ejbrown494

The new Netflix documentary on Sean “Diddy” Combs doesn’t just expose personal misconduct — it reveals a business model  that eerily echoes both traditional sharecropping and its modern cousin, digital sharecropping. In both systems, the laborers create the value while the landowner (or platform) owns the land, sets the terms, and harvests the profit. In music, that landowner was often Puffy. Sharecropping 101 — and How It Morphs in the Music Business Traditional sharecropping offered newly...

You made the movie. You put your soul into it. But once the credits roll, the real work begins. Because making the film is half the job. Selling it is the other half. Most indie filmmakers secretly hope they can dodge the marketing part: “Maybe a distributor will pick it up…” “Maybe Netflix will call…” “Maybe it’ll go viral like Blair Witch …” “Maybe someone will stumble across it on YouTube at 1AM…” But hope is not a business model. Not if you want to keep making films. Not if you want to...

In 2015, Lee Daniels sat at The Hollywood Reporter  roundtable and did something rare for a Black showrunner in a white-dominated industry: he flipped the script. Instead of politely nodding through the usual “diversity is important” platitudes, Daniels pushed the white showrunners in the room to reckon with their empty writers’ rooms and their fantasy-land excuses. He said what we all knew: You don’t hire us. Not because you “can’t find any.” But because you don’t look for us , don’t trust...