CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

As Though It Mattered: Hollywood, AI and the End of Original Ideas

Theatrical advertisement from 1950 – Public Domain

I am not entirely up to speed on what the feature film business in London is like these days, but I do remember a production meeting for 28 Days Later.

There were department heads around a large table, Andrew Macdonald at the helm. There is a particular atmosphere to those meetings—everyone present, but not entirely there, each waiting for their moment to speak, or not to, as though something important were taking place.

It struck me, even then, that nothing in the room had quite begun anywhere.

At one point someone turned—I was head of post-production, or something similarly digital in a field still finding its legs—and barked an order at me.

“No one has spoken to me like that since school,” I said.

The room went quiet. Not because I had said anything especially provocative, but because I had said anything at all.

What stayed with me was not the tone, but the assumption behind it—that this was how things were done, and that it mattered.

My first contact with the film world had come years earlier, when Alan Parker was making Pink Floyd – The Wall. I met a young American woman in London—she was playing a groupie. I was young myself. We hung out at Blake’s Hotel in Kensington, surrounded by a high level of ease and access that felt staged.

“It’s all acting,” she said.

At the time, I took that to mean the obvious. Later, I wondered if she meant everything else, too. The way people conversed about films, about books, about each other. There was a second-hand quality to it all, as though everything had already been said somewhere else and was now being repeated with surprising conviction.

In the immediate years that followed, I moved through very different environments—filming alone in a war zone, later working in two New York galleries where the question of whether something meant anything at all was treated with near-oppressive seriousness.

Set against those experiences, the film world seemed to........

© CounterPunch