The Hollyborg

Mar 20, 2008 - 10:44 AM PST

I remember back in the 70s, when ABC was run by Hyman "Pops" Scharansky. He wore a sweater and chinos most days. You could go to Pops for anything. You had a problem, you talked to him. He'd help you nurture your show; if at first it didn't succeed, he'd juggle it in the schedule, try this night or that, this time slot or that, until it found the audience it deserved. Cancellations were delivered knee to knee, in quiet tones, before the fire, with brandy, at his cabin in Big Bear.

Back then, television was a civilized man's game. nowadays, the face of Hollywood, the face of television production...well, it has no face. it is a computer. it is the borg. it is a collective, a mindset, and nothing so kind as a face. if you were able to follow the telephone lines, through the wires and the air and over the wi-fi, follow the power, where the power goes, follow the power to its lair, you would find only a collective. The big 8, and their shareholders, those people totally disconnected from Hollywood -- a guy in a train switching shed in Wisconsin, and a deckhand on a bauxite freighter in the Great Lakes, and a fish-cake maker in South Florida, and so on and so forth. Children in China. Sheikhs in Dubai. The list goes on and on.

The beauty of this is that they can dis you and the dis cannot be fought because it emanates from nowhere, from everywhere, from the Hollyborg. You can take out a single drone, and it won't affect the Collective one bit, they'll still send cubes, tubes after you. Hollyborg tubes. They fly in little television set boxes, beaming images of seduction and coercion and bloody titillation in your face. Beaming images of big boobies and bloodspray and exploding cars in your face. That's what the Hollyborg does.