Burning Shorts Issue 8 February 2007

Blog As Artistic Collage

"Let us not talk falsely now the hour’s getting late." –Bob Dylan

Hollywood (movies and television) no longer affords the conditions for creative innovation, and, so, Hollywood is broken. It is understandable that most professionals in Hollywood are blind to this reality.

This is why. At best, Hollywood has been always dysfunctional. Specifically, Hollywood has been the dysfunctional marriage of creativity and commerce, of art and business. Some time ago, I sought to present this dramatically with the help of a mental health professional.

I proposed that, before an audience, we assemble a group of Hollywood creative talents as well as a group of Hollywood business and management executives. Each group would be small in number but great in eloquence and intensity. The moderator or, rather, the mediator would be a mental health professional; specifically, a marital therapist.

Then, the therapist would pry open and help the participants unpack the enduring tensions in this "dysfunctional marriage". I thought it might be illuminating. And fun.

Dysfunctional marriages produce many unsuccessful offspring, just as the Hollywood marriage of art and business produced many unsuccessful works. However, even dysfunctional marriages produce some remarkable offspring, perhaps all the more worthwhile because of their family histories, and, so too, did Hollywood produce some remarkable, even wondrous works.

On those occasions when I could advance this proposal, I did so. Alas, those to whom I presented it were too caught up in the very dysfunction to explore the idea.

Now and hereafter, it is too late. Hollywood, like other businesses, has become a body with four or five heads: Disney, Newscorp, Time-Warner, Viacom, and perhaps Sony or NBC-Universal. As a result, the cost of making and marketing content has soared, and the marriage has dissolved with bottom-line business in control. Wondrous works fade as possibilities.

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At the same time, digital media, in which film-making resources and global distribution are easily available to anyone motivated, have provided a spectacular source of hope and excitement for innovative and compelling entertainment. From Walt Disney to DC Comics and countless other examples: the great ones started small; yes, even Superman. So, online video is the focus of my attention, and a focus toward which I have been working for twenty-five years.

The site Burning Shorts is my effort to bring to Hollywood and to the audience the early, small, and yet wondrous: the finest online video, and the innovative talents who will emerge.

However, nothing in my experience prepared me to be dazzled by Bedazzled. It is not an online video. It seems to describe itself as a "blog".

I prefer to recommend it to you as a site which, in its totality of look, tone, design, and content is a wondrous work of art. It is also organic, growing over time. I do not know the identity of its author currently, but the whole site feels like the expression of a single artist: visual images, online videos, links, and exotica, woven together by prose, wit, and intelligence. I urge you to consider this important.

You will find it at http://bedazzled.blogs.com/ .