Hollywood's Death By Algorithm w/ Justine Bateman

0:00Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Justine Bateman. Justine is a filmmaker, author, and former actress who rose to fame as Mallory Keaton on the hit 80s sitcom Family Ties. In recent years, she's moved behind the camera, making her directorial debut in 2021 with the movie Violet. She's also published books on fame and aging. In this episode, we talk about fame and its impact on identity. We talk about the influence of streaming platforms on the film industry. We talk about the role of Gen AI in creative fields. We discuss the societal shift towards digital interactions and much more.

0:39So without further ado, Justine Bateman.

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2:27their Shop Apotheker app. Justine Bateman, thank you so much for coming on my show. Yeah, really pleased to be here. So, you know, many, many people will be familiar with you all the way back from the 1980s. And there's so many different places we can start, but you've written very interesting work about what it's like to be famous, kind of bringing the normal person into the point of view of someone that goes through the entire life cycle of fame in a way that is quite rare. You've also written and directed a film called Violet, which I watched yesterday in preparation for this. And so a lot of different places to start, but let's, I guess, start from what's kind of more recent, which is your political commentary.

3:25Some people may have seen you on Fox in the past few months. They may have seen you in other places talking about partisan politics and so forth. I'm curious, what was your journey from actor, director to a public commentator on political issues? Well, I'm not an actor. It was a fantastic career long in the past, but just a filmmaker now and an author. And I don't really feel like I make any political comments. I'm just... There's something that happened in the last eight years that was a suppression of the new, of new ideas, of anything that contradicted what was the acceptable list of positions to have, all of that.

4:28And the only time we really get a national poll is every four years during the presidential election. And that national poll said enough people were like, I'm done with this. And that broke the mob mentality momentum that's necessary to maintain that kind of suppression, that kind of oppression. It was more of a, to me, it was more of a spiritual thing. Like you could, at least in Los Angeles, you would feel the heaviness. Like you could just feel it everywhere you went. and that it broke that and you could look at other sort of mob mentality situations in in you know over the last i don't know thousand years and you can there's a momentum that's necessary and once that momentum is broken it can't it can't maintain itself anymore so that's what I've mostly been very excited about.

5:29Um, and then I think the only place where I really talk about anything political is just, and to me, it's just like, are you going to be a leader if you are in an elected position or not? Cause if you're not get away from us because you're, you're going to be a danger to our city our state and in that along those lines um yeah i think gavin newsom the current uh governor of california and karen bass the current mayor of los angeles have done uh have been very detrimental to our state and our city and i just to me that's not political it's just like my god just vote for competent people you need to vote someone in that can handle your worst case scenario and if that's not your criteria then you're just playing games and when the shit hits a fan you're going to have an absolute problem which is what we've seen recently yeah so you talked about a mob mentality i mean that's something i talk about on this podcast all the time.

6:38And I often talk about what it was like to go to Columbia between 2015 and 2020 when, you know, you literally were not allowed to ask certain questions. And the level of social pressure and social, you know, punishment that was doled out on people that questioned the orthodoxy, whether it was around race issues, identity, gender, or just, you know, not even necessarily political issues. You know, I remember, I mean, I had stories of one person that said they didn't like Beyonce and the whole room had like a meltdown. You know, there was just like a baseline conformity around certain things that you had to like.

7:30And it was actually difficult to describe to people that were not a part of it because some of the stories I had were so outlandish that they almost felt made up, but you actually couldn't really make them up. So that's just a way of giving you a little bit of where I come from and the kinds of things I've talked about on my show. I'm curious as, I guess my perception of you is that you must be a Hollywood insider. You must know a lot of people in Hollywood. I don't know if that's accurate, given that your acting career is in the past. But my real question is, what window can you give into what the culture of Hollywood is like in these mob mentality respects?

8:15oh sure um yeah acting's in the past but i'm i'm you know been in the business since i was 16 years old um it's actually you're actually wind up in a much better position when once you're a screenwriter director producer because you are um you are gathering people into your film versus being somebody who's you know auditioning to be included um so yeah i've been in the business since

8:471982 1982 and yeah I know a lot of people and one of the fun things about being in the business this long is um the people that were assistants when I was younger um are you know running this and running that um that's a fun thing to see you know or somebody who was like a lower level uh agent or an agent's assistant or a runner in the mailroom is now one of the partners. So yeah, I know a lot of people in the business, you know, of course. And, and I, and I love, I love the entertainment business and I love all the people that are called to it. It's a very special collection of people with, you know, from, from the executives to the crew with very specific skill set, varying skill sets, but very unique skill sets.

9:49So, yeah. Well, I'll say here's what's happened. I'll give you the shorter version of what's happened in the business specific to what you just asked. And I have an essay coming out in tablet. it uh they're doing a physical magazine um that's uh kind of talks about that but the entertainment business was established i'll just say you know specific to the film business was established by people who were really risk takers like they're not only willing to like essentially you know recruit enough people to, it's like a small city to get a film done, but, and to create some sort of fanciful story or reenact some real story or something that wasn't there before.

10:40It just creates something out of nothing. They're also willing to, in most situations is rare to not have this, but you're willing to earn a living where you're not sure how you're getting the next check. So it's a constant, you're, you are a risk taker financially. You're a risk taker emotionally, creatively, everything you have to be. That stopped. It's funny. I went to school late in life. So, uh, I went, I was at UCLA from, um, 2012 to 2016. So I was like the, I was the bash right before you were there. Um, I said UCLA, I said that. yeah and I'm really glad I wasn't there during that shutdown time I would have been I would have been really sad about that anyway we can get into education later but in entertainment something what happened I believe about you know well there's other things and not to make this too long of an answer but and I've written essays about this how this the tech companies you know Once they decided to use our work as content for their websites, they changed a lot of things.

12:01The way work is treated, the way work is spoken about. They don't call them films and series. They just call it content because it's just stuff for their shelves, really. um they uh changed the financial ecosystem in in a lot of ways that are extremely detrimental to um the filmmakers and the crew and everybody involved um but one of the things that happened to the film industry it's for a couple reasons they lost their north star they lost their north star of outstanding work meaning that was always the goal before and there was room for all kinds of work there would be films and so so tv series but like the goal was this excellence you wanted to be associated with something really good and not just something that like lasted beyond this era.

13:00Um, and it was shameful to do something for money. And sometimes you had to, but it was, you didn't feel good about it. And what happened like eight, 10 years ago is you had this streaming, um, situation. You had a lot of studio executives chasing, kind of chasing after them, not wanting to be made to look like chumps financially. So they started following that business model that really screwed things up. And they also started following that North star in as, in as far as how they relate to the work. The studio started looking at the films and TV series, just as content and started making, there's exceptions to this of course there have been some good work over the last 10 years but the focus became volume content and i can tell you i watched four films the last three days one of them was good the other three big stars lots of money i know

14:13shit absolutely terrible phoned in performances by actors who were good actors bad script bad direction phoned in direction passable uh production values and like if you're really called to this and you're gifted at this and this is this is where you're supposed to be and what you're supposed to do it would rip you up inside to turn in something like that where it just seemed like it's not like you swung for the fences and you didn't really make it but you tried no this was like didn't it look like you were paid to not care

14:59so and sorry the component that relates to what we're talking about that oppression the shutdown they started through all of that behaving a lot more like a corporation than anything to do with making films and series in that they were very much reacting to the loudest 1000 people on social media who are committed to being angry about anything put a plate of pudding in front of them they're going to get mad about it anything and i think that is a lot of like um intimacy through injury is what i call it like you want connection with people and it's a lot faster to get that connection through conflict than it is through you know developing a friendship or something like that so they started reacting to that and they went into this fear mode um and you saw a lot of reboots a lot of remakes a lot of sequels a lot of you know creative fear and financial fear and like, and that was it.

16:09So the, even the stuff that's, that is, that has been good over the last decade has had very difficult for the most part, difficult time getting an audience, not had the, not had the support of the promotion that's necessary. Um, yeah. And it's like, it's like you're in this giant Costco of stuff. And you have to like paw through it to find the actual films and the actual series. Because, yeah, like there's no one at the helm anymore. There's no, you know, you also got to go on and on about it. You got rid of the critics, really. There aren't really many critics anymore. There are people that will do like summaries of some project that was released.

16:56Sometimes you'll find some good critics, like accidental critics by. I've read some film bloggers that really watched the film, really know the history of filmmaking, and could see where the influences were and what the metaphors were and things like that. But gosh, I don't really see that mainstream much at all. Yeah. I mean, I grew up going to the movie theaters multiple times a month with my family. It was like a family thing. And as one gets older, I always ask myself, do I think that there was a golden era just because it's when I happen to be a kid and a teenager and I'm looking at the past through rose-colored glasses?

17:48Or is it actually the case that there was a golden era and that era has passed? I think about this with music too. And I go back and listen to music from the 60s and 70s and it kind of feels like a golden era even though I didn't grow up with that music. So that makes me feel that maybe I'm being actually, I am being kind of objective when I say that like the 90s and 2000s was a golden era for just really good films. There was like a lot of good films being made, high quality. Some of them were mass appeal, some of them were niche appeal, but there was just really good storytelling that was happening.

18:30And I agree with you. It's not that that doesn't happen today, but it does seem like it happens at one third the rate it did a few decades ago. And I'm curious, what are the deep drivers of that? Do you think that the best storytelling has moved from films to streaming? because this is something that a lot of people will say. It's not that the storytelling doesn't happen anymore. It's that now it's on HBO Max and Apple TV and Netflix as opposed to at the movie theater. Oh, I don't even think we can make a distinction between the two. You know, we can make a distinction between the effort that's going into like tiktok videos and youtube channels and i mean that's definitely changed the whole talk show circuit you know like um anyway there's that but i think if i don't know that we can make a differentiation between streaming streaming films and series and films that are in theaters and uh series that are on tv there was a point where we could there was a difference there was there were say like uh 2007 2008 they started you know webisodes streaming shows and the first first that had the first one that had a serious budget and uh and serious stars and a serious script and serious director was house of cards which right i remember that was 2012 2014 i don't have the date right but somewhere around there and then uh which is something i was like pitching in 2007 and they're like nobody will ever watch anything more than three minutes and i said no that's a youtube restriction you couldn't upload any anyway whole other story but But yeah, once that started, then there wasn't a differentiation.

20:46There is a differentiation between content and films and series. And it's not necessarily money. It's definitely not necessarily money. It's commitment. It's focus. So one of the big things that's happened is either a carelessness, and or laziness because it's not a huge effort, I don't think. Maybe just because I'm a screenwriter, but it doesn't take a huge effort to lay into your scripts some cohesiveness, to have there be reasons why people are doing what they're doing, to not just throw a bunch of events out there And then, you know, but because the focus has been on making content second screen so that people on their primary screen of their phone and going through Instagram, whatever they're doing, are not distracted from what's ever up on the TV or on their laptop.

21:56Distracted enough that they would turn it off. That's been the focus. Have they achieved that? Yeah. 100%. Got lots of stuff where I can live away for 15 minutes and look back and I'm not lost. Or I'm just as confounded because they didn't really put time together. Here's a way that you can tell. You said like, you know, are we just imagining that what we saw when we were younger was better because we were more open to it or something? Here's a test. watch something that when you were a kid you thought was sort of a kind of a disposable film you know like a i don't mean disposable i mean like um not a not a maybe not a top tier film you know something if it was on on a saturday you'd like yeah you'd totally watch it maybe uh not to speak uh uh derisively of uh of of um uh rom-coms but like maybe a rom-com or something you know not something that was possibly going to be nominated for an oscar or anything right you just look at one of those from your childhood and you'll see you'll notice the story is tight the angle the the camera moves are specific the actors are committed like it feels more full it feels satisfying it feels and i mean that's how i can tell like i can look at like any film from the 80s or 90s and sure there was a lot of beast stuff too but the stuff that was just like I had to out in theaters you go watch it with a friend because it's fun but you know you know it's not a top top tier film but you watch one of those now and you're like damn this is tight this is intentional this is entertaining it's complete it's goes full circle Or even if it doesn't go full circle, it ends with a question that makes you want to contemplate that question for a few minutes after.

24:07They're just not doing that right now for the most part. Again, there are exceptions. So I'm trying to put together the theory of sort of why this has happened. And so one thing I'm hearing you say is that whereas storytellers, screenwriters used to write for an audience they assumed was paying attention solely to the screen and had no other distractions because in 2006, what would I have had to be distracted by? Right. Now they're writing for an audience that is presumptively scrolling on Instagram or TikTok or half distracted looking out of the corner of their eye. And the kind of story you have to write in that case is one where, first of all, you've got to have celebrities because people like to look at celebrities.

25:01You've got to have something crazy going on in every scene, whether or not that's actually good for the story. Long story short, you have to optimize for a totally different set of things than you would if you're just trying to write for an audience that's paying attention. Let me change that for you a little bit. The audience is different, but it's not the audience you just cited. The audience in the past were individuals who were going to watch television and they were going to go to the theater and they were going to also have subscriptions to HBO and places like that. that's not the audience now that's who was buying do you know what i mean who's buying this it's somebody spending money in a theater or it's somebody watching that television and based on the nielsen ratings we see that these people are watching or not watching and the the advertisers are interested and who's watching and that they're going to pay based on that that's not that's not who's paying the people who are paying now are the streamers apple is paying netflix is paying amazon is paying sometimes the studios are but for the most part not only are these the buyers these this not only are they the buyers they're the they're the they're the last the last uh kind of depot for your project even if you're it's a sony project and you're releasing in theaters you know i say sony because they don't have an online outlet for themselves but that's where it winds up those are your buyers what those that's your audience that's who you're making your project for you're not making it for human beings i mean i mean human beings you're not making it for the for the the actual the actual human audience yeah yeah yeah you're making it for these companies that's your audience you're making your project for and what do they want they want something that will drive traffic to the amazon site so you can sell your items they want something that's like a even if it's a loss lead or whatever to sell their devices apple i'm just saying like it's not even as a not even as a criticism as much as it's a just a simple business observation you have the castle in the moat in business what is amazon's castle it's not making incredible films amazon's castle is their website and selling these goods on their website so what do they need to do what has to happen in the boat to put in the remote to protect that.

27:58And part of that is get people on the site. Apple devices, computers, uh, you know, hardware. And then how do you keep people, keep people on that device? Um, now Netflix is a little different, but for them, it's a website. You get people on the website, keep them on the website, keep them, keep giving them new stuff. Even if it's just the promise that there's something of quality inside of it. God, there was a really good word I found at one point, and it means that on the outside, there's every indication that there's quality inside, but then when you open it, there's not. So keep giving you something new so that you keep that subscription up.

28:48Now, in the past, because the audience really were individuals who were going to buy tickets and turn on the television set, you had to make it for them. You had to make it, like you were just saying, you had to make it in a theater. My God, it has to be interesting enough to hold their attention for 90 to 120 minutes and for them to tell their friends and for them to come back again and want to watch it again. You had to make it for them. What's going on in society right now? Not so much. Maybe you're making it story-wise about what's going on in society right now. But that's tricky because you're probably starting it a year before that society that's going to watch it.

29:32And so are you making it? You got to look around society and go, what's missing? What do I need to make that will fill that hole? And hopefully that hole will still exist the day it's released. And then you have that magic. TV, same thing. You're going to make something that is going to make them want to come back next week and see that again. or see the next iteration, or not iteration, but the next episode. You're making it for those people. What did those people need? Or what do they need they don't know they need? But that's not, generally speaking, the focus. And if that's where most of the money is coming from, these streaming companies, which, by the way, Apple and Amazon in particular, like I said, This is not their castle, right?

30:25They don't need it. They just shut it off like this. And in fact, not too long ago, they stopped acquiring as much material as they had been in many films rather and series as they had been before. And that really messed up the business. So now you've got your dependence, a lot of your financial dependence on these companies, two thirds of them, this isn't their main business at all. and they could just shut you off like this and it really wouldn't affect you be better for their bottom line they wouldn't be outlaying all this money because you know you gotta pay a lot of money to get people to come do something that's not that great right that's a very precarious situation and then you introduce generative ai and like so that whole business that whole 100 year old business that was so phenomenal you know and you know you'd have some dogs in there too but but there was an ecosystem, financial ecosystem, creative ecosystem where there was room for everyone and everything.

31:25That died. It's not there anymore. Right now you have sort of this volume content factory. And again, some exceptions, but that's, as far as what the focus is, that's the focus because that's the audience. The audience is Amazon, Netflix, Apple. I love what Amazon Prime does. It's genius from a business perspective. Just almost any movie you could ever want. Everywhere else, it's$3.99. Amazon Prime, it's always$3.79. They're just undercutting on thousands of movies by 20 cents just because they can, because fuck you, they're Amazon. But look, when I go to buy my movies, why not save 20 cents? It makes no difference.

32:15It'll add up. Yeah, exactly. especially if you didn't watch it in time and you got to re-rent it right exactly yeah um but i will say this too there is the the art of filmmaking you like soldiers on like those are really called to this like and they know what i'm talking about everything i've said they know what i'm talking focusing on making the absolute best film you can make and going beyond creatively doing, going, going further than, than you think you can going further than filmmakers you admire, you know, from the past, like, you know, when they say that you can stand on the shoulder of giants.

33:08Yeah. And also you have the football right now. They don't, they passed it to you. Now, what are you going to do with it? Go forward. Um, and I think there's a new genre coming in the arts because we haven't really had a new genre in the arts since the nineties, not of any real significance. And again, there's been good work here and there, but like what, like what characterizes the aughts or the tens or what about the, uh, the, the, the comedy sitcom with no laugh track styled as a fake documentary, like the office parks and recreation. So listen, I think a lot, if we were to bring up examples, a lot of what we're going to name predates, predates social media or the explosion or predates the explosion of social media.

34:02Cause that's really made things not great. Like that, you know, because again, the loudest people on social media, like you got executives going, oh no, this, they said this, they said that. do you know what it was like in the 80s you didn't hear from any of these people i mean that's a long time ago fine but just as an example like because you know i had experience with that you didn't hear from anybody you would get they'd send letters and so you have somebody who took the time to write the letter and put a stamp on it you know i wrote about that in the book um but now it's like anytime somebody wants to pop off about any show whatsoever.

34:45And maybe they don't even really mean it, but they just feel like it. Again, for that intimacy through injury, they're going to get more attention for speaking poorly about something than saying like, wow, I really enjoyed this. Right. If you imagine Arrested Development or even The Office, right? The Office, the famous Diversity Day episode with all of the racial humor from Michael Scott, which is like so funny. If that happens in the era of social media, man, you have to imagine there's a Twitter storm the next day and the executives are all worried about this risky humor. That's why you don't really see any comedy.

35:28I mean, comedy was the first thing on the chopping block as far as canceling things. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of resentment in there by people who look at artists and think that they are regarded in a lofty manner and resenting that and wanting that for themselves. And there's a lot of resentful hall monitor behavior that's gone on. Yeah, a lot of revenge of the hall monitors. I wanted to talk about your film Violet a little bit. So one of the things, the kind of screenwriting 101 pieces of advice that they give, for example, when you're converting a novel to the screen, is that obviously in a movie, you can't hear what's going on in the character's head, which you can in a novel.

36:28You can have a readout of every thought and everything. And when you're converting for the screen, you either have to show what they're feeling with an action or otherwise accept that that may not be conveyed to the audience. But your film Violet was really interesting because it actually created kind of like a different form where the whole movie pretty much you are seeing not only what the main character is saying and doing and what's going on on her face, you're hearing her own inner monologue, which you call the committee in the film, which is the committee of voices. Sometimes it's a male voice that's always saying negative things to her.

37:18And other times it's a voice of insecurity that's written across the screen. and you're seeing this as she's actually speaking the dialogue that is normal film dialogue. And so in that way, it's closer to a visual novel than a movie. And it really works as a method of storytelling. I don't know if had that been done before. I've never seen that before. Had that been done before? And if not, where did you get that idea from? I'm sure somebody said something. I mean, there are films where, you know, there's been writing on the screen. Sofia Coppola, a lot of handwriting on the screen for, I believe, for the title sequence for Virgin Suicides.

38:08Ed Templeton, the artist, photographer and painter, he has often drawn on his photographs. Also, Peter Beard, another photographer famously in Africa, would draw, would write on his photographs and paint on them, sometimes with animal blood and things like that. So there's definitely kind of a background on that. But for me, it was like, as a filmmaker, I look at each film and I go like, okay, or each project, the books too. Like, what's my objective here? What's my thesis statement? and then for me once i know that then it makes it then all the decisions after that are easy because i i need to um choose um department heads wardrobe choices scene choices dialogue cadence everything that kind of dovetails into that and to support or contradict and then supporting it in that contradiction that that thesis statement like writing an essay um so with that film i had the you know which is all about somebody who's making fear-based decisions and if you are someone who's making fear-based decisions you're kind of you're off your own track you're not really being yourself and how do you cross that chasm from making fear decisions to making instinct-based decisions wherein you would be on your track and um for me years and years ago I made a lot of fear-based decisions and I did not feel like I was on my track and then I started looking at that so the negative thoughts I started thinking like how would I react to these negative thoughts if they were coming at me from somebody else like Coleman if you were saying them to me would I treat them with as much um weight with as much

40:22would I think they were true? Or would I question them? And often if you're looking at something objectively, you're more so going to question it. I wanted to ask you, talk to you a little bit about fame. You wrote a book about fame. And you've been in, you've gone through a whole arc with fame, right? You were famous very young. I've heard you talk about this without expecting, or seeking. And then you've over time lost much of the fame, some of the fame that you had. Fame moved on. It's not something that you can lose. It's something that hovers over you for a while and then moves on. You have no control of it.