NYT article with quote. Remember, "net participation" is not profits. I don't even think studios keep an accounting of which movies make a "profit" in the clean sense, their model is based around renting facilities to independent producers, who get most of their money through hedge funds, government tax credits and special purpose finance vehicles. "Making a movie" is a multi-part process that involves many different economic actors, many of which are related in many different ways.
Asking if Forrest Gump made a profit is almost like asking if a factory's 2nd floor makes a profit -- it's so intertwined and dependent on the other parts that you could only define "profit" by drawing a bunch of arbitrary lines.
The closest you can get to answering this question is when an LLC is created strictly for the purpose of producing a single film, but in those cases the LLC is always wrapped-up as soon as costs are covered because tax laws only allow the costs of the film to carry over so many years. A movie simply isn't a "going concern," it's not a business, businesses make them, but they themselves are not severable ventures. And therefore, a film cannot "profit," it can only pay "proceeds."
Both Paramount and Winston Groom both agree that his contract stipulated 3% of profits. This is not in dispute.
You've gotta show a link for that, newspapers routinely misreport the terminology involved here by simply accepting the writer's characterization uncontested, which should go to show that this matter doesn't concern anybody but the writer and his client. You'd have to show me his contract and it says "profits," and it gives language that defines that in GAAP-compatible terms -- I've done net and gross deals before for clients and my contract never says just "profit," your share of the money is always defined on a sideletter, usually several pages along, that rules exactly what is revenue, what is expense, and which tranches of investors have superior claims to your split.
The entire narrative of this controversy is controlled by rich writers, their attorneys and agents, which leak everything that proves them right. Notice Paramount's response to Groom:
" 'Forrest Gump' will make money for net participants and we have already advanced $3 million to these individuals, including $250,000 to Winston Groom. We are treating everyone fairly and respectfully and we won't be goaded into bad behavior."
Emphasis mine. Note also they advanced him $250k as part of his agreement aside from direct payments of $35k for the original option. "Net participation" is a term of art that bears no relationship to any GAAP notion of "profit." you read through that whole article and the only people who use the term "profit" are the people who stand to benefit from stretching the definition to suit their checkbook, namely Groom, Eric Roth and the producers.
Note also that if the United States had a proper Copyleft regime, he wouldn't get a dime from anybody and Paramount's film would be able to call itself a "mashup" of his novel.
First of all, Buchiwald's option did spell out he was to receive a portion of proceeds.
Exactly, not the profits, the proceeds of the agreement; proceeds != profits. The questions was wether or not the story they optioned was actually Buchwald's Coming to America concept, or an original story by Eddie Murphy with no contribution from Buchwald. At the juncture of Paramount declaring that net participation still hadn't paid off on Coming to America, Buchwald went to the LA Times because he thought it would improve his negotiating position to characterize Paramount's position as fraudulent, which it wasn't.
All you're witnessing is a skirmish in the protracted political and legal battles between rich writers and rich movie distributors. Nothing more.
Well, it's two sides of a coin, there's "guilt" on one side and "goodwill" on the other, both create revenue but neither is really a business model. There are people like Louis CK, just like there are people like you, but I think it's evident, at least at this time, that there aren't enough people like you to keep anybody but the Louis CKs of the world paid more than occasionally. It really is just a way for superstars to extract a premium, after making their name on the back of "monetized" media.
As far as OSS is concerned, people give money to projects like Mozilla all the time, but in that particular case they're almost completely dependent on their "monetized" search field revenues, just as MySQL is monetized through a for-pay license tier, Android is monetized through a variety of different revenue streams, and Linux is monetized through support licenses.
Red Hat doesn't depend on goodwill and neither should Louis CK.
Right, essentially he's saying Louis CK was merely selling his work as a product instead of arranging all kinds of side-deals and whatnot.
Exactly. If he had done a contract with YouTube for original or exclusive content, there's no doubt you'd here some jackoff from YouTube or Google talking about how great it was that Louis CK had partnered with them to exploit their monetization platform, because that's exactly what Google runs, monetization platforms. It doesn't really have anything to do with old media/new media or DRM at all.
Of course monetization, regardless of its form, is deleterious and sort of a cancer on entertainment....
While I don't normally comment on down-modding, I can't really figure out why people are modding these down aside from the possibility that they just don't agree with it on the merits.
...so when she gets the money she rightfully earned?
Writers don't deserve profits unless their name or the reputation of their work guarantees box office. Why do people naturally assume that all film writers are naturally entitled to a share of the profits? Why not just a huge check up front? Or why not a share of the gross?
What's happened is writers go to the press when they want to complain about their deals and mobilize the screams of a thousand fanboys to do their bidding, and people have allowed the whole "did the film profit?" question to frame the conversation, when some writers actually make gross splits, well better than "profit," and most writers make a hell of a lot more money up front than if they were just getting "profits."
I have several friends that are working screenwriters, they make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and have written several films, and contributed rewrites on countless others, but they've never had a film produced-- no film they've ever worked on has ever gotten to the point of being made. Are you saying that writers who spend years working on projects that don't get made aren't entitled to getting paid? They have almost zero control over that, you know. You do realize that somethingg like 99% of the screenwriting man-hours expended in Hollywood is spent on scripts that will never be produced.
When J. K. Rowling collects her gross points from Warner Bros. they can't believe they let her have such a sweet deal, and she tells them "Fuck you, it's legal."
Without seeing anyone's contract you can't say what people are entitled to, but most writers' contracts specifically entitle them to some percentage of "defined proceeds" from a film's exhibition and sales. The proceeds are defined as some amount of money collected for the film, ether the gross, or the gross minus the exhibitor's fee, or the gross minus the exhibitors and distributors fee, or any number of formulas that graduate the participation over weeks or months. The "expenses" of the film are subtracted, and this often includes a lot of costs that would never be counted under GAAP definitions of "costs," because many of the entities aren't at arms length and many of the costs are compulsory based on master agreements and formula deals.
Essentially the famous "Order of the Phoenix" statement is just a paystub, it has nothing to do with wether a film "profits" in any sense, and studios never claim these movies lose money in public, it's only the disgruntled talent that does. Studios definitely lose money on other things and they're happy to grouse about that to Congress, just like any industry does (hello Amazon sales tax resistance).
Winston Groom should have hired a lawyer, just like anyone who makes a multi-million dollar deal is supposed to do, it's minimal due diligence. Art Buckwald's specific gripe was that he thought Paramount stole a movie from him, which is to say they took his story without attribution or buying it from him, and in court they claimed that if he had received a standard writer's contract for the film, he wouldn't be entitled to any proceeds, because the proceeds weren't in the money.
I don't weep for writers; they generally get significant advances, sometimes in the millions of dollars, for their work, and top rewrite screenwriters don't get "profits" but can charge $200k a week for their services.
*I* remember the slides, I used to load them up when I was a projectionist at the UA in Roseville, MN:)
You're right, the exhibitors always did this, it's the production and distribution getting into the game that's sorta different. Also, it used to be that "monetization" was ancillary to the primary goal of selling tickets, but ancillary has become such a huge profit center that it's been re-termed "monetization" and it drives decision making throughout the old-line entertainment and Internet/new media industries.
He's selling. That's how he made that money. You know, exchange of goods for services rendered.
The primary issue is that a clean quicktime movie is a good, but it's non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Nor is it really a service, since it's mechanically reproducible for marginal cost and no labor. In effect he's like a free-to-air PBS station, and his website is like the pledge drive that guilts you into ponying up there instead of going to bittorrent.
"Shit" definitely beats "crap"... "honestly"... OTOH, movie theaters always had the candy stand, which is how they monetize their screenings, since they only keep a small percentage of the box office, particularly in the first two weeks.
OTOOH, we'll see if Louis CK starts accepting ads, or if he continues using the PBS funding model, and I don't see how he'd sell a $1 million in videos without having had several cable specials for promotion first. What he's really done is he's "monetized" the publicity he got from the big media platform, it's not a good example of a sustainable, thriving business model. Dane Cook is a better example of a purely "internet-created" comedian.
In the end, I'm sure that as long as people can laugh at the Holocaust and menstruation, Louis CK will have no problems, on whatever media platform he chooses.
"Hollywood" didn't claim a loss on any of those films, if they did, show me the link. What you're really saying is that some writer or actor thought they got screwed in their contract, and went around to a bunch of reporters and lawyers, with the claim that their "net points" deal never paying off constituted the film "never profiting" according to "corrupt Hollywood accounting."
Studios don't account from profit or loss on a film-by-film basis, they account for profit by their divisions and operating units, most of which sell production services and only marginally take equity risk on production.
Link is wrong, the document in the article shows a writer's defined proceeds from their payoff of their contractual deal, which is a formula based on a bunch of numbers, not a film's "profit". The words "revenue," "profit," and "cost" do not appear once.
In this context "monetize" means transforming the content demand into something that can be resold -- viewer eyeballs are resold to advertisers, thus ad-supported media is "monetized." Youtube is "monetized," Louis CK's videos aren't "monetized" yet but if they continued to move like the first one did it's a possibility, as advertisers see the videos as a useful way to piggyback their messages.
Going to see a movie at a theater used to be the gold standard "non-monetized" form of entertainment, until they started inserting product placements, music, placing ads before the shows, and reselling the movies characters as brands for toys, games...
To be fair, isn't that what Hollywood regularly does?
It's a tricky issue, considering the director, John Lee Hancock (more recently of The Blind Side), is just as much of a Texan as Knowles. On the merits, I'd rather the world have racist movies than pandering, boring ones.
Several years ago I worked on a little movie called "The Alamo" with Billy Bob Thornton. After a few months we had an amazing cut, about three hours long- it was an epic, complex movie that didn't pull any punches about Texas history and gave complex renderings of all the historical characters.
They scheduled a test screening in Austin so they could get a read on what people in Texas would make of it, and one of Harry Knowles's little minions from Ain't it Cool managed to plant himself in the audience an provide Harry with all the material he needed in order to write a scathing hit piece that accused the filmmakers of historical fraud, besmearching the honor of all Texans and being stupid Hollywood types looking down our noses at racist cracker hillbillies. (I don't think he ever actually saw the long cut of the film, I suspect that he was simply angry that he wasn't invited and didn't receive the emoluments to which he'd become accustomed.)
Long story short, within a week of Harry's post, the plug was pulled on all efforts to finalize the film and post production was shut down for three months while the studio recut the movie, leaving it the bland, inoffensive and rather lame thing you can buy today on Amazon. Forums just make filmmaking more political, and politics generally ruins art.
The premise of the Will Smith I am Legend is that the Vampire Apocalypse was caused by an errant genetically-modified virus, a virus that "completely cured" cancer.
There isn't really much overlap between MPEG-LA and MPAA members; the MPAA are a bunch of motion picture producers, distributors and exhibitors, the MPEG-LA is a bunch of technology companies, and institutions like Columbia University and Fraunhofer. There are some tenuous links: Sony is a member of the MPEG-LA and a division of Sony is an MPAA member, Apple is an MPEG-LA member and the (now deceased) former CEO of Apple was the chairman of The Walt Disney Company.
DRM is not a part of H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 and I'm unaware of the MPEG-LA requiring any sort of DRM implementation as a part of a license -- if that were the case that would be very interesting.
At no time in The Jungle does Upton Sinclair write "I, Upton Sinclair, saw..." And while much of the incidentals in The Jungle are based on real things that happened, you'd be in a lot of trouble if you tried to use The Jungle as evidence to indict anybody. Upton Sinclair never accused a living person of a criminal act in The Jungle, but Daisey makes several falsifiable claims alleging real crimes by real people against real victims. Upton Sinclair also never represented his work as an account of actual people in an actual situation, which Mr. Daisey repeatedly did to the TAL producers.
"Muckraking," such as it is, still requires that real claims come with real evidence. Modern examples like Michael Moore's or Kirby Dick's works are content to jump back and forth between factual claims, innuendos, and moral appeals, but what makes it "muckraking" is that they never affirmatively lie. They might edit out things against their agenda, they might represented a sequence of events in such a way as to maximize emotional response, they may choose their subjects in such a way that slants their presentation of the truth.
But they never tell you the sky is green, because to them such species of claims shouldn't be necessary. When Mike Daisey said the guy with the claw hand was injured making Apple products, he was telling us the sky was green. His stories in the end aren't even about China or technology manufacturing, they're just a narrative about guilt and his emotional response to globalization, and a certain sort of liberal NPR listener, highly susceptible to demonstrations of guilt, is the consumer. That's why he made it a narrative with himself witnessing things, to elicit emotions and empathy.
If he'd said "people were poisoned by hexane, making the gadgets in your pocket," it still would have accomplished muckraking and had the virtue of being true, but instead, he said "I saw a dozen 13 year olds poisoned by hexane at Foxconn making iPhones," not because he saw that, but because doing a one-man show with "Steve Jobs" in the title sells more tickets than a one-man show about Chinese labor abuses as such.
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NYT article with quote. Remember, "net participation" is not profits. I don't even think studios keep an accounting of which movies make a "profit" in the clean sense, their model is based around renting facilities to independent producers, who get most of their money through hedge funds, government tax credits and special purpose finance vehicles. "Making a movie" is a multi-part process that involves many different economic actors, many of which are related in many different ways.
Asking if Forrest Gump made a profit is almost like asking if a factory's 2nd floor makes a profit -- it's so intertwined and dependent on the other parts that you could only define "profit" by drawing a bunch of arbitrary lines.
The closest you can get to answering this question is when an LLC is created strictly for the purpose of producing a single film, but in those cases the LLC is always wrapped-up as soon as costs are covered because tax laws only allow the costs of the film to carry over so many years. A movie simply isn't a "going concern," it's not a business, businesses make them, but they themselves are not severable ventures. And therefore, a film cannot "profit," it can only pay "proceeds."
You've gotta show a link for that, newspapers routinely misreport the terminology involved here by simply accepting the writer's characterization uncontested, which should go to show that this matter doesn't concern anybody but the writer and his client. You'd have to show me his contract and it says "profits," and it gives language that defines that in GAAP-compatible terms -- I've done net and gross deals before for clients and my contract never says just "profit," your share of the money is always defined on a sideletter, usually several pages along, that rules exactly what is revenue, what is expense, and which tranches of investors have superior claims to your split.
The entire narrative of this controversy is controlled by rich writers, their attorneys and agents, which leak everything that proves them right. Notice Paramount's response to Groom:
Emphasis mine. Note also they advanced him $250k as part of his agreement aside from direct payments of $35k for the original option. "Net participation" is a term of art that bears no relationship to any GAAP notion of "profit." you read through that whole article and the only people who use the term "profit" are the people who stand to benefit from stretching the definition to suit their checkbook, namely Groom, Eric Roth and the producers.
Note also that if the United States had a proper Copyleft regime, he wouldn't get a dime from anybody and Paramount's film would be able to call itself a "mashup" of his novel.
Exactly, not the profits, the proceeds of the agreement; proceeds != profits. The questions was wether or not the story they optioned was actually Buchwald's Coming to America concept, or an original story by Eddie Murphy with no contribution from Buchwald. At the juncture of Paramount declaring that net participation still hadn't paid off on Coming to America, Buchwald went to the LA Times because he thought it would improve his negotiating position to characterize Paramount's position as fraudulent, which it wasn't.
All you're witnessing is a skirmish in the protracted political and legal battles between rich writers and rich movie distributors. Nothing more.
Well, it's two sides of a coin, there's "guilt" on one side and "goodwill" on the other, both create revenue but neither is really a business model. There are people like Louis CK, just like there are people like you, but I think it's evident, at least at this time, that there aren't enough people like you to keep anybody but the Louis CKs of the world paid more than occasionally. It really is just a way for superstars to extract a premium, after making their name on the back of "monetized" media.
As far as OSS is concerned, people give money to projects like Mozilla all the time, but in that particular case they're almost completely dependent on their "monetized" search field revenues, just as MySQL is monetized through a for-pay license tier, Android is monetized through a variety of different revenue streams, and Linux is monetized through support licenses.
Red Hat doesn't depend on goodwill and neither should Louis CK.
Exactly. If he had done a contract with YouTube for original or exclusive content, there's no doubt you'd here some jackoff from YouTube or Google talking about how great it was that Louis CK had partnered with them to exploit their monetization platform, because that's exactly what Google runs, monetization platforms. It doesn't really have anything to do with old media/new media or DRM at all.
Of course monetization, regardless of its form, is deleterious and sort of a cancer on entertainment....
While I don't normally comment on down-modding, I can't really figure out why people are modding these down aside from the possibility that they just don't agree with it on the merits.
Writers don't deserve profits unless their name or the reputation of their work guarantees box office. Why do people naturally assume that all film writers are naturally entitled to a share of the profits? Why not just a huge check up front? Or why not a share of the gross?
What's happened is writers go to the press when they want to complain about their deals and mobilize the screams of a thousand fanboys to do their bidding, and people have allowed the whole "did the film profit?" question to frame the conversation, when some writers actually make gross splits, well better than "profit," and most writers make a hell of a lot more money up front than if they were just getting "profits."
I have several friends that are working screenwriters, they make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and have written several films, and contributed rewrites on countless others, but they've never had a film produced-- no film they've ever worked on has ever gotten to the point of being made. Are you saying that writers who spend years working on projects that don't get made aren't entitled to getting paid? They have almost zero control over that, you know. You do realize that somethingg like 99% of the screenwriting man-hours expended in Hollywood is spent on scripts that will never be produced.
When J. K. Rowling collects her gross points from Warner Bros. they can't believe they let her have such a sweet deal, and she tells them "Fuck you, it's legal."
Without seeing anyone's contract you can't say what people are entitled to, but most writers' contracts specifically entitle them to some percentage of "defined proceeds" from a film's exhibition and sales. The proceeds are defined as some amount of money collected for the film, ether the gross, or the gross minus the exhibitor's fee, or the gross minus the exhibitors and distributors fee, or any number of formulas that graduate the participation over weeks or months. The "expenses" of the film are subtracted, and this often includes a lot of costs that would never be counted under GAAP definitions of "costs," because many of the entities aren't at arms length and many of the costs are compulsory based on master agreements and formula deals.
Essentially the famous "Order of the Phoenix" statement is just a paystub, it has nothing to do with wether a film "profits" in any sense, and studios never claim these movies lose money in public, it's only the disgruntled talent that does. Studios definitely lose money on other things and they're happy to grouse about that to Congress, just like any industry does (hello Amazon sales tax resistance).
Winston Groom should have hired a lawyer, just like anyone who makes a multi-million dollar deal is supposed to do, it's minimal due diligence. Art Buckwald's specific gripe was that he thought Paramount stole a movie from him, which is to say they took his story without attribution or buying it from him, and in court they claimed that if he had received a standard writer's contract for the film, he wouldn't be entitled to any proceeds, because the proceeds weren't in the money.
I don't weep for writers; they generally get significant advances, sometimes in the millions of dollars, for their work, and top rewrite screenwriters don't get "profits" but can charge $200k a week for their services.
*I* remember the slides, I used to load them up when I was a projectionist at the UA in Roseville, MN :)
You're right, the exhibitors always did this, it's the production and distribution getting into the game that's sorta different. Also, it used to be that "monetization" was ancillary to the primary goal of selling tickets, but ancillary has become such a huge profit center that it's been re-termed "monetization" and it drives decision making throughout the old-line entertainment and Internet/new media industries.
The primary issue is that a clean quicktime movie is a good, but it's non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Nor is it really a service, since it's mechanically reproducible for marginal cost and no labor. In effect he's like a free-to-air PBS station, and his website is like the pledge drive that guilts you into ponying up there instead of going to bittorrent.
"Shit" definitely beats "crap"... "honestly"... OTOH, movie theaters always had the candy stand, which is how they monetize their screenings, since they only keep a small percentage of the box office, particularly in the first two weeks.
OTOOH, we'll see if Louis CK starts accepting ads, or if he continues using the PBS funding model, and I don't see how he'd sell a $1 million in videos without having had several cable specials for promotion first. What he's really done is he's "monetized" the publicity he got from the big media platform, it's not a good example of a sustainable, thriving business model. Dane Cook is a better example of a purely "internet-created" comedian.
In the end, I'm sure that as long as people can laugh at the Holocaust and menstruation, Louis CK will have no problems, on whatever media platform he chooses.
"Hollywood" didn't claim a loss on any of those films, if they did, show me the link. What you're really saying is that some writer or actor thought they got screwed in their contract, and went around to a bunch of reporters and lawyers, with the claim that their "net points" deal never paying off constituted the film "never profiting" according to "corrupt Hollywood accounting."
Studios don't account from profit or loss on a film-by-film basis, they account for profit by their divisions and operating units, most of which sell production services and only marginally take equity risk on production.
Link is wrong, the document in the article shows a writer's defined proceeds from their payoff of their contractual deal, which is a formula based on a bunch of numbers, not a film's "profit". The words "revenue," "profit," and "cost" do not appear once.
In this context "monetize" means transforming the content demand into something that can be resold -- viewer eyeballs are resold to advertisers, thus ad-supported media is "monetized." Youtube is "monetized," Louis CK's videos aren't "monetized" yet but if they continued to move like the first one did it's a possibility, as advertisers see the videos as a useful way to piggyback their messages.
Going to see a movie at a theater used to be the gold standard "non-monetized" form of entertainment, until they started inserting product placements, music, placing ads before the shows, and reselling the movies characters as brands for toys, games...
In fact, this may demonstrate how far advanced General Cragg of Fomalhaut V has advanced since attempting to kidnap Kirk and Spock. They didn't even have warp drive back then...
Not exactly what he said, but an oldie and a goodie.
Is that like the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front?
Codependency destroys families.
It's a tricky issue, considering the director, John Lee Hancock (more recently of The Blind Side), is just as much of a Texan as Knowles. On the merits, I'd rather the world have racist movies than pandering, boring ones.
Several years ago I worked on a little movie called "The Alamo" with Billy Bob Thornton. After a few months we had an amazing cut, about three hours long- it was an epic, complex movie that didn't pull any punches about Texas history and gave complex renderings of all the historical characters.
They scheduled a test screening in Austin so they could get a read on what people in Texas would make of it, and one of Harry Knowles's little minions from Ain't it Cool managed to plant himself in the audience an provide Harry with all the material he needed in order to write a scathing hit piece that accused the filmmakers of historical fraud, besmearching the honor of all Texans and being stupid Hollywood types looking down our noses at racist cracker hillbillies. (I don't think he ever actually saw the long cut of the film, I suspect that he was simply angry that he wasn't invited and didn't receive the emoluments to which he'd become accustomed.)
Long story short, within a week of Harry's post, the plug was pulled on all efforts to finalize the film and post production was shut down for three months while the studio recut the movie, leaving it the bland, inoffensive and rather lame thing you can buy today on Amazon. Forums just make filmmaking more political, and politics generally ruins art.
The premise of the Will Smith I am Legend is that the Vampire Apocalypse was caused by an errant genetically-modified virus, a virus that "completely cured" cancer.
There isn't really much overlap between MPEG-LA and MPAA members; the MPAA are a bunch of motion picture producers, distributors and exhibitors, the MPEG-LA is a bunch of technology companies, and institutions like Columbia University and Fraunhofer. There are some tenuous links: Sony is a member of the MPEG-LA and a division of Sony is an MPAA member, Apple is an MPEG-LA member and the (now deceased) former CEO of Apple was the chairman of The Walt Disney Company.
DRM is not a part of H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 and I'm unaware of the MPEG-LA requiring any sort of DRM implementation as a part of a license -- if that were the case that would be very interesting.
Mr. Woo regularly claims that for $30 he'll give a motherboard that works :)
At no time in The Jungle does Upton Sinclair write "I, Upton Sinclair, saw..." And while much of the incidentals in The Jungle are based on real things that happened, you'd be in a lot of trouble if you tried to use The Jungle as evidence to indict anybody. Upton Sinclair never accused a living person of a criminal act in The Jungle, but Daisey makes several falsifiable claims alleging real crimes by real people against real victims.
Upton Sinclair also never represented his work as an account of actual people in an actual situation, which Mr. Daisey repeatedly did to the TAL producers.
"Muckraking," such as it is, still requires that real claims come with real evidence. Modern examples like Michael Moore's or Kirby Dick's works are content to jump back and forth between factual claims, innuendos, and moral appeals, but what makes it "muckraking" is that they never affirmatively lie. They might edit out things against their agenda, they might represented a sequence of events in such a way as to maximize emotional response, they may choose their subjects in such a way that slants their presentation of the truth.
But they never tell you the sky is green, because to them such species of claims shouldn't be necessary. When Mike Daisey said the guy with the claw hand was injured making Apple products, he was telling us the sky was green. His stories in the end aren't even about China or technology manufacturing, they're just a narrative about guilt and his emotional response to globalization, and a certain sort of liberal NPR listener, highly susceptible to demonstrations of guilt, is the consumer. That's why he made it a narrative with himself witnessing things, to elicit emotions and empathy.
If he'd said "people were poisoned by hexane, making the gadgets in your pocket," it still would have accomplished muckraking and had the virtue of being true, but instead, he said "I saw a dozen 13 year olds poisoned by hexane at Foxconn making iPhones," not because he saw that, but because doing a one-man show with "Steve Jobs" in the title sells more tickets than a one-man show about Chinese labor abuses as such.
"where the heck are you finding these condolences"
Remember, Khatami was in power until 2005.