Readers know about my obsession interest in how business is portrayed in film, discussed at greatest length in my paper, Wall Street & Vine.
My theory, in a nutshell, is that it isn’t business that Hollywood doesn’t like (after all, Hollywood is a business) but capitalists. Filmmakers resent the capitalists for forcing them to make artistic tradeoffs for the sake of the bottom line, and this resentment comes out in the films. My paper shows the many ways this resentment is displayed in films. (It also discusses, among other things, why and how filmmakers differ from other artists in this respect.)
This attitude is most clearly displayed best in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (to which I devote a whole article), in which anti-hero Gordon Gekko discusses his philosophy of life:
[I]t's all about bucks, It's a zero-sum game. Somebody wins and somebody loses. Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another. Like magic. . . . Capitalism at its finest. The richest one percent of this country owns half the country's wealth . . . You’ve got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing; I own.
Now Oliver Stone is preparing an updated version for the financial meltdown in which the villain is reportedly a hedge-funder.
As I discuss in my article, one of the ways capitalist-resentment creeps into film is in the big role luck plays in the filmmakers’ version of business. After all, as I explain, “if financial success or failure depends on luck, or worse, it makes no sense for capitalists to force filmmakers to compromise their art to attract an audience. And when films fail financially, this cannot be the artists’ fault.”
This comes through in how filmmakers view securities and commodities markets, as in Trading Places, where Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy portray eccentric commodity traders who destroy Dan Ackroyd and elevate Eddie Murphy in a bet. All of them try to get ahead by stealing data.
Filmmakers’ source for this story of business is their own business which, as I explain in my paper, “must cater to fickle tastes.” Thus, in The Hudsucker Proxy, the Coen Brothers portray a creative genius who happens to be a fool who strikes it big with the hula hoop.
I note in the paper that “filmmakers might do better if they made more use of markets such as the Hollywood Stock Exchange,” citing Saul Levmore’s article, Simply Efficient Markets and the Role of Regulation: Lessons from the Iowa Electronic Markets and the Hollywood Stock Exchange, 28 J. CORP. L. 589 (2003). But one would expect this development to actually heighten filmmakers’ resentment: what could be worse than to show that you could actually predict which films would succeed and which would fail?
So you can imagine filmmakers’ horror at the possible advent of new film futures markets, discussed in today’s WSJ:
Major Hollywood studios have sent a message to Wall Street: Greed is not good.
Two proposals from companies that want to launch financial exchanges allowing investors to speculate on the box-office prospects of Hollywood films by buying and selling futures contracts have fueled objections from the Motion Picture Association of America and other trade groups from the film industry.
The MPAA's strongly worded opposition led the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to delay an approval process for one of the exchanges. With a decision expected soon, both proposals could be in jeopardy as regulators discern what derivatives trading on films could mean for the entertainment industry less than two years after the global financial crisis brought Wall Street to its knees.
The MPAA’s executive VP is quoted as talking about “how important it is to ensure that the establishment of new financial marketplaces does not open the door to rampant speculation and financial irresponsibility" and how the market could tarnish "the reputation and integrity of our industry.”
But the president of one of the new markets, The Cantor Exchange, notes that “other market participants, like movie theater owners, film financiers and smaller studios, have privately expressed enthusiasm for the venture.” Of course: these are the evil capitalists that filmmakers dislike for tainting their art.
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