MTS?

Rushfield puts out his annual State Of The Entertainment Industry message. He holds out some theoretical vain hope, based solely on the imbalance between demand and supply.

Everyone wants entertainment, and the outsiders are supplying it adequately. Hollywood lost its chance a long time ago, just as the “journalism” industry lost its chance earlier and academia is losing its chance right now. All industries violently discarded their customers and blindly obeyed billionaires and The Holy Dow.

Rushfield brings up one end of the problem that could be solved in an alternate way:

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If you want to feel some real terror, you don’t have to go to the latest Blumhouse film. Just take a few minutes to peruse the release calendar for the rest of this year, and wonder how any theater will survive it. In the past, the exhibitors have been their own worst enemies. But this one is on us. We need one or two theaters to survive if we’re going to have a theatrical business. Therefore, I hereby direct the heads of our studios to get on their knees before America’s exhibitors and beg for forgiveness, and ask what they can do to help get them through this terrible situation.

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Theaters could solve their problem outside of Hollywood, though it’s probably too late for some of them. Enid seems to offer one answer. The Gaslight Theater has been staging live plays for more than 50 years, and it’s still thriving. It has developed and used local talent intensively, and often writes its own plays. It doesn’t borrow actors or scripts from Broadway, as ‘summer stock’ theaters did in former decades. Enid lost its last film theater a long time ago, and Gaslight probably gains from the lack of competition.

If all the exhibitors got together and formed a Mutual Benefit Association, they could redevelop a nationwide live theater system that doesn’t need NYC or LA. The Mutual Broadcasting System followed this plan in the ’30s and ended up as a strong fourth choice after the Big Three, including genuine free-thinking reporters like Frank Edwards. MBS didn’t have a central studio; it helped its member stations to create their own music and drama, and then distributed the better material ‘horizontally’ instead of ‘vertically’.