Given how much money it costs to make a movie, shouldn't these guys in Hollywood work hard to make sure the script is really "tight" and there's no fluff in it BEFORE they start the shoot?
Er, no.
The short answer is that this is why production is moving to Canada -- nobody knows how to make movies, but everybody wants to be a producer.
usually most of this cost is not picked up by the US which is generating most of the content to begin with
I would really, really like to see some solid evidence of this. I have heard this theory several times, and I have the following suspicions about it:
This is all bunk generated by state-owned telecom agencies used to getting a generous cut of the international toll charges on voice phone calls. That is, the caller's toll on voice calls is split between the calling country and the destination country. But with IP services, there's no billing per packet and no revenue to share.
Those same foreign telecom agencies are trying to claim that they're picking up more than their share of the tolls because they want a subsidy from the US. That is, they want the US to pick up the tab for all that Cisco gear they're buying to get on the net in the first place. Given Cisco's predilections to equate router sales with Fighting Terrorism or Wiring Our Schools or some other patriotic malarkey, this should be a fairly easy sell in some quarters. After all, what's the point of a government if not to pad Cisco's Q3 sales figures?
... SCO sucked? It was late to market with every major improvement of BSD, had obnoxious licensing restrictions enforced by code (which was easily overridable -- just drop in a Linux-derived/bin/login with some obvious patches), and did its best to be absolutely unusable as hell at all times. The only way to fix it without Linux was to install the unsupported Skunkware CD, which made life tolerable, but never fun. SCO's dead? Well, good riddance, say I. (Oh, and did I mention it derived from Microsoft's Xenix? All the more reason to stake the bugger.)
It's perfectly proper for the FBI to have a database where they can look up criminal records
But were these in fact criminal records, or just long dossiers of suspicious-looking activities being monitored by the FBI? We "think" this guy "may" have committed a crime, a list for which is now being made to police agencies nationwide? That's abuse of authority. A man is guilty of a crime or not, but inventing a twilight world where someone can be accused by an investigating agency and this becomes fact -- well, let's just dispense with the jury system!
Why these guys were collecting such information in the first place. Seriously, there are a lot of privacy activists out there, but it seems to me that the vast majority of them are complaining about the cookie-of-the-month problem when what they should really be looking at are the kinds of scams government data collecting enables. Identity theft, for instance, wouldn't be possible if not for the ubiquity of Social Security numbers as a "citizen ID" of sorts.
Don't think anyone in "the industry" has any illusions about filmmaking as art. I was last night at the home of a fairly successful screenwriter, who told me how he was in story development for an animated feature for the Mouse. They spent several million (something like $15k/week per writer over a number of months, and this was a team of five or more) on the story, which bubbled up past several layers of junior executives. But the writing team all along was saying to themselves, "this is so not Disney" (A key scene in a bar with a hooker??? But, hey, these guys asked for it...) "This project is gonna die." And sure enough, once it got high enough -- poof. Did somebody lose a job over that? Well, all the writers, of course. But I imagine, given the bloodletting at Feature Animation, so did the exec who greenlighted the story in the first place.
Thank you for that, but I don't think Jboy is a troll; more likely, he's another overly-sensitive Canadian who takes offense at the suggestion that people from El Lay wouldn't want to shoot in Canada given the opportunity. Well, y'know, it's the weather, eh? And BTW, the reason X-Files left Canada was because its stars couldn't stand the damn cold, so it's not like I'm making this up.
Its funny how you say that Hollywood's direction towards safe, predictable formula films is a result of the flight of films from Hollywood to areas such as Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal.
No, I never said that. What I did say is that Canadian film subsidy allows US producers to dither and make films by committee for less than it would cost in Hollywood. The fact is that the people greenlighting scripts, hiring stars, and doing all the other things involved with actually producing the movie all still act exactly the way they do when they're making a movie in Hollywood, but the costs are lower because of Canadian content subsidies. The real issue is that if these idiots knew what they were doing, they wouldn't need to have an army of assistant executive producers (read: Tom Cruise's agent, the guy who swung the financing deal from an Asian bank, the lawyer who weaseled the contracts to prevent any meaning to the words "profit participation") -- and they wouldn't shoot in Canada.
For the writer's-eye-view
on
Review: Showtime
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
go here. The problem with this movie is the usual story -- too many cooks in the kitchen. But that's not unusual; a friend who works for a major studio once told me that, on one feature he was working, the filming process looked something like
Film five minutes of material, six different ways.
Record test audience's reaction to all six sequences.
Discard lowest-rated pieces.
Lather, rinse, repeat until you have 120 minutes of material.
There are a lot of people in the "industry", especially the non-acting union-represented trades, who are worried about production flight, and rightfully so. A lot of shooting has migrated to Canada over the last few years because of tax subsidies film and TV production receives in the Great White North. The real reason Hollywood is exporting jobs to Canada is that the producers can make big, expensive mistakes for far less. (However, this is changing, I'm to understand: in the first place, Canadians are sick of paying gazigabucks for film subsidy; and in the second place, California's state legislature has passed special tax cuts for film industry types so they can fuck up more cheaply in state. I love how everyone in Hollywood is a liberal until it comes time to pay the rent.) Nobody in Hollywood knows how to make a movie. Everybody wants to be seen having a part -- hence the proliferation of credited producer and assistant producer roles. The bureaucracy beggars the lexicon. As a result, only "safe" movies ever get made, "safe" being defined as "will a teen-age boy go see it?" The consistent exceptions, unsurprisingly, seem to be coming from Pixar, which is far away from Hollywood's stinking tarpits.
Are we now so blind to the Constitution
on
SSSCA Editorials
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
that Congress feels obliged to ignore the part about
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Those of you who still think FDR's "living document" idea of the Constitution (i.e., it means whatever is politically expedient), please justify your position in light of Disney-bought Senators.
I can almost see that, except that it would have to be in-state for it to work. I can see Hollings now: "My opposition is funded by a buncha carpetbagging Yankee liberals" -- and he'd be partially right.
They must. South Carolina, you will recall, was one of the states that begged off from the Microsoft antitrust suit when Bill bought them off for a measely $20,000. Best investment he ever made. Of course, the rat's price has gone up some since then -- he now cost Hollywood $260k for this election. But hey, they ggot the "Hollywood Wants A Pony For Christmas Act" introduced, didn't they?
In my estimation, there's a high likelihood this guy's got the CIA behind him. The Los Angeles Times has reported that the CIA has been using LA's expat Iranian community for
intelligence-gathering, as well as satellite broadcasting into Iran.
The one problem I have always had with the notion of the Klingon Empire as practiced on "Star Trek" is that they couldn't possibly exist in real life. The Klingons are basically at the level of space bikers, or the Taliban, that is, they're mainly interested in what they can squeeze out of situations at this moment using whatever violent methods are at hand now. Research? Pure science? These things make not a great warrior!
The Federation would have had these guys for lunch in a heartbeat.
Full disclosure: I am an employee of Pricegrabber, so you may make of that what you will. Nonetheless I still buy stuff online and offline like everyone else here.
Two and three years ago, online sales were a mammoth below-cost bazaar. But as the entrants found they had to achieve profitability, and this quarter, they started to disappear. In some markets, brick-and-mortars took over their competitors that were threatening to bury them only a few months before. For instance, take PetSmart's buyout of pets.com, or KB Kids' buyout of eToys.com (a spectacular flamout). This is natural, and in the long term, for the better. What are left are in fact the low-overhead guys, the ones who didn't start with enormous, get-rich-quick dreams. There's still a lot of vendors making money over at the Yahoo stores, believe it or not.
Pricewatch, PriceGrabber, et al are in the online comparison shopping business. All of them charge their merchants for listings; the real question is how. With Pricewatch, the vendors are charged based on the number of products listed, which means you essentially get a list of whatever the retailer thinks are his strongest sale products at the moment. There's two disadvantages for the site visitor (consumer) in this: first, it reduces the breadth of merchants, and second, it hides a fair amount of products. Pricegrabber does a better job of this simply because their underlying pricing structure doesn't automatically discourage merchants from showing more products. (Of course, there's nothing preventing merchants from being selective for their own reasons, but at least it's not an issue financially.)
From personal experience, the difference between online and brick-and-mortar prices is narrowing generally, but that doesn't mean there aren't bargains out there. Where I use our own site most is on unusual items that most b&m's won't stock (for instance, SCSI drives). Even when looking at more commodity items (ATA drives, CD-R media), it pays to at least check prices online to see whether the price delta and convenience factor combined are worth it to you. (For many people who don't live near big cities, online is the only realistic option and a great salvation.) Also, don't forget that there's a much broader selection available online than off. It's not unusual to find a product available online that even big-box retailers are out of. I recently bought a Samsung N501 DVD player through a merchant on our site that was not only substantially more expensive at our local Best Buy, but out of stock as well.
There's a lot to answer here. First, one of the big reasons Hollywood needs so much money is because nobody knows how to make movies. If you need proof, look at the number of sequels out there -- it's called branding anywhere else, the McDonaldization of entertainment. That'll be a Die Hard 15 to go, and could I get fries with that? Well, of course. So this is why movie production is heading to Canada: the idiot directors and producers who haven't got a clue about how to make movies can make their expensive mistakes for less in the Great White North (eh?).
You're exactly right when you say that the business of making and selling movies isn't static. That's the wonderful thing about it. And that's exactly why these kinds of evil copyright changes have to be resisted. Do you remember Sony v. Universal? This was the case that was supposed to destroy Hollywood -- and yet they somehow got all the richer for it. The big beef they had was that home taping off the air was depriving them of revenue -- damn it, there's a revenue stream 'supposedta come off every viewing, don't these idiot Japanese and consumers know that?
Riiiight.
The Supreme Court mercifully kicked Universal City Studios and their evil kin out the Fair Use door, and they somehow -- somehow! -- found a way to make money anyway. I somehow think they can find a way to make money if they have to live with fair use. Besides, it's not as if they haven't been screwing people out of their just rewards for ages, now is it?
I have a friend who had an idea that could have saved them. When he was at SGI, he pointed out that machines that were optimized for graphics had to have great I/O performance, which would also make them great performers in another I/O intensive task: running RDMS engines like Oracle and Sybase. SGI management wasn't interested.
I used to work for a company that actually made a product that ran a (badly underutilized) Oracle as part of its core functionality. In fact, the only thing this application was about was I/O performance. (We wrote train control software, so the major tasks were acquiring data and shoving it back out to the controlled devices.) There were several things that basically zilched their prospects in this area:
Oracle never took Irix all that seriously. Oracle has an internal order in which they build and release their servers; at the top of the pecking order are Windows and SPARC Solaris. Somewhere in the middle/bottom comes Irix. This means you're always behind on releases if you choose to use Irix.
SGI machines were unreliable compared to most comparable machines. This is from memory, but we lost Indy after Indy due to power supply failures and hard drive overheating problems. We had to buy support, even if it meant going through a third party to do it. The same was true of their Challenge series machines, which were basically Onyxes minus the graphics pipes.
Because of the small Oracle/Irix installed base, the combination was buggier than others. Again, from memory, but we had far more problems than we did once we moved to (then-) DEC Alpha.
An article in AdWeek a while back pointed
out that the most effective dot-com advertising campaigns
... were almost certainly never tested. Who measures "effectiveness", and how? Jupiter/Media Metrix? Those jokers? Their sample size is way too small to be useful. Ditto for Nielson Netratings. Besides, AdWeek is all about selling ads and the ad industry, so I have to cast a very jaundiced eye toward anything they blurt.
So many companies have gone sneakers up because they had ineffective advertising. They blew gobs of investor cash on ads of questionable merit (Superbowl, anyone?), and then woke up one day to the ugly hangover that people weren't buying from them. Oops. For a lot of dot-coms, the most cost-effective advertising is goto.com and other pay-for-placement search engines. I know; I'm working for a dot-com whose larger, better financed competitors went out and blew tens of millions on TV ad campaigns that, while boosting their traffic levels, couldn't possibly have been profitable for them. That is to say, this book sounds like Doctor Quack's Elixir And Panacea for Ailing Dot-Com's.
The
last one is an injunction against covetousness, and while that's perfectly good advice, it's not something I want Big Brother to
monitor (acting on it is stealing, but wanting it is just thinking).
It would never make it past the Democrats, anyway -- their coin is minted in coveting what the other fellow has. The recent tax cut was somehow unfair because some people got to keep what they earned.
Isn't the business of determining reciprocity of payment clearing subject to treaty and not unilateral legislation? In other words, the U.S. may pass laws saying certain kinds of foreign contracts are illegal, but if these contracts are subject to treaty, those laws are automatically voided by the superior law of the treaty?
No, it is not. It is Germany's equivalent of the New York Stock Exchange. The Dow is merely a convenient dipstick indicating the health of the overall market, and selected market sectors.
If this is such a great idea, there oughta be zillions of dollars in it. It ought to be cheaper than our current energy sources.
But it isn't.
This is why the solar bugs keep demanding subsidy. This is extremely perverse, because that subsidy has to come from somewhere. In our society (i.e., the West), we became wealthy by burning fossil fuels. Subsidizing solar energy with wealth created by burning fossil fuels is doubly stupid.
My company recently had a discussion with Oracle; one of the things they said was that NetZero has a 14 TB database of every URL its users have ever been to. They search this database on the fly to determine which ads you might be interested in seeing. Wow.
The First Amendment is not absolute and has lots of exceptions, this would just be another one. For example, you could just think
of it as copyright - personal data is owned by the person it describes. Copyright is a well established exception.
Except that, well, not. I have a hard time, given Liquormart v. Rhode Island, understanding how non-misleading commercial speech suddenly gets un-protected because a bunch of Eurocrats want it to be. Face it, kids, the Euros hate liberty. At risk of invoking Godwin's Law, Hitler may have lost the war, but his ideology seems to have survived him.
This whole business is silly and totalitarian. Had it happened a few years ago, it would have been over junk mail lists. While annoying, nobody would have taken it seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
Two years ago there were people complaining about the number of H1Bs entering the country, but they were voices in the wilderness.
... SCO sucked? It was late to market with every major improvement of BSD, had obnoxious licensing restrictions enforced by code (which was easily overridable -- just drop in a Linux-derived /bin/login with some obvious patches), and did its best to be absolutely unusable as hell at all times. The only way to fix it without Linux was to install the unsupported Skunkware CD, which made life tolerable, but never fun. SCO's dead? Well, good riddance, say I. (Oh, and did I mention it derived from Microsoft's Xenix? All the more reason to stake the bugger.)
Why these guys were collecting such information in the first place. Seriously, there are a lot of privacy activists out there, but it seems to me that the vast majority of them are complaining about the cookie-of-the-month problem when what they should really be looking at are the kinds of scams government data collecting enables. Identity theft, for instance, wouldn't be possible if not for the ubiquity of Social Security numbers as a "citizen ID" of sorts.
Don't think anyone in "the industry" has any illusions about filmmaking as art. I was last night at the home of a fairly successful screenwriter, who told me how he was in story development for an animated feature for the Mouse. They spent several million (something like $15k/week per writer over a number of months, and this was a team of five or more) on the story, which bubbled up past several layers of junior executives. But the writing team all along was saying to themselves, "this is so not Disney" (A key scene in a bar with a hooker??? But, hey, these guys asked for it...) "This project is gonna die." And sure enough, once it got high enough -- poof. Did somebody lose a job over that? Well, all the writers, of course. But I imagine, given the bloodletting at Feature Animation, so did the exec who greenlighted the story in the first place.
Thank you for that, but I don't think Jboy is a troll; more likely, he's another overly-sensitive Canadian who takes offense at the suggestion that people from El Lay wouldn't want to shoot in Canada given the opportunity. Well, y'know, it's the weather, eh? And BTW, the reason X-Files left Canada was because its stars couldn't stand the damn cold, so it's not like I'm making this up.
- Film five minutes of material, six different ways.
- Record test audience's reaction to all six sequences.
- Discard lowest-rated pieces.
- Lather, rinse, repeat until you have 120 minutes of material.
There are a lot of people in the "industry", especially the non-acting union-represented trades, who are worried about production flight, and rightfully so. A lot of shooting has migrated to Canada over the last few years because of tax subsidies film and TV production receives in the Great White North. The real reason Hollywood is exporting jobs to Canada is that the producers can make big, expensive mistakes for far less. (However, this is changing, I'm to understand: in the first place, Canadians are sick of paying gazigabucks for film subsidy; and in the second place, California's state legislature has passed special tax cuts for film industry types so they can fuck up more cheaply in state. I love how everyone in Hollywood is a liberal until it comes time to pay the rent.) Nobody in Hollywood knows how to make a movie. Everybody wants to be seen having a part -- hence the proliferation of credited producer and assistant producer roles. The bureaucracy beggars the lexicon. As a result, only "safe" movies ever get made, "safe" being defined as "will a teen-age boy go see it?" The consistent exceptions, unsurprisingly, seem to be coming from Pixar, which is far away from Hollywood's stinking tarpits.I can almost see that, except that it would have to be in-state for it to work. I can see Hollings now: "My opposition is funded by a buncha carpetbagging Yankee liberals" -- and he'd be partially right.
They must. South Carolina, you will recall, was one of the states that begged off from the Microsoft antitrust suit when Bill bought them off for a measely $20,000. Best investment he ever made. Of course, the rat's price has gone up some since then -- he now cost Hollywood $260k for this election. But hey, they ggot the "Hollywood Wants A Pony For Christmas Act" introduced, didn't they?
In my estimation, there's a high likelihood this guy's got the CIA behind him. The Los Angeles Times has reported that the CIA has been using LA's expat Iranian community for intelligence-gathering, as well as satellite broadcasting into Iran.
The Federation would have had these guys for lunch in a heartbeat.
Two and three years ago, online sales were a mammoth below-cost bazaar. But as the entrants found they had to achieve profitability, and this quarter, they started to disappear. In some markets, brick-and-mortars took over their competitors that were threatening to bury them only a few months before. For instance, take PetSmart's buyout of pets.com, or KB Kids' buyout of eToys.com (a spectacular flamout). This is natural, and in the long term, for the better. What are left are in fact the low-overhead guys, the ones who didn't start with enormous, get-rich-quick dreams. There's still a lot of vendors making money over at the Yahoo stores, believe it or not.
Pricewatch, PriceGrabber, et al are in the online comparison shopping business. All of them charge their merchants for listings; the real question is how. With Pricewatch, the vendors are charged based on the number of products listed, which means you essentially get a list of whatever the retailer thinks are his strongest sale products at the moment. There's two disadvantages for the site visitor (consumer) in this: first, it reduces the breadth of merchants, and second, it hides a fair amount of products. Pricegrabber does a better job of this simply because their underlying pricing structure doesn't automatically discourage merchants from showing more products. (Of course, there's nothing preventing merchants from being selective for their own reasons, but at least it's not an issue financially.)
From personal experience, the difference between online and brick-and-mortar prices is narrowing generally, but that doesn't mean there aren't bargains out there. Where I use our own site most is on unusual items that most b&m's won't stock (for instance, SCSI drives). Even when looking at more commodity items (ATA drives, CD-R media), it pays to at least check prices online to see whether the price delta and convenience factor combined are worth it to you. (For many people who don't live near big cities, online is the only realistic option and a great salvation.) Also, don't forget that there's a much broader selection available online than off. It's not unusual to find a product available online that even big-box retailers are out of. I recently bought a Samsung N501 DVD player through a merchant on our site that was not only substantially more expensive at our local Best Buy, but out of stock as well.
You're exactly right when you say that the business of making and selling movies isn't static. That's the wonderful thing about it. And that's exactly why these kinds of evil copyright changes have to be resisted. Do you remember Sony v. Universal ? This was the case that was supposed to destroy Hollywood -- and yet they somehow got all the richer for it. The big beef they had was that home taping off the air was depriving them of revenue -- damn it, there's a revenue stream 'supposedta come off every viewing, don't these idiot Japanese and consumers know that?
Riiiight.
The Supreme Court mercifully kicked Universal City Studios and their evil kin out the Fair Use door, and they somehow -- somehow! -- found a way to make money anyway. I somehow think they can find a way to make money if they have to live with fair use. Besides, it's not as if they haven't been screwing people out of their just rewards for ages, now is it?
So many companies have gone sneakers up because they had ineffective advertising. They blew gobs of investor cash on ads of questionable merit (Superbowl, anyone?), and then woke up one day to the ugly hangover that people weren't buying from them. Oops. For a lot of dot-coms, the most cost-effective advertising is goto.com and other pay-for-placement search engines. I know; I'm working for a dot-com whose larger, better financed competitors went out and blew tens of millions on TV ad campaigns that, while boosting their traffic levels, couldn't possibly have been profitable for them. That is to say, this book sounds like Doctor Quack's Elixir And Panacea for Ailing Dot-Com's.
Isn't the business of determining reciprocity of payment clearing subject to treaty and not unilateral legislation? In other words, the U.S. may pass laws saying certain kinds of foreign contracts are illegal, but if these contracts are subject to treaty, those laws are automatically voided by the superior law of the treaty?
But it isn't.
This is why the solar bugs keep demanding subsidy. This is extremely perverse, because that subsidy has to come from somewhere. In our society (i.e., the West), we became wealthy by burning fossil fuels. Subsidizing solar energy with wealth created by burning fossil fuels is doubly stupid.
Glad I pay for my DSL service!
This whole business is silly and totalitarian. Had it happened a few years ago, it would have been over junk mail lists. While annoying, nobody would have taken it seriously.