Peter Bart: Hollywood hopes a new round of “fixes” can cure the malaise rather than prolong the pain

The consensus is clear: Hollywood believes it must pursue what Bob Iger tactfully (or ominously) calls “some solutions.”

Hopefully the “solutions” to the strike go beyond cuts and delays – we’ve already dealt with the impact. Disney alone cut 8,000 jobs and incurred costs of $7.5 billion. Top class films from Disney Snow White to Paramount Mission: Impossible 8 to Sony Spider-verse was postponed for another year.

More complex “solutions” are already hinted at: Netflix promises a new approach to content – a “half as much, but twice as good” mandate. Viewers around the world will be excited to see how it turns out.

Other big brands are also under scrutiny: the opening numbers for The wonders damaged this legacy. The HBO label once dominated ads that said “for payment,” but this year’s ads will carry a pleading subtext: If you can’t “consider it,” at least find it.

For industry veterans, the push to “fix” and “remake” is a repeat of the moment four decades ago when Hollywood’s three most powerful players decided to take personal leadership of this mission.

Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg announced the creation of a new dream machine that would do everything differently: even studio stages would be distinctively designed. Compensation formulas will be reinvented, as will the decision-making machinery. The product itself would break new ground.

At the opening press conference, the Dream Team left out a few details: Where should it be built? Who would fund it? What content would it produce?

What would it even be called?

While the media scoffed at this vagueness, I found it admirable. The visionaries of the show business had no intention of revealing their secrets or telling the community about its backwardness. They will all be just fine.

I remember Spielberg carefully explaining to me why Hollywood’s stages were clumsily designed and how he would fix it. The problem: He never managed to build his new studio and never found his ideal location.

He ended up back on the Universal campus, where he started as a kid.

It’s fair to say that DreamWorks eventually became a film and animation program and even won a few Oscars (american beauty, Shrek), but never caused a wave of innovation. Of the three founders, only Spielberg still makes films. Geffen’s focus is on art and Katzenberg’s on politics.

Given the hunger for “fixes,” could Hollywood somehow be stumbling upon a new golden age, or at least a period of renewed profitability? Inevitably Peter Biskind, who described the wasteful era of the 1970s in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bullshas published a new book on the current plight.

Titled Pandora’s Box: How courage, deceit and greed turn television on its headAmong other things, the book deals with the demise of the HBO mythology (how did Tony Soprano become Ted Lasso?). Biskind quotes Michael Fuchs, the first HBO president, as saying, “HBO is dead at fifty. There is no more HBO.”

He also quotes FX’s John Landgraf, who says, “You don’t make art by throwing money at it.”

In his review of the new pop culture tracts, Michael Schulman said: The New Yorker Notes: “We used to say that 21st century television was like the 19th century novel – instead of staring at the idiot box, we were communicating with Dickens or Zola back then. At a certain point it no longer seemed true.”

Maybe it never happened.