March 27, 2025 - Los Angeles

Los Angeles is a trip.

Let me state something at the outset. Even though I was born out here, grew up in Indiana and began my career in Nashville… I actually consider myself a New Yorker.

A NOTE FROM THE LEGAL DEPARTMENT: I am obligated to mention that my New Yorker status is, of course, a technicality. My citizenship was earned by invoking the “if you live in New York for at least a decade you can claim it as your home.” clause.

Now, as a New Yorker and being in the entertainment business, I have made the obligatory trek between New York and LA hundreds of times. Yet, after all these years, I am still fascinated by this place.

Los Angeles sits precariously balanced on a knife’s edge between a massive, unforgiving desert and a vast, seemingly endless sea. Everyone who lives here knows that, at some point, whether from the shaky ground beneath or the karmic implosion that will inevitably come from the unrelenting, slow-moving violence that is LA traffic - this city will, one day and without question, either be consumed by the desert… or simply slide into the sea. A clash of extreme forces that makes the City of Angels a Shangri-La, but with a terminal diagnosis.

While the town still stands, however, it delivers an endless array of oddities and bemusements. An insanely silly example are their taxi cabs. Now, of course, these days taxis aren’t as much of a thing as they used to be. But there was a time, over a decade ago, when I grabbed a taxi from LAX to Hollywood. As the cab pulled up, I let out an embarrassingly loud cackle (thank god I was in LA… no one even noticed). It wasn’t that the car was funny - it was fine. And it certainly wasn’t anything to do with the driver, he was a lovely man who knew the town like the back of his hand. No, my laugh was because of what was written on the side of the cab. See, in New York we have the classic yellow cabs. On the side of our cabs, it simply says, Yellow Cab. Call it what it is, right? But, no, in LA they had a different name on the door of their cabs. The taxi company in LA is called… get ready for it… United Independent. Just let that simmer for a moment. United. Independent. “We’re united… independently.” Or maybe it’s “we’re united in our independence?”I don’t know why, but it just tickled me to no end.

But after all of these years… and after telling that joke in innumerable meetings, I am confronted with an embarrassing realization. Those sloppy word welders who blithely slapped two seemingly contradictory words together… were actually really on to something.

Let me explain.

We sit at a crossroads in the history of entertainment. The big players are in, what could justifiably be called, a state of paralysis. A less generous assessment would be that the industry is in utter shambles. Data is pouring in and the outlook for the industry is, at best, bleak. Consumers are simply not going to the theaters like they used to. 2025 box office is down more than 7% from this time last year . And last year ticket sales were 26% lower than pre-pandemic 2019. And, I hate to remind everyone, but 2019 was one of the lowest box office year since the 1980’s. (NOTE: Don’t look at box office revenue, look at tickets sold. Revenue is misleading metric, because theaters and studios drastically increased ticket prices when ticket sale began to dip.) When it comes to streaming, according to Statista, over 50% of consumers say they are no longer willing to let their credit card get pinged every month for a subscription. Instead, they are cycling through subscription VOD services based on what they want to watch. They sign up, watch, cancel, move to another platform and repeat - a pattern that is horrifying to streamers who rely on stable or growing subscriber numbers to keep their shareholders happy. As for traditional studios, their net income is down over 60% in recent years. Big production companies and production funds are declaring bankruptcy. Streamers are laying people off , while they are producing and acquiring less movies and shows. And two days ago, the Hollywood Reporter reported that free, creator content on YouTube got more viewing time than any other U.S. media provider. Thanks in no small part to viewers over 50!

This is what scholars call, “a s**t show.”

For filmmakers and storytellers, there are two ways to look at it: either the sky is falling, or this is the opportunity of a lifetime. You may have already guess where I land on that spectrum.

For years, I have been bemoaning the way the entertainment industry (in general), and the movie business (specifically), is broken. The industry’s power has, for over a century, rested in their ability to distribute films. They didn't own the audiences as much as they owned the audience access points. And because of that, they were able to “evil-genius” a system that forced everything to go through their gates. Even an independent financed and produced film, if it wanted to find an audience, would have to go through the big machine. And once in their grips, filmmakers and their financiers were obligated to accept the industry’s economic terms… and worse yet, their devious accounting practices. Forgive the hyperbole, but one could call it a kind of hostage situation. You want your movie or show to be seen? You have no choice but to hand it over to the companies that own and control the funnel and accept their terms.

But now, Hollywood and the systems they created are faltering. The question isn’t necessarily whether the industry can right the ship, they probably will. But it’s a pretty safe bet that whatever they come up with will still attempt to leverage their stranglehold on distribution and control the economics of entertainment.

So the question isn’t, “can we fix Hollywood?” No, the question is whether their current weakness provides an opportunity for independent filmmakers and their financiers to build up their own parallel industry.

I believe this is the moment.

And I’m not alone. Look at what four time Academy Award® nominated actor, Mark Ruffalo said recently:

But for it to really work - and I can’t believe I’m about to use this phrase - we need to be United Independents. I think we need to build a collective. A sort of storyteller coalition. A community of filmmakers, artisans and craftspeople who make great films and shows, and then leverage new technologies, tools and models to create our own, separate Indie film industry. From top to bottom. New financing models. New, more efficient production tools. New marketing and Direct to Consumer distribution. We don’t need to abandon the existing streamers and platforms… they can serve as fantastic “second windows.” But for the most lucrative part of a release cycle: the initial release… that should belong to the creators and their communities.

To make this work, we need understand the market. We need to work together in order to deliver our stories in a way that:

• Meets audiences where they are, and therefore costs less to market

• Gives audiences the experience and stories they want

• Encourages fans to not just watch, but to participate

• Incentivizes all stakeholders and even fans to actively amplify a project to increase reach

• Eliminates the middlemen who take all the money

• Enables projects to recoup faster and more predictably, thus attracting more financiers

The good news is, for every single thing I just mentioned, solutions already exist. There are really smart, passionate people who have built literally every piece of this new Indie film puzzle.

Therefore, I believe there are clear ways for Indie filmmakers to outpace the traditional industry. If the industry’s power comes from their ability to control the access points for audiences, then their biggest vulnerability is exposed when the creators have their own access points.

So as a collective, an empowered community of the creators who are actually making the products, there is enormous power. It’s scary, I admit. The entertainment business has trained us all to think: “We get paid to make the stuff, and then someone else figures out how to get it into the world.” But that’s exactly what the old system relied on. By giving up the “business” part of the entertainment business to some one else, we handed them the keys to the kingdom.

But, no more. I believe that if we embrace this moment and coalesce around a shared goal: a new, fairer, more efficient and more effective industry created by filmmakers and for filmmakers, we can quite literally change the world.

So with my new, weekly newsletter and podcast - Entertaining the Future - my hope is to highlight this exciting, transformative moment for Indie filmmakers and financiers. But, I also hope to be a gathering place for creators from all over the world. Learning from each other. Supporting each other and collectively, cooperatively build the next wave of cinema. Not just for ourselves, but for generations of storytellers to come. It’s an audacious goal. I hope you will join me in this mission.

Let me know what you think in the comments below, and please share this newsletter with your friends. Let’s unite in our fight for entertainment independence.

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