The lobby at Andreessen Horowitz is also Marc Andreessen’s library, and it’s full of books about Hollywood:
In 1908, the country’s nine largest filmmakers formed the Movie Picture Patents Company, insisting that no one else could make movies because they controlled the patents on the original movie camera, co-created by Thomas Edison at his lab in New Jersey. The patents belonged to Edison, and he backed the Patents Company. So a new wave of filmmakers moved to the West Coast, where the courts were less friendly to Edison. Hollywood became a place to make movies in part because it was so sunny — you could film outdoors more often and with fewer lights — but also because it was so far away from New Jersey.
Who the Devil Made It — an oral history of Hollywood collected by the director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich — begins in the days of the Patents Company. Allan Dwan, who started making movies in the 1910s, tells Bogdanovich that as independent filmmakers moved west, the Patents Company hired strongmen to enforce its patents. Dwan remembers snipers climbing trees overlooking movie sets and taking shots at the cameras they deemed illegal. He would film as far as he could from the railroad stops, so he and his crew were harder to find.
The story of early Hollywood is very much the story of Silicon Valley, full of innovators fleeing the old rules in search of the new. It only makes sense that the lobby of Andreessen Horowitz is stocked with books on early Hollywood, including Who The Devil Made It. Bogdanovich and Dwan tell a story not unlike the one told in What the Dormouse Said, where a group of freethinkers rise up in the 1960s and create the personal computer, pushing against entrenched giants like IBM.
As The New Yorker explains, Andreessen and Horowitz are pals with [Michael] Ovitz, the guy behind CAA, one of Hollywood’s biggest talent agencies. When they started their firm, they went to Ovitz for advice.
“Call everyone a partner, offer services the others don’t, and help people who aren’t your clients,” he said. “Disrupt to differentiate by becoming a dream-execution machine.” They did all that. And, in contrast to typical Silicon Valley VCs, they hired a whole team of publicists who guided Andreessen Horowitz stories into Fortune and Forbes. They hung some Rauschenbergs around the office — just like CAA. And when people pitched them, they drank from glassware rather than plastic. The books complement the Rauschenbergs and the glassware. They, too, lend authority.
…the Patents Company hired strongmen to enforce its patents. Dwan remembers snipers climbing trees overlooking movie sets and taking shots at the cameras they deemed illegal. He would film as far as he could from the railroad stops, so he and his crew were harder to find.
Back in the day, it seems that people took things into their own hands a whole lot more often than what we see now. Today, policing is better and the courts are more active, so instead of lynch mobs and wives poisoning their husbands, we “call Saul”. I recall my parents and their friends would occasionally talk about citizen arrests.
I’m not sure about the trade-off. We are more “civilized”, but contracting out the psychic effort of law enforcement has left us passive in the face of some threats. People remark on the lack of spree killers in earlier times: maybe there was more fear of the guy next door and the immediate justice.
Also, more effective institutions have allowed our “leaders” to embark on more ambitious social projects, such as civil rights and mass immigration. “Don’t fear the more criminally minded stranger; we’ve got that figured out now, so just enjoy all the good social signaling you will get by subscribing to the latest inclusive goodthinking.”