Off-Off Hollywood

A Manifesto

Mac, a 74-year old Scottish YouTuber who vlogs like no one is watching

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“If there can be off-Broadway plays, why can’t there be off-Hollywood movies?”

— John Cassavetes on The Jean Shepherd Show, February 1957

The Great Recession of 2008 was no stroll in the park. But even then, tech was an ironclad industry. Like Detroit in the ‘50s, Silicon Valley was America’s breadwinner.  The idea of anyone betting against tech in ‘08 was as dumb as…anyone betting against housing in 2007. But here we are, seriously discussing the downfall of Twitter¹ or Meta.

The looming break-up of Big Tech reminds me of the fall of the Hollywood studio system in 1948. Independent films existed before 1948, but if you wanted anybody anywhere to see your movie in any theater in America, you had to play ball with MGM, 20^th Century Fox, Paramount, Warner Brothers or RKO. Much like today’s creatives insist they have to be on Instagram, TikTok or Twitter “for their job.”

In the ‘50s, Hollywood classics were still being released. But even when the Golden Age was losing its luster in the later years, there were a few vibrant communities outside of Tinseltown. New York filmmakers like Morris Engel and Lionel Rogosin were making eye-opening docufictions. In France, Francois Truffaut, a critic for Cahiers du Cinema, made The 400 Blows, the opening salvo of the French New Wave. After John Cassavetes announced the idea of an Off-Hollywood film on The Jean Shepherd Show, listeners donated money and he used that money (along with money from several other sources) to make Shadows, an independent film that was not widely released in America but was a monstrous success in Europe.

This was the beginning of the independent era of film, or the Off-Hollywood era of film, to use Cassavetes’s term. For the past sixty years, this has been the only alternative to Hollywood. Like Off-Broadway, the indie film movement began as a response to the mainstream. Also like Off-Broadway, it ended up being a test market for the mainstream. Many plays that were Off-Broadway smashes landed in Broadway and many directors that started off in indie obscurity are now directing blockbuster smashes (Greta Girwig and Barbie being only the latest example).

But the ‘50s also gave us Off-Off Broadway — plays that were too transgressive and challenging for even the Off-Broadway crowd. For whatever reason, this idea never quite trickled down to movies. To this day, if you do not make an indie film or at least a microbudget indie film with a crew, etc. you are either in the art world or you are a TikToker.

Could the breakup of Big Tech lead to the Off-Off Hollywood era the way the breakup of the studio system helped facilitate the Off-Hollywood era?

The problem with building your business on a platform you don’t own is that the foundation is never stable; you have to be able to constantly move with the new currents of whatever’s going on there. And what’s good for Google or Facebook is not necessarily what’s good for you.

This is from a great Verge article on rebuilding the internet of people, not algorithms. Or, as it is known in some circles, the indie web. Imagine a video that wasn’t viral on one app like TikTok, but was passionately shared among several small but dedicated web communities. Much like songs were shared among four or five very influential music blogs in the ‘00s.

While I wouldn’t say that this infrastructure is essential for such a guerrilla operation as the Off-Off Hollywood movement, it couldn’t hurt. What is essential? Hunger. And right now, it could be argued, that’s all that exists. TikTokers are making “corecore” videos (short compilations of depressing news footage and movie scenes with a plaintive piano score in the background). They are also making “humancore” videos (videos comprised of candid shots of people living in life-affirming ways like dancing on the beach and flying kites). Teams of film makers are remixing movie scenes or whole movies with psychedelic effects and vaporwave music mixes on the Racer Trash Discord. YouTube vloggers are vlogging like no one is watching, with low viewer counts and no sponsorship deals. They just want to express something to the camera. Not even an audience, necessarily, the camera. Many of them feel more comfortable in front of a camera than a person.

Why is there this hunger? I would pin it on the Existential Trident being poked in our faces daily: the triple threat of nuclear annihilation, environmental collapse and AI displacement . The last threat particularly might explain why a lot of this hunger is fueled by a search for authenticity. This valuation may have seemed tedious, ponderous, borderline calculating² even in 2021 — and this was when COVID had many people questioning many things. But “authentic” is the opposite of “manufactured” and AI has expanded the scope of what can be manufactured direct-to-consumer in the last ten months: poems, love letters, fashion models, influencers, cartoons, friends, lovers, therapists, writers, actors, musicians…perhaps there’s a shorter list of what can’t be manufactured.

I would bet that the humancore creators and the vloggers doing it for the love of the game are driven by an insatiable thirst for what is authentically, quintessentially human. After years of dancing and primping for invisible algorithmic gods, the idea of trying to hop onto the latest trend in order to become rich seems futile, especially with the current inflation that is happening in the attention economy. According to Time Magazine, TikTok personality Grace Africa, who has more than a million followers, did not have a big crowd at VidCon this past year . This is not her fault of course. A million followers is simply not a big enough audience in the attention economy anymore. All the more reason to vlog like no one is watching.

It is precisely this growing indifference to online fame that is fertile ground for an Off-Off Hollywood movement. If these creators aren’t even enamored with dreams of conquering TikTok, the hottest medium out there, you can bet they do not daydream of being Hollywood stars. But they seem to crave authenticity and connection. Something even more intimate than the world of indie film, with its festivals, pricey movie theaters and “microbudgets” that are still daunting to creators that use their phones.

Let’s look at that word “creator” by the way. Since 2007, we were told that the iPhone was a pocket movie studio. So why hasn’t this been the case? If content creators were called “directors” and “stars” as opposed to “creators” and “influencers” this would require platforms like YouTube and TikTok to pay them more (even now, with Reddit charging money for its data, there is no talk of compensating the users for their precious, scrapeable data). The truth is and the truth has been that, ever since the glory days of Vine and Snapchat, every teenage girl was a director and a star.

OK but this is beyond “Off-Off Hollywood,” no? This has nothing to do with movies!

Movies weren’t movies in the beginning either. Most films in the early 20^th century were less about narrative and more about spectacle. Also most films were not that long. In the turn of the last century, the longest films were 15 minutes long. The first wave of Off-Off Hollywood films would (and should) be shorts. In the ‘00s, sketch videos from Derrick Comedy and Lonely Island would go viral. Who’s to say the next generation of directors don’t start off with short videos online that are first premiered in Off-Off Broadway theatrical spaces, just like when the sketch group Human Giant would premiere their sketches at their monthly UCB show the day before they were premiered on music blogs the next day (before comedy blogs existed, indie music blogs supported alternative comedians)

Already we see YouTube creators landing Hollywood deals. Kane Pixels, who spun the creepypasta of haunted offices to the next level with his YouTube series Backrooms, has a deal with A24. Viral sensations like RackaRacka have a well-reviewed A24 horror film in theaters this summer called Talk to Me. ³

from Kane Pixel’s series Backrooms

It’s great that Kane Pixels and RackaRacka have deals with A24, but not all great online content is made for indie horror studios. Much like comedy clubs are great for mainstream comedians that crank out jokes nonstop, but an alternative venue like a bar might be ideal for a different type of comedian, a bar with a projector might be helpful for exhibiting the wild fruits of the Off-Off Hollywood revolution (these bars were useful in supporting alternative comedy shows from the ‘00s to the ‘10s that had mixed media).

Wait, who said anything about venues? We hate going out! Why leave home?

“Someone who doesn’t exist is more successful than you. Let that sink in.”

That is from an eerily prophetic Forbes article Matt Klein wrote in November 2020 (two whole years before ChatGPT debuted)⁴ about virtual influencers like Miquela. I’m in a generous mood. Here’s another line from that article:

 “Why rep a real woman of color when you can have a fake one that you can totally control everything about them?”

So for now it may feel great to be candid on YouTube. But what about when AI scrapes that intimacy to make a robo-star? Or, arguably worse, what if that supportive comment telling you to keep going is from a sophisticated bot who is counting on you to follow its Instagram page out of reciprocity?

Or, to bring it back full circle, Hollywood wants to resuscitate the Hollywood studio system days. The Paramount Decrees that broke the system up back in 1948 were terminated in 2020, leading to today’s mega-mergers: your Disney-Foxes, your Amazon-MGMs, what have you. But these companies only want to resuscitate the business model of the Golden Age, not the quality films. No, here they are more likely to replicate the model of early silent cinema, when there was an enormous quantity of disposable work that had no union protections to halt the pace of its furious deluge of releases.

And Hollywood is hoping this time to fill its hit factories with AI robots that have no union dues. But what Big Hollywood and Big Tech fail to grasp is AI is going to hurt them more than it hurts us. No one wants to see a TV show with AI visuals.⁵ Just ask the Marvel fans that felt gyped that Disney Plus used AI for the Secret Wars opening credits. Big Tech also seems to be in danger of being strangled by its Frankenstein monster. In the ‘50s, the Off-Off Broadway world was established to shelter those who withered in Broadway’s glaring lights. The Off-Off Hollywood world, however, is no shelter. It’s a vantage point where you watch the flickering light off the flames that are engulfing Big Hollywood and Big Tech. As we have seen time and again, in media and in art, ruins lead to rebirth. After WWII, with its studios destroyed in the war, a bunch of Italian filmmakers shot everything on location. We call them Italian Neorealists today and we remember them for setting the stage for French New Wave as well as for the type of independently-minded films Cassavetes made. Back then, they were just a bunch of guys who wanted to make films no matter how dismal the conditions.

Much of what passes for trend spotting online ends up being a sort of hyperstition where the journalist/blogger wills a trend into existence. For this reason, I call this a manifesto. This is a call to arms. And like Cassavetes’s call-to-arms that I quoted at the top, I would also like to start it with a question — as we all know, one question leads to many questions:

“If there can be off-off-Broadway plays, why can’t there be off-off-Hollywood movies?”

“Are a billion followers more valuable than one empathetic nod?”

“Why am I still hungry?”

1. The company’s name is now X, which only proves Twitter’s decline

2. “Authentic” has never gone out of style in the world of marketing and advertising

3. Keeping in line with authenticity, the Phillippou brothers that make up RackaRacka used prosthetic special effects as opposed to CGI for their film. No one is more sensitive to how fake CGI looks than someone who works in digital all day.

4. Let that sink in.

5. AI is better for struggling creators that can’t afford both sides of a nickel. Specifically for special effects. I can imagine a bunch of struggling indie Off-Off Hollywood directors making indie genre B-movie shorts with cheap special effects in the style of the Roger Corman FIlm School that gave us DePalma, Scorcese and Demme.