Asked about modern film in a 1990 Interview magazine, Brian Eno responded:
I think the big problem is that the budgets are too large. Nothing is more guaranteed to kill any work of art than a big budget. Because as soon as you have a big budget you have big expectations, you have lots of people involved, you owe. Nobody talks about making a movie these days for less than several million dollars. I’d hate to do anything in that frame of mind – “It’s got to succeed.” You get so many movies that are dilute in their position, because to take any extreme position means sacrificing part of the potential audience. So movie people say, “It was meant to be this, but we had to have a bit of that, and we had to have somebody else showing the other point of view as well.”
This also happens to be how I explain to myself why I walk out of almost every Hollywood film brimming with disappointment. I bear sadness for the films' opportunities missed, their risks untaken and their fields of cinematic innovation left fallow. When there's a great deal of money to be made, there's a great deal of money spent, and a great deal of money spent means a great deal of control for the financiers, who understandably desire a safe investment. A risk-taking film might succeed wildly, but it might sink; the most mediocre of Matthew McConaughey vehicles, on the other hand, stands at least a fighting chance of returning the money before it decays into oblivion.
That's why I'm optimistic about most media industries' recent — if you call the past few-decade span the window of recency — hemorrhaging of financial potential. It's not that I think, as the top suits of said industries vainly hope, that the profitable bottleneck conditions of the 1970s shall rise again. It's that I find that the most effective stuff is made where there least money is made. The most effective music today, to my mind, comes out of the ambient and avant-garde traditions, which have never been cash cows. The most effective films are small-return, small-budget, pictures like Ramin Bahrani, Kelly Reichhardt and So Yong Kim are putting out. The most effective books tend to come off small and/or academic presses. They're not making anyone wealthy — not directly, at least — but they're taking the chances necessary for success.
So there's not a dime to be made selling records any more? Good; weed out the musicians — and more importantly, labels — in it for the dimes. Box office returns are slowly but surely shriveling? Maybe we'll be spared Spider Man 4. Publishing's ongoing crisis state continues? The problem was never that there are too few books. Newsprint's dying? Not exactly; it's just that what people have done with newsprint before is no longer viable. There are plenty of neato imaginable uses of ink and paper, just not ones that cost, and lose, millions of dollars a week. Same deal with radio: you can execute all sorts of fun, useful ideas with it, just not the ones that cost a hundred bucks a minute. Like economically depressed cities, unprofitable forms are labs. If you want to know where to find the cool stuff, it's where the money isn't — or where the money soon won't be.
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