A Pompeii resident looking out his window at Mount Vesuvius on August 24, A.D. 79 would have noticed something was amiss from the black smoke emanating out the top. He might have fled the city before it got destroyed, salvaging what he could. Movie mogul David Ellison has been observing the virtual darkness menacing Hollywood, and is taking steps to rebuild elsewhere.
Entertainment industry luminaries are going berserk over the looming Ellison merger of Paramount and Warner Bros studios. As usual with them, for all the wrong reasons. They warn about the resultant reduced production, fewer jobs, less competition (four major studios instead of five), and that Ellison may move the entire conglomerate out of Los Angeles. Which some astute insiders see as a good thing, given what the recent studio regimes and political leaders have done to the physical location and its workers.
It wasn’t that long ago when Hollywood’s decline would have been considered a national tragedy.
