At this point, it’s been four months since I moved to Los Angeles, and I'm still trying to figure out how to tie a neat bow on a story I recognize will never have a tidy conclusion.
The reality is that no one I’ve talked to actually knows where this whole Hollywood thing is going. What they do agree on is that the entertainment industry is undergoing a seismic shift— not unlike when then-revolutionary “talkies” replaced silent films in the late 1920s, or when young filmmakers like Dennis Hopper and John Schlesinger harnessed the counterculture movement to usher in “New Hollywood” in the 1970s.
“The movie business has completely changed,” author and veteran YouTube creator John Green tells me. “Making a movie like The Fault in Our Stars and putting it in theaters is essentially impossible now.”
He’s referring to his young adult romance novel that became a hit film adaptation in 2014, grossing over three hundred million dollars at the box office against a $12-million budget. Nearly a decade after the film was released, we’re sitting in the lobby of his downtown L.A. hotel in April, hours before Turtles All the Way Down (a streaming-only adaptation of another one of his novels) screens in front of fans for the first time.
“I was fortunate to be, I think, one of the last people to have that kind of experience,” Green continues. “It’s a very different world now — it’s a very fractured media landscape. YouTube and Hollywood have collided in fascinating ways, and the splintering debris of that collision is all around us.”
He believes that studios will experiment and adapt. After all, they have lots of runway, especially when compared to the nineteen-year-old filmmaker editing videos from their bedroom. Talent will follow the money. It always has.
But here’s the thing: Those indie filmmakers now have more opportunities to hone their craft than ever before, because viewers are watching video in more ways than ever before. 59% of consumers now find “user-generated content” as entertaining as traditional media, according to an April report from consulting firm Accenture. And YouTube took the number one spot for TV watch-time among streaming platforms in February 2023 (and hasn’t relinquished its standing since).
So, by the end of this months-long marathon, I’m left with one last question.
Why did I really move to Los Angeles?
The stereotypical answer would be a particular refrain, the one I’ve heard ever since arriving here: L.A. is the only city where you’re thirty minutes from a beach and thirty minutes from a hike at all times. Who wouldn’t want to live here?
The rational answer would be because of a job. In joining a creative company, why wouldn’t I want to work in-person, spending a lot time at our team’s studio — maybe even too much time?
But in my heart of hearts, I know the real answer is because I — like Rhett, and Link, and Stevie, and Lilly, and Isaiah —grew up adoring movies. In the same way that countless young people packed up their car full of dreams and struck out west before us, we all moved here with similar motivations: to write, or produce, or maybe even star in projects for the silver screen.
Before coming here, I’d always held the belief that true staying power in Hollywood came not from social media followers or other vanity metrics, but from a consistent commitment to the craft of creating. The views might go up. The views might go down. Yet the only real shot any of us have at progress is to actually practice the art of storytelling. To continue putting pen to paper, year after year after year.
The delineation of where the art itself manifests, too—as “user-generated content” on YouTube, or a limited series on HBO, or anything and everything in between—feels less important than the character of the people creating it. Because in a moment rife with uncertainty, I’d bet on tenacity, the persistent individuals who just don’t know how to quit.
Look no further than Lilly, picking up the pieces of her big breakthrough and coming out the other end with a clearer vision. Or Isaiah, persevering after a costly trip to Amsterdam and refusing to let one failure overwhelm his identity. Or Rhett, Link, and Stevie, building Mythical into a thriving production company capable of making a television-caliber show on their own—after a decade of trying to convince this town that they belonged.
“Rhett & Link Talk Getting Colonoscopies Together and Taste Treats from The Mythical Cookbook,” The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (March 2024)
Mythical Chef Josh joins Rhett and Link on the Tonight Show as part of their press run for Mythical Kitchen’s cookbook.
I think back to my conversation with Chef Josh Scherer in Burbank about his voyage from food journalist at Los Angeles Magazine to rising on-air talent within the Mythical ecosystem. During our conversation, we were met with a surprise that might just represent how far he’s come.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Stevie shouted from the door to the GMM set. “Josh, you’re going on Jimmy Fallon next week!”
“Holy smokes, that’s huge!” he responded, trying to process, in real time, the information he’d just been delivered. Ever the professional, he returned back to our conversation. “What am I doing…well, we’ll figure that out later, I guess.”
Without the farm system Rhett, Link, and Stevie developed, individuals like Josh may have slipped through the cracks—and never had the chance to make a living off their creativity. That’s something worth celebrating.
And it touches on a broader theme: As the tools of production become increasingly democratized, a whole new world of possibilities has opened up. Opportunities—and entire careers—arise in areas that didn’t even exist ten or fifteen years ago.
Sure, that unbundling is partially responsible for the current, fractured landscape we find ourselves in. No one really knows what will emerge from this all-encompassing blob we refer to as “content.” And there's a good chance Los Angeles will slowly lose its standing as the epicenter of the broader entertainment industrial complex.
But where motion pictures are made, there is—and will always be—Hollywood.
