Gen-Z Filmmakers Echo Easy Rider Generation
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- The Amazing Digital Circus: Last Act — its eighth episode is screening at 2,300 theaters after the pilot racked up 440 million YouTube views, with producer Ray Nutt calling it proof that 'everybody's learning what Gen Zers are liking.'
- Curry Barker (Obsession) and Kane Parsons (Backrooms) are cited as today's aggressive young YouTube-birthed filmmakers whose success may open doors for other Gen-Zers.
- The 1960s 'rabbis' — advocates like Ted Tanen (American Graffiti), David Picker (Midnight Cowboy), and John Calley (A Clockwork Orange) — shepherded young filmmakers' projects against stalled studio machinery at Musso and Franks-era meetings.
- Billy Friedkin had to coax $17 million out of Fox for The French Connection, with then-fox-executive Richard Zanuck saying it was 'our last production and it's all the money we have left.'
- The 1960s studio system was collapsing: Warner Bros, Fox, Columbia, United Artists, and MGM were on the block, and icons like Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck were selling out or retiring as audiences drifted to TV.
- The author frames YouTube as the modern replacement for the 1960s gatekeeper system, but notes the 'rabbis' may reemerge if studio management turns 'as inert as its predecessors.'
- Box office is described as strong, with 'magic money from Oracle, Amazon or Abu Dhabi' materializing to fund newly muscled majors greenlighting product.
Why it matters: The piece argues YouTube has supplanted the 1960s 'rabbi' system as a discovery mechanism for young filmmakers — evidenced by The Amazing Digital Circus reaching 2,300 theaters and breakouts from Barker and Parsons — while the author himself concedes the 'rabbis' may reemerge if studios turn 'inert' again, undercutting the parallel he's drawing.
