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George Lucas To Quit Movie Business
CaroKann writes, "Variety is reporting that George Lucas is getting out of the movie business. Mr. Lucas laments that today's big-budget franchise films are too expensive and too risky. He believes American audiences are deserting their movie going habits permanently. Instead of making major films, Lucasfilm will instead focus on television. Lucas states that for the price of one $200 million feature movie, 'I can make 50-60 two hour movies' that are 'pay-per-view and downloadable.' Notably, he does not plan on distributing movies online, calling online distribution a 'rathole.'"
is truly inflammatory. It is horribly taken out of context, which makes you wonder if the submitter works for mainstream media because they love taking things out of context. The quote goes: We're trying to find out exactly where the monetization is coming from. We're not interested in jumping down a rat hole until such time as it finally figures itself out.
He is saying, "We do not want to rush into this and have the method we chose to enter the online realm explode on us." Online movie distribution is in its infancy. We have already seen the Wal-Mart/iTunes debacle. He is simply making a methaphorical statement to describe that they are being cautious, but he does not openly say, "Online distribution is a stupid."
So, this one again proves that you must always RTFA.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
More explosions, mostly.
Explosions are really, really expensive. A film crew is the size of a mid-sized company. Sit through the credits some time, and see the names of the script girl and the second second assistant director and the backup plasterer. Each camera takes several people (camera operator, loader, focus puller, and sometimes more), and for an explosion you're going to have to catch it from several angles because otherwise all that work ends up as only a fraction of a second of screen time. They call cost money, not just in salary but in insurance, craft service, studio rental, the rental of the camera equipment they're holding, etc.
And every single one of them is sitting around while the explosives rigger is making 200% certain that none of them get hurt when the explosion goes off. And another 200% certain that the explosion is going to do the right thing the first time, because otherwise you'll have to start from scratch.
It's literally tens of thousands of dollars to make even something simple blow up. If you want something big to blow up, it'll cost you a few hundred thousand. Add a few dozen explosions into the movie, and suddenly you're talking about real money.
If they're on location, they have to have bathrooms, and hauling a porta-john into the desert isn't cheap, either. It's not any one thing that makes it pricey. It's eight million little things.
Plus the eight million little things that go into the digital effects (light matching, wire frame artists, shading artists, data center ops, plus a studio to put them all in, usually close to the studio which means the high-rent district).
Why bother? If you don't do all of that, your movie comes off looking cheap. Scrimp on the continuity girl, and the lack of continuity becomes glaring to the audience. It works for indie movies, which the audience expects to look cheap, but your summer blockbuster is going to look corny, and audiences won't enjoy it if it looks corny.
Lucas figures that the small screen is cheaper. The low resolution means that makeup that used to take two hours now takes only half an hour. Sets are built to a far lower level of detail; even where the audience can see the difference [e.g. Firefly vs. Serenity] you have lower expectations. (It used to be that you could save money shooting with three cameras rather than one, which means you can do in one take what used to take three, but these days quality dramas are usually shot movie-style with just one camera.)
It can all be done cheaper than it is. As in any organization a lot of money goes to waste between the cracks. Better organization means less wasted time and unnecessary equipment, but it's like at your office: you have a spare printer or ethernet cable sitting around not doing anything. It cost money to buy, but if you need it you'll be glad you have it, especially if the lack of it drives the entire company to a standstill. When those resources are people, though, it gets pricey fast.
I do partly wonder if George will find that producing for HDTV is more expensive than he expects. I know that TV news shows had to chuck their old sets and build new ones when they went to HDTV, and the network anchors spend more time in makeup chairs than they used to.
Still, Lucas is right that TV is cheaper to produce than movies. It is astonishing that even an expensive show like Lost runs only $3-5 million per episode, even though it's 1/2 to 1/3 the length of a full movie. Some of the difference is set-up costs, but even the pilot, where they had to put out all of the one-time costs, cost a measley $10 million, and that was full of fancy effects and explosions.
Most Lost episodes are only that expensive because they involve location shooting in Hawaii, which is expensive, and it's done to keep the location secret, which makes it more expensive. They do most of the back-story and interiors in LA, and they end up flying people back and forth. It's amazing that they can do that. But they make up for it with clever management: they're shooting several episodes in parallel, and they don't fly people back and forth to Hawaii every single week.
It takes less than two weeks to shoot primary photography on an episode of Lost, compared to 30 to as much as 60 days for a movie. It's not really that there are fewer takes, although there sometimes are, but it takes so much less time to get each take ready. Standing around a set waiting for the light guys to remove every single damn shadow is incredibly tedious. (People rarely wear hats on TV because it's hard to light your face properly. They even forbid certain hair styles in TV shows; a movie director expects more flexibility.) And God forbid you should have to do it outside, where the lights look completely different at 2 PM as at 6 PM, even with the supplemental light. Audiences notice that in movies when they don't on TV.
The effects are cheaper on TV. The resolution is higher on HDTV than on NTSC, but it's still lower than full movie resolution. The actual pixel content may not be much higher, but the color reproduction on film is better, and it would take many pixels to compensate for that. The better the final picture, the more time it takes to make it look realistic: you have to have an artist shade every single pixel, or it ends up looking like the Babylon 5 effects. (Miniatures are easier, but not as flexible.)
What effects they do shoot on Lost would look cheesy on a movie screen. Audiences wouldn't pay $10 a seat for them. They expect more from a movie. Even where they do have good effects, you're often seeing less than you think you are. A movie is expected to be a big-budget affair, and producers say "yes" to a movie when they'd say "work around it" to the same request for a TV show.
That'll save Lucas a lot of money, and arguably we'll get better work. The man DOES know how to tell a good story, when he doesn't let the effects take up his whole life. Sometimes less is more, and the work-arounds make for better drama.