It’s no secret that Hollywood is rapidly changing, and one of several driving forces is the arrival of the creator economy.

Some of the industry’s top minds gathered at PMC’s Los Angeles headquarters last week at Deadline’s inaugural LA Law Summit to discuss how technology allowing anyone the ability to establish a completely unmitigated relationship with one’s audience has forced an entire rethink on how the entertainment industry does business.

“The creator economy is evolving very quickly. It’s something that has come such a long way over the last decade, and now it feels like it’s very much at the heart of entertainment. I think about the creator economy as a space where creators [and] entertainers take advantage of lower barriers to entry to effectively establish an unmediated relationship with their audience,” Matt Dysart, Partner, Entertainment at Greenberg Glusker LLP, said. “Effectively, the only mediator you have to work with is the algorithm.”

Dysart was joined by Ethan Cohan, Partner at Del Shaw Moonves Tanaka Finkelstein Lezcano Bobb & Dang LLP; Jack Whigham, President and Co-Founder, Range Media Partners; and director/producer Anthony Hemingway.

They all agreed that breaking down those barriers between creatives and their audience has resulted in more economic opportunity for creators.

Hemingway is the producing director for Hulu’s All’s Fair, and his work also includes directing episodes of television across CSI: NY, Treme, True Blood and Shameless, among others. He put it quite succinctly: “It’s really ultimately about turning creative authority into economic authority.”

There are countless examples of creators who have achieved success without a traditional studio or network backing them, from Joe Rogan to Charli D’Amelio. Digital-first creators are not the only ones benefitting from the business model, either.

“It’s become a term that some people look at as very narrow, but it really doesn’t make a difference whether you’re somebody with a thousand followers on your Instagram channel or you’re an Academy Award-winning actor who wants to establish secondary businesses or even primary businesses. You’ve got this opportunity to cut everybody else out and just go straight to the consumer,” says Cohan.

That’s not to say there is no longer value in the old way of doing things. There’s balance to be found by mining both the wisdom of the traditional studio system and the creator economy, this group argues.

“Any time there’s that disruption in, distribution, there’s so much opportunity, there’s a lot of unknowns, but I think that’s what we try to capitalize on,” said Wigham. “At the end of the day, you are still connecting storytellers with distribution. As someone who was, historically, in the lanes of traditional film and TV, I was at least smart enough to know what I don’t know.”

Watch the full video above and check back tomorrow for more from Deadline’s inaugural L.A. Law Summit. Also check out video of our awards presentations to law legends Patricia Glaser and Nina Shaw here.

Deadline’s inaugural L.A. Law Summit was sponsored by Blank Rome LLP, Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, Greenberg Glusker LLP, Del Shaw Moonves Tanaka Finkelstein Lezcano Bobb & Dang LLP, Glaser Weil Fink Howard Jordan & Shapiro LLP, and Stubbs Alderton & Markiles LLP.

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