• L.A. Times (free registration required), Monday, November 28, 2005 11:30 AM

The Los Angeles Times' Patrick Goldstein, an entertainment reporter who takes every opportunity to question the honesty and integrity of Hollywood's honchos, began a wonderful, lengthy piece, published right before the Thanksgiving holiday, like this: "Showbiz people are prone to exaggeration, but when everybody is exaggerating about the same thing, you know something bad is happening." The "something bad" Goldstein was referring to is, for the entertainment industry, conceivably very awful indeed. "The era of moviegoing as a mass audience ritual is slowly but inexorably drawing to a close, eroded by many of the same forces that have eviscerated the music industry, decimated network TV, and, yes, are clobbering the newspaper business." It's all about the new technologies--the Internet, DVDs, DVRs, videogames, iPods and whatnot--which, in Goldstein's view, offer "more compelling diversion than 90% of the movies in theaters." It's a more or less obvious observation, followed by a dour prediction. "I've watched friends who used to regularly go to theaters mutate into adjunct professors of DVD-ology," Goldstein writes. He blames the motion picture studios themselves for this phenomenon, saying they have failed to properly manage the distribution of their content. "Hollywood has become a prisoner of a corporate mindset that is squeezing the entrepreneurial vitality out of the system," he concludes. However, there's no stopping the trend at this point, in Goldstein's view. Mass moviegoing, as we once knew it, is over .

Read the whole story at L.A. Times (free registration required) »