Originally published at: Spielberg, Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson to "curate" Turner Classic Movies | Boing Boing
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Decisions like the mass layoffs tell me that Zaslav is just another slave to the MBA mentality. An executive who wasn’t beholden to that herd impulse would look at this relatively tiny division of 90 dedicated and competent experts and acknowledge that: it’s a nice little low-overhead business that works smoothly and attracts quality advertisers; is beloved by viewers and brings prestige to the larger corporation; and that the logical conclusion to leave it the heck alone.
But no: end of quarter coming up; markets uncertain; shareholders scared. Must do layoffs. Ungh. Me strong CEO!
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Is it, though? Rather than paying an experienced, competent staff to run the channel, he’s going to have three unpaid old rich white guys curate everything. Ok, Paul Thomas Anderson isn’t that old, but the point still stands. Three rich men who are super busy with their own projects are displacing an entire paid staff, and you think this is welcome news?
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Celebrity scabs!
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Or…Humans now have the capacity (though capitalism warps the will) to retain everything humans create and into the future. This is relatively new in human existence. The problem then becomes one of filtering the information to provide useful access for future generations from which to learn and grow. A problem that we all face on a day to day basis.
Here we have three passionate, professional, and well-resourced students of the history of film. While the narrow cultural breadth of this team should definitely be expanded.* These are exactly the sort of filters we should be pleased to have to make sure that we don’t lose the history of any art form to the ravages of time, distraction, and profitmongering.
*Spike Lee? Iñárritu?, Sofia Coppola?, Bong Joon-ho?, DuVernay?, Almodóvar?. Admittedly my gap in knowledge of African and Asian filmmakers is one I desperately need to fill.
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You don’t think there were passionate, professional students of the history of film among the staff who were laid off? Why does everything have to result in people losing their jobs? And like I said, those three are busy with their own projects. My guess is they pawn a lot of the work off on their underpaid assistants and unpaid interns.
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None of this was defending the layoffs. I’m as pissed as the next TCM lover. I just don’t think that nullifies the value of these three stepping in and using their influence for good to make sure the effort continues in the wake of an atrocious decision.
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Here’s a crazy thought. Maybe they could have used their influence to save some of those jobs. Maybe they could oppose that atrocious decision rather than enable it.
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I’m assuming neither of us were party to the conversations they had with Warner Brothers management in the immediate aftermath. How about neither of us jump to conclusions about what was and wasn’t said.
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In my opinion, what was said in those conversations is irrelevant. I do not think this is a good thing. I do not think this is making the best of a bad situation. I think it’s just bad.
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More importantly, it allows them to currently monetize and market IP which had ceased being particularly economically viable. Preservation and curation of long forgotten works allowed for creating a market for something that was previously considered worthless.
MBA’s are definitely Golgafrinchan B-Ark class of people.
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You do realize that the particular arrangement of this volunteer scabbery, when intersected with the desire to have a more diverse roster of volunteer scabs, necessarily means asking a bunch of women and POC to do unpaid labor?
When privileged doofuses like these three proudly crow “I’ll do it for free!” they rarely think of the precedent they’re setting.
This is dumb and bad. Just hire and retain a diverse paid staff of film experts.
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We don’t necessarily have a canon of classic literature, but we’ve gotten damn close due to systems that have empowered white professors to teach largely white students about what books have value and why, influencing for years what books are retained and further bolstered for years to come.
Film has had a shorter lifetime, and no doubt have efforts been made to imply there’s a film canon. What was present on TCM was no doubt already the result of so-called curation, but it sounds like the library was sizable and it was at least accessible. Further reducing that on the preferences and whims of three very good but not necessarily representative directors potentially pushes us in the direction of narrowing what values we’re supposed to find in “great” film.
I’m not in favor of this unless we invest in and dump more of these films in fully accessible places, like the Internet Archive.
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