Tuesday, April 12, 2005

The Big Money

Rox tries to remind us that Big Smut is all about the Benjamins. Certainly there's a lot of truth to this, but it's also the case that this is something that conservatives have been arguing against for years. The Michael Medved school of entertainment economics tells us that those Hollywood moguls make way more R-rated movies than they should because more family-friendly fare is more profitable. Without getting into the details, I do wonder why the free market always seems to fail for conservatives when it produces something they don't like, but nonetheless that is the argument they're making - Hollywood makes R movies even though they should make more cartoons!

...let me just add that while I think that of course it's mostly about making money, I actually do think it's wrong to chalk it all up to making money. A lot of people involved in the biz fancy themselves to be artists. Plenty of others don't. But there is certainly some mix of art/money which goes into every greenlight decision. I'm certain that for the big studios the overriding emphasis is on the money, but there are certainly movies which get made and TV shows which get sustained based on the idiosyncratic views of those involved rather than on any rational business decisions.