The way Hollywood consolidated its power and shifted the digital on its own terms allowed it to

continue to distribute the movies the studios wanted to distribute, which were blockbusters.

Hello. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Will Tavlin.

Will is a writer and fact checker based in New York, and he recently wrote a really great piece for Nplus 1 magazine that digs into the digitization and digital shift in the film industry, not only focusing on streaming, which is, I think,

the aspect of this that we're most familiar with, but also the shift to digital filmmaking,

to filming on digital cameras instead of on celluloid film. And this is really important because in both

of these instances, you know, one happening 20 odd years ago, the other one happening more

recently, we see these narratives about how these digital technologies are going to enable

this democratization, this shift in the power relations of the

industry, but then what we actually see is that it reinforces existing power structures

and just really, in most cases, empowers the already powerful. I think it's important because

this aspect of shifting to filming on digital has really huge

implications for the industry, for the way that films are exhibitioned or shown in theaters,

for the way that films are made, but it's something that we don't talk about so much

or the implications of it, especially when we talk about streaming and how that's transforming

the film industry.

I was really happy to have this conversation with Will because I think it builds well on the conversation that I had with Peter Labusa back in July of 2021. That's episode 71 if you want to go

back to it, where we talked a lot about what streaming was doing to the film industry.

But now in this conversation with Will, we look, I think more broadly

at the film industry, how there have been these kind of technological changes, these changes to the

business model over a longer period of time, and then what these digital shifts have actually done and how

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