By the Ghost of HST
JANUARY 27, 2025
They say the smoke over Los Angeles is from the wildfires in the hills—but anyone with a nose and half a conscience can tell that what’s really burning is the American Dream, Stage 32 edition.
Hollywood is collapsing. Not with a bang, but with a conference call. One where a man named David Zaslav, zipped into a billion-dollar skin suit, tells a room full of bean counters that real stories are dead and intellectual property is king. Meanwhile, John Malone—his invisible overlord at Liberty Media—sits behind the curtain like a Bond villain with a cable portfolio, pulling strings and pumping asset sheets full of adrenaline and absinthe.
This isn’t creative destruction. This is economic arson.
As of this month, Los Angeles has lost 25% of its motion picture jobs since the pandemic. Below-the-line workers—grips, sound engineers, set decorators, and those poor bastards who make CGI explosions look real—are watching their livelihoods go up in literal smoke.
👉 LA Times: 2024 was a tough year for Hollywood jobs
It’s starting to look a lot like Detroit in the 1980s—another American dreamscape gutted from the inside out by men in suits with no attachment to the factories they killed. In 1950, Detroit had nearly 300,000 auto manufacturing jobs. By the time Clinton played sax on Arsenio, that number was a husk of itself. The machines left. The money left. And the people who made the city sing were told to “retrain” while watching their neighborhoods rot from the curb.
👉 The Week: The Rise and Fall of Detroit
Now it’s Hollywood’s turn. The fires are real this time—burning through canyons, halting production, and chasing out the remaining illusions of stability. Crews can’t afford their rent. Writers are being replaced by bots trained on their own stolen words. Actors are auditioning for the metaverse while AI-generated influencers sell deodorant to your children in seven dimensions.
And Zaslav? He’s out here throwing streamer scraps at Wall Street like chum. Malone? He doesn’t need to show his face. His power’s in the silence. These men don’t make movies. They make balance sheets, and they’re turning the last American storytelling factory into a discount licensing outlet in the name of “efficiency.”
Seth Rogen tried to warn us with The Studio. Satire, sure. But it’s hard to laugh when the parody is wearing your health insurance as a hat and auctioning off your job to a guy in Toronto.
This isn’t just about LA. This is about what happens when one industry owns the soul of a city, and then lets it die. First it was cars. Now it’s dreams. Tomorrow? Who the hell knows—maybe we’ll outsource Congress to a TikTok house in Dubai.
And yes, full disclosure: I’m one of the casualties. Twenty-seven years in the edit bay and suddenly I’m filing dispatches between bankruptcy filings and gin-free nights. This isn’t just reporting. This is survival. This is me trying to carve sense out of the wreckage. Not just for you—for me. Because if the world’s going down, I’m damn well going to describe the flames in perfect detail on the way out.
The creative class is being gutted like a rare mountain goat in a billionaire’s trophy room. The cities left behind—Detroit, L.A., maybe your own—are just waiting rooms for the next collapse.
If there’s a revolution coming, it won’t be on screen. Not unless someone figures out how to smuggle it past the IP lawyers.
Filed from a bungalow in Laurel Canyon, surrounded by smoke and broken NDAs.
