engage in before lunch every day.
It’s the ego of being a part of this Squid Game, and prestige borrowing by proximity to celebrities — formerly known as “star fucking” — that keeps them playing. The creatives stay because it’s a vocation — we would do this for free. When it comes to writers, most of the time we aren’t compensated at all, especially in my purview, the super-elite dramatic features area.
You need your own fortune to participate in dramatic features, much like thoroughbred horse breeding and racing. Hard to squeeze much diversity, equity and inclusion in that group. The reason I’m in it is because I’m not suited to write, direct or produce anything else, having been born into the horse-breeding set. And those are the films I enjoy most.
While I namedrop as hard and fast as the next person, it’s for different reasons, usually to ratchet up the stakes when I’m telling a story, not to elevate myself in the eyes of the people on whom I’m dropping names.
In my natal world, filmmaking isn’t considered a proper career, nor is entertainment in general. My mother’s disdain for it has only increased over the years as she’s watched it not only impoverish me but deny me the success she and just about everyone who knows me believes I deserve. I’ve never believed in myself as much as they have.
“What’s a sun dance?” asks Mum in her version of Lady Violet Crawley.
All of which is to say I’m not in it for the prestige, borrowed or personal. I have no social insecurities and celebrity is neither here nor there: I grew up surrounded by famous people, rare privilege and the prestige and influence of the most powerful nation in human history, and I’m a native New Yorker. It’s almost death by privilege.
Having said that, my lack of success relative to my social rank makes me living proof that White privilege is nothing more than postmodernist malarkey.
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JUST LIVING THE NIGHTMARE, MAN
I’m one of the few who can say with absolute sincerity that I’m in it purely for the love of filmmaking. But for a long time now the feature films sector hasn’t been what I signed up for at the age of 19, coming out of a screening of Hiroshima, Mon Amour at Wesleyan.
When it comes to awards-fare, Hollywood execs are boxed into a maze of a process that censors scripts — philosophically speaking, there is no difference between a studio/agency analyst and the Chinese Film Administration, particularly with the addition in recent years of Maoist “sensitivity readers” — and their addiction to prestige, represented by that little gold-plated man.
People saying "Oh, cool!" after I tell them what I do has become stale enough to make Christmas stuffing.
I'm not sure when the symptoms started, Doc, but my response lately has been a sighed "Yeah,” then dropping my gaze to the floor like Imelda Staunton as Queen Elizabeth contemplating the crypt beneath her feet in Westminster Abbey.
If I forget myself and quip about my disillusionment with the Great Hollywood Squid Game, the stock reply is almost invariably, “But, hey, you’re living your dream, right?”
I’ve stopped using my own stock reply, “It turned into a nightmare a long time ago. I just refused to wake up in time to spare myself and investors a couple of million in unsecured loans.” If you want to watch an American short circuit before your eyes tell him that, far more often than not, following your dreams leads you to the opposite of what you hoped to find after all that following.
“But it’s the process that counts!”
Oh, fuck off. What does that even mean? The only process I want right now is a fat check processed by my bank. I try not to remind myself that if I’d stayed the course in my natal world — BA from Wesleyan; masters at Harvard; entry-level position at Morgan Stanley — I’d likely be worth $100 million today. Even one-tenth of that would be dreamy.
As good as it feels to pop the pimples of my discontent by firing off truthful zingers about the Dream to strangers, I’ve stopped; I can think of few more unpleasantly subversive things to tell an American than the reality of the Dream being by and large a hoax, the fakest of fake news, that despite being the most privileged kind of White man possible in this country, talented enough “to make it big in this town,” as the old timers used to tell me when I was younger, I live hand-to-mouth like a college student.
So glamorous.
And now the specific sector of the entertainment business that I’ve devoted 35 years of my life to, awards-fare dramas, is on the brink of collapse.
I’m also not so sure that, when it comes to achieving movie stardom, having your dreams come true is healthy for you and those around you, unless your ego is a bodhisattva-level of balance and enlightenment.
Honestly, I'm surprised Sundance is still happening; I guess the festival itself is lucrative. There were only three major acquisitions at the 2023 market that could make the indie model of financing and production work.
An article about it in the New York Times carried an unusually candid quote from a producer, a sign in itself that producers are past the point of despair and no longer obeying unwritten industry commandments like “Thou shalt not call out the studios in public,” a.k.a. Hollywood Omertà, a mafia term, aptly:
“I’d like to believe this movie could have done well in theaters,” said Ram Bergman, a producer of “Fair Play,” one of the festival’s most acclaimed and sought-after films. But despite the enthusiasm from the traditional studios, he said, there was little faith that the $5 million R-rated thriller, starring Phoebe Dynevor (“Bridgerton”) and Alden Ehrenreich (“Solo: A Star Wars Story”), could succeed opposite the superhero spectacles without a prohibitively expensive marketing budget.
“You are dealing with a lot of the studios that have convinced themselves that these movies cannot really do well in theaters,” Mr. Bergman said. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
And Fair Play was probably in development for ten years — the average is nine. Bonkers, right?
More to the point: Have you seen Fair Play? Have you even heard of it?
If you begin a sentence about your project with "It's a drama —" every exec these days will cut you off right there. And I mean all of them — the Borg-ish Hollywood Clone Mind is passive-aggressive totalitarianism. They're like pre-Trump Conservatives marching in lockstep; they only donate and vote for Democratic candidates because if they don't, the wooly creatives they depend on will scream bloody murder.
How do you create a product that depends on the highest degree of creativity if you’re so close-minded the people you depend on to make that product can’t even finish a sentence?
If I step back from the kind of dialogue with producers and execs that I take for granted at this point, the rapid-fire snap judgments made with preconceived notions that aren’t even theirs have a surreal quality. I’m Alice in Wonderland talking to any number of the adult characters in the book, know-it-alls making non-sensical declarations.
Off the top of my head, the funniest example is a walk-and-talk I had at a production company in London. The head of sales was this old-school East Ender with a cockney accent so thick you could lay bricks with it, his voice pulverized by 50 years of smoking a pack or two a day. He’d suggested in a meeting a few weeks before that I try to write a smart horror script.
I pitched it walking toward to the elevator, so it wasn’t strictly speaking an elevator pitch: “It’s based on a 19th-century short story by Guy de Maupassant —”
“Yeah, ‘eard of ‘im. What’s the title?”
“The Horla.”
“The ‘Orla? Might have to work on that. Let me ‘ave a think. What’s it about?”
“A sleepy seaside town is stalked by an invisible succubus-vampire —”
He stopped, scowled at me and growled, “Invisible? What’s the point of a creature feature if you can’t see the creature?”
And that was it, over, killed, done. Frankly, an invisible killer is far more terrifying than one you can see.
I would understand if Hollywood were churning out brilliant, groundbreaking features that say something about humanity of a kind that nobody has seen before like they did in the late 50s through the 70s.
How do you get an indie film financed these days? Auteur director Robert Altman once said something to the effect of, “I don’t care if the money for a movie is skimmed off the tables in Atlantic City, as long as it’s there.” If the self-financing studios are known for their dodgy accounting practices, indie films… well, Bob Altman said it best, so I’ll leave it there.
No, I won’t: Given that we can't launder money for Russians and the Chinese anymore, just how many stupid, nouveau riche investors can there be, prepared to throw millions away on a one-in-a-thousand chance of walking a few yards of red carpet in front of a step and repeat at a top-tier festival?
Even during what I could never bring myself to call the "good" old days ten years ago, when China's many promises and commitments still looked promising, it was already almost impossible to override a fat cat's business manager after he asked to see the numbers on similar films and guffawed when he savvied the revenue distribution waterfall. After wiping away tears, another thought strikes him: "Wait, so… mind if I ask how you make a living doing this?"
And now it's so much worse.
I can guess where some of the extra-studio financing is being sought from my colleagues’ posts of photos taken on trips to Saudi Arabia, that beacon of ethical humanitarianism that makes a mockery of the latest DEI initiatives oozing into offices in Culver City, Burbank, SaMo and Hollywood proper, stifling already beleaguered, overworked staff who are waiting for the axe to drop on their jobs at any moment; if it looks bad from the outside, the inside is slow motion mud wrestling for survival.
In 2021, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced that the Sovereign Fund is investing $64 billion in Saudi Arabia’s “entertainment sector,” which can mean theme parks and movie complexes, not necessarily production spend.
Qatar announced big money for filmed content in the mid-Aughts, with the mandate that it be used to improve Islam’s image in the West, which can only be done one way: through stories about Sufis. Everyone scrambled to get a piece of that; as one of the few filmmakers with in-depth knowledge of Sufism and its potential to be translated to the screen, I took a few calls and meetings about it. If dramas are difficult to market, the lives of medieval Muslim saints and mystics aren’t going to improve the image of what how the West correctly sees these sponsors of terrorism.
The promise of financing gold from Qatar never happened to the extent it was promised. I’ll bet we’ll be seeing a lot more world’s biggest water slides than remakes of Laurence of Arabia from bin Salman’s initiative. In terms of image improvement, it’s obvious what all those cries of "Islamophobia!" from Abigail Disney et al. were really all about: Arabs shooting at executives' feet with solid-gold Smith & Wessons yelling, "Dance, habibi! Dance!"
The final season of The Crown was all about death and funerals: Diana’s, Princess Margaret’s, the Queen Mother’s. There were symbolic deaths, too, namely of the close bond between William and Harry, and symbolic funerals in the planning of Prince Philip and the Queen’s, complete with lead soldiers, bookending a scene between the Queen and Tommy Lascelles in Season 2. Philip is determined to have fun with his funeral, unto a product placement for Land Rover that took the significance of a Royal Warrant of Appointment — “By Appointment to His Royal Highness… etc.” — to the next level.
As for the Queen’s funeral, it was obvious that director Stephen Daldry and Peter Morgan tried to walk the fine line between a meaningful sense of loss and longing for a great monarch and schmaltzy sentimentality. In terms of the finale of a great series, the benchmark for me as a writer-filmmaker is Battlestar Galactica — I didn’t just have tears streaming down my cheeks, I was properly in mourning for at least two weeks.
No matter how deftly it could have been done, the casting of Imelda Staunton would always have been an obstacle in achieving the sort of sublime sense of nostalgia that the show deserved. Elizabeth II knew how to balance being identifiable as an ordinary member of the conservative Women’s Institute and inspiring awe with the transcendent mystique of a semi-divine monarch. Both Claire Foy and Olivia Coleman captured that in their own ways; for my money, Foy nailed it best. Staunton was rarely anything more than a slow-clapping, middle-class W.I. member. The show didn’t so much end as it got bored by the calmness and forgot to carry on.
On that cheery note, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Stay warm and safe. Don’t do anything I would do.
Thanks for reading.
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