When it comes to Hollywood, William Goldman certainly may have been right when he said that, “nobody knows anything.”  Certainly the forces that drive Hollywood have always been somewhat mysterious.  Why and how pictures get made, why some get to be hits and others misses.  How some generate buzz and some actors and movies get hot, all sometimes seemsto be the stuff of movie magic.  

And all of this was before the digital age.  Before Netflix, and Amazon and Hulu and Pirate Bay and digital prints:  Before on demand and binge watching were everyday words.  

Today, the nuances of the film “business” are such, that it sometimes stretches the credibility of the word business.  Yet even amidst all of these changes, 2012 was a banner year.  After two previous declining years, 2012 generated over 11 billion dollars at the box office and even gave us some decent movies like Argo, Silver Linings Playbook, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty.

What did this year of 2012 mean in the new paradigm of Hollywood?  Longtime film journalist Anne Thompson takes us through the year in The $11 Billion Year: From Sundance to the Oscars, an Inside Look at the Changing Hollywood System.

My conversation with Anne Thompson: