Government interference with the internet seems to be the fastest way to dystopia, these days.
Thank goodness private citizens, acting with complete freedom and in their own self-interest, built the internet, promulgated standards to operate it and maintain the authorities that regulate it. Oh wait...
Your error is in assuming that there can be more or less government interference on the Internet. Government interference pervades the Internet -- the assets that form it are owned by huge state-owned firms or cartels of service providers, and your service can be curtailed for essentially any reason, by government or corporate interests. The only question is who that interference will benefit, the individuals or the authorities, corporate or governmental or otherwise. Sometimes it's not a zero-sum game, but only sometimes.
I'm not trying to troll, but really. if you compare the the two platforms one is mostly open and one is glued shut.
I'm not trying to troll, but really; if you compare the two platforms one is mostly bought and paid for by the handset purchaser, the other is free to the consumer and OEM but is distributed with the intent of selling mobile eyeballs to advertisers. What could possibly go wrong?
Google hits tell you what you searched for *AND NO LESS*, and the latter is why people trust Google.
Google will never contradict you, in the end. It'll always be your good buddy who can introduce you to someone who thinks just like you. What's not to trust about such an awesome, if codependent and deleterious, relationship? Of course it shows you NO LESS than what you looked for, but it's all about what you think to look for in the first place, isn't it?
What's better, hearing what They want you to know or hearing only what You want to hear? There's still deference to authority happening, there isn't necessarily any originality or free thought going on. You've just used the connector of the World Wide Web to find new mantras to mindlessly repeat, and brandish them ("Drill Baby Drill!" "Change!") like little beads on a neolithic necklace.
People have this idealism that somehow the Internet can enable informational liberty, without considering that it might just enable informational hedonism-- the pursuit of nothing more than comfortable and happiness-inducing ideas.
What's remarkable is that the survey says people don't trust the "propaganda" of multinational corporations but they do trust a multinational corporation that keeps a record of basically everything they do on the Internet.
Media bias exists but it's really just a convenient excuse. News media's real problem is that it regularly can confront you with information you didn't want to know or strongly disagree with, even though you need to know itif you're going to be a functioning citizen. Google only tells you what you want to know, or cared to look up, and then it gives you every site on the 'net so you can find whichever sites agree with your personal prejudice and use that to justify yourself. Despite many many studies proving vaccination is safe, people seem to find all the evidence they need that it causes autism; or that Barack Obama was born in Kenya; or that Israel was justified in attacking the Gaza flotilla, or the opposite!
People like Google because it allows them to sustain and perpetuate their OWN biases. Instead of having to confront an opposing viewpoint, which may or maynotbe biased, they can use simply use Google to find authorities they agree with. Part of their preference for Google IS bias in media, but only part -- and it's simply too easy nowadays for people to simply shout "media bias!" without any supporting evidence whenever the news reports something that's inconvenient.
GoodReader is an excellent app for downloading zip files and unzipping the contents. You can even tap on the attachment's icon in Apple Mail and it will launch GoodReader automatically. $3, but complaining is free.
There are also a lot of APs which just got the credit by investing in the film.
Name one AP that got credit by investing -- any backer would be a fool to take anything less than a clean "producer" credit. Some APs are actor's relatives and agents, however;)
Uy. Yeah everyone can be an artist, except in a way that's commercial. That's the tricky part.
You maybe can write a short story but can you read a script and write-out the main character and still have something that makes sense and is entertaining, in a week? A friend of mine is a screenwriter and he had to do this on set a week before they started shooting.
You can doodle but can you light a hallway and office set with 5 tweenies and a Kino-Flo?
You can hum to yourself, but can you record and cut five reels of foley in two weeks? Or design six versions of a sound effect for an alien machine gun, and have all of them rejected and come back and do 6 more?
What proportion of that goes into paying the salaries of a handful of well-known "stars", though ?
What proportion of the audience will flip the channel if they don't see someone they recognize? Seeing attractive celebrities is a big part of the appeal of television.
Headline actors, even in the time of Mozart were able to demand a share of the House. The upshot of the film industry is that performance has been democratized: people, all people, are able to vote with their dollars for who they want to see, and actors are no longer judged "great" on the basis of a few wealthy and well-connected patrons and critics.
Performance even in the pre-industrial age could be extremely remunerative if you managed to land a job with a court or ecclesiastical theater company. You might not have received gobs of money, but you would have influence and status, everyone in the country would know or name, you would have the privilege of circulating with the political and social elite of the country, and you would have the power to control what other artists your patron patronized. It was true wealth in everything but the wallet.
But what if it kick-starts a world-wide audience of 1 million people willing to pay $10.00 for a season?
Just to keep it in perspective-- A very popular, broad-appeal hit show like "Glee" generally get about 5 million viewers a night, but they don't have to pay anything to watch it. A one-hour scripted drama can cost anywhere from $1 mil to $5 mil an episode.
It's only very recently that actors have joined the ranks of the elite getting paid high sums of money for their work.
Check your sources on that: Jimmy Stewart is generally recognized as having received the modern agency/gross points deal for Winchester '73 in 1950, and many independent producer/actors, including Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle had gross deals in the silent era. Even when they didn't get grosses, contracts actors at the Big Five in the thirties would easily earn an average workers years's wages in a matter of weeks,
Actors who make this kind of money aren't paid because they're good actors, though often they are.They receive this level of compensation because their name on the poster literally guarantees people will come to see the film. If you've ever heard the term "bankable actor" this is where it comes from-- an actor is such a guaranteed draw that a producer can literally get a bank loan for their film on the basis of that actor's appearance in the film.
The actors demand their share of the money because they are the draw. That's what a "star" is.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but good artists are much harder to find than programmers. Good production requires good set designers, lighting directors, casting directors. Not to mention that the AV equipment required and support staff to run it cost much more than a single computer and an internet connection.
In LA a significant slice of the population owns equipment that can shoot 720p and has production equipment -- every other house in the Valley seems to have a garage converted into a studio of one type or another, so in some places it's definitely easier than others. But even that being so, very few good no-budget independent projects are produced here, no more or fewer than any other part of the US. The real limiting factor, as you indicate, is the human talent, particularly in the acting and writing. Even FOSS projects fail unless the lead developers are very talented and persevering, and know how to code, and lead others, and communicate well, and promote and market and support..
Hi, I'm a sound designer who regularly contributes his work for free (or for very low rates) to the projects of newe filmmakers.
I can tell you that if I didn't have a regular paying job working on commercial movies, there is no way I'd be able to contribute my spare time to freebees. Having a well-paying job allows me to keep my own equipment and have the savings necessary to spend time working for free, and being a member of my union (and relying on other people working and paying into the insurance pool) makes sure that I have health care when I work on freebees.
I'm sure it works the same way in development, no? Programmers contribute there time to open source projects, but the most skilled programmers who accomplish the most work and make the best contributions are professionals who are doing so in their spare time. Amateurs might be good for testing or doing the sort of things in filmmaking we leave to interns, but production is a sophisticated profession and requires years of experience in a particular trade to have proficiency and cutting-edge skills, and if you aren't doing it all the time you just never have a chance to develop those.
These projects are a great way for the creators and crew to network and get their idea exposed, but the goal is to secure funding and produce the show in a conventional way, after proving the concept is viable and commercial. BitTorrent is not a usable or profitable means of replacing television, but it might be a new way for studios to discover pilots.
Sure it does - without good distribution and marketing there's little incentive to make a good movie.
This is an inversion of what you're talking about, you're confusing good and expensive. Man on Earth had no distribution and yet it was good. Good movies are made all the time. There's little incentive to make an expensive movie without distribution and marketing. Even more, there's little incentive to base your business model on film production if the distribution medium can't provide enough upside to fund the projects.
Just look at our victim here in the TFA; they're charging as much as they dare charge people who will get nothing in return, and for that they will have a miserable budget and they probably won't be able to repeat it under the same conditions. It's like the Million Dollar Webpage of film production: A one-off stunt, nothing more. And there isn't much evidence that even for-pay revenue models for online distribution generate enough money to make a movie honestly, namely: paying everyone a market wage, not calling in any favors, and not relying on the externalities/surpluses of the profitable parts of the film industry.
DVD's don't have any coupling to marketing the way online distribution does.
Online distribution has no coupling to revenue streams, nothing like theatrical moolah anyways -- you'll never see a $100 million BitTorrent (or even Hulu) opening day. The only way you can make money on things online is with Long Tail, and long tail just doesn't make enough in a hurry to fund a movie. Theatrical distribution is still a winning formula for the studios, they make a lot and ever growing stream of revenue from it; their problem is that their budgets have gotten even larger, and that worked as long as DVDs moved, but ever since their window started closing budgets have started to come down. It used to be that a Will Smith or Tom Cruise would get $20 million against 20% of the gross; that just doesn't happen nowadays, particularly since CGI has started really balooning, and 3D conversions and processes are millions of dollars on their own.
But theatrical is here to stay for at least another decade. Nothing replaces Date Night, unless our country turns into a nation of losers and everyone stops going to movies on Friday night in favor of playing an evening of WoW. What an awful outcome; but I saw Raimi on the lot last week and he's developing a Warcraft feature, so maybe the doom encroaches from both ends.
With regard to marketing coupling, you have to get the public branded first, though, and making that happen through Facebook and Google analytics just won't deliver the same numbers as a national ad buy. People don't like movies, movies go out and like THEM. At least that's what you have to do if you want maximium interest; Internet advertising is just too low-impact.
Distribution has nothing to do with making a good movie, I'm just saying very few people make a good movie. We've had very-low-cost distribution channels for 10-15 years now, since DVDs have become standard, and there hasn't been significant movement toward indies, at least compared to the first half of the 90s, which was really a golden age for non-studio films, and those were distributed on FILM. Even Clerks had a theatrical at the time and made a ton of money for Miramax on home video.
There will always be a lot of people with terrible ideas for movies, it just so happens that people will pay to see a terrible idea if you spend $200 million producing and marketing it. What they won't spend $8 to see are bad ideas produced on a shoestring.
Where on Earth do you get that information? Renting home videos out commercially might not be illegal but it sure as hell violates the terms of the license, even if they get away with it.
We just buy em there, and rent em out just like anything else.
Those copies at BB are only licensed for private home exhibition (that's why the rental copies cost a lot more and your company pays royalties when you rent them, dipshit). By renting those out you're cheating not just the studio and the distributor, but also the writers, director and actors out of income. My neighbor down the hall is Columbia Pictures Home Ent's Worldwide President, you want me to pass along a URL to your post?
Apparently good writing isn't that expensive, if one cares to engage in it.
It's very cheap, however it's not exactly the sort of thing you can find at ScriptMart. Creative writing is a very strange beast and people who are consistently good at it are hard to come by and hard to develop, and it's hard to keep them working on things that are going to keep a broad swathe of people interested for two hours. Good scripts can be had for free, but you can also get struck by lightning for free. Anybody can get lucky once.
And even when you find good writing, it's not like people pay $8 to watch a script reading. The movie actually has to be made well, too.
Maybe projects like this will get us off the Hollywood Blockbuster/Direct-To-DVD treadmill.
The Man from Earth didn't make money until it was released on DVD at Blockbuster. That's the only consistent revenue stream films like this have; I know, I've worked on (and have revenue participation in) several of them.
I don't get how people bring up Man from Earth, one film that's barely made any money in absolute terms, and use that as an argument against an entire industry that produces and has to make a profit on hundreds of films in a year. Obviously people are going to make good movies for a small amount of money, but they almost never do so consistently -- the rarity of these projects should be a strong indicator of just how unstable this mode of production is. The only exception I can think of is Tyler Perry, and his films trade completely in niche demographic (read urban black) appeal.
The producer retains copyright except in the territories where he has specifically relaxed it to a local subsidiary, for tax or other reasons. Production companies usually don't make a lot of money from the profits of the show, distributors keep much more. Production companies make much of their money by taking a percentage off the top of the budget as their fee to produce. Producers of course get a nice slice of the gross, but it's the difference between 5 or 10% for the producers and like 50% to the distributors.
Nope. And I don't plan to until 2019 when the Sonny Bono Act, a U.S. copyright term extension heavily promoted by Miramax's parent company, finally wears off.
To be honest, I think your politics is depriving you of a lot of really good movies. So do you never watch a Pixar film either?
No-one is holding a gun to their heads, forcing them to spend all that money.:)
Well, the guy who ran IATSE (my union) in the 30s used to keep a.38 on his desk when he had meetings with studio execs:) I'm not sure any SAG negotiator has ever brandished a firearm, but there is the story about Jon Peters threatening Ray Stark when he was Barbara Streisand's manager...
Consider that the biggest costs with film production these days is CG/special effects, actors, marketing, and distribution.
If you spend $20 million on Tom Cruise, you'll make at least that much back in presales; actors generally pay for themselves. On smaller films getting one "name" actor is the difference between the film getting funding or not in the first place, so in that case their value is inestimable.
People will pay to watch cool special effects. If your trailer has awesome shots, people will come to see the movie.
Prints & Ads are expensive, but again people don't go to movies unless they hear about them, and wether or not a film has US distribution and a big marketing push is generally decisive as to wether or not the film will be able to presell foreign territories. P&A pretty easily pays for itself unless the movie is a plain dud.
The thing with films like Paranormal and Man from Earth is that they're essentially stunts that only make money because of their novelty. For everyone one of those that goes on to get recognition there are literally hundreds of quarter-million-dollar quickies that never swing that one festival screening that puts them over the top, or gets them the attention of the fanboy press, lying in wait to deck themselves in the borrowed plumes of the filmmakers they "discover."
There's definitely no business model in making these films, they're so uneven in quality. A much more representative film in the budget range would be something like The Asylum's Transmorfers or Snakes on a Train; ridiculously poor-quality films that get their feature presentation on Sci-Fi channel and profit from their German TV presale.
Notice I'm not saying that Paranormal or Man from Earth are BAD, just that good small-budget films don't reliably profit. Without the reliable profits, it's very hard for these filmmakers to continue making them, because nobody wants to keep making $30k movies all their life, they finally get to the point where they want to make something and not have to beg, borrow and steal to get it made, and they run out of people to call in favors from. Paranormal easily cost over a million dollars when all of the favors and one-time-only deals the filmmakers made are factored in.
How much of that cost goes to pay made up positions like "Associate Producers" and others who really contribute nothing to the project?
For the record, APs work their asses off, and usually earn that credit by doing the line producing or post-production supervision, and are themselves usually one promotion over the coffee gofers and runners. It's miserable and unglamorous work and as a technician I have nothing but respect for them.
You might be getting confused between Associate Producers and Executive Producers, but even they sometimes work very hard, or if they don't work on the film they at least are risking millions of dollars of their own money. Everybody's different of course.
Slashdot Mirror
Government interference with the internet seems to be the fastest way to dystopia, these days.
Thank goodness private citizens, acting with complete freedom and in their own self-interest, built the internet, promulgated standards to operate it and maintain the authorities that regulate it. Oh wait...
Your error is in assuming that there can be more or less government interference on the Internet. Government interference pervades the Internet -- the assets that form it are owned by huge state-owned firms or cartels of service providers, and your service can be curtailed for essentially any reason, by government or corporate interests. The only question is who that interference will benefit, the individuals or the authorities, corporate or governmental or otherwise. Sometimes it's not a zero-sum game, but only sometimes.
I'm not trying to troll, but really; if you compare the two platforms one is mostly bought and paid for by the handset purchaser, the other is free to the consumer and OEM but is distributed with the intent of selling mobile eyeballs to advertisers. What could possibly go wrong?
Google will never contradict you, in the end. It'll always be your good buddy who can introduce you to someone who thinks just like you. What's not to trust about such an awesome, if codependent and deleterious, relationship? Of course it shows you NO LESS than what you looked for, but it's all about what you think to look for in the first place, isn't it?
What's better, hearing what They want you to know or hearing only what You want to hear? There's still deference to authority happening, there isn't necessarily any originality or free thought going on. You've just used the connector of the World Wide Web to find new mantras to mindlessly repeat, and brandish them ("Drill Baby Drill!" "Change!") like little beads on a neolithic necklace.
People have this idealism that somehow the Internet can enable informational liberty, without considering that it might just enable informational hedonism-- the pursuit of nothing more than comfortable and happiness-inducing ideas.
What's remarkable is that the survey says people don't trust the "propaganda" of multinational corporations but they do trust a multinational corporation that keeps a record of basically everything they do on the Internet.
Media bias exists but it's really just a convenient excuse. News media's real problem is that it regularly can confront you with information you didn't want to know or strongly disagree with, even though you need to know itif you're going to be a functioning citizen. Google only tells you what you want to know, or cared to look up, and then it gives you every site on the 'net so you can find whichever sites agree with your personal prejudice and use that to justify yourself. Despite many many studies proving vaccination is safe, people seem to find all the evidence they need that it causes autism; or that Barack Obama was born in Kenya; or that Israel was justified in attacking the Gaza flotilla, or the opposite!
People like Google because it allows them to sustain and perpetuate their OWN biases. Instead of having to confront an opposing viewpoint, which may or maynotbe biased, they can use simply use Google to find authorities they agree with. Part of their preference for Google IS bias in media, but only part -- and it's simply too easy nowadays for people to simply shout "media bias!" without any supporting evidence whenever the news reports something that's inconvenient.
GoodReader is an excellent app for downloading zip files and unzipping the contents. You can even tap on the attachment's icon in Apple Mail and it will launch GoodReader automatically. $3, but complaining is free.
Name one AP that got credit by investing -- any backer would be a fool to take anything less than a clean "producer" credit. Some APs are actor's relatives and agents, however ;)
Uy. Yeah everyone can be an artist, except in a way that's commercial. That's the tricky part.
You maybe can write a short story but can you read a script and write-out the main character and still have something that makes sense and is entertaining, in a week? A friend of mine is a screenwriter and he had to do this on set a week before they started shooting.
You can doodle but can you light a hallway and office set with 5 tweenies and a Kino-Flo?
You can hum to yourself, but can you record and cut five reels of foley in two weeks? Or design six versions of a sound effect for an alien machine gun, and have all of them rejected and come back and do 6 more?
What proportion of the audience will flip the channel if they don't see someone they recognize? Seeing attractive celebrities is a big part of the appeal of television.
Headline actors, even in the time of Mozart were able to demand a share of the House. The upshot of the film industry is that performance has been democratized: people, all people, are able to vote with their dollars for who they want to see, and actors are no longer judged "great" on the basis of a few wealthy and well-connected patrons and critics.
Performance even in the pre-industrial age could be extremely remunerative if you managed to land a job with a court or ecclesiastical theater company. You might not have received gobs of money, but you would have influence and status, everyone in the country would know or name, you would have the privilege of circulating with the political and social elite of the country, and you would have the power to control what other artists your patron patronized. It was true wealth in everything but the wallet.
Just to keep it in perspective-- A very popular, broad-appeal hit show like "Glee" generally get about 5 million viewers a night, but they don't have to pay anything to watch it. A one-hour scripted drama can cost anywhere from $1 mil to $5 mil an episode.
It's only very recently that actors have joined the ranks of the elite getting paid high sums of money for their work.
Check your sources on that: Jimmy Stewart is generally recognized as having received the modern agency/gross points deal for Winchester '73 in 1950, and many independent producer/actors, including Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle had gross deals in the silent era. Even when they didn't get grosses, contracts actors at the Big Five in the thirties would easily earn an average workers years's wages in a matter of weeks,
Actors who make this kind of money aren't paid because they're good actors, though often they are.They receive this level of compensation because their name on the poster literally guarantees people will come to see the film. If you've ever heard the term "bankable actor" this is where it comes from-- an actor is such a guaranteed draw that a producer can literally get a bank loan for their film on the basis of that actor's appearance in the film.
The actors demand their share of the money because they are the draw. That's what a "star" is.
In LA a significant slice of the population owns equipment that can shoot 720p and has production equipment -- every other house in the Valley seems to have a garage converted into a studio of one type or another, so in some places it's definitely easier than others. But even that being so, very few good no-budget independent projects are produced here, no more or fewer than any other part of the US. The real limiting factor, as you indicate, is the human talent, particularly in the acting and writing. Even FOSS projects fail unless the lead developers are very talented and persevering, and know how to code, and lead others, and communicate well, and promote and market and support..
Hi, I'm a sound designer who regularly contributes his work for free (or for very low rates) to the projects of newe filmmakers.
I can tell you that if I didn't have a regular paying job working on commercial movies, there is no way I'd be able to contribute my spare time to freebees. Having a well-paying job allows me to keep my own equipment and have the savings necessary to spend time working for free, and being a member of my union (and relying on other people working and paying into the insurance pool) makes sure that I have health care when I work on freebees.
I'm sure it works the same way in development, no? Programmers contribute there time to open source projects, but the most skilled programmers who accomplish the most work and make the best contributions are professionals who are doing so in their spare time. Amateurs might be good for testing or doing the sort of things in filmmaking we leave to interns, but production is a sophisticated profession and requires years of experience in a particular trade to have proficiency and cutting-edge skills, and if you aren't doing it all the time you just never have a chance to develop those.
These projects are a great way for the creators and crew to network and get their idea exposed, but the goal is to secure funding and produce the show in a conventional way, after proving the concept is viable and commercial. BitTorrent is not a usable or profitable means of replacing television, but it might be a new way for studios to discover pilots.
This is an inversion of what you're talking about, you're confusing good and expensive. Man on Earth had no distribution and yet it was good. Good movies are made all the time. There's little incentive to make an expensive movie without distribution and marketing. Even more, there's little incentive to base your business model on film production if the distribution medium can't provide enough upside to fund the projects.
Just look at our victim here in the TFA; they're charging as much as they dare charge people who will get nothing in return, and for that they will have a miserable budget and they probably won't be able to repeat it under the same conditions. It's like the Million Dollar Webpage of film production: A one-off stunt, nothing more. And there isn't much evidence that even for-pay revenue models for online distribution generate enough money to make a movie honestly, namely: paying everyone a market wage, not calling in any favors, and not relying on the externalities/surpluses of the profitable parts of the film industry.
Online distribution has no coupling to revenue streams, nothing like theatrical moolah anyways -- you'll never see a $100 million BitTorrent (or even Hulu) opening day. The only way you can make money on things online is with Long Tail, and long tail just doesn't make enough in a hurry to fund a movie. Theatrical distribution is still a winning formula for the studios, they make a lot and ever growing stream of revenue from it; their problem is that their budgets have gotten even larger, and that worked as long as DVDs moved, but ever since their window started closing budgets have started to come down. It used to be that a Will Smith or Tom Cruise would get $20 million against 20% of the gross; that just doesn't happen nowadays, particularly since CGI has started really balooning, and 3D conversions and processes are millions of dollars on their own.
But theatrical is here to stay for at least another decade. Nothing replaces Date Night, unless our country turns into a nation of losers and everyone stops going to movies on Friday night in favor of playing an evening of WoW. What an awful outcome; but I saw Raimi on the lot last week and he's developing a Warcraft feature, so maybe the doom encroaches from both ends.
With regard to marketing coupling, you have to get the public branded first, though, and making that happen through Facebook and Google analytics just won't deliver the same numbers as a national ad buy. People don't like movies, movies go out and like THEM. At least that's what you have to do if you want maximium interest; Internet advertising is just too low-impact.
Distribution has nothing to do with making a good movie, I'm just saying very few people make a good movie. We've had very-low-cost distribution channels for 10-15 years now, since DVDs have become standard, and there hasn't been significant movement toward indies, at least compared to the first half of the 90s, which was really a golden age for non-studio films, and those were distributed on FILM. Even Clerks had a theatrical at the time and made a ton of money for Miramax on home video.
There will always be a lot of people with terrible ideas for movies, it just so happens that people will pay to see a terrible idea if you spend $200 million producing and marketing it. What they won't spend $8 to see are bad ideas produced on a shoestring.
Where on Earth do you get that information? Renting home videos out commercially might not be illegal but it sure as hell violates the terms of the license, even if they get away with it.
Those copies at BB are only licensed for private home exhibition (that's why the rental copies cost a lot more and your company pays royalties when you rent them, dipshit). By renting those out you're cheating not just the studio and the distributor, but also the writers, director and actors out of income. My neighbor down the hall is Columbia Pictures Home Ent's Worldwide President, you want me to pass along a URL to your post?
God I hate freeloaders.
You're a Buena Vista freegan!
Apparently good writing isn't that expensive, if one cares to engage in it.
It's very cheap, however it's not exactly the sort of thing you can find at ScriptMart. Creative writing is a very strange beast and people who are consistently good at it are hard to come by and hard to develop, and it's hard to keep them working on things that are going to keep a broad swathe of people interested for two hours. Good scripts can be had for free, but you can also get struck by lightning for free. Anybody can get lucky once.
And even when you find good writing, it's not like people pay $8 to watch a script reading. The movie actually has to be made well, too.
Maybe projects like this will get us off the Hollywood Blockbuster/Direct-To-DVD treadmill.
The Man from Earth didn't make money until it was released on DVD at Blockbuster. That's the only consistent revenue stream films like this have; I know, I've worked on (and have revenue participation in) several of them.
I don't get how people bring up Man from Earth, one film that's barely made any money in absolute terms, and use that as an argument against an entire industry that produces and has to make a profit on hundreds of films in a year. Obviously people are going to make good movies for a small amount of money, but they almost never do so consistently -- the rarity of these projects should be a strong indicator of just how unstable this mode of production is. The only exception I can think of is Tyler Perry, and his films trade completely in niche demographic (read urban black) appeal.
The producer retains copyright except in the territories where he has specifically relaxed it to a local subsidiary, for tax or other reasons. Production companies usually don't make a lot of money from the profits of the show, distributors keep much more. Production companies make much of their money by taking a percentage off the top of the budget as their fee to produce. Producers of course get a nice slice of the gross, but it's the difference between 5 or 10% for the producers and like 50% to the distributors.
Nope. And I don't plan to until 2019 when the Sonny Bono Act, a U.S. copyright term extension heavily promoted by Miramax's parent company, finally wears off.
To be honest, I think your politics is depriving you of a lot of really good movies. So do you never watch a Pixar film either?
Well, the guy who ran IATSE (my union) in the 30s used to keep a .38 on his desk when he had meetings with studio execs :) I'm not sure any SAG negotiator has ever brandished a firearm, but there is the story about Jon Peters threatening Ray Stark when he was Barbara Streisand's manager...
If you spend $20 million on Tom Cruise, you'll make at least that much back in presales; actors generally pay for themselves. On smaller films getting one "name" actor is the difference between the film getting funding or not in the first place, so in that case their value is inestimable.
People will pay to watch cool special effects. If your trailer has awesome shots, people will come to see the movie.
Prints & Ads are expensive, but again people don't go to movies unless they hear about them, and wether or not a film has US distribution and a big marketing push is generally decisive as to wether or not the film will be able to presell foreign territories. P&A pretty easily pays for itself unless the movie is a plain dud.
The thing with films like Paranormal and Man from Earth is that they're essentially stunts that only make money because of their novelty. For everyone one of those that goes on to get recognition there are literally hundreds of quarter-million-dollar quickies that never swing that one festival screening that puts them over the top, or gets them the attention of the fanboy press, lying in wait to deck themselves in the borrowed plumes of the filmmakers they "discover."
There's definitely no business model in making these films, they're so uneven in quality. A much more representative film in the budget range would be something like The Asylum's Transmorfers or Snakes on a Train; ridiculously poor-quality films that get their feature presentation on Sci-Fi channel and profit from their German TV presale.
Notice I'm not saying that Paranormal or Man from Earth are BAD, just that good small-budget films don't reliably profit. Without the reliable profits, it's very hard for these filmmakers to continue making them, because nobody wants to keep making $30k movies all their life, they finally get to the point where they want to make something and not have to beg, borrow and steal to get it made, and they run out of people to call in favors from. Paranormal easily cost over a million dollars when all of the favors and one-time-only deals the filmmakers made are factored in.
For the record, APs work their asses off, and usually earn that credit by doing the line producing or post-production supervision, and are themselves usually one promotion over the coffee gofers and runners. It's miserable and unglamorous work and as a technician I have nothing but respect for them.
You might be getting confused between Associate Producers and Executive Producers, but even they sometimes work very hard, or if they don't work on the film they at least are risking millions of dollars of their own money. Everybody's different of course.