GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Seen The Lights Go Out On Sunset.
I suppose you can still catch a rock show on a Saturday night, it just won’t be Van Halen. And you can grab a drink in one of the Sunset Strip clubs that are still hanging on. But you won’t have any trouble finding parking. And you might be surprised by how empty the streets feel when you stumble out of the club after the show is over in the graveyard hours of the night… those witching hours when, back in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, the real fun was just beginning.
In the end the two erstwhile parents of the Sunset Strip were both mortally wounded by the same monster… a monster called streaming which came disguised, as devils always do, as something that would be “better” for us. That it turned out to be more difficult to stream video than audio was nothing more than a technological stroke of luck which gave Hollywood an extra thirty years or so to figure out a solution which, I’m sorry to say friends and neighbors, we never really did. Quite the contrary, Hollywood has actually been complicit in its own streaming decline. A fact of which I was reminded as Robin and I stood on the empty boulevard outside The Rainbow hugging out our goodbyes.
Looking down at me from a billboard across the street were the faces of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon advertising the imminent release of their new movie “The Rip” along with a big red “N” and the words which, for may of us on the theatrical motion picture side of Hollywood, have become something like a muttered curse… “exclusively on Netflix.” With only two weeks to go, this was the first marketing I had seen for the movie despite the fact that it features one of the best-known and most-popular movie star pairings of the current movie star era, and a director (Joe Carnahan) who has made some really good movies.
But there has been no hype for this movie… there is no buzz at all.
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