Is It Chinatown, Or Curtains, For The Movies?
Part 3 of my series on Warner Brothers
Trump just signed an executive order limiting state regulation of AI.
This followed the news that Disney had purchased a $1 billion stake in OpenAI, an artificial intelligence company, whose generative AI constitutes such a threat to Hollywood that it was one of the main reasons why writers and actors went on strike in the past few years.
Then there was the takeaway from the Supreme Court’s questioning during oral arguments this past week in which the conservative majority hinted that it would allow our nation’s disgraced chief executive to fire members of independent agencies, such as the FTC or FCC.
These agencies need to give regulatory approval for actions such as the $83 billion merger between Netflix and Warner Brothers Discovery, which was announced just over a week ago and which I have discussed in two previous posts, the first one on Dec. 7, “Warner Brothers Should Remain True To Its Artistic Roots,” and the second on Dec. 8, “Standing Up For The First Amendment.”
I opened my Dec. 8 post with Trump’s words of portent following the approval of the merger by the boards of both Netflix and Warner Brothers Discovery.
As Trump said ominously regarding the merger, “I’ll be involved.”
It should have been no surprise that Paramount, owned by the Ellisons, friends of Trump, then made a hostile takeover bid for Warner Brothers Discovery.
In times such as this, we might all become a bit melancholy.
But we can’t give into cynicism.
We must keep on fighting for justice, for true justice, for the freedoms that we hold dear, such as freedom of the press.
Nonetheless, all of us might feel on occasion like Jake Gittes, Jack Nicholson’s private eye in the movie, Chinatown, which incidentally was distributed by Paramount.
We might all remember the famous line: It’s Chinatown, Jake.
Those words, written by Robert Towne in his brilliant script, epitomize the cynicism as well as the confusion that many Americans felt during the 1970s in the wake of the Vietnam War and at the height of the Watergate scandal.
Yes, Chinatown, a Paramount picture, was a great film, but it did not leave us with hope.
To the contrary, it suggested that many people were doomed to a tragic fate.
In this regard, it differed from the Warner Brothers films I have discussed in my previous two posts, particularly the films of Humphrey Bogart, like Casablanca.
I will return to those films a little later in this essay, the third in a series about Warner Brothers Discovery’s proposed $83 billion merger with Netflix.
But first I would like to address a larger issue here, which is that there comes a time when a person must ask himself or herself just what it is that he or she really stands for.
This country has historically stood for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, as well as an international rules-based order, which is to say respect at home and abroad for the rule of law, and a sense that all of us have a fair chance to succeed if, as many politicians say, we “work hard and play by the rules.”
Just as our country is being tested right now, the same may be true for the film business.
As I pointed out before, Disney just announced that it is buying a $1 billion stake in OpenAI, a generative artificial intelligence company that will now be able to license cartoon characters from the stable of the Mouse House.
To expand on my earlier point, animators, writers and others in the creative field are deeply concerned at the prospect that they will lose jobs and that they will not be compensated for the characters that they have created. Moreover, animators, writers and other talent are also concerned that their inventions will be used in ways that violate the souls of Mickey Mouse, Buzz Lightyear, Goofy and other characters.
Artificial intelligence is clearly a threat to anyone in the creative field.
Still, as dire a threat as is artificial intelligence, it need not be so dire if the people running the companies obey laws that we will need to enforce a code of decency, fairness and honor, where originality is still protected and where creators are still compensated.
Unfortunately, as already noted, we are living at a time when the leader of our country is evil and lawless and when he has just issued an executive order that could neuter the ability of states to regulate artificial intelligence.
Executive orders can be revoked by the next president, but, until that time, we need Republican members of the Congress, those who have a conscience, to work around Speaker Johnson, who has shown no leadership here, who has refused to stand up to Trump.
Those Republicans with a conscience can join Democrats in passing a law through a discharge petition, if need be, a law that will call for national standards on protecting animators, actors, writers, directors and others from artificial intelligence.
While they are doing so, those Republicans with a conscience, and such lawmakers do exist, can also pass legislation to protect members of independent agencies from being fired indiscriminately by Trump.
This latter bill will be necessary and particularly relevant if members of the FTC and FCC, for instance, approve of the Netflix Warner Brothers Discovery merger.
They should be able to do so without fear that they will be fired.
Nor should any agency member approve of a rogue takeover attempt of Warner Brothers Discovery by Paramount, which has obvious national security risks and conflicts of interest in that Affinity Partners, founded by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is providing some of the financing for the Ellisons in their takeover bid, in addition to which sovereign funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi are also ponying up monies for this hostile takeover attempt.
As some of us have perceived for a decade, Trump is the greatest threat to our nation, to the freedoms we cherish, in the history of our nearly 250-year-old democracy.
The last thing we should ever want is for Trump, via his proxies, to gain control over Warner Brothers Discovery, which would happen, were the Ellisons, who run Paramount, to take over the former in a hostile bid.
It goes without saying that our country depends on the neutrality of our news and entertainment organizations, which must remain independent and free of the coercion of the solipsist in chief or rogue actors overseas, such as Putin, who has sway over Trump, and the Gulf states.
The best journalists, like the best artists, illuminate the truth, enrich our souls and help us to navigate our way past evil in the world.
As I argued in my Dec. 7 piece, “Warner Brothers Should Remain True To Its Artistic Roots,” not all content is created equal.
There will always be junk as well as art.
If I can return to the Warner Brothers movies of the 1930s and 1940s, those movies starring Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, John Garfield, Edward G. Robinson and others represent if not the pinnacle of filmmaking, then perhaps the best body of work over a period of time produced by any studio in the annals of cinema.
It is true that not one of those WB pictures may quite approach the artistic genius of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, as I wrote before, but Warner Brothers in the 1930s and ‘40s consistently churned out classics, like Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, White Heat, Dark Passage and so many others, all of which were suffused with grit, liveliness and a hard-boiled optimism.
The protagonists of so many of those WB movies were underdogs, as I wrote in my Dec. 8 piece, “Standing Up For The First Amendment.”
Yes, Bogey and Cagney and Garfield played underdogs, who typically prevailed by the last reel. And they prevailed without mawkishness but rather with determination and a fierce, well-earned wisdom.
They were heroes, tough guys and gals, right out of Hemingway, Hammett and Chandler with scripts adapted or penned originally for the screen by Julius and Philip Epstein, John Huston and even William Faulkner.
Warner Brothers movies were uplifting, but the studio, like its filmmakers, directors and screenwriters, and actors were not rank sentimentalists.
As I say, there was nothing sappy about a Warner Brothers film.
These movies appealed to the romantic in many of us, with their idealistic bent, and that idealism was grounded in reality, the reality of the Depression and the threat of evil abroad, as well as at home.
Jack L. Warner Productions did not indulge in fantasy.
They presented us with characters, who were consummately American in their scrappiness, resilience and ingenuity.
All of which is to say that Warner heroes can teach us a lesson today, because those heroes, like Bogey, Cagney and Garfield, never gave up; they persisted in the battle and, even if they sometimes seemed doomed, they found a way, more often than not, to defeat evil as best as they could.
Of course, the evil we all face now is in many ways worse.
It is the same one that we have faced for a decade, as I have written since 2015 or so for the Huffington Post, Thrive Global and Substack.
And the evil of the solipsist in chief could now compromise the movie business and the freedom of the press, as I wrote in my last two posts.
Trump is indeed a threat to all we hold dear, as I have long contended; I discussed these threats in detail in my 2016 piece for the HuffPost, “Exit, Trump, Pursued By a Bear.”
If the Ellisons, who run Paramount, do take over Warner Brothers Discovery in a hostile bid, that would be a potentially fatal blow to the cable news business.
One might say that CNN is part of a public trust. It simply cannot be taken over by a wannabe dictator, who is in bed with Putin and other foreign actors.
Were Paramount to take over Warner Brothers, it would be curtains, as Bugs Bunny might say.
Yes, it would be curtains, not only for the independence of Warner Brothers and CNN.
It would possibly be curtains for our country’s freedom of the press and our democracy, if the Ellisons win in their hostile takeover.
CNN would tragically become an organ of the Trump administration.
It would also become a version of Russian state TV.
We cannot allow this to happen.
Congress must act to rein in our rogue chief, who has committed high crimes and misdemeanors, worthy of impeachment.
It may seem unrealistic to bring him up on impeachment charges, given the cowardice of so many Republicans in the Congress.
But some have started to defy Trump and Speaker Johnson with discharge petitions.
For instance, on Thursday, the House overturned a Trump executive order that took away labor union protections for federal employees.
And a few weeks ago, the House used a discharge petition to demand the release of the files of Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex trafficker.
That measure, which Speaker Johnson had tried to block, later passed in the Senate.
Republicans with a conscience need to do something similar in bringing articles of impeachment against Trump.
He must be convicted of impeachment, for his corruption is so clear, with his pay-for-play graft, which has boosted his family’s coffers with billions of dollars. And Trump’s actions are not only sinister, from extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific to raids and deportations of American citizens and non-citizens alike; his actions, in particular, on national security are also incompetent.
In deploying reportedly one-quarter of our naval assets in the Caribbean, Trump is endangering American troops while getting us into a completely unnecessary war that we do not seek or need to fight.
He is also ceding the rest of the world to Putin, Xi and other dictators.
And in putting so many assets in the Caribbean, Trump has left us on poor footing militarily, should there be threats elsewhere.
The so-called Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, spelled out in a recent national security document, may sound self-important, but it is nothing more than an abdication of our historic role as a force of good across the globe.
This is tragic.
It would also be tragic if we lose our freedom of the press.
If I can return again to the Warner Brothers Discovery bidding war, I respect many of the critiques concerning Netflix.
In the week or so since Netflix announced its $83 billion merger with Warner Brothers Discovery, a merger that includes roughly $10 billion in debt, doomsayers have feared the death of the biz.
As I wrote in my Dec. 7 piece, I can understand why exhibitors are worried, since Netflix is primarily a streaming business that seems to care little for theatrical releases, though it does create original content, too.
It is also true that, should the merger go through, Netflix, which already possesses a significant market share in the streaming business, will come closer to monopolizing that aspect of movies by adding HBO’s streaming division to Netflix’s existing one.
I also respect the view of actors, writers, directors and other creative talent, who fear that they will lose jobs because they will have fewer places to shop their projects.
These are all legitimate concerns, though they pale in comparison to the existential threat that I have already outlined, the threat of the Ellisons turning over editorial control of CNN to Trump and Putin as well as Arab investors, including the Saudi prince, MBS, who, according to our intelligence agencies, ordered the execution of Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for the Washington Post.
As I wrote in my Dec. 7 piece, the fears that Netflix will ruin the exhibition side of the film business are probably overstated, not unlike a similar fear years ago about VCR’s.
Moreover, as I pointed out in my Dec. 7 piece, there were fear-mongers decades ago, who believed that the invention of film itself might stop people from reading books.
This did not happen, though it is true that fewer people now have the endurance to read long novels, as I wrote in that piece.
But there are many reasons for this tragedy, including the toxicities of social media and other electronic technologies, the decreased attention span of readers of all ages, the mental health crisis we are all facing, particularly among younger people, as well as other challenges and stressors that are afflicting everyone, such as climate change, the rise of autocracy in the world, the decline of the rule of law at home and elsewhere, as well as the lack of affordability of health care, food, housing and medicine.
Of course, it does not help that we have the worst role model on the planet in our disgraced chief executive, a man who essentially does not read anything beyond bullet points that include his name.
Yes, the literacy crisis in this country is very real.
And if people do not read legitimate newspapers or watch reputable TV stations like CNN, our democracy could perish.
To repeat, we cannot allow this to happen.
This is the greatest country in the history of the world, and I am convinced that we have the pluck, the resourcefulness and the imagination of Warner Brothers heroes like Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney and John Garfield, to prevail in a fight against the devil and his disciples.
Republicans in the Congress have the ability to summon the free will in their souls and show the courage and the honor to do the right thing and serve as a check and balance on a wannabe dictator.
Let me return now to a discussion of Chinatown, with which I began this essay and which could provide us with some enlightenment.
Chinatown is a film noir that owes much to the Humphrey Bogart movies of the 1940s, movies like The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep.
I mentioned earlier that Robert Towne, who wrote the Oscar-winning script, created the private eye, Jake Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson.
Gittes is as hard-boiled and fierce as Bogey’s Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.
But he is even more jaded and bitter.
Chinatown is darker than the Warner films.
Given that it came out in 1974, at the height of the Watergate scandal, as I noted earlier, Chinatown stews with more than a degree of corruption, and it limns a multigenerational tragedy right out of the Greek playwrights and the Bible.
As we know from the Old Testament, curses can be passed down unto the third generation and the fourth generation.
Yes, there is a sense of doom in the movie, in which some people seem fated to a dark turn.
The malevolent villain at the center of it all is played by John Huston, an explicit homage to those old Warner Brothers movies, for it was Huston, who directed Bogey in The Maltese Falcon as well as other classic pictures.
Yes, Huston’s character in Chinatown is evil. But the chief executive of our country is even worse.
I should point out that our nation does not have to meet a tragic end the way that many of the characters do in Roman Polanski’s film.
No, it does not have to be curtains for the United States.
Netflix may not be the ideal suitor for Warner Brothers Discovery.
Perhaps, Comcast will consider another bid, though there would be monopolistic concerns there, too, given that Comcast owns Universal Pictures as well as NBC and MSNOW, formerly known as MSNBC.
Comcast’s bid, like Netflix’s approved merger, would not involve CNN, but it might still be problematic for a media company to be tangentially linked to both CNN and MSNOW, rival news networks.
At this point, the Netflix bid seems to be the best one.
It bears repeating that not all content is created equal.
There is only one Bugs Bunny. There is only one Humphrey Bogart. And there is only one CNN.
Bugs, Bogey and CNN all have strong brand identities, and the brand is one of courage, vitality and the truth.
Those values should never be compromised.
Art should never sell out to tyrants, for those tyrants will destroy the light and truth, the imagination and love at the heart of movies, TV and the news business.
In The Maltese Falcon, the black bird turns out to be a fake.
But our dreams are real. As is the love in our souls.
If we summon the love within us, we can once again realize our dreams of an America that remains a democracy, where art and journalism continue to speak truth to power.
There is nothing artificial about that.