So that's not at all what either of them were doing. Or, well, not quite.
To set the stage: the 1950's are a weird time, though a crucial one, in movie history. You're coming out of the 1930's and 1940's and television is now a thing. Movies are one of the two main methods of mass pop culture, the other being radio, but movies need to be shown at a specific place, unlike radio, which you just listened to in your home. Television exists, but it's rare and few people own it. So you go to the movies to see the newsreels, shorter films (like 30-60 minutes long), the big ones are feature length, you've got epics as well, the movies are this place where there's always something, and the quality is all over the place. The 1950's arrive and with it comes television.
Television throws a wrench into that so hard. The entire radio framework transitions to television fairly seamlessly, and a lot of what was outlined in the movies outside of the big productions becomes part of television. One, news moves directly there. That's crucial. Two, there's now a guaranteed short film precedent that leads to anthology series, which try to do what are essentially hour long plays filmed and delivered every day; the big one is Alfred Hitchcock Presents, but you may be more familiar with the lasting modern example of those, The Twilight Zone. The trick is to run on time and under budget, rely on scripts and acting, and do it with people who won't charge out of the nose or give them a level of flexibility you don't get from studios.
Television is also a threat because it allows for reshowing movies, without necessarily getting money back, and also TV needs back material to fill space on the cheap, which is where the archive falls in. So that's a push and pull.
The other thing that creates this vacuum is the 1948 antitrust suit, United States vs Paramount Pictures. What this settles is that you cannot sell movies in bundles, so your big movie cannot be sold on the condition you also screen this low budget thing. The combination of that plus television forces the majors (Paramount, MGM, Fox, Warner, RKO, then Columbia and Universal) that the way forward is Go Big or Go Home. Giant epics are the thing they can do and only they can do. If not that, then at least bet on star power.
This creates a huge market for movies on the cheap outside of the majors. This is the birth of the modern B movie. On time and under budget, bet on the 19 yo male as your audience as the women will watch anything a man will and a younger kid will watch anything someone who's 20 will. This also fills in a gap because you can send that off to TVs, which is where the archetype of the presenter that really peaks in Elvira comes from.
With that established, this is the ambient in which both of these guys grow up in.
Spielberg starts by making home films, he's one of those directors operating out of a new tradition. Film cameras are cheaper than ever in the 1950's economic boom. Kids can make their own films. And he makes this zero budget sci-fi film for $500 in 1963 (about $5500 in today's money). He makes a short film in 1968, shows it to Universal, and gets a contract as a director. Key detail, he's doing stuff in TV, because Universal is the "low budget" major. He works with Joan Crawford, Rod Serling, and even does an episode of Columbo. He's already on the industry as a rising star operating with a budget and learning the tools of the trade.
Universal moves him up to TV movies, not just teleplays. You've more options, bigger budgets, more time. He makes a couple, then gets the chance to do a film called The Sugarland Express in 1974, which is a smaller, more self contained drama, and this one does get a full theatrical release. It's not terribly successful, though the critics do like it.
The other key detail here is that the reason they're taking bets on these unknown directors is that studios are going broke. They went big and went broke, because everything is this massive Event and quality isn't keeping up with it. There's a huge push and pull, it's very standardized, and you're starting to see TV directors make jumps to film; Sidney Lumet is a big one here. European and Japanese films are making a splash. The B movie directors, though, who got used to on time and under budget, continue working as they did. So the big studios retreat to smaller bets, movies relying on acting and clever filmography and good scripts. This is all happening in the late 1960's and early 1970's.
So Spielberg gets a chance to do a $9M movie in 1975 (about $56M in today's money). The name of this movie is Jaws. This movie will change cinema forever. I don't need to tell you what happens next.
In this sense, Spielberg is a creature of an existing system within television and film. He climbs the ladder from within, and throughout proves his mix of old gen and new gen.
Lucas is more interesting. Lucas is coming in not from home movies but from experimental underground cinema screenings, because you can get army surplus and host movies no one will show for an audience of people who will see weird arthouse stuff but also popular films. He's also in film school at this point, doing weird visual-only things. Film school is very new at this point in time. He makes THX 1138, which is a short film, gets national awards, and networks with Francis Ford Coppola off a prize from Warner.
Coppola's just off The Godfather, he's a big deal, he made it in Hollywood, and now he wants to help fund and produce movies he wants to see and things he likes. So he produces Lucas's first full-length film, American Graffiti. That movie is done for $770k in 1973, or about $5.8M in today's money; it is a runaway success for Lucas. Crucially, this is also on Universal, who greenlights it on the condition of it being a low budget film, because a low budget bet with Coppola's name attached could at least give you decent ROI. After that, he gets to make Star Wars, on a budget of $8M, using all kinds of tricks to save up on cost. I don't need to tell you what happens next.
Both of those are stories about a place and a time. They exist in a specific studio system. They either rise through it, or take advantage of this specific vacuum, this gap in the industry, to really surge through.
Barker and Parsons are doing completely different things. I'll start with Parsons, he's in an interesting framework.
Parsons is rising through a tradition of Youtube videos that I half associate with B movies but not quite. It is 90% showreel; on time and under budget don't exist here. But the budget also doesn't exist either. This explains why so many of these projects are deeply visual and relying on visual effects. It's also why analog horror takes off; hiding imperfections through filters. But success in here, especially with horror films, means you've got a possible path. Horror's an interesting genre, as it still is the last of the original groups of B movies working on a tradition of no budget and experimentation by dint of no budget, while also being intensely populist. It also is a massive struggle to transition out of horror into other things.
He gets scouted by 21 Laps Entertainment (Shawn Levy, whose work I despise, but who's got money and a willingness to spend), as well as A24 and Atomic Monster (James Wan, AKA the creator of Saw). You may notice that A24 sits rather oddly here. We've a profoundly populist moneymaker and a guy who makes his money off what essentially are B-movies, what is A24 getting us here?
A24 is no stranger to horror films; they're also distribution specialists. They can get you anywhere at this point, though not en masse, but your own reach is inherently limited anyway. You go middle scale, bet on big critical darlings and the odd low budget bet, and run with it. So A24 is filling in the role of being Universal in Lucas and Spielberg's story.
Curry Barker kind of does the same thing, though more traditional filmmaking as opposed to largely VFX. He goes to film school, runs a sketch comedy channel, gets some popularity, and makes the no-budget Milk & Serial, which he posts on Youtube, that picks up steam, and gets picked up by Tea Shop Productions. That's a B-movie company, once again, on time and under budget is the name of the game here. He gets to make Obsession on less than $1M, that gets shown on tiff, and picked up by Blumhouse. Blumhouse is The Big Name in horror, so this is huge; it's what propels the film to be everywhere for no cost. It's also why Obsession is such a smaller film in scope.
Both of these films and filmmakers are operating within a very specific path - YouTube as showreel, no-budget as a matter of course, horror as the only path to populist low-budget films that will get picked up and shown world over. The question is how do you transition from that to other films. Ari Aster has had success; he's also struggled moving out of horror. Robert Eggers is a similar case, but he's shown more success within horror as well.
We've also seen giant studio blockbusters metaphorically spin their wheels in the post-pandemic world; which is why there's now a clamor for these smaller films, so to speak, especially when you've actors like Robert Pattinson or Timothee Chalamet or Emma Stone delivering really strong performances as the selling point. So the question is more "what else will step into the void" than anything regarding those two specifically.
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