Mia Wong (2:12)

Welcome to here, a podcast about the consolidation of capital into increasingly centralized forms and how it's ruining your life. I am your host, Mia Wong, and with me today to talk about how the consolidation of media monopolies has ruined many, many, many, many, many things for many years is Vicki Osterweil, friend of the show, Author of forthcoming April 14, 2026, the Extended How Disney Killed the Movies and Took over the World. Vicky, welcome to the show.

Vicki Osterweil (2:45)

Thanks. It's so great to be back. Thank you, Mia. I'm excited to talk about something a little less depressing than the things we could be talking about.

Mia Wong (2:52)

Slightly less depressing.

Vicki Osterweil (2:53)

Very mildly less depressing.

Mia Wong (2:56)

You know, like this is A story, obviously, the story that we're talking about here foremost is acquisition of Warner Bros. Or forthcoming acquisition. Since Netflix has backed out, it technically still could fail, but seems very, very unlikely to. And you know, you could tell things are going great in the news where this is the fun one and the fun one is us, before we started recording, talking about who we think the sort of Nazi commissar they're going to put in charge of CNN is going to be.

Vicki Osterweil (3:26)

Who's there?

Mia Wong (3:26)

Barry White. So things going very good? Yeah, as you can tell.

Vicki Osterweil (3:34)

Oh, my God.

Mia Wong (3:36)

You. You had the most cursed name that I've heard so far.

Vicki Osterweil (3:40)

Oh, yeah, Tim. Yeah. Tim Pool, I think, is probably the most cursed. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be the most. It's a dark horse candidate. I don't know. What are the numbers on polymarket? Should we look who's. Who's a front? She pull it up?

Mia Wong (3:54)

I. They. They've probably. It's. That's probably up now, which I hate. I. I refuse to check Poly market. Even if I could know facts ahead of time, I simply will not. Yeah, they can't make me. Oh, God.

Vicki Osterweil (4:06)

But we're not talking about insider trading, war crimes. We're talking about insider trading, intellectual property. So that's. That's pretty good.

Mia Wong (4:12)

Yeah.

Vicki Osterweil (4:12)

Yeah.

Mia Wong (4:15)

Okay, so to start, let's go back ways and do you want to talk about, I guess, sort of the beginning of the history of what we're talking about here, which is the consolidation of all media into a handful of increasingly large conglomerates.

Vicki Osterweil (4:32)

Yeah, absolutely. So in a way, like, consolidation is the entire history of the movie business. So obviously what's happening here with Paramount, which is one of the oldest, one of the old five studios, merging with Warner Brothers, that leaves Disney and Paramount, Warner Brothers and Sony as the three companies that release movies. Is this good?

Mia Wong (4:57)

It's only three.

Vicki Osterweil (4:58)

A24.

Mia Wong (4:59)

A24 is going to get bought like three weeks from now.

Vicki Osterweil (5:03)

Oh, God. And Netflix and Amazon are the new other studios. And Netflix was in competition for this and withdrew, as you said. Anyways. But like, one of the things that. The very beginning of the Hollywood system. Hollywood starts because Thomas Edison. So now we're going way back, right, the 1890s.

Mia Wong (5:20)

Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of, speaking of, dude who ruthlessly consolidated their power, he's like, we're intellectual property.

Vicki Osterweil (5:27)

Precisely.

Mia Wong (5:28)

Dear God.

Vicki Osterweil (5:29)

So Thomas Edison is credited in the US with inventing the movie camera. He is one of five or six people in the world who came up with the technology around the same time. It's just not linearly possible to name any of them as the inventor of the movie camera. But he gets that credit because he sued the shit out of, out of everyone who tried to make a movie for 15 years. Jesus Christ. So he, he puts patents on the movie camera, he puts patents on his stuff. And then. And this is in New York, he's in New Jersey. Menlo park famously is where his lab is and what he starts doing other than making really, really boring movies. He's a mid film producer. His movies are not that exciting. And at this point a movie is 15 seconds to about a minute. Often seen in a nickelodeon, like in a really small screen or, or like in a small room. These are short films. 99% of them are lost to time. We can't even watch these movies. Right. But one of the things that he would do is he, because he had the patent on movie cameras, anyone who tried to film a movie, he would sue them. Jesus Christ. It was eventually too hard to maintain this. So what he did is he teamed up with the other large independents and Eastman Kodak and they formed a thing, I think it's called the motion picture company, which is then referred to as the trust, quote unquote. And the trust just did this at scale. So now instead of it just being him fighting against his competitors, it's all the leading movie filmmakers. All the leading filmmakers and the literal film company will come down, sue you, sometimes even beat you up and like, and shatter your cameras if you, if you try to make a movie without their permission, without a license from them and without their equipment. Right.

Mia Wong (7:08)

This is such a good system by the way. Like I just like, like just the system of property rights. So good. No problems.

Vicki Osterweil (7:16)

Exactly. So what happens? So what happens? A bunch of filmmakers move to this new land development out in California called Hollywood. You know, it's 1907. They're really far away from New Jersey. Lawyers at Edison Goons. Right. They're as far as possible. So Hollywood is founded by a bunch of movie pirates basically. Right.

Mia Wong (7:39)

That's incredible.

Vicki Osterweil (7:40)

Violating, you know, Edison's copyright because they're sick of his legal harassment.

Mia Wong (7:45)

So it's some real. The mountains are high in the Emperor's far away shit.

Emily Simpson (7:48)

Yeah, yeah.

Vicki Osterweil (7:48)

I mean exactly, literally, how far can we get away while still being on the continent? Like that's, you know, let's do it from New Jersey, which like many such cases, many people.

Mia Wong (7:57)

Yeah, yeah.

Vicki Osterweil (7:58)

That far away from New Jersey before. But you know, so jumping forward into the classical Hollywood period, we're more familiar with There are sort of five major studios. And one of the ways that the major studios worked is that they had something called vertical integration, which is something we should all know about as we are living through times of monopolies. Amazon is a classic example of vertical integration, as is Google. What vertical integration means is that you own everything in the pipeline for movies. You have the offices where the producers work, you own the soundstage, you employ all the people who work on it. You employ the actors. You also then own the film that gets made. You own the cameras, you own the company that produces the film. Sometimes, although those instances, they didn't always own those companies, those chemical companies, it's not important, but you know. And then you own the movie theater where it's shown, right? So like movie theaters before the 40s, you would go to a RKO Pictures house. RKO is one of the early big ones, or a United Artist Theater. And they would only show United Artists movies. Jesus Christ. So there would be an active competition with one another. So your neighborhood would have, you know, there'd be an mgm, there'd be an rko and you would go based on what movie was where. Then there's antitrust action done in the 40s that breaks up these studios. The studio system sort of slowly collapses. They also then loses a lot of market share to television. This is a really pot ended history, but I'm trying to give it as much as possible. So basically, so by the 60s or 70s, what you have is a lot of independent producers. So the studios just become a brand and a sort of pot of money and often, and often a sound stage. They keep the sound stages, right? But then like distribution becomes independent actors and like directors, they all are independent, they all have agents, right? It used to be that they would be hired by a company and they would just work for that company. Why? You know, classical Hollywood directors would make like 60 movies because they would just churn them out. They would just be like directing them. Show up, do it for two weeks, show up on the next one, do it for two weeks, etc.

Mia Wong (9:50)

Christ.

Vicki Osterweil (9:51)

This is the studio system. So then by the 60s and 70s, it's starting to look more like what you have now, which is the studios are basically, they are the homes of all the producers. The producers are people who connect the money and the talent, you know, and, and put it all together and package a deal and market it, right? And that process, it seems like it's sort of a losing proposition. The business isn't doing super well until the emergence of the blockbuster With Star wars, right? So Star wars and Jaws and a bunch of other movies in the 70s. We're going so fast right now. I'm trying my best, but I'm sorry, this is.

Mia Wong (10:23)

No, you're. This is like. I was like, here, let's talk about like 150 years of history.

Vicki Osterweil (10:32)

So anyways, with the emergence of the blockbusters, one of the other things that happens is that the way blockbusters work is that they are released everywhere in the country at once. Film comes on, used to come on literal physical objects, and you can only have so many. And they can only be so many places at once, right? So the way film used to work is they would make a certain number of film reels if they thought it was going to be big, there was a star, but the studio was always gambling on how many. How big it would be, how many people would pick it up. And then they had to sell it to the movie theaters, right? And then the films would circulate. When they did well, they'd print more. So movies would circulate for like a year, right? Two years sometimes even.

Mia Wong (11:09)

But with.

Vicki Osterweil (11:09)

With Star wars and the day and date system that we have now, what they started doing was just putting it in every movie theater in the country. You also get the emergence of multiplexes, White flight in the suburbs. I'm really going fast here. I'm trying. But the result is that movies get both more potentially valuable, but that value gets more and more concentrated in the early period of the. Of the release, right. In the early window. Open weekend was not very meaningful until the 80s, really, you know, late 70s, early 80s, as that happens, you suddenly need more financing and you can make more money off of bigger gambles simultaneously. The rest of the economy is going through financialization, right? Which is a process that you've talked about on the show before. I can't get into that.

Mia Wong (11:53)

But yeah, we can't.

Vicki Osterweil (11:56)

And then Reagan deregulates everything, right? Reagan. Reagan rifts apart the FCC in many ways deregulates media ownership stuff. This is a big move. Then across the 80s, the home market opens, so you start getting VCRs, and this completely transforms the business another time, because movies can flop in the theater, but you can guarantee rentals, right? So for like the 80s and the 90s, the big studios kind of could print money because it was pretty hard to lose money on a movie. Now the people who lost money on movies were like, you know, dentists from the Midwest who they get to invest in. They'd be like, oh, yeah, sorry. Like there's arcane deals, people still got rinsed. Obviously it was Hollywood, it was shady as hell. But as so. So with the deregulation and with all this money flowing and with the integration of the home market, suddenly technology companies like Sony and the emergence of, of, of like Lucas films, that they also get really into computers. Lucas, George Lucas famously is into like the computer side of the business. All these different technologies get brought into the cinema at the same time as it gets deregulated. So companies start snatching up these other film studios, right? And so where once there were five studios and then the 60s and 70s, you actually have a ton of independent studios, a lot of really small ones, and they start getting gobbled up by these bigger conglomerates. You know, Sony is the one that was also a mega Corp in the 80s already that then would eventually go on to own, to buy out a bunch of movie companies. The same thing is happening though with radio, with tv. The main thing that happens under the FCC regulation stuff is that they loosen up. Whether a movie studio can own a TV studio. They used to be fully separate and then. And broadcast rules changed, Broadcast rules changed. So studios could own a movie theater or you could own a movie company, a radio station and a TV station all at once.

Mia Wong (13:44)

Oh, good God.

Vicki Osterweil (13:45)

And as you can imagine, that is how things started accelerating. You get like the ABC Disney merger In the late 80s, NBC, Universal, mergers and acquisitions become the big thing. You know, the stock market is booming, then you get other big corps buying them out. And then we're just in the classic phase of consolidation where bigger and bigger fish eat up the smaller ones.

Mia Wong (14:06)

And this is how, I guess importantly for this story, suddenly all of the television news media is owned by these giant ass movie companies which.

Vicki Osterweil (14:15)

Exactly.

Mia Wong (14:16)

Surely nothing will go wrong.

Vicki Osterweil (14:18)

Well, yeah, and we come to you here from iHeartRadio, which you know, is a lovely rebrand of.

Mia Wong (14:24)

Technically speaking, we are iheartmedia.

Vicki Osterweil (14:26)

Okay, sorry, sorry, excuse me.

Mia Wong (14:28)

A technically distinct company. I think actually don't ask me, explain exactly how that whole.

Vicki Osterweil (14:34)

Right.

Mia Wong (14:34)

I hear media, I hear radio split works, but exactly.

Vicki Osterweil (14:36)

You know, so media consolidation, this is, you know, consolidation is the story of capitalism, famously. Right. Like yeah, that like you know, an industry builds, lots of new entrepreneurs come into the space. People figure out what's possible with the industry. As more and more money flows in, a few winners come and consolidate. We've seen it happen in tech as well, but yeah, it has particularly perverse effects when we're talking about the visual culture, the audio culture and the news media. The way Information is spread. Although I wouldn't, you know, I would argue that the effects are still pretty perverse from the way social media and tech giants have controlled things. I think that's pretty, pretty obvious.

Mia Wong (15:14)

Oh, yeah, it is extremely bad, I would say.

Vicki Osterweil (15:19)

You might say it's extremely bad. This is Ryder Strong with a podcast called the red weather.

Mia Wong (15:30)

In 1995, my neighbor Anna Trainor disappeared from a commune. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. So, no, I am not your guru. And back then, I lied to everybody.

Vicki Osterweil (15:43)

They have had this case for 30 years.

Mia Wong (15:46)

I'm going back to my hometown to uncover the truth.

Vicki Osterweil (15:50)

You can now binge all episodes of

Mia Wong (15:52)

of the Red Weather on the iHeartRadio

Vicki Osterweil (15:53)

app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Emily Simpson (15:56)

A ambitious, well intentioned, ferocious and wealthy

Vicki Osterweil (16:00)

mother looks like in the black community.

Emily Simpson (16:02)

This Woman's History Month. The podcast Keep It Positive Sweetie celebrates the power of women choosing healing, purpose, and faith. Even when life gets messy, love, it's not a destination.

Vicki Osterweil (16:12)

You have to work on it every day.

Emily Simpson (16:14)

Keep It Positive Sweetie creates space for honest conversations on self worth, love, growth, and navigating life with grace and grit, led by women who uplift, inspire, and tell the truth out loud.

Vicki Osterweil (16:26)

I have several conversations with God and I know why it took 20 years

Emily Simpson (16:32)

to hear this and more. Listen to Keep It Pies as sweetie on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or

Vicki Osterweil (16:37)

wherever you get your podcast. It's the new me and it's the old them.

Emily Simpson (16:42)

Everybody's on their journey and your journey's different to theirs. This Women's History Month, the podcast if youf Knew Better with Amber Grimes spotlights women who turn missteps into momentum and lessons into power. I think coming out of where I came from, the Bronx, I think I grew up really poor.

Vicki Osterweil (16:58)

I didn't know that then because I

Emily Simpson (16:59)

very much use my creativity to romanticize life. And I'm like, my mom did a really good job of like, you step

Vicki Osterweil (17:06)

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Emily Simpson (17:10)

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Vicki Osterweil (18:44)

You know, a lot of people are very upset about the news that David Ellison, who is the Nepo baby to end all Nepo babies because he's not a Hollywood Nepo baby. He's not the son of a previous. He's just the son of a rich guy who wanted to be in movies. So he bought his way into like acting roles and then he like just threw money around until he got Skydance Global, which is this company that. Yeah, you know, he's been in Hollywood for 10 years. Technically, he's like an experienced producer. This man is 43 years old, which for like, you know, the CEO of a billion, you know, he started with a generous loan from daddy Larry, let's just say. And yeah, you know, I think people are very upset obviously because he's a Trump ally. Right. The Allison's are Trump allies. He has literally said I'm going to make more right wing movies. You know, like, you know, the daily, Daily Wire, you know, they, they were all washing out but now they'll probably have contracts or whatever. You know, who knows, like it's going to be money. But a lot of people are also saying that this is just for CNN and that's actually not true. Yeah. So a thing that is important to know is that the cable part of this deal, Netflix was going to spin off the cable. The Discovery Channel at CNN was going to spin off all the cable. So if he just wanted cnn, he could have waited for The Netflix deal to go through, and he could have just bought it on the market for a steal. Because the thing about cable is it's losing money. If you look at. Okay, this is a really dark fact, and apologies to everyone, but if you look at the rate of cable subscription costs, if you look at a meta aggregate data of it, the price of the annual subscription to cable goes up by the distributed amount of the previous year's subscription costs that were lost by boomers. Dying.

Mia Wong (20:24)

Jesus Christ.

Vicki Osterweil (20:25)

So basically, it is a literally dying. It is a literally dying market. The only people who still pay for cable, other than institutional forces are, like, people above 60 and they're just literally dying. And the price goes up as more and more of them die. It is over as a business. Cable, Even espn. Disney is trying to get rid of espn. Right. Even sports are valueless now. Not valueless. I mean, still billions of dollars, obviously. But to these. To these rules.

Mia Wong (20:50)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, if you look at what ESPN's like try to do about this, they're, like, just turning into an influencer factory.

Vicki Osterweil (20:56)

Yeah.

Mia Wong (20:57)

With just, like, Rich Eisen and like, all of these fucking unhinged dipshits.

Vicki Osterweil (21:02)

Exactly. So anyway, so people are pretty, like, despairing about it because they think it's about cnn. But if it was just about cnn, like I said, they could have just waited and gotten it for a song. David Ellison really thinks he's a. He's cosplaying as a movie producer, but because he has so much money, he's succeeding. Of the movies he's produced that you might like, although I didn't like it. But a lot of people like Top Gun Maverick. Like, it's fun, I guess.

Mia Wong (21:24)

Like, everything about that movie suddenly just, like, clicks into focus. It's like, oh, I just want you

Vicki Osterweil (21:30)

to know that Top Gun Maverick is the greatest work of art that he produced by some extreme margin. This guy's responsible for Terminators 5 and 6. That would be Dark Fate and Genesis. He produced Geostorm, which you may remember, came too late to capitalize on the disaster thing. In 2017, he made the Gemini man movie, which is when Will Smith fought Will Smith with weird aging technology.

Mia Wong (21:55)

Oh, I vaguely remember seeing TV commercials.

Vicki Osterweil (22:01)

It kind of killed Will Smith's marketability as a star. That was kind of the film after Earth did that Shyamalan. But he's responsible for ending Will Smith. He did the Spy Kids reboot, which Spy kids Armageddon from 2023.

Mia Wong (22:16)

Oh, no.

Vicki Osterweil (22:17)

This guy has made just really bad movies.

Mia Wong (22:21)

All of these weird Right wing people are all like, the thing they want to do is make movies. This is like, what's killing the Daily Wire is that they decided to be a movie company and it turns out they can't make movies. But it's like this guy is like, what if you had that but backed by like the entire tech capital apparatus and your dad was fucking Larry Ellison, the Oracle guy, like one of the richest test fascists who has ever lived,

Vicki Osterweil (22:43)

Then you can do it. Then you can just buy yourself a movie studio and you can do it, because the thing movies need is money.

Mia Wong (22:49)

And then you can keep buying other movie studios.

Vicki Osterweil (22:53)

But, and this is a bit contrarian, I'm not sure that this is worse for movies than Netflix getting it, because Netflix would have likely sabotaged what was remaining of WB's theatrical business model. Right? Like, Netflix doesn't like the theater. Now they've been trying to get into theatrical because that's like, you know, it's cash on the table. You know, it's how you build. It's the greatest marketing on earth. Right? And you, when you have a big hit film, then that's a franchise. You get TV shows, you get theme parks, you get, you know, lunch boxes, you know, toys, T shirts, you get resales, you get a reboot 10 years down the line. Right. You get licensing. So they want that. But. But Netflix is really, I mean, they hate movies. Netflix literally has a production design, a design philosophy of making movies that are designed for people who aren't looking at them. So the characters say what they're doing. I mean, there was this big article that came out about this a few weeks ago. Like, yeah, Netflix is a nightmare company. So it's a real. It's a real sell in care of this kind of situation. Yeah, like, you've got this fascist creep, but at least he, like, really thinks he likes movies, you know, Like, I don't know. Anyway, the point being, people are very upset about this news because it's happened new and because he's a Trump ally. There's this political angle. They were making all this noise. They were begging Trump to do it. Y' all are 30 years late to this being a problem. Like, I'm not trying to be like, I'm not trying to be like that. Whatever.

Mia Wong (24:19)

Like, no, yeah, like, but like, we are.

Vicki Osterweil (24:22)

Well, but like having three movie studios instead of two. Like, you're already doing pretty bad. Like, yeah, in the 30s, as I gave you in that little pot of history, in the 30s, Hollywood was so brutally integrated that they literally, the Federal government literally broke it apart at the height. At the height of the studio system. The biggest company at the time, which I believe was MGM, was the big studio, controlled 18% of the market, of the film market, which is massive. I mean, the market of anything. 18% of the market is obscene.

Mia Wong (24:56)

Hideous.

Vicki Osterweil (24:56)

Yeah. Disney, in a bunch of the past years has run 40% of the market worldwide. Worldwide. Not like we are already at this level of concentration. Like. Yeah, the fact that it, that it keeps going, like, yes, it does mean there will be fewer and fewer movies. It does mean more layoffs. It means things are getting worse. But, you know, we've been here. You know what I'm saying?

Mia Wong (25:22)

Yeah.

Vicki Osterweil (25:22)

I think it's 37. I think it's actually only 37%.

Mia Wong (25:25)

It's only 37. Oh, wow.

Vicki Osterweil (25:27)

Wow. Yeah.

Mia Wong (25:27)

3%.

Vicki Osterweil (25:28)

Huge difference. I rounded up. I'm sorry about that.

Mia Wong (25:32)

Yeah. Well, and this is something I think gets back to one of the sort of political answers that I've been seeing to. This is like, you know, this return from kind of like the left of the Democratic Party to being like, oh, we should talk about, like, anti monopoly. We should do, like, trust busting again. It's like, probably, yeah, but we did this, right? Like, we did this. We got rid of the monopolies and then they came back and it's like, this is, you know, this is. This is. The problem is that this. This is basically a structural problem of capital is this kind of resolution. And you can break up the monopolies, but they'll just reform. It requires you to win the battle forever. And all the monopolies have to do is get like one fascist elected or get like. Like all they need is one Ronald Reagan and you just lose everything.

Vicki Osterweil (26:18)

Yeah.

Mia Wong (26:19)

And it's like, okay, like, this, this is a problem that can't be solved just by tinkering on the edges of the system. You have to actually like. Like destroy the conditions that make it possible. And those aren't regulatory conditions. Those are. Hold on. Why are people allowed to own this shit?

Vicki Osterweil (26:37)

Yeah, and I think that's exactly right. And I think, you know, one of the things about monopolization, which is famous. One of the things that, that even capitalists don't like about monopolies is that the quality goes down famously. Right? Because you don't. You don't. You don't have to compete, whatever. There's literally no reason to try and make the product good. But, like, one of the things about the concentration of IP and like, one of the things that's like, sort of scary about their. Its consolidation in general. And this is a fact that's really important to understand. When you own a bucket of intellectual property. Let's say you own Sesame street, right? Which is one that's not owned. So it's a good example to use, because it's weird when you own Sesame street. And if you start to make products of Sesame street, it means that every idea that isn't Sesame street but threatens to become more popular than Sesame street is, is a threat. Yeah. So it is. If you own. If you own enough ip, it is in your logical material interest to stop new ideas from being made, because every new idea is competition. If you own the back catalog of Bob Dylan, as, like, some of these investment firms do, I think he's. I think he has sold to Hypnosis or one of these big. They're these big music investment firms that own the. The rights to all of these old songs. If you guys. If y' all remember, in 2018, 2019, all movie trailers suddenly started having weird, sad girl covers of, like, 60s and 70s pop songs. Do you remember this era?

Mia Wong (28:04)

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Vicki Osterweil (28:06)

Like a sad guitar girl. And I was just like, what happened in, like, Hollywood? Was there, like, some weird trend? No, what happened was these investment firms got hold of it, and if they can release a new cover version of a song.

Mia Wong (28:18)

Oh, God. Are they gonna keep the copy?

Vicki Osterweil (28:19)

They hit the property rights twice. So they get it on the new. They get it on their new play, and then people go back to the old ones. They're reminded of it.

Mia Wong (28:26)

Yeah, because it's worse too, because the new ones are all shit. Oh, God.

Vicki Osterweil (28:32)

And. And this is only possible because of the way that the streaming services got consolidated and that they pay per play. Because pay per play, as everyone knows, completely screws artists. There's just no way to make any money off that. Yeah, but if you own a massive library like the, um. Like the BMG or Sony Universal, if you own a library like that, you do nothing and you make billions a year. Yeah, Right. So it becomes this permanent, perfect rent that you never have to worry about. So all you have to do is buy enough musical IP and then try and get new artists who are hot to cover your old ip. So this is like this really weird, esoteric seeming. You know, it's based on the division between particular recording copyrights and the copyrights of, like, individual song of the songwriting. It's like, built on this sort of weird, esoteric structure of intellectual property law, which, like, when you start talking about it people's eyes literally like, roll into the back of their head, right? Like a daisy. They like, fall over and a daisy pops up. They're just dead. That's not interesting. But like, because of that, for five years, when you went to the grocery store, you would be in a weird, uncanny valley where you were hearing a song that you thought you recognized but was like, slightly different.

Mia Wong (29:43)

Yeah.

Vicki Osterweil (29:44)

Right. So the entire material struct structure of the world. Yeah. Like the psychic structure of the world gets transformed by these weird exploits over like, financial loopholes by the worst people on earth whose goal is to never let you hear a new song. Yeah, right. Like, they never want you to hear new music again. They just want the boomer tracks to play forever with like, new versions by, you know. They just want Charlie XCX to record Jefferson Airplane. Like, that's their. That's their wettest dream, you know. And all that shit is going on in the background of your life. Right. Like, I mean, it's not. It's. It's. Yeah, but it's affecting the psychic atmosphere. It's producing nostalgia. It's producing all these affects that are rife for fascism. It makes people want to go back. Yeah.

Mia Wong (30:28)

It's like, okay, what. What happened the last time we saw like, the completely unhinged, like, concentration of all capital monopolies? It was like, well, all that capital was liquidated by World War II. There was World War I as well too. Right. These were both to a large extent. This is something that, you know, if you go back and read anyone who's doing any political analysis about World War I in the lead up to it, and as it's happening, the thing everyone is talking about is like, is the consolidation of monopoly capital. And I think you can argue maybe that the early 1800s had like a larger consolidation, just in the sense of, like, I'm questionable as to whether this is just because it's too expensive to literally run a country. But, like, we haven't quite return to, like, the East India Company has an army and they conquer countries periodically. But like, I think it's just because that's too expensive and you'd rather just outsource that to the state.

Vicki Osterweil (31:20)

But it's less far than you think. Less far than you think. Because the part of the way that it outsourced this to the state and this is in this. This is all stuff from my upcoming book, which you can pre order now.

Mia Wong (31:31)

That's true.

Vicki Osterweil (31:32)

The World Trade Organization, one of the things that it did when you joined the wto and this was done by lobbyists, mostly film and pharma and chemical lobbyists from the US Makes sense. If you join the wto, you have to accept. You don't not only have to accept their copyright and piracy law, you have to agree to build copyright courts and copyright police in your country.

Mia Wong (31:56)

Jesus Christ.

Vicki Osterweil (31:57)

So that if, say, Apple sees you making a fake iPhone, they have a literal legal procedure domestic to your country to force you to stop. To smush those pirates. Jesus Christ. Major corporations can get police in Vietnam to go in and light a warehouse on fire because it's full of faked goods, like, without ever leaving the US Right.

Mia Wong (32:21)

So, yeah, yeah.

Vicki Osterweil (32:22)

The company's more distributed through these world trade organizations.

Mia Wong (32:25)

Well, they did the order liberal thing of we're using the supra state apparatus to. To negate the sovereignty of the state by creating the super state, which we run.

Vicki Osterweil (32:35)

Yes. So, I mean, I'm obviously interested in the IP and the cultural angle. This is the only law like this in any of these agreements. All the rest of the trade agreements, like, they can negotiate, but, like, part of what's so obscene about Trump's tariffs is that the US Already had this. It was called the Priority Watch List. They just had this list in the White House where they could just say, you're not doing a good job enough stopping piracy. And it gives the White House unilateral capacity to create trade embargoes on people without going to Congress. Like, this was already the tariffs, which also hurt your economy, obviously. But even if they worked the way Trump imagines they do, like, he already had that power and like, other presidents have been using it for decades, big visible sanctions like what they put on Iran or Venezuela are a much more dramatic upscale. But the Priority Watch List, they can just threaten to upgrade you from on the watch list to a priority country on that. And you will watch countries fold entirely on trade policy. Like, it's crazy. So, like, one of the things that's interesting about this moment and about the Trumpist moment is that they're ripping apart their own infrastructure because they're. They literally just don't understand how it works.

Mia Wong (33:42)

No, it's like. It's like that you. You handed them an aircraft carrier and they're ripping out the copper wires and trying to sell it, and it's like, you have an aircraft carrier. What are we doing?

Vicki Osterweil (33:49)

Yeah. Oh, God. Exactly. You know, so again, like, I think there is this talk about the consolidation of culture. And I think, like, you know, people like the Ellisons are just. They're just vulgar at it.

Mia Wong (34:03)

Yeah.

Vicki Osterweil (34:04)

Like the thing is like Mike Eisner was better at it. Like Bob Iger is who is the CEO of Disney currently. Although he's about to step down. Bob Iger saw them through the acquisition of Marvel and Star wars and all that. He is an incredible. I mean you know, whatever his team even he himself is a pretty unimpressive guy. But like you know like other than internal politics which is what all CEOs are good that anyway, you know like these, these, these companies were already good at this. And like what has happened is that a wing of the capitalists who are really bad at it and really resentful because they're all sort of like the David Ellison's of the world. They're all the resentful fail sons of wealth who you know, they want more power and more respect and they don't appreciate how much their shit is already built on the very thing they claim to want to do.

Mia Wong (34:49)

Yeah, well, and I guess it is to some extent a kind of funny like the election of Trump and also just sort of Ellison just like devouring this is why this like third studio that he's eaten in like five years and like all, all these forces being devoured by this is just like. Well yeah, like this is what happens when you set up a system like this. Eventually there's going to be a bigger fish who's just going to devour you because they have for example Oracle behind them which is just an amount of capital that like outside of like Disney you can't have that kind of capital.

Vicki Osterweil (35:21)

Right.

Mia Wong (35:22)

And like with Trump it's like yeah, you fought. You finally created a monster that is large enough to shatter the extremely delicate and complicated system that you did and is also just doesn't understand it.

Vicki Osterweil (35:35)

Yeah, exactly. And I think like if you want to see what the future of, of Hollywood looks like, I mean you know you can go worse than to look at China, right. China is the most dynamic film market. It overtook the US as the number one value of the box office in 2022. I think, I think it did in 2021. But that was still Covid shutdown affected.

Mia Wong (35:52)

Yeah.

Vicki Osterweil (35:52)

2022 or 2023. China became an actual, the actual plurality of ticket sales in the world by dollar if not by number. By number. They've already long surpassed the U.S. yeah, yeah. But the way that Chinese phone companies work is like they're all pretty nakedly financial companies like Tencent and Alibaba. Right. And like, like these are companies they're just already from other sectors and they're just like, we have cash. We use the cash to make a movie. Ye, studios always did too. Right. I want to be really clear, like I don't want to romanticize, but like, you know, that's where it always was, Right. And it's just that like in the turn of the century when Hollywood was being made, industries were just more divided.

Mia Wong (36:34)

Yeah.

Vicki Osterweil (36:45)

The reason to talk, talk about all of this business stuff on some level, I mean, it's interesting on its own as history, it's interesting as critique of capitalism. But I think it's also interesting because it affects the aesthetics, like, of what the movies that get made. Right. And I think when we think about. When people think about fascist propaganda, you know, we think about the Nazis, Right. Obviously, because the Nazis had the longest running fascist propaganda machine in the world. They had the Ministry of Culture under Goebbels. Right. And I think when we talk about Nazi propaganda, we think about Triumph of the Will and we think about stuff like Juden Suss. Right. Like extremely horrifying anti Semitic bullshit. Yeah. Extremely horrifying anti Semitic movies. There were two of them in the 10 years that Goebbels ran the UFA, which is the film company that made movies for Germany. The vast majority, the vast majority of films under the Reich were frothy comedies and musical and adventure stories. Because the principle that Goebbels operated on was called the orchestra principle. And he believed that you should just actually, art should just be reduced to creating feelings. It should be totally de. Intellectualized. And then very little of that art remains. Those movies are mid. You know, the movies made by Yufa are not good. Like even the ones that are like, not offensive, they're just mid. But they all do the same thing. They all work together around a principle, certain principles around family and romantic love and domestic life. Most of it inoffensive in and of itself. And so I think when we think about Ellison taking over, I think we imagine, you know, as we were joking about in the beginning, shit like the Daily Wire, Anti Woke Cinderella or whatever the fuck.

Mia Wong (38:22)

Yeah.

Vicki Osterweil (38:22)

Am I allowed to cuss? I'm doing so much of it.

Mia Wong (38:24)

Yeah, I swear all the time.

Vicki Osterweil (38:25)

Okay.

Mia Wong (38:26)

Thank God we are not regulated by the fcc.

Vicki Osterweil (38:30)

Yeah, let's go. No one is these days.

Mia Wong (38:32)

I mean, I guess we technically are, but we're not under the radio regulation, so we can say whatever we want.

Vicki Osterweil (38:38)

Perfect. Love that. But like, fascist filmmaking has not looked like that for the most part in the history of it. Fascist filmmaking looks like family adventure fare. Often. And I think we have been so blinded to the way that this happens that we imagine that Ellison taking over is suddenly going to mean that now there's going to be fascist movies in theaters. But, like, have y' all been to the movies? Yes. Like, have y' all seen what Warner Brothers did with, like, the Snyderverse? Like, yeah.

Mia Wong (39:10)

Like, did you. Did you watch the Beekeeper?

Vicki Osterweil (39:12)

Right.

Mia Wong (39:13)

Speaking of Netflix, like, that was. That was the most fascist movie I have ever seen. Exactly. It is literally. It is a movie that is just a guy shooting a bunch of people, and then the background superstructure is an explanation of what the Fuhrer is, which is the. Like, the. The force that is outside of the order, that is able to violate the rules of the order in order to. In order to create the order itself. Except it's a guy called the Beekeeper, and he just shoots people. Like, it's.

Vicki Osterweil (39:39)

It's. That's pretty bad.

Mia Wong (39:40)

That's bad.

Vicki Osterweil (39:41)

Yeah. I did not watch that one. And I like, status.

Mia Wong (39:43)

It's really unhinged. I. I watched it with my family. Nightmare. Holy. It's going insane.

Vicki Osterweil (39:50)

Yeah. Things are so bad that, like, there was a movie, Nobody, with Bob Odenkirk that came out in 2019, and it was basically a parody of those, like, Liam Neeson, you know, the John Wick movies. And, like, Liam Neeson, like, dad Men, Taken stuff. Right.

Mia Wong (40:04)

Yeah.

Vicki Osterweil (40:04)

And it was a parody. You. Maybe you could be clued in by the fact it was Bob Odenkirk and it was filled with comedians. Maybe you could be clued in by the fact that he's fighting because they took his daughter's hello Kitty bracelet. Like, there's a pretty cool. Like. But it's dry. But it plays it dry. Plays it very dry.

Mia Wong (40:19)

Yeah.

Vicki Osterweil (40:19)

Every single professional film critic reviewed it like it was dead serious. Like, Bob become the next. Next Liam Neeson. And part of that is because they shot good action sequences. Like, he did a good job with the satire.

Mia Wong (40:34)

Yeah.

Vicki Osterweil (40:34)

But then what happens? What happened next is that now there's a nobody, too. And it's completely forgotten the joke, and it's not good either.

Mia Wong (40:41)

So, like, Jesus fucking Christ.

Vicki Osterweil (40:43)

Yeah. And Bob Odenkirk, just, like, he had this one window where he could really sell that. He couldn't sell it in the sequel. Doesn't matter. No, it's. It's.

Mia Wong (40:49)

It's the Jarhead sequels.

Vicki Osterweil (40:51)

Right. Exactly. But, like, we're just in. In a time of extreme literalism. Yeah. Where, like, everything is really, really, like, script driven. It's really on its Face. It's really textual. Everything is just selling something else. Everything can possibly be sequel. Nothing really changes. Politics only exists as bureaucracy. These are all deeply fascist concepts. They're just more subtle than goose stepping SS uniforms. Part of what's so funny about the Daily Wire is it's like, like they come for Disney. Like you can't do anything to make a more fascist pop. Like, yeah, Disney entertains people and makes a fascist populace. Like they're just bad filmmakers and that kind of matters. Yeah.

Mia Wong (41:35)

I think there is a chance that like, I don't know, Ellison is such a dumbass that he just tries to do it anyways. Like he just tries to be like, fuck. Well. But even then, like he hasn't really made like, like a stereotype of Nazi movies. He's made like actual Nazi movies.

Vicki Osterweil (41:53)

Right.

Mia Wong (41:54)

Just to say Top Gun Maverick.

Vicki Osterweil (41:59)

People love Top Gun Maverick. People were like, yeah, I guess it's maybe kind of problematic. Like, but we love, you know, it's like that movie is like literally propaganda for the Air Force. I like, I thought it was fun. Yeah. Like, don't get me wrong, but like people are, have been really trained to not see that stuff. Death.

Mia Wong (42:16)

Yeah. And it's like we're like now fighting the war that that movie was propaganda for.

Vicki Osterweil (42:20)

Yes, exactly.

Mia Wong (42:21)

Like we literally, we literally are fighting. We've made it a rod. Like where we bombed a R15s went

Vicki Osterweil (42:28)

down for the first time. The Gulf War.

Mia Wong (42:30)

Yeah, because they got shot down by her own. By our own allies, air defenses.

Vicki Osterweil (42:36)

You know why? Because we didn't have Maverick, we didn't have Tom Cruise trading them. And that's what Allison's going to do. That's why I'm happy he's merging it. Because our brave boys in the skies are going to be safer.

Mia Wong (42:46)

God.

Vicki Osterweil (42:47)

So yeah. Anyways, I don't know where I'm going with this because obviously things are bad and anyone betting against things getting worse over the last 10 years has lost their pants.

Mia Wong (42:56)

Right.

Vicki Osterweil (42:56)

But things can get worse. But also there is the actual object, the actual film object exists. And part of what has been hard about Hollywood. But the reason they've built these monopoly structures, the reason they've built these IP structures is because audiences are fickle and that's annoying. And you can't just force stuff down their throats. And they're not going to just buy something for sure every time. And you have to sort of seduce them. Right. You have to make something they want to see. The MCU was unstoppable until it stopped and now no one likes it, and it's really annoying. Right? And they still make their money back on the mcu. Like, they're doing fine. Do not play a violin for Kevin Feige. He's doing fine. He's crying on his third yacht. You know, but, like. But. So I guess what I'm saying is that, like, is that, like, as we enter into more and more naked versions of this, what it should help us do rather than think, oh, my God, all is lost, is to reflect on how we got here already. How often we were already here under liberalism, under Biden, under just regular capitalist conditions, how often we've already been here, reevaluate the way we think about what good culture could look like, and then start to move.

Mia Wong (44:09)

Yeah, I want to come back to something I said a few years ago when we did a show with Gar about the people's Joker, and I saw the TV glow. Yeah, I saw the TV glow. I was about to say the one about the egg who has the bad ending and never transitions.

Vicki Osterweil (44:24)

Yes, the horror movie about not transitioning. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mia Wong (44:28)

I think there is an extent to which, you know, there was a really brief attempt to sort of sublimate transness into film for, like, one year. But, you know, like, we are the people who've been spat out of this. But also, trans people are making movies at a rate that has never happened before, like, ever. There's never been anything like it. And, you know, like, the Wachowskis, like, have a studio now where they're pumping out a bunch of trans movies. And, like, you know, we're getting, like, Manhunter, and we're getting, like, a whole bunch of other stuff. And, you know, the thing I said a few years ago, I think is even more desperate and true now is that, like, trans film is one of the last things fighting for the existence of film as a medium and not as a way to sell you toys and, like, $15 popcorn.

Vicki Osterweil (45:22)

Hey, they also sell you all expenses, paid vacations. You have to go into debt for. Okay, Mia, this is a really valuable market. Yeah. Support trans film. Support local film. And the thing about movies is that movies are bad, but the other thing is that movies are good. So it's hard.

Mia Wong (45:37)

The dialectic in motion.

Vicki Osterweil (45:39)

Yeah, yeah.

Mia Wong (45:40)

Look, I will say this. There has been, for many thousands of years, a second dialectic operating, and then it's a dialectic between labor and capital. That's probably. I probably backed it in capital too far. But, you know, fuck it. I don't know. We can resolve we could resolve movies good and movies bad by resolving the other dialectic of capital and labor by simply destroying the categories and ending the class system. I believe in us, we can make movie good again. Movie has never been good. There can be a new future where movie good.

Vicki Osterweil (46:13)

Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I believe.

Mia Wong (46:16)

One final thing, Vicki. Where can people find your book?

Vicki Osterweil (46:21)

Yes, it's being put out by Haymarket, so you can go to their website. I also have a link to my bookshop page via Blue Sky. I'm Vicki Acab on Blue Sky Guy. So if you want to watch me posting through it, you know, come hang out, I guess. But yeah, pre order it, talk to libraries about it. Ask a local. If you have a local bookshop, asking them that stuff really helps. It'll make a huge difference. And yeah, I would really appreciate any of that. If you're. If you're interested in how Disney destroyed the world and in the ways that we've been talking about here today, you can read way more about it.

Mia Wong (46:55)

Yeah. And I don't know. Vicky, Vicky. Vicky's books good. Can confirm have read. They are. They are. They're good.

Vicki Osterweil (47:01)

Aww, thanks, man.

Mia Wong (47:05)

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Vicki Osterweil (47:18)

You can now find sources for It

Mia Wong (47:20)

Could Happen here, listed directly in episode Description. Thanks for listening.

Emily Simpson (47:23)

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.