172 Comments

In order for there to be fresh material, there has to be fresh leaders. People with a vision who will hire artists with a vision. There's currently a movement in England with small movie houses, anything from 15 to 50 seats, and they're showing independantly produced films. I've read that is also begining to happen in the US. That seems hopefull. Music can do the same thing.

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I've floated the idea to our film club maven. She is intrigued...

What the hell – all it takes is a large fortune – in 25 years or so we'll have a small fortune!

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Look for a small venue that you can rent and film makers that are looking for a place to show their films.

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But how small ?

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Pocket-sized!

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How about suicase? It's a long story but if we buy LV, the brand with the logo of course, we could get a free bag 💰 and put whatever into it 👛

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Sounds complicated. Also, unless our fortune was all in 1's, I can't imagine needing an entire suitcase, once we're done...

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One of these little theaters opened this year in Davenport, Iowa, here on the Big River in a repurposed auto shop. I'll check the parking lot again at the remaining multiplex here, but I'll bet the owners could plow up and plant half of it in hay and not turn anyone away... Not that 'the owners' would have such insight.

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Yes, the western died of oversaturation but in the sixties, the last decade where you could say that it was a legitimate genre, artists like John Ford, Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone were finding new things to say through the confines of the western, something I am not sure one could say about superhero movies today. Where is the equivalent of The Wild Bunch or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in the Marvel franchise?

I think the more salient corollary with Marvel, etc. is the movie musical.

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I was thinking the same thing while reading this article - the spaghetti westerns were, I think, a direct response to how stale westerns had become. They were redefining and experimenting with the genre, without the spaghetti westerns we would not have graduated to franchises like Dirty Harry.

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One of the reasons Westerns died is that chasing Indians and killing them became socially unacceptable.

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A lot of the later Westerns were about the end of wild west. Movies like Shane, the Searchers, the Wages of Violence, the Last Gunfighter and so on. Some of it echoed the end of World War II and a return to peace much as a lot of entertainment at the end of the Cold War echoed the end of the USSR as a superpower. It was a creative era, and there was a new theme that spoke to the present.

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Agree Robert, or True Grit. Great stories

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True Grit is my favorite

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At some point you got Western Satire with films like Blazing Saddles and Support your Local Gunfighter.

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The musical, like animation, is less a genre than a form. It never entirely goes away - although the rise of the jukebox musical over the last few decades is definitely another example of the kind of staleness HB is talking about.

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It would seem to me that art businesses (especially music and movies) have very little to do with the art itself. Business is very content at selling sausages - any bland product that makes some kind of a “sure profit”.

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Yes. Most of them won't change a thing until they are facing extinction. I'm sure there are hundreds, if not thousands of creative folk out there screaming at the top of their lungs ,trying to break through the hurricane force of winds of mediocrity now that the Internet & cheap equipment/electronics has "democratized" everything. Too many people out there creating mountains & mountains of garbage I think.

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I think you guys will enjoy the statistics in this article:

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No one buys books

Everything we learned about the publishing industry from Penguin vs. DOJ.

ELLE GRIFFIN

APR 22, 2024

In 2022, Penguin Random House wanted to buy Simon & Schuster. The two publishing houses made up 37 percent and 11 percent of the market share, according to the filing, and combined they would have condensed the Big Five publishing houses into the Big Four. But the government intervened and brought an antitrust case against Penguin to determine whether that would create a monopoly.

The judge ultimately ruled that the merger would create a monopoly and blocked the $2.2 billion purchase. But during the trial, the head of every major publishing house and literary agency got up on the stand to speak about the publishing industry and give numbers, giving us an eye-opening account of the industry from the inside. All of the transcripts from the trial were compiled into a book called The Trial. It took me a year to read, but I’ve finally summarized my findings and pulled out all the compelling highlights.

I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).

But let’s dig into everything they said in detail.

Did you know that 96% of books sell less than 1,000 copies? That’s why I write here instead ????

...

https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books

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Real stories and decent acting that take some risk and are either speaking about what is happening today or is pure escapist fluff to me seems to be what is needed.

Aside from the lack of this plus the industry trying to replace everything with AI, I sense a flattening of the industry just as with the rest of the arts. Can anyone imagine a show like “All in the Family” being aired now? It is success was at least partially from its using controversial subjects. But since being so outré in a serious way seems to be forbidden in tandem with the growing censorship, we don’t have the good shows that could create or revitalize genres.

Actually, while new people are needed if the old people actually had good material maybe they could be good again.

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Call me a contrarian but I believe movies over the last 25 years or so (using Y2K as an arbitrary point in time) are just as wonderful as any time in cinematic history. Are most people seeing these critically acclaimed movies that tend to be lower budget and independent? No. However, when you compare them to the great movies of the 1930s-1990s, I will argue that these movies stack up with the very best from an artistic point of view.

The point is that the movies today are not unlike yesterday in that only a very few each year were really excellent (some years none). It's not like a new Citzen Kane or Casablanca appeared every month at the theater.

I would encourage everyone to make their own "best of the 2000s" list. I think you'll be surprised about how many great films still come out and proportionately speaking, I think they occur about the same frequency as prior periods of time (this is totally subjective of course).

So here's my view about the present/future: I do not believe there is any crisis that will prevent truly excellent, original art in cinema from being created now or into the future. It may or may not come from big studios or have big budgets but the stories are there and being made. If they're good, they'll get bought and distributed.

p.s. here's my "Best of the 2000s" list: Sideways (2004), Capote (2005), Ratatouille (2006), Midnight in Paris (2011), The Artist (2011), Whiplash (2014), Mad Max Fury Road (2015), Lady Bird (2017), Green Book (2018), Nomadland (2020), Aftersun (2022), Past Lives (2023)

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I wish I shared your optimism about good stories getting made into movies. It's just not happening anymore because for every good story made into a film (a rapidly declining number), there are more than ever that won't be made, because the audiences have moved on. Movies aren't relevant as they once were. In the 40s, 65 percent of the US population was going to the movies TWICE A WEEK. Attendance isn't even one percent now. The entertainment pie is cut into slivers so thin you can barely see them. All the major studios are bleeding badly, the indies are barely surviving and it's getting more difficult than ever to finance any film. When I worked in film acquisitions in independent film during its prime, we had around 60-70 producers we could go to, companies thatcould make real films. Today, there's not even 10. In 2014, my Nordic company, which had 350 employees, was reduced to 13 people.

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Jim, I hear you and thank you for sharing your experience. I have a couple of friends in the movie business and they often echo your sentiments. In fact, I actually have a friend who wrote the screenplay for an indie pic that got made with a bit of success getting some prominent Hollywood talent to star in the movie. He's trying to get a second movie made and there is little money to be found!

On the other hand, I would also say that ex-U.S. is doing a good job of picking up the slack. It's interesting to look at some of the numbers. This may be far from perfect but as you can see, there are actually a lot of indies still released each year. All is not lost and if you can get the right story and cast, we all know Amazon has the money to pay for distribution.

The storytellers and dreamers are out there!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Independent_films_by_year

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Just as wonderful as any time in cinematic history? You're entitled to that opinion, but as Jack Nicholson said in Mars Attacks, "Yikes!"

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I love this comment: as someone who doesn't care for movies because of the pablum that Hollywood generates, I know and adore five of the films on your list. Can we add The Shape of Water (2017) as well?

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I agree on the 20-30 year period before a refresh of a brand is possible, like Dr Who in the UK. Though the James Bond franchise is an interesting film series that sort of regenerates with each new “James” if the main actor is the right fit.

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I agree with you!

I told my son (a millennial) Westworld was a movie from the 70’s after he told me I should watch the “new” series. He didn’t believe me. I bet him 20 bucks. Google won me 20 bucks!

Hollywood counts on current generations being ignorant of or being willing to cast off anything that came before them.

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Great piece Ted. These laws seem quite universal, we can apply it to our living patterns as well. We used to live in tight knit communities and then in the post war era many people spread out to the suburbs. We churned out highly subsidized single family homes up until the bubble burst and now I think we're seeing a shift back to more walkable towns and cities (at least in some places).

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The sooner, the better. I live in a town that prides itself on being progressive...until someone dares mention adding bus service and/or sidewalks. Then the masks come off.

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I know the feeling, they play lip service to a progressive standpoint and then it all crumbles away!

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The reason people object to these things, whether they know it or not, is crime. Since crime is currently legal, the only way to avoid crime in your neighborhood is to make it either physically or financially inaccessible to criminals. If you want these folks to change their minds, you need to implement an aggressive law-and-order agenda.

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Agreed. And don't forget that, despite the left's utmost efforts, we can still protect ourselves with dreaded guns that, according to them, can fire themselves a kill people.

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Don't US crims have cars? Or is being "poor" totally equivalent to being "a criminal'. Probably both in USA. In the UK rural crime is mostly perpetrated by,let's say -not locals,not your neighbours. I sometimes do a walk in the countryside near my city home,going just a little further than is comfortable. Past the suburbs,then past that weird belt of scruffy not quite anything exactly,horse paddocks,weed infested fields obviously being held for possible future development,etc then into "the countryside",but there are houses here,they're back off the road,they have tall,attractive gates,it's elegant and tidy and I realised "this is where the rich people live". Peopie with SERIOUS money. The public transport stopped a mile or so before here and I'm not on another bus route for a couple of miles,I mean in USA I guess that would be "a couple of hundred miles",but it's a different world. I'm a visitor from Planet Impecunious!

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Most poor people are not criminals, but criminals tend to be poor. And criminals do have cars but they're largely not inclined to go too far from their homes because they're generally not very smart or forward-thinking. So, physical and financial separation largely does the job.

I'm not endorsing this, mind you -- it's terrible. Poor people are shut out from opportunities and trapped with criminals they get victimized by, everyone else has to pay way more for the privilege of not getting their home broken into, and ideally located urban areas which should be bustling and progressive are left to decay along with public services. It sucks for the rich and poor alike and it's the direct and obvious consequence of not taking criminals off the streets.

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You mean, criminal gangs never use cars and need to rely on walking and public transport only? How there is so little crime in, for example, Japanese cities, with sidewalks, bicycles and public transport everywhere?

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Because they're Japanese.

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I live in Fort Worth, TX in an older neighborhood (originally developed in the mid-seventies) that's, interestingly, "hidden," though it's within short walking distance of a Walmart/Sam's center. Though walking less than a mile to shop (which my wife and I do occasionally) isn't physically taxing, that may happen two or three times a year... Because it's either too freaking hot or cold to do that regularly. "Walkable" towns sound great until reality, or weather, step in. Maybe that works in southern California, but simple observation indicates otherwise.

And I have a question: How were single family homes "highly subsidized?" My wife and I saved carefully and paid off our first house here in seven years, then sold it and used those funds to finance our current home, which I designed and had constructed twenty-three yeats ago. When it was completed we paid of the construction loan and have never had a mortgage. My Dad did the same. Who subsidized my single family home? Besides my wife and myself.

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You make good points. However, the differences in cost of housing of all and the income of most Americans have been increasing for over four decades. It is increasingly not just practical, but impossible, for people to buy a house.

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FHA's Single Family mortgage programs: https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/housing/sfh

You seem to be a special case but the majority of people do have a mortgage subsidized by the government.

Also regarding the weather, I disagree, people in places like Toronto and Montreal commute to work by walking and biking in the dead of winter. Yes it's not as "convenient" as getting in a car, but it's better for the common good.

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I suppose you think walking and biking in the dead of winter is "better for the common good." Whose common good would that be? I think it's idiocy and likely life-threatening. And, strangely, my opinion is certainly as valid as yours. It's amazing that you want to disregard the advances that have made living comfortably available to the vast majority of the western world's populace. You're welcome to do that, but please don't suggest I have an obligation to do the same. I don't.

Regarding FHA loans: Whether or not Big Gubmint was involved is immaterial. My parents took out a mortgage when we moved to Florida and built the house in nineteen seventy-four. They paid it off in twelve years. I have no idea whether it was FHA backed, or not. My grandparents on both sides bought and paid for their homes before FHA existed. Maybe my parents were careful because they were born in nineteen twenty-five and thirty and realized what can happen when the economy tanks. My wife's parents were born at the same time, so we seemed to have followed our families' precedent.

You know, it's not that difficult. We don't have "smart" phones. We only eat out for special occasions, not nightly; that's not a recent occurrence, but with high prices for crappy food and poor service it seems we haven't missed much. We've bought two new cars during our twenty-eight years of marriage (one in twenty twenty-one, the old cars were/are much better). I do ninety percent of the maintenance on our home, and cars and anything else that needs to be repaired. The times that I can't repair things are few and far-between; in these cases the interweb is your friend. We're careful about spending money in many other ways as well. It's just that people want everything now, and aren't willing to do with a little less. If Big Gubmint got the hell out of housing, education (from kindergarten to college loans), healthcare, and myriad other things most everything would cost less and be more available.

And, in my humble opinion, that would be particularly better for the common good.

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GI Bill: 24,000,00 mortgages. Your family: 2.

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I think that's a good thing, those who served, like my Dad (thirty-two years in the USAAC/USAF, fighter pilot first, last, and always; Korean War veteran and POW[ disabled vet; retired as a squadron commander working for Colonel Bud Day (a personal friend who attended my Dad's funeral; if you don't know who he was, find out on the interweb). He paid off the first loan (maybe backed by the GI Bill, I have no idea) in twelve years, and took out two successive loans (that would be the old Home Equity type) and paid off both of those as well. His dad, born in eighteen ninety-six, after surviving the Great Depression, managed to pay off his loan, no GI Bill, and my Mom's father, born nineteen 0 two did the same. So, including myself, that would actually be seven, including my current home, which I paid for with cash, two hundred forty thousand dollars on a salary of under sixty thousand at the time: two thousand two. And my wife had stopped working by then.

You managed to miss the point I tried to make: If you're willing to do with less, like an inexpensive starter home and simply not spending all that you make, working and saving, it is possible to afford a house. But, but! Interest rates! My Dad's first loan's interest rate was assuredly over twelve percent, as shorter loans incur much higher rates than the approximately ten percent standard thirty year mortgage in seventy-four (no info seems to be available about short-term mortgages). So, again, if you're careful, patient, and plan accordingly it is definitely possible to purchase a home.

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Because now at least (and im in UK) governments like us to be in thrall to them so being in debt to the government sounds to me like a great way of achieving that.

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Most homeowners have traditional mortgages; I used to be a banker and can say that qualifying for FHA mortgages isn’t a walk in the park. Besides, this is America: aren’t we all entitled to do what we want?

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Of course, everyone is entitled to their own decision. For people who prefer to be car dependent and live in the suburbs, all I have to say is.. I love that for you!

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But for people who don't want that... we should have more options...

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Great to learn that some one is taking an interest in living patterns! Are we really moving back to "....walkable towns and cities..." though? As an Architect I have clients who aspire to a suburban existence! Ughhhhhh...!

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I just replied to a similar comment. I'm a registered architect (I guess you capitalize your profession in Britain) in the Lone Star State (capitalized), in the city of Fort Worth. Its area is 350 square miles (910 km2), 35 miles (56 km) north to south, and 29 miles (37 km) east to west. We have right at one million residents, and are the twelfth largest city in the US. The downtown is great, look up Sundance Square if you care to do so. I live in a small, established neighborhood with old growth post oaks and cedar elms, lots of grade change, and a wide variety of residential architecture. It's a beautiful place and walk several miles daily (hip rehab). That's about to end, we've had an unusually long spring with (mostly) mild weather. But that's about to end when temps get into the upper nineties or triple digits (36 degrees C +). And, go figure, I love it here in my "Ughhhhhh" suburban existence. And guess what? I lived in Britain for two years (North Aston) and Germany (Stuttgart) for three. Googley Maps has shown me how things have changed in those places over the decades, and it's evident that sleepy North Aston has become "suburbanized" since I lived there. I wonder if the people who live in the houses located on what was farmland previously think about their current environment. Perhaps they're "Ughhhhhh" about it as well.

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Well, some of us: www.culdesac.com

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Well I live in the centre of Portsmouth, UK and don't own a car so what about you?

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Beautiful Austin Texas and a Honda Fit. I do get ~30 miles per week walking the dog. My neighborhood, the Arboretum, is very walkable; sidewalks everywhere, commerce on one side and parkland and golf course and nature trails on the other. I don't even have to cross a street to walk from the complex to Trader Joe's or Starbucks, Great Hills Park trailhead is less than a mile away. Work's 18 miles away in a bad neighborhood; when I was working downtown my commute was 20 minutes on a very nice bus and a ten-minute walk.

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I used to walk to the university where I taught Architecture and I work from home now , I walk everywhere! (Shopping . Play etc.) Portsmouth is a great walking city!

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Our Western Swing Album "Susie Blue and the Lonesome Fellas" was all authentic Western Swing from the 40's and 50's and we got 4.5 stars from DownBeat, a write up in the Wall St Journal and Billboard Magazine, an award from the Western Swing Association, a feature on NPR and a Grammy nod. We had been performing jazz in Chicago for 20 years but suddenly the world noticed us, Yipeee Yai Yay, Listen here https://susiebluelonesomefellas.bandcamp.com/album/susie-blue-and-the-lonesome-fellas-western-swing-vol-1

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Carry on, carry on...but if there's Miles and Miles of Texas to slog thru, count me out.

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You are most nostalgic for not your own childhood experiences but for what a previous generation either struggled for and won, or struggled and lost. Hence peak Westerns was approximately two generations (50 years) past the loss of horse culture.

But it differs by modality; timing may be more compressed for music.

Also, the advent of streaming has and will continue to alter the usual nostalgia equations -> Ie, for things that aren’t ever lost, how can you be nostalgic for them?

Beowulf is Old English nostalgia for the “tales of the old days” in Scandanavia

Shakespeare also recycled old histories.

The fetishization of Beowulf by teachers in top high schools and colleges in the 50s was a USA thing as the UK rebuilt in ruins; only niche medievalists had heard of it or studied it in the UK.

Meanwhile, kids growing up in struggling 50s UK found their inspiration in: the music of loss and woe recorded by US African American Blues artists, later introducing American youth to Blues through British Invasion Rock acts

One of those acts came to Chicago in the early 60s and asked a music industry official, “do you think I could meet [blues artist]?“ who was his hero.

“Sure, in fact he’ll be here tonight.“

“He’s performing here tonight?!“

“No, he comes here to clean; he’s our janitor.”

Today’s doting over pets and the grotesque behavior around marriage ceremonies (over the top weddings) and birthing (gender reveals; trophy adoptions by celebrities) is a cargo-cutting and fetishization regarding the decline of marriage as an institution and fertility/ numbers of children

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Overclass and overeducated Americans have long been fawning anglophiles.

I can see why overclass Americans might like what they see.

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Including the fact you have a feline for your Substack avatar, that was a particularly good comment. Many hearts for you.

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It's a recent selfie. Actually not a selfie, some friends and I got hold of a camera phone and we started fooling around with it.

Anyway, thank you for the kind words.

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That's a good dose of good insight.

There's also a political angle in that current politicians often claim legitimacy for their ideas from the past. The 19th century was full of this. That's when they invented the idea of national dress and national food. The Victorians in the UK took it to an extreme. The queen had a thing for Scotland so people made up clan tartans that had been lost and suppressed.

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P.S. I should mention the book Shadow Empires with its section on empires of nostalgia which discusses the Carolingians among others.

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I'm not sure the best way of understanding the Western, or its place in our culture at the genre's height, is to take the genre's superficial features at their word. If Americans loved watching covered wagons moving across the plains in the 1950's, at the dawn of the Space Age, it may not have been because the studio executives were out of touch or risk averse or pandering to nostalgia.

Might it not be because the genre's superficial features--the open space of the American West, the Covered Wagon, the lone, tight-lipped Cowboy, and the rest of it--gave them a rich source of metaphors they needed to make sense of their own launch into the Space Age?

Might it not be that the Western provided a prolific founding myth to imaginatively ground America's post-war boom, the unleashing of its commercial animal spirits, its individualism, it entrepreneurial giddyup?

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If "America" is an IDEA as much as a physical place and a people,then America needs a FRONTIER. I know from History that about 1900 era when it was publicly accepted there was no more Frontier that was felt as sad,the journalists and writers of the day expressed that,so it's interesting that the first Western movies started appearing then in the new media of film. And of course,lots of Old West people lived into the 1930s,some longer. Now,laugh at me or sneer if you will,but I BELIEVE that The Ukraine is the New Frontier. I know,it's in the East,not the West,but everything about the situation suggests to me that it's being presented (in a subtle and subliminal way) as a new Frontier. In fact the very word "Ukraine" means "the borderlands" so in Russian or American it is a "Frontier". Yes,circa 1960 the opinion formers did TRY to make Space the new Frontier or is that The Final Frontier but it all petered out,it was to be honest boring.

There is a new Space Race on now but the Chinese have made no secret that their interest in The Moon is firmly commercial,they intend to mine it for minerals (if there's any there). I don't know. This makes me think that maybe the "barn in California moon landing "theory could be right,once again I don't know. Only if there is mineral wealth up there I'm ABSOLUTELY sure there USA capitalist corporations would have been strip mining it for decades now.

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I have previously commented on nostalgia in the music industry.

That said, it's interesting that westerns dominated TV in 1959, but nobody wanted to move to Wyoming.

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That's an important insight.

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Thank you for the kind words.

Also, keep in mind that network TV, by definition, is mediated by and dependent on networks, and there were a limited number of networks and channels in 1959.

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Which I expect made the inhabitants of Wyoming very happy.

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Hollywood, and the music industry as well, seem to repackage familiar genres because they are afraid to take chances. They would rather go with a tried and true idea as opposed to taking a risk and striking out in a new direction. I get it. But there is a wonderful opportunity for those willing to take a chance on a new idea, new actor or new artist. I would welcome small movie houses showing indie movies, or small record labels pushing indie artists. Remember when the only beer you could buy came from about 3 large breweries? Now we have a plethora of craft beers to enjoy! The same could happen in the music and movie world. I hope it does. I haven’t purchased beer from a major brand in 15 years…

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Isn’t the Star Wars franchise essentially a reboot of the Western? One thing to watch for might be old genres reimagined in new guises. Film noir had its brief moment - what next?

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Maybe, it always reminded me of the Errol Flynn swashbucklers; ships/star ships, I guess.

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The top 3 shows of 2023 were all football. And it’s interesting to see (on the graph you provided) the growth of documentary film as a genre into the 2010s. As Marvel movies start to become reality shows about aging moviestars, I wonder if people are starting to crave a nonfiction blend.

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I think football was something like 27 of the top 30 broadcasts.

But that's the key word. Nobody is watching broadcasts for scripted shows. The networks are barely broadcasting it. I think ABC will have zero scripted shows this fall. (I may be slightly off on that.). Anyway, the scripted stuff is streaming and we don't get ratings data for that.

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Huh. Thanks for that.

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Ages ago, in the 1980s, Spy Magazine noted that there seemed to be a Hitler Channel, All Hitler, All the Time. There were so many World War II shows, new and old, that one could just watch the War Against Hitler all day.

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I still find it hard to believe that there was a hit comedy series, Hogan’s Heroes, about a German POW camp and the lovable Nazis in charge. I admit I enjoyed watching it.

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All the Nazis were played by Jews including some who were persecuted by the Nazis. It's an interesting story.

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Werner Klemperer also played an unrepentant Nazi judge in '61's Judgement at Nuremberg. He pulls it off perfectly, but it's surreal to watch. Like it's from a parallel universe.

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Thanks, I’m definitely going to watch that movie now

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Thanks, that’s very interesting

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We were a better society when we laughed at Nazis instead of reinflating them into a modern boogeyman. Talk about stupid nostalgia!

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I see that huge bulge in animation at the end of the graph and feel a little excited. Hopefully any of that comes out of artists and not just nerds puppeteering CGI that looked like soulless AI garbage even before AI garbage was churning it out. Although, calling animation a "genre" feels a little like calling "the internet short" a genre.

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Worse, we might have nostalgia for the uncanny valley. If I'm lucky, I'll be long gone before the great retrospectives appear.

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I grew up watching the Westerns on TV! I was 8 in 1958 and my favorite Western actors were Roy Rogers and Dale Evans! (among others.) I loved cowboys! I wanted to be a cowgirl! I also loved Sally Starr and Chief Halftown who I met twice, here in Coatesville, Pa. during special events and a grand opening of a toy store! I can remember Buffalo Bill Days held in Town with special events and a parade. But I can't seem to remember the history of why we celebrated Buffalo Bill Days back then! I think it had something to do with Buffalo Bill Cody and The Wild, Wild West Show stopping in Coatesville in the 1800's!

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I grew up in Victorville California. Roy and Dale lived in Apple Valley. Trigger was stuffed a featured in the lobby of the Apple Valley Inn. I enjoyed the Roy Rogers show, but it was disconnected from my reality. Roy hang out at the local bowling ally that my brother frequented.. He thought Roy was often drunk. I was a buss boy. Dale would come in after church on Sundays. Her makeup was so think I always wondered how she

The Roy Rogers show, like most others at the time presented an Ozzie and Harriet reality that Hollywood was trying to sell us. My grandfather worked as a cowboy in Wyoming before he moved to California in the 20s. Cowboy was a working class job. It was an independent lifestyle where you made your own way. Post WWIi, this lifestyle was changing. The movies that connected to me recognized this. Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion. Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show. The cowboy tv genre died because it did not represent what was really happening.

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