Is Hollywood at a creative dead end?

Daily Circuit Friday Roundtable
Daily Circuit illustration

This week on the Friday Roundtable, our panelists discuss storytelling, race and gender in film and on television. Is Steven Soderbergh right when he argues that Hollywood is ruining cinema?

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE STATE OF FILM AND TELEVISION:

Mark Harris on network TV's attempt to imitate cable
Judging by the new crop of fall series, the networks have decided to imitate the single most easily pilfered aspect of cable dramas. Not their quality, their depth, or their ambition. Something else — something about their main characters. In short, everyone on a new show this fall seems to be an... Oh, dear. How can I describe them without using a seven-letter physiological vulgarism that has no place in a classy entertainment magazine? (Mark Harris on EW.com)

Soderbergh's speech at the San Francisco Film Festival
Art is...about problem solving, and if it's obvious from the news, we have a little bit of a problem with problem-solving. In my experience, the main obstacle to problem solving is an entrenched ideology. The great thing about making a movie or a piece of art is that that never comes into play. Everything is on the table. All the ideas and everything is open for discussion, and it turns out everybody succeeds by submitting to what the thing needs to be. Art, in my view, is a very elegant problem-solving model.

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