The Post-Celluloid Era

One need not venture far into The Decline of the Hollywood Empire before stumbling across the first exclamation mark. It is right there, at the bottom of the first page of chapter two: “Digital distribution,” writes author Hervé Fischer, “will end this archaic system of distribution and hasten the decline of the Hollywood empire: two giant steps forward for film in one fell swoop!”

If this is true, the excited punctuation is wholly warranted. The mere idea of the collapse (“imminent” and “inevitable,” apparently) of the planet’s mightiest pop cultural apparatus evokes images worthy of the kind of apocalyptic spectacle Hollywood has been trading in since D.W. Griffith hired his first elephant wrangler: walls crumbling, skyscrapers toppling, seas rising, ships sinking, great cities consumed by conflagration—the whole judgement-day, world’s-end, made-in-California, Day of the Locust shebang.

Like most people who have been prophesying...