Is it Too Late to Save Hollywood?

Over the past two decades, A.S. Hamrah has carved out a peculiar niche for himself in the increasingly bowdlerized world of American film writers as an uncompromising critic of not just movies, but the systems of power they reflect. Take his quip about Everything Everywhere All at Once, from one of his signature short-form reviews for n+1: “The thing I don’t understand is how you lose money running a laundromat,” Hamrah writes, “especially if you own the building.”

The latest collection of Hamrah’s work, Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing, 2019–2025, includes dozens of such reviews along with longer essays for Bookforum, The Baffler, and The New York Review of Books that reverberate far beyond Hollywood and into the uneasy place film holds in the post-Covid era. Noting that Donald Trump’s two favorite movies are said to be Citizen Kane and the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Bloodsport, he writes, “There it is, the Trump administration summed up in one weird double feature.”

Hamrah’s most recent project was Last Week in End Times Cinema, a weekly newsletter collecting together “pathetic and ridiculous” news stories about the movie business. (True to form, Hamrah blasted these digests out from his EarthLink account rather than bothering with Substack.) Those columns are now available in a separate collection as well. There are dispiriting headlines like “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 Ending Explained” and summaries of news stories about Sam Altman, the “eyebrowless CEO of OpenAI,” suggesting “AI might figure out on its own how to stop itself from ending the human race.” Read enough of these missives and it becomes obvious why studio heads were too focused on replacing actors with algorithms to properly market a film like Train Dreams, filing it away in Netflix’s library of slop after a curtailed theatrical release.

Together, Algorithm of the Night and Last Week in End Times Cinema provide a sardonic—yet sobering—guide to the societal breakdown of 2020s America. The Nation spoke with Hamrah about how the pandemic ruined the movie-going experience, AI hustlers and rubes, and the cinematic experience of social media, where police violence, fascist propaganda, and pygmy hippos compete for our enfeebled attention spans. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

—Kyle Paoletta

Kyle Paoletta: In Algorithm of the Night, you write that 17 months passed between the last film you saw in theaters before lockdown in 2020 and the next time you were able to visit a cinema. That period covers the most acute phase of the pandemic, so I’m curious to hear what kind of lasting damage you think that long layoff did to the culture of moviegoing?

A.S. Hamrah: There’s the personal level and there’s what happened in the film industry, especially with exhibition. On the personal level, it’s a coincidence that the last film I saw was a press screening for the rerelease of The Conversation on 35mm that Francis Ford Coppola had put together. After seeing that film, once the pandemic started, I started to live like Gene Hackman does in that movie, which is in an isolated environment by myself, in my case just listening to people on the phone or on Zoom in my apartment, rarely seeing them in person. And like that character, I was losing my mind. The next movie I happened to see in theaters was M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, a movie about people trapped on an island who become infected with a mysterious illness that makes them age. That’s also how I felt, like I had aged in that period in an unnatural way. When I saw Old it was at a regional arthouse cinema in upstate New York, and of course they were showing it digitally. It didn’t look great on the screen—it certainly didn’t look like The Conversation. There’s a clear kind of degeneration between seeing a movie from the 1970s projected on 35mm and seeing a new movie projected digitally. And that too, is a form of immiseration.

On the level of the film industry, they’ve totally given themselves over to this sense of degeneration. Almost everything is projected digitally, which reflects what I think of as this kind of gleeful attitude the studios have about the death of moviegoing. They don’t control theaters, so they would much prefer it if there was only streaming, where they get all the money. They don’t care about the experience people have at the movies, because they don’t want people to even go to the movies. Ted Sarandos, the CEO of Netflix, is always insisting, “People actually don’t like going to movies.” The implication is that people just like sitting on their ass at home and scrolling through a menu of crap—essentially what many people were doing during the pandemic. And now AI is being sold to us in a similar fashion as streaming—it is something inevitable that is going to happen to us whether we want it to or not, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

KP: I suspect these studio executives are so quick to say no one goes to movies anymore because they themselves do not go to movies anymore.

ASH: People now often tell me things like, “I have two kids in college, one’s pre-law and the other is studying biochemistry, and they never go to the movies.” People like that weren’t going to the movies when I was in college, either! If the convenience of streaming is defining the industry for the people who run it, like Sarandos and Bob Iger and David Zaslav, then the exhibitors now have to counter this by making it more convenient to see movies. They’re not doing that. Instead, they’re just adding more layers between you and the movie you want to see: Often you have to drive to a dead mall. You have to go online to buy a ticket. You have to pick a seat before you get to the movie theater. There’s often no cashier now in the ticket booth, so if you prefer to buy a ticket at the theater you have to go to the concession stand and wait behind people who are buying their special popcorn buckets, and then pick out the seats, and so on.

KP: The cinema feeling so impersonal strikes me as one of the pandemic’s lasting legacies. What was once a social experience has become the opposite, even as our phones are bringing us into vivid contact with strangers. I found your passage about watching the video of George Floyd’s murder quite moving, and it made me connect the feeling you articulated there to what we’ve all experienced over the past two years as our feeds have been filled with videos of Palestinians being massacred by Israeli soldiers, or even ICE officers killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti last month in Minneapolis. The availability of these videos feels like a feature of what you call “End Times Cinema”—we have more and more access to human suffering all the time in video form, even as our artistic production feels so immiserated.

ASH: Those videos are made by amateurs for the most part, not TV news or documentarians, just regular people recording footage of the violence in front of them. What’s so stark is not just the horror of those images, but the contrast between them and these AI videos that Donald Trump shows now, of himself as a strong man or a fighter jet pilot dumping shit onto protesters below. It’s just so apparent that that form is on the side of repression and injustice, and the other is against that.

I wish someone would just take all the videos of ICE raids—of people being thrown to the ground, dragged out of schools, taken out of their cars, taken out of their places of work, sometimes escaping from the ICE agents — and make them into a three-hour supercut with no commentary and put that in a movie theater. That is the kind of cinema that we need right now. I don’t want to see documentaries that are mediated by entertainment values.

KP: It does feel like the entertainment industry has become so creatively emaciated that it’s completely unequipped to address the moment we’re living in. There’s a line to that effect in the introduction to Algorithm of the Night, where you write: “The confluence of digital projection, streaming channels, AI and the alleged death of criticism often makes it seem like we are dealing with the destruction of a worldview.” How would you describe that worldview?

ASH: Cinephilia, which is the engine of the history of cinema and its future. The streamers want to make a cinema with no future: It’s a cinema of the present moment that you can just dial up at any time you want to see it, and then you forget it instantly. And, as we have learned, it’s a second-screen cinema. You are doing something else while you watch it. The worldview that I’m saying is under threat is what gave us the Cinémathèque Française and the Museum of Modern Art and Anthology Film Archives, the kind of places where film and its past and its future are preserved. I mean, Warner Brothers Discovery can barely keep Turner Classic Movies on the air. And David Zaslav makes more as CEO of WBD than the entire budget of TCM.

KP: Last Week in End Times Cinema reads like a record of Hollywood’s disengagement from the values of cinephilia, which is happening with astounding rapidity as AI goes from speculative technology to a tentpole of the studios’ plans for the future.

ASH: The power that the studio heads have now is far greater than any kind of power that the original studio moguls had, or even than the agents that took over the studios and brought us into the blockbuster era. This is a much more dire period. When it was Samuel Goldwyn and Harry Cohn and Irving Thalberg running the studios, they wanted to make what their version of good movies was. They had an emotional as well as a business investment in the future of their industry. The same thing held true throughout the decline of the studio era, when new types of people were coming in, first the New Hollywood directors and then mostly agents and lawyers. They, too, had a vested interest in the continuation of the film industry. That led to Star Wars—we can debate whether that was a good thing or not, but they wanted cinema to continue.

That is not the case anymore. There’s no comparison between Jeff Bezos and Lou Wasserman. I mean, no studio head in the 1950s was trying to go to the moon. At the same time, the new studio heads like Zaslav, Bob Iger (Disney), Bezos (Amazon MGM), and David Ellison (Paramount) are just such utter cowards when it comes to the kinds of films they want to make. They are only interested in sequels and franchise movies. There is no innovation or risk taking in the films themselves, only in the technology used to make them. This is why WBD was so scared about One Battle After Another failing, and why the trade publications (which are monopolized by the Penske Media Group)—Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, and so on—mimics that fear and tries to instill it in the audience.

KP: How do we restore cinephilia? Is that even possible in our current political climate?

ASH: I don’t think it needs to be restored. It exists. It’s an ongoing thing that exists that’s willfully being ignored. The success of Letterboxd speaks to its continued existence. There are tens of thousands of people, many of them younger people, around the world that think about the cinema this way. But the people that make it at the highest corporate levels want to pretend that those people don’t exist.

KP: Everything that has been going on in Hollywood, from the arrival of Apple and Amazon as players in the studio world to the labor unrest two years ago to all that corporate consolidation that’s happened since—that all makes it feel like movies made solely by AI are on the horizon.

ASH: Consolidation is going to lead to a worse product at a higher price that fewer people like but that they have no choice but to see if they want to see a new Hollywood movie. Hollywood creatives don’t really understand what a labor action is, in my opinion. It’s not about writing funny signs and having them photographed for social media. Bob Iger in particular was talking about how Disney’s plan was starving these people out. The studios made certain concessions regarding AI during the SAG strike and the writers’ strike, but they were not terribly consequential.

KP: Beyond the need for Hollywood labor to get more assertive, how do cinephiles weather the storm of AI and corporate consolidation and ascendent fascism and everything else that threatens us?

ASH: My suspicion about AI is that it’s going to flop. There’s going to be a bust, as many people are now predicting, and for cinema that probably looks like AI being received as a gimmick, kind of like 3D movies. As with 3D, I don’t think the audience is there for it. But it will be used for various phases of production to eliminate labor behind the scenes. A bigger problem right now is the CEO class. These corporations are not serious about anything except consolidation. They don’t know what a movie is. They’re hiring people who are incompetent, like Zaslav, who are just there to oversee consolidation and get bonuses no matter how much money the studios lose. And then, again, there’s theatrical exhibition—going to the movies. Both the owners of the big chains (AMC, Regal, etc) and most people who run small theaters are not recalibrating their minds to the current conditions under which people go to the movies.

We should make it easier for people to see movies by not putting all this interface between them and the film. We don’t necessarily think of moviegoing as a form of community, but that’s what it is. I don’t mean this in a touchy-feely, family-friendly way, either, which has too often become a default mode. One of the strengths of places like Film Forum is they’re open seven days a week. They start showing films early in the afternoon, and they show them till midnight. You have to make your audience understand that when they get the urge to go see a movie, they can go see a movie.

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