Company Town

Los Angeles smells good. There’s always something blooming. There’s the fresh cut grass. There’s the ocean as well.

Even the smog--the pollution. That smells good too.

It’s a warm place. You could walk around naked. Clothing is a cultural formality, not a utility.

The seasons are barely perceptible, so it’s easy to lose track of time. You get sucked in and years go by.

It’s a seductive place.

And those who aren’t immediately repulsed will be seduced.

But even those who are repulsed seem to stick around.

Los Angeles doesn’t make sense. The sprawl, the hectic architecture, the traffic, the multitude of cultures. It’s a bewildering place. Traveling the streets—driving the endless boulevards—I’m always struck by the overwhelming realization that this place should not exist.

But LA has its own logic. It makes sense like a dream makes sense.

In dreams nothing is logical, but everything makes sense.

Everything is where it should be.

There’s nothing wrong here.

Even if it’s a bad dream—a dream you don’t like—you’re still exactly where you’re supposed to be.

It’s no surprise that this dreamlike city is home to the Film Industry, an industry whose core business is the manufacturing and selling of dreams.

***

I put in 25 years. This would be year 26, but as of this writing I haven’t worked in 2026 and I’m not sure I’ll ever work in entertainment again.

The writing has been on the wall for quite some time. But it’s a sad thing--especially since the collapse of Hollywood is (mostly) self inflicted.

Outsiders like to blame the unions and burdensome regulations. That’s not exactly wrong, but the big reason is that Hollywood stopped making a product that people wanted to consume.

Movies are funny things. On one hand they’re art. But on the other they’re a mass consumer product--like a car, or a soft drink.

But unlike a typical consumer product, it was something we consumed together. We went to a special place, sat with strangers, and watched stories.

And those stories infected us.

They entered our minds and our souls and they implanted things.

Deep things. Ancient things. Timeless things.

Things like heroism and beauty and love and fear and sex and death and adventure and tragedy and pain and injustice and all the things that make up our dreams.

There’s a thing we call “cinematic language”. It’s how we tell a story with images. (If you want to learn more about the language of visual media, read Scott McCloud’s excellent book Understanding Comics.)

An odd thing about cinematic language is that it’s the same language as dreams. There’s a scene in Christopher Nolan’s Inception where Leonardo DiCaprio is explains to (the tragic) Ellen Page how dreams work.

He tells her, “Dreams feel real when we’re in them, right? It’s only when we wake up that we realize that something was actually strange.”

But what he’s really describing is cinematic language. Because Inception is really a movie about movies.

While it’s far from my favorite film, I think it’s the perfect film. Because the suspension of disbelief is perfect. You believe the plot about dreams because you’re familiar with how movies work--maybe not consciously--but you know.

Everyone knows. There may be people who have never seen a movie, but everyone has dreams.

Another odd thing about film: you don’t “watch” a movie, you look into it. And you put yourself inside it.

Now you’re in the dream.

And you’re hypnotized.

Because movies do that too.

The motion--the moving images--they hack your brain. We’re programed to pay attention to moving things and we can’t look away.

Even when the things aren’t real.

Even when it’s just light reflected off a screen.

So we’d go to these special places--these movie theaters--these temples--and we’d sit, and we’d “watch” and we’d enter the dream.

And we did it together.

And after the movie was over--and the lights came on, and we’d file out over the sound of popcorn crunching under our feet--we were different.

We’d become transformed.

Sometimes we were changed in minor ways. But sometimes not. Sometimes we were changed in profound ways.

Again, we did it together.

Before the movie we were a room full of strangers.

But after--on the way out the door--we all had something in common.

Because we shared an experience. We’d shared the dream, and we’d all become transformed.

And then tech got involved.

Streaming turned movies from a communal experience to a personal experience. The switch from the communal to the personal was an issue, but tech also introduced an new managerial class to the industry.

The new tech managers needed metrics. There had always been managers in Hollywood. But the metrics were simple. Was the movie good or bad?

Siskel and Ebert had it right: a simple thumbs up or thumbs down.

If the script, the director, and the actors were thumbs up—and you gave them a budget big enough to make it happen—then chances were it was probably going to be a good movie. Often the decision to green-light a film (aka “signing the check”) was the decision of a solitary executive—who more often than not was a man.

But the tech people wanted their own metrics. Not that it’s bad to have metrics. If you’re designing a software product or sending a rocket to Mars, then yes, please establish some Key Performance Indicators (KPI).

But you can’t apply a tech style KPI to a dream. Even if it’s a synthetic dream.

At least, you can’t do it successfully anyway. Because dreams don’t work like that--nor does any sort of art.

And that’s a funny thing about making movies. You try to make the best film you can, but at the end of the day you have no idea if it’s good or if it’s going to be successful. You just have to hope the audience likes it. Because the audience gets the final say.

Now, you can design a movie that will appeal to a preexisting audience. Marvel movies are like this. There’s a large group of fanboy nerds that will see every single one.

You can count on them every time.

Just like you can count on the Oscar Bait crowd (for example).

But those movies are slop. And Hollywood became specialists in slop. Because slop is safe. Because you can apply KPI style metrics to slop.

As a result they lost the audience. People found other places to turn their attention such as social media. As a result the audience probably won’t come back.

I wrote a book in 2024 (that was published in 2025). While writing, I thought of it as my farewell to the industry.

But looking back, what I was actually writing was a eulogy for Hollywood, the place where dreams were made.

***

I left Los Angeles many years ago. It was just before the birth of my first son. We weighed the pros and cons of raising our kids in LA, and eventually (mainly for financial reasons) decided against it.

So we departed, and eventually settled in the Mountain West.

It’s a beautiful here. The schools are good, the taxes aren’t bad, and the cost of living is reasonable. But there’s nothing dreamlike about it.

We have seasons here. As such, I’m painfully aware of the passage of time. The smells are different too. But no citrus, no blooming jasmine, and certainly no ocean.

But there are other scents you don’t get in Southern California. Like the humid bouquet of wet grass after the passing of a thunderstorm, or the metallic burn of an approaching snow squall.

Naively, I thought I could easily change careers and find something else to do with my life. But I couldn’t. Nobody wanted me.

Why? The most common answer was that I was “overqualified”—which means I wasn’t qualified at all.

But maybe there was something else. I’d speak about my experience and my background I’d get funny looks. They’d look at me with skepticism—as if I wasn’t quite real.

So I stayed in The Industry.

But now the Dream Factory is closing. Production in Los Angeles is at an all time low. Movies aren’t made there anymore. Nobody wants to shoot there.

Some production still happens in states with better film tax incentives and less burdensome regulations, but most of it happens overseas.

About half the below the line budget for a typical film in labor. And labor is cheaper in other countries.

Cheap labor is better for the bottom line—and it’s better for all the metrics.

But don’t worry they’ll still make movies. That’s not going away. It will always be around in some form. After all, they still make opera, and they still put on Shakespeare productions, and somewhere in the world someone is even doing a Punch and Judy show.

But I have to wonder how good the movies will be.

What becomes of a synthetic dream when it’s not made in a dreamlike place?

BTW the audiobook version of Hollywood Samizdat: Notes From Below the Line is available on Spotify, Audible, and many other streaming platforms. Please give it a listen.