The ways that Hollywood loses money is the red meat of news reporting on the industry.

The headlines screamed in early 2012: “Movie attendance falls to 16-year low,” “Hollywood in turmoil as DVD sales drop,” and “John Carter Financial Disaster For Disney.”

What goes largely unreported, however, is that the studio have found other ways to make money. Despite all the hand-wringing in the press over losses, the 6 major studios  made record profits. Consider Disney for example. Despite the “John Carter” fiasco, the studio made record profit in fiscal 2012. How is this possible?

The studios have found new ways of making money.

1. They are licensing to new media. Since 2010, there has been an explosive growth in license fees for studio-owned TV series, both still-on-the-air and older ones...

Now we learn why Christopher Dodd, the retired Senator from Connecticut, is receiving over $1.5 million a year to head the Motion Picture Association of America.

The MPAA, the trade organization for the Hollywood studios, is financed by Warner Bros., Fox, Universal, Disney, Sony and Paramount. Each provides about $10 million per year. Aside from efforts to suppress digital piracy, it lobbies Congress and regulatory agencies.

Its crucial job here is to protect the Big Six’s crown jewels: their intellectual properties. Without their libraries of movies, animated shorts and TV series, they couldn’t survive.

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It is hardly surprising that pop culture protesters in zombie-masks are now intent on occupying Wall Street.

For the past decade, Hollywood has been casting financiers as the villains of society. In the multiplexes, businessmen have even replaced terrorists as villains. In the Warner Bros. political thriller, “Syriana,” for example, the villain is not al Qaeda, an enemy state, the Mafia, or even a psychotic serial killer.

Rather, it’s the big oil companies who manipulate terrorism, wars...

In 1997, Sumner Redstone warned Hollywood studios that the video store business was going into the toilet if it didn't get some help. His company, Viacom, then not only owned Paramount, but Blockbuster Entertainment as well. Rentals from Blockbuster's 6,000 stores put $3.9 billion dollars in the six major studios' pockets, and he argued that studios “can't live without a video rental business. We are your profit."

As a result, the studios agreed to share the cost of stocking Blockbuster's stores in return for a share of its rental revenues.

He won that battle, but lost the war.

Thirteen years later, two-thirds of America's video stores have closed and Blockbuster has gone bust. In April 2011, Dish Network bought it out of a bankruptcy auction with plans to convert what remains of its rental store business to streaming a...