Any sentimentality about capitalism is a fool's errand, but the end of Hollywood - and that is what we're witnessing, regardless of what happens with Paramount - is more than sentimentality. For a hundred years, the movies did what Harper Lee said of mockingbirds - they “don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.” Hollywood didn't poison our rivers or use up our resources; it paid its employees better than almost any industry, its product (for most of those 100 years) could be afforded by almost anyone. Movies were at the center of our public sphere, our greatest export, the greatest argument for our way of life. As Frank Capra put it, “No saint, no pope, no general, no sultan, has ever had the power that a filmmaker has; the power to talk to hundreds of millions of people for two hours in the dark.” To know that power is going away, that Hollywood has been destroyed from within - by the greed and incompetence of people with no understanding of creativity, who have reduced this miracle of communication to the terrible word "content" - is crushing for those of us who've lived our fortunate lives in this business. Of course the business will go on churning out content - and some of it will still be great - but it will never be what it was, and my heart goes out to so many younger people who will never realize that dream of holding audiences spellbound for two hours in the dark.