Wow. What a week it was last week for Hollywood — and what a time to be in the entertainment bid’ness — show business…this business of show. I heard someone say the other day that AI was the future of writing and the WGA was in for a shock as soon as The Algorithm learned how to write a spot-on three act RomCom that just needed a bit of polish from a Production Assistant. Could this be? Is this the moment that we’ll look back on and wonder — wow, that’s when FinalDraft decided to come out with the AI edition so that anyone could summon forth a decent (enough) screenplay to get the old elusive Green Light? (Oh wow! Someone want to create that boxed software GreenLight!?)

All joking aside, sorta, the world seems all tee’d up for some momentous evolutions in the nature of story telling at this very fluid, you know — moment: attention is on the outcomes of the current WGA strike, TikTok is being banned, ‘Metahuman’ and Deep Fakes are a real thing, and the fallout of the WGA strike is unknown as ‘Imagination’ and Structure’ both try to save themselves from existential calamity.

So, here we are.

What does Hollywood — or more generally, the Industrial Light and Magic Complex — look like in some possible/probable futures? What’s the lead story in some issue of Variety Magazine? What kinds of roles are on the credit roll of some middling action film? Are there middling action films in the future, or is every film incanted in real time as we ourselves opt for specific structure, tone, genre only to have ParamountAI+ summon 112 minutes of well-tempered visual story telling on demand?

This is going to be an awesome General Seminar, and I want you to come along. We’re going to take a little journey to some near future Hollywood in the Near Future Laboratory’s 1973 McDonnel-Douglas Mk3 ’Starling’ Time Machine. We’re going to wander around Los Angeles, people’s living rooms, writers’ bungalows, and grab some magazines from newsstands, gaze at billboards along Sunset Blvd, sneak into the award’s shows, and shuffle through IMDB — all so we can try to pick up a sense of how Hollywood may change in some near future.

Remember: General Seminar is never about being “right” or predicting the eventual outcome. That’s boring. What we want to do is embrace our ability to imagine possibilities, including the possibilities that we’d prefer and do so with humble, creative, perspectives, learning how to amplify our imagination into material change in the world by creating artifacts from these futures that spark deeper, richer conversations and outcomes.

In this General Seminar, we will focus our Imaginations on possible futures of Hollywood and visual story telling. We do this by representing our ideas in the form of artifacts — things we might find if we were in some possible future, wandered over to a newsstand and took a look at the latest issue of Variety, or overheard a conversation between a writer and their agent at a café, or stumbled into an improv acting class above a nail salon in a little corner strip mall in Reseda. What are the possible worlds and can we sense-make around a future of Hollywood entertainment _through_ the artifacts we might find were we to stumble out of the Near Future Laboratory’s janky time machine in some unspecified near future?

Grab your ticket now for Wed May 17th as we take that little trip to some possible near futures!

Two times are available for tickets: 10AM PDT (UTC-7) and 3PM PDT (UTC-7).

Hope to see you there!

(Pssst — each ticket comes with an invitation to the Near Future Laboratory Discord where these kinds of questions and conversations are always happening!)

Julian

P.S. Wondering What’s General Seminar, anyway? Or perhaps you Want to listen to a General Seminar to get a sense of the vibe?