The Coming Creative Boom

The Corona-Chan quarantine might bless us with a baby boom, but it will also bless us with a creative boom, and in the “right” direction.

Hollywood has had to halt its productions. They might lose 20 billion dollars. They’ve put their feature movies onto streaming platforms, just so that they get seen and the brands can maintain some value.

Hollywood and its giant apparatus represents the last remaining tower, however dark and menacing, of the corporate period in art. It takes lots of money and lots of people to make art on that scale, and virus is a perfect menace for such a system, which has, like most of corporate America, been trading debt with its equities to a great degree. That means the dark tower is built upon sand.

I saw all this over ten years ago with the last recession. Businesses that built their growth on debt were very quickly bankrupted by a minor interruption in revenues. I watched a successful restaurant I played at go under in two months when the last recession hit. Just a few people less showing up and, more importantly, no growth, and there was nothing to do. Time to fold.

That’s our society now, though – you acquire debt based on your ability to service that debt on a monthly basis. Lose your job, and suddenly you can lose everything else as well. My prayers go out to those of you trapped in this system.

But I digress – We’re talking about a creative BOOM here, not a bust, but a bust on Hollywood can create a ton of opportunity for REAL creative people. Those of us who have been operating in the uncertainty of the indie realm for a decade are perfectly poised to take advantage of such a slip. Not only that, but we might have a little bit of extra time right now to make extra art.

We’ve been going at it alone, or in small groups, for a long time now. We don’t need to cut jobs or tighten our belts any more than usual; after all, any artistic project we put out might fail anyway. It’s life. It’s NORMAL for us. The potential upside just grew, the downside didn’t.

Hollywood has been creatively bankrupt for a long time now. The writers can’t write, the actors can’t act, and the producers can’t balance a checking account.

Add to this the risk-averse necessity of pulling in monthly and yearly revenues to service corporate debt, and you have a perfect system to stifle innovation and reward mediocrity.

This is why they are so obsessed with remakes and sequels: there is no need for talent and you have as close to a guaranteed return as you can get. You just leverage nostalgia for old franchises, slap some pretty faces in the frame (and on your couch, hopefully), and get your energetic (but untalented) nephew to direct it for you, and you can get your revenues in for the quarter. After all, nobody else can film Brand X!

It’s the inversion of the independent, who has to write razor sharp stories audiences love, who suffers endless competition, who has to go years before recouping an investment.

The boom is coming, and coming sooner than the behemoths of Hollywood are going to be able to react.

Let me help you be part of it. You can read my new book on creative productivity and put out some art that will make a real difference in our culture:

Physical version available here – https://amazon.com/dp/B086B79WFW

You should also check out the massive and FREE collection of stories myself and the other pulprev guys assembled. It’s yuuuuuuuge

Physical version available here – https://amazon.com/dp/B086BBYY9L