Strike reveals a future feared

Hollywood has always been a land of fear and anxiety. It's why the town's most-repeated maxims involve the slippery grip on the pole of success -- why just root against your enemies, for example, when you can root for your friends to fail too. Everyone in this nasty labor dispute has profound insecurity about the future, an attitude deeply rooted in industry history.

Near the end of his career, the fabled producer David O. Selznick glumly walked across a deserted back lot one night, saying, "Hollywood's like Egypt, full of crumbling pyramids [that] will keep crumbling until the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands." Even half a century ago, the moguls were congenitally pessimistic, always convinced the business was about to collapse. Perhaps this attitude grew out of the industry's Jewish shtetl roots. Maybe it's because the industry teems with hustlers and salesmen -- they're always worried the public will smell the con.

Whenever a new technology has arrived, Hollywood has seen it as a grave threat to prosperity, whether it was the coming of talkies, the growth of television or the arrival of the VCR, the greatest gravy train of all, which the studios immediately attempted to sue out of existence. The studios didn't crumble -- they reinvented themselves and continued to prosper.

Even if you chalk up some of the poor-mouthing to gamesmanship, it's hard to reconcile the studio's negativism about the future with the current state of the business. To hear them talk, you'd think they were running an airline or an American auto company, to name just two ailing industries that have forced workers to take pay cuts and health care rollbacks to keep the ship afloat.

In fact, Hollywood, once a boom or bust business, has never been as stable or consistently profitable as it is today, thanks to better management of risk, a flood of outside investment, global growth and a vertical integration that finds most studios in the hands of far larger corporate behemoths. When NBC has a cold, GE doesn't even sneeze.

The studios' problem is that they see the sweeping change represented by the Internet as more of a threat than an opportunity. For all the talk of how the industry needs a titan like Lew Wasserman to mediate the strike, everyone seems to have forgotten that Wasserman's greatest coups, like buying the Paramount movie library for a song, involved a belief that entertainment would always have future value.