This digital archivist thinks Hollywood's 'competition era' is over

With last year’s double strike halting production for six months, and the workforce still furloughed, the entertainment industry’s recovery has been slow. Domestic box office revenue is expected to fall 30 percent this year compared to 2019. Cable TV subscriptions are expected to drop to 10 million by 2028. And with Paramount Global buying Skydance Media, Hollywood’s future is as it’s ever been: completely uncertain. As one studio executive told the Los Angeles Times, it’s “something of an existential question mark.”

Eager to learn more, I contacted Cade to help him understand what’s going on in Hollywood. Over the phone from Los Angeles, where he recently moved, Cade and I talk about the fate of the entertainment business, the grave implications of the Internet Archive lawsuit, and how we can better preserve the internet, which it likes to forget.

Maya Cade: I was on Twitter in June 2020, and I noticed a lot of people were talking about how Black films are dramatized to be racist or discriminatory. So instead of shaming people for that idea, I had in mind, okay, how do I bring people to the opposite of that belief, to that belief and move us beyond that. I don’t want to ignore the truth because of its weight. And I know there are many paths to the truth. I also don’t want to dismiss people who feel that way. But I wanted him to tell it how he sees it. Because by only talking about Black films being hard, we’re devaluing this art form in a very disrespectful way. This idea of, “Oh, all these movies are about slavery. These movies are about trauma porn.

I counted the number of movies about slavery — and there are hundreds of them over time. But at the same time I think what does it mean when a white decision-maker wants blacks to be viewed a specific way? They have a say in how they are perceived in our media. I also think that film has become the dominant narrative of telling history. So there are many truths to answer. But I think we’ll be in a better position to deal with those things when we look at the history of black film as a whole.

Recently the Internet Archive has lost an appeal that can have a significant impact on the way we access information. Resources like the Film Black Archive and the Wayback Machine are also part of this discussion. This is a slightly abstract question, but how can we live better lives?

Of course, this isn’t Hollywood’s first or second or third financial audit. “When we look closely at history, we realize that all the conversations we need to have about character, funding, representation and all of these things have been done before,” said Maya Cade. “Ego tells us we should be first, but why would we want to be?” That was Cade’s mission when he launched the Black Film Archive in 2021. “At a time when people demanded that the totality of our lives be represented in the media,” he said, “they felt Blacks could not be captured in film noir.” Cade knew better. So he got to work and created the most comprehensive online database of Black film titles, including all kinds of obscure and well-known films. A former audience development strategist at the Criterion Collection, he told me people were missing a larger context for current issues. The collection, which celebrates its third anniversary this August, includes more than 300 films released between 1898 and 1999, with all titles available for online streaming. What Cade accomplished was rare and necessary: ​​he cataloged a century of noir cinema and made it freely accessible.

One of the early goals of the internet was to democratize knowledge. Whether everyone agrees with them or not is another matter. And the internet-only archive The only thing from the early days of the internet that still exists in the same form is AI. Wikipedia too. Both of these things are under constant attack, because sharing knowledge freely means someone comes and controls the free flow of knowledge. They want to win that.