A Hollywoodland Tale

Hollywood is the world’s most dependable metonym. More universally recognized than Wall Street or the White House, the Los Angeles neighborhood has been dematerialized and made ubiquitous over the past century. It has come to stand for an industry, an aesthetic, a moral ideology, a mode of professional conduct, a global cultural hegemony, and a romantic ideal of successfulness itself. Often it is deployed vaguely, evoking all of the above at once. Something Hollywood does not signify is innocence; nor does it innocently signify. Like synecdoche used to refer to seats of government, Hollywood is a shorthand for a regime whose leadership, values, and priorities may change from year to year, or even minute to minute, while remaining conveniently coherent to its subjects.

Like the Argo in Roland Barthes’s famous formulation, “[Hollywood] is an object with no other cause than its name, with no other identity than its form.”¹ The most consistent thing about it is the word itself—convenienced, semiotically, by the bizarrely preserved white-painted steel letters that persist to this day on the southern ridge of Mount Lee. Originally an outlandish advertisement for prospective homebuyers, spelling Hollywoodland, today the sign that simply reads “Hollywood,” is a national monument itself more beloved than our forever eternal Mt. Rushmore.² Every person on Earth is familiar with this sign, this word. Its ubiquity prevents us from seeing it clearly and presently. So, to what does “Hollywood” actually refer today? How might we demystify its empire of illusion? And why is now the moment when the machine appears to be faltering, as connected systems of industry collapse into one another or simply float away? This volume, A Hollywoodland Tale, explores the Hollywood superstructure from various points of entry, surveying inveterate insiders and staunch independents alike, along with several writers, producers, photographers, actors, stylists, and entrepreneurs who have contributed creative labor and left while they still could. Though this collection of interviews appears as a volume in the summer of 2026, its conversations were conducted over a span of five years. One way to begin might be by examining the changing ways that Hollywood has depicted and imagined itself over time.

Then (A Historical Survey)

Like the mythic origins of its superstars, Hollywood has its etymological roots in more modest places. While still a stretch of recently purchased fig and apricot groves, it was given its modern name by Daeida Wilcox, the wife of a California land developer, who was herself born in Hicksville, Ohio. She and her husband, Harvey Wilcox, had moved west from Topeka, Kansas and purchased 160 acres in the Cahuenga Valley, in the foothills west of Los Angeles, itself founded little more than a century earlier as El Pueblo de la Reina de los Ángeles. The Wilcoxes envisioned their new settlement as a sober, morally upright Christian community, where the sale of alcohol would be prohibited. Daeida appears to have borrowed the name from the estate of an Illinois man she once sat next to on a train. On February 1, 1887, Harvey filed a subdivision map for “Hollywood, California” with the Los Angeles County recorder’s office.³ By 1894, the region comprised a small settlement of eighteen families on the outskirts of Los Angeles. H. J. Whitley, the man who first developed tracts and residential subdivisions to make it a proper suburb, was from Ontario by way of Oklahoma.⁴ Hollywood was incorporated as an independent municipality on November 9, 1903, before being annexed by the City of Los Angeles on February 7, 1910.⁵ The first motion picture companies set up shop there in 1911.⁶

These origins are difficult for us to imagine, because the American film industry has scarcely pictured them itself. As a Fordist machine of self-burnishing narrative, Hollywood prefers to imagine that it has always just been there. If it must have an origin, it would rather jump back another 60 years, to the California gold rush—a metaphor Hollywood likes because it promulgates a vision of truly democratic success, the slim but even chances of unimaginable wealth for anyone foolhardy enough to try their hand. Indeed, if the State of California was founded on the myth of finding fortune in the west, the life of that dream has largely been extended by the promises of fame and success in mass media, still offered to young Americans by Hollywood today.⁸

During the gold rush, the only surefire way to make money was by selling shovels. That part of metaphor also applies to Hollywood today. For as long as the motion picture business has existed, it has operated as a tightly controlled syndicate of studios that share information, fix prices, and control the production and distribution of the industry, which is both operationally costly and enormously profitable given a proper management of risk—which is nothing more than the management of audience expectations (this is show business, after all). The twenty or so years of motion picture production that took place in France, England, Germany, Australia, and North America before the first film studios set up shop on the former ranchlands around Beachwood Canyon feel in retrospect like atomized, idiosyncratic experiments. Available attractions varied widely in length, and the performers in the pictures remained almost completely unknown. A vernacular for cinematic narrative may have been established in this time, but it had no primacy as a medium, no integrity as an industry, and no presence as a cultural object until a handful of immigrant entrepreneurs, many of them Jewish, operating movie houses and production studios on the east coast fled the authority of Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patent Company, an early monopoly on production and distribution, by transplanting their operations to southern California.⁹ Only by operating as a guild, vertically integrating and horizontally colluding to standardize form and content, did something coherent enough to be given a name begin to emerge. The coalescence of cinema as an art form parallels the coalescence of Hollywood as a geographic locality and ideological imaginary.

By 1948, Hollywood was a tightly controlled oligopoly of film interests, with eight companies managing over 95% of films produced in the US.¹⁰ That year, the Supreme Court banned vertical integration between production and theatrical distribution in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., a landmark case that altered the form of Hollywood filmmaking as much as the self-censoring morality pledge of the Hays Code¹¹ altered its content. Movie theaters had to be independently owned, with the ability to buy and show whichever releases they wanted.¹² This shift in distribution lasted until 1985, when the Reagan administration tacitly signaled that they would no longer enforce the decree, opening the door for the reintroduction of vertical integration.

This shift in corporate regulation by the US government over the second half of the 20th century led directly to the fiduciary logic of Hollywood today, as the original stewards of the industry were first constrained by the decree and then replaced by Reagan-era executives who considered film production as just another asset inside a synergistic portfolio, and held cinema to a standard less of art than “media.” By the mid-1990s, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was being steered by a French bank; Paramount was a subsidiary of Sumner Redstone’s Viacom (which also controlled the National Amusements theater chain, Blockbuster Video, MTV, and the CBS Corporation); Twentieth Century Fox was owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp; Warner Bros. had merged with Time, Inc.; Universal Pictures had been sold to Seagram, the Canadian whisky distillery; and Columbia Pictures had jumped from the holdings of American soft-drink conglomerate into the portfolio of a Japanese electronics group. Today, The Walt Disney Company is the only Hollywood studio to have been in business before the Paramount Decrees and remain an independent entity.

If, at the height of the studio system, Hollywood’s romantic portrait of itself was as a giant, harmonious machine, in which teams of performers danced and sang in syncopated glee, a macroscopic view of cinema in the decades since then sees this program wither away into stories of rugged, solipsistic individuals, as the decline of the studio system mirrored a general loss of faith in American institutions amidst rampant privatization. The private-eye protagonists of Hollywood during the neo-noir 1970s, from Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971) to Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971), Elliot Gould in The Long Goodbye (1973) and Jack Nicholson in Chinatown (1974), reflect both the frustrated-genius mentality of New Hollywood’s auteurist takeover as well as the increasingly alienated and embattled visions of the nation at large. The culture war that began in the unrealized ambitions of 1960s utopianism and its conservative backlash found its first form in these roughneck, conservative protagonists.

By the 21st century, responding both to the threats from abroad following the attacks of September 11th and the specter of its own obsolescence in the wake of the internet, Hollywood became uniquely dependent on the teleology of the superhero. This was the most recent era of a coordinated effort between studios to produce something like a zeitgeist, and it is one we are only now stumbling out of, like attendees from a matinee. It’s impossible to watch these films today, each tirelessly replaying scenes of global (or intergalactic) annihilation, without acknowledging some unprocessed anxieties about a world spinning out of control and the quasi-fascistic desire for an Übermensch to save us. The lone individual who is the law, shapeshifting from the tribalistic and amoral cowboy of the ‘50s to the cynical and agoraphobic detective of the ’70s, was given a makeover after 9/11, becoming a character of annihilating power and unsurpassable morality. Often, he was independently wealthy, daylighting as a playboy billionaire while fighting crime and corruption by night. Even when it was constricted by a self-imposed moral code, Hollywood in the 20th century proved far more capable of delivering heroes with ethical nuance, who fight and occasionally lose to larger systems of moral order. The absurdly virtuous heroes venerated by Hollywood and spoon-fed to audiences through the 2010s seemed to manifest a corresponding fear of the absence of any kind of order beyond them. It’s no coincidence that this period was also an era in which Hollywood itself became increasingly subject to the role of individuals, oddball billionaires with unprecedented power to impose their will on a system that had always functioned best as a syndicate.

Now (The New Reality)

Ever since the Reagan Revolution reintroduced vertical integration into Hollywood, the industry has largely become the plaything of venture capital, private equity, and activist investors. Where it once had to fend off regulators to maintain coordinated ad campaigns and advantageous theatrical releases, today the main concern is that the studio system is too intertwined, too competitive, and too mutually dependent for a healthy creative market. Theatrical releases have been supplanted by streaming, and every major streaming platform is now owned by a production studio—a blatant example of the kind of vertical integration once outlawed by the Supreme Court. Additionally, the last of the goliaths have been eating each other. With the prospective acquisition of Warner Bros. by Paramount in 2025, the number of historic Hollywood studios left standing has dropped to four: Columbia (still owned by Sony), Universal (recently announced to be for sale by Seagram successor Comcast), Paramount (or whatever its name becomes after the deal with Warner is completed), and Disney. Together, these make up 87% of the production market, with Amazon-owned MGM studios carving another 5%.¹³ These aging giants, two of which are held by some of the richest men on earth, are rapidly collapsing into one another as a regulation-averse federal government looks on.

In Hollywood today, the hallmark of success is a diversification of revenue streams around stable intellectual properties. A cinematic universe broad and enduring enough to support film franchises, television shows, spin-off series and amusement park rides—to say nothing of diffusion through t-shirts and happy meal toys—promises a return on investment for decades to come. The decision at Disney to replace legendary CEO Bob Iger with former theme parks division chairman Josh D’Amaro is reflective of this reality, leveraging future creative conceptions with the experience economy in mind.¹⁴ But the well is running dry on superhero stories, and no one is sure what the next wellspring of integrated crossover content will look like. The temperature reading in the summer of 2026 is that audiences are restless and eager for something new. It could well be that the future of the industry looks far more online, using AI and platform integration to try and capitalize instantly on internet trends. The Ellison family, which intends to control the production arms and libraries of both Paramount and Warner Bros., also hold a majority stake in the venture controlling the operation of TikTok in the United States. Amazon recently cancelled its plans to release Artificial, a Luca Guadagnino film that darkly satirizes the ambitions of OpenAI founder Sam Altman, in the wake of a $50 billion partnership between the non-nonprofit and Amazon Web Services.¹⁵ Netflix is actively poaching major content creators from YouTube with six-figure deals.¹⁶ The two most profitable American films of 2026 so far, in terms of box office gains over budget, are Obsession and Backrooms, two horror movies directed by filmmakers who built their early fan followings on YouTube.¹⁷ Beginning in 2029, the Oscars, which remain Hollywood’s most enduring and successful venture in self-preservation, will be broadcast exclusively on YouTube.¹⁸ It’s hard not to see this as the formation of Hollywood’s latest paradigm, one built around IP sourced not from comic books or video games but the internet itself.

 An antitrust lawsuit brought by the Attorney General of California against the Paramount–Warner merger, which continue to unfold at the time of this essay, hinges on conflicting interpretations over the market which Paramount and Warner Bros. are both in. While the two companies each oversee vast and diverse media pipelines, the state’s argument holds that their merger constitutes an antitrust violation in three separate markets: wide-release theatrical distribution, top-grossing films, and cable-channel licensing—effectively pushing combined market dominance to over 30% in these areas.^{19 20} This contention will fall flat if the judge overseeing the case proves sensitive to Paramount’s argument, which all of these pathways fall into the broader market of online video and streaming—which, by factoring in tech companies, reduces all of Hollywood to a mere supporting role in the world of “content.”^{21 22}

In many ways, the story of Hollywood in the 21st century is the story of every other major American industry—one of entrenched financialization of every asset and the gradual shift in orientation toward shareholder values, which seek to reduce risk of loss while juicing short-term gains until they become unfeasible. Like farming without field rotation, the practice maximizes short-term supply until the system collapses under the pressure of its own abuse. Every publicly held company in the United States, from fast food purveyors to real estate holders, is under the yoke of this system, which ultimately works to hurt both consumers and producers for the aim of extracting value to the parasitic investor class between them. What makes Hollywood different is that it makes this process visible by inducement to narrative, glamorizing every step of supply and demand. The story of its financial extraction is one of the most concrete ways we have of understanding how capitalism works, and how those inside the system of abuse conceive of the system.

Hollywood today is atomized beyond any locality, so that its reference to a physical location is purely vestigial. The majority of film and television production now takes place outside of California—the geography of commercial production now includes the U.K., Vancouver, Georgia, New Mexico, New Jersey, and Australia as much as it does the sound stages of Los Angeles. In the same respect, these films are no longer available only in the movie theaters once owned and operated by the Hollywood studios, but appear in a variety of formats across a variety of screen sizes.

In the midst of flux, in the absence of affirmed and successful strategies, tropes, genres or methods, how do we make sense of a collapse of meaning? How can we learn to address and understand an art form that no longer plays by the same rules without resorting to nostalgia and regression? One way is to learn from the people who are experiencing this dissonance firsthand, each of whom establishes their own relationship to Hollywood as they see it. Comedy, a thread running through so many of these interviews, becomes a thematic lens for show business at its most explicit—the mutuality between performer and audience at its most overt. The conversations assembled in this volume chart various positionalities within and without the Hollywood system as it strains under the weight of its present financial pressure.

Inveterate insiders include HBO Vice President and Head of Comedy Amy Gravitt, producer and the Black List founder Franklin Leonard, lifelong studio actress Jena Malone, child actor-turned-filmmaker Bonnie Wright, and premier SNL writer Celeste Yim. Voices from the generation of talent currently reshaping the industry include the actor and producer Lionel Boyce; writer, director, and actor Abbi Jacobson; creators and showrunners Konrad Kay & Mickey Down; screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes; actor and writer B.J. Novak; documentarian-turned-narrative filmmaker Lance Oppenheim; designer and artist Emily Schubert; and the archival documentarian Matt Wolf. Many of these voices came from humble beginnings and toiled for years in obscurity before their “discovery.”

Against such systems of reification, several conversants also provide a conception of staunchly independent film production processes outside (or ahead of) Hollywood, constellated around the directors Gregg Araki, Kelly Reichardt, and Gus Van Sant, as well as producer and Killer Films CEO Christine Vachon. A special place in this archive may be reserved for the voices of those whose relationship to the industry is defined by ambivalence, who have been both inside and outside at various points in their careers and may exist at this point in a kind of superposition, occupying both spaces at once. These include the writer, director, and actor Lena Dunham; novelist and screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis; and the cinematographer and artist Arthur Jafa. In a retrospective gesture, Eve Bromberg’s essay Jerome Robbins as Ballet Maker describes the life of a figure who worked consistently within Hollywood at the height of its studio era, capturing the diverse contributions of a talent whose outpourings could not fit merely within predefined molds. Pensions & Hollywood, an essay by Adam Fried, further maps the disparate yet intertwined relationships between real estate, financial management, and labor that have helped us conceive of and describe Hollywood in a more holistic light.

These essays and interviews attempt to map the spectral and nebulous regions of labor and desire that Hollywood metonymically points to. One of the most striking takeaways of these interviews, in aggregate, is that the crisis within the industry has nothing to do with a lack of creativity or talent. It is a structural problem, as a system designed for maximal efficiency and security increasingly fails to deliver an enjoyable product. Thinking this way, we may begin to see Hollywood in its truest light, as a paradox of capitalism—perhaps the essential paradox, one that keeps a belief in the system’s virtues alive.