Hollywood Babble On & On #1174: Original Origins

Hollywood loves superhero movies, they make a lot of money.

Hollywood loves reboots, rehashes, and remakes, because they make executives feel safe.

Combine the two, and the Hollywood studios think that they've got a license to print money.

One problem, it's driving fans nuts, because not only are we seeing origin stories, we're seeing the same origin stories over and over again.

Here's a good example...

When Sam Raimi's Spider-Man franchise sputtered out in the overwrought and overcrowded Spider-Man 3, Sony, desperate to keep the franchise in the hands and not back with Marvel/Disney had two options. They could have "James Bonded" it, and just changed the actors and filmmakers and had Spider-Man go off on a new more or less stand-alone adventure, or they could reboot it, with a retelling of the origin story.

They decided to go for the reboot.

Why?

The real reason is that the people running the studio think that simply continuing a successful franchise isn't enough, you have to go and redo a specific story that they know for a fact has succeeded in the past.

However, that's not what they told the public and the filmmakers.

Those people were told that the reboot was necessary to bring about a new creative vision that will take the characters and the franchise in new directions.

But did it?

In the retelling they just seemed to take the elements from the first Sam Raimi film and just shuffled them around like a deck of cards with a few tweaks to create the illusion of depth. They added a storyline about a conspiracy about Peter Parker's dead parents, had Norman and Harry Osborne switch places in the whole Green Goblin storyline, and piled money on the whole thing with two hands.

It seemed to work. The two Amazing Spider-Man films made a lot of money at the global box-office. But there's a catch.

So much was spent on those movies that Sony's margins on them were either paper-thin, or nonexistent. This means they've delayed the third film, and are, no doubt, thinking about rebooting the whole damn origin story all over again.

There's also reports that Fox's reboot of The Fantastic 4 will feature a retelling of their origin story, which was done in the first Fantastic 4 movie.

Oy.

So let's take a moment to consider when and why you should tell a superhero's origin story.

1. IF THE AUDIENCE DOESN'T KNOW IT ALREADY.

Iron Man needed to have his origin story told, because the general audience really didn't know where he came from and why he does what he does. Simple.

However, if his story was fully part of modern folklore and can be recited by a child in a country that doesn't even have comics, then you probably don't need to do it.

But what about Batman Begins?

Batman Begins was technically a reboot of Batman's… beginnings, but unlike Amazing Spider-Man it actually served two purposes.

First, it corrected the error of Tim Burton's Batman that made a pre-Joker Joker the killer of the elder Waynes instead of common street punk Joe Chill. By denying Bruce Wayne vengeance against the person directly responsible for the deaths of his parents, it forces him to act out against crime in general.

Second, it filled in the mechanics of how a young boy survived a terrible trauma to become the ruthless butt-kicking cape-wearing maniac we all know and love today.

2. IF THE ORIGIN CAN'T BE TOLD IN A TWEET.

Let's face it, you can sum up the origins of a lot of superheroes fairly quickly. Superman: Alien gets powers from our sun, Spider-Man: Gets bit by a radioactive spider, loses his beloved uncle. Etc…

So if you can get away with just saying "This happened and that's why they're like this" and just get going with the adventuring. 

3. IF IT HAS SPECIFIC RELATIONSHIP TO THE CHARACTER BEYOND JUST GIVING THEM POWERS.

Right now Marvel is casting their Doctor Strange, and it would probably be a good idea to include his origin story in the film. He's not that well known, and his becoming the Sorcerer Supreme plays a major role in his character's story arc. He starts off as an arrogant neurosurgeon, confident he has mastery over life and death, has an accident, can't do surgery anymore, and his desperate search for a cure leads him into a hidden world of mystery and magic.

That's a pretty involved story, and pretty important to the character. So it can be forgiven for telling his origin story, as long as they only do it ONCE.

Anyway, that's what I think, let me know what you think in the comments.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1173: Palpating Palpatine & Missing Mythbusters...

PALPATING PALPATINE

Since Star Wars 7 is a JJ Abrams production there's naturally lots of rumours spewing all over the internet. The latest is that the Emperor Palpatine, chronologically last seen being tossed to his alleged doom down a shaft in the Death Star by Darth Vader, will be making a comeback as the main villain.

If you remember JJ Abrams' modus operandi he loves to leak rumours about what he's working on, strongly and vehemently deny that those rumours are true, and then, when the picture's released, reveal that the rumours were true all along. (e.g. Star Trek Into Darkness.)

Now while all signs are saying that the rumours are true, I'm hoping it's not true for these reasons.

1. FAN SERVICE OVER STORY: The only reason to bring Palpatine back is because when Abrams takes over a franchise he feels he has to go all in for what he thinks the fans want, most famously with casting fan-favourite actor Benedict Cumberbatch, inappropriately as fan favourite villain Khan.

But here's a question: How many people, fans included, were actually satisfied by the story in Star Trek Into Darkness? 

Then answer is: Not many.

Fan service characters and casting infects the story, and becomes an excuse to avoid the hard work of creating something new that the audience would find interesting.

2. RENDERS VADER MEANINGLESS: Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back tricked the audience into thinking that it was the story of Luke Skywalker, the revelation that Vader was Luke's father in Empire,  his redemption by tossing Palpatine down the shaft in Return of the Jedi and the story of his fall in the prequel trilogy showed that the saga was really all about Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader.

Bring Palpatine back and Anakin/Darth is no longer the fallen soul being redeemed through suffering and sacrifice, he's just a bump on Palpatine's road of mischief making.

And that's another thing…

3. IT CHEAPENS PALPATINE: Here's JJ Abrams' sales pitch: "We'll bring back Palpatine, he'll be played by another actor, so he'll look different, sound different, and he won't be ruling the Galaxy anymore, but he'll still be bad-ass because the actor will be a lot younger, and we'll use truckloads of CGI."

Anyway, I'd have preferred they create a new threat born from the chaos of a post-Palpatine galaxy, but Hollywood can't resisting rehashing stuff because they know you fans will lap it up like the salivating dogs that you are.

MISSING MYTHBUSTERS

For some reason this is the only pic I could find

The long running blow-shit-up-in-the-name-of-science show Mythbusters is trimming 3/5s of its cast for the next season. They're dropping long running build team Kari Byron, Tory Belleci and Grant Imahara.

The producers and the Discovery Channel say it's to bring the show back to its roots of just having original hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, but I don't really buy that.

I suspect they're trying to trim costs, but are doing so at the risk of alienating some of the show's long running fans who literally came of age in the long time those three were on the show.

Crying shame.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1172: A Minority Report of One

Amblin TV,  the TV production arm of mega mogul Stephen Spielberg, is developing a TV series version of Spielberg's 2002 hit Minority Report.

In case you don't remember the movie, it was an adaptation of a Phillip K. Dick story about an elite police unit that handles "pre-crimes." Basically three "pre-cogs" with the ability to see the future spot crimes before they happen have their visions analyzed by police, and then the suspect is then grabbed and imprisoned without trial.

Now the unit isn't shut down by the Supreme Court for its total destruction of the legal system on the word of three chemically mutated people who live int a kiddie pool, instead, it's brought down by Tom Cruise, the unit's commander, when it predicts that he'll kill someone after a lot of chases, fights, and other big action set-pieces.

Now unlike other movie-to-series ideas I'm not going to judge if the premise has enough meat to become a decent TV series. (Since the premise of "pre-crime" fighting does lie at the heart of the successful series Person of Interest.)

This time around I'm going offer some advice to the lovely folks at Amblin TV.

If they want Minority Report to succeed as a TV series then there is one person they must keep as far away from it as possible, and that person's name is…

STEPHEN SPIELBERG

Now you're probably wonder "But he's behind some of the biggest movies in Hollywood history, his touch should be golden when it comes to TV!"

You'd think that, but then you'd be wronger than a wrong person who just climbed up the wrong tree on the corner of Wrong & Really Wrong in the heart of the town of Wrongsville, Population: You.

When it comes to developing TV series Spielberg and Amblin's record is decidedly checkered. If you do some deep digging you quickly realize that Amblin/Dreamworks' most successful TV projects tend to be the ones that have an arms length relationship with the great man himself.

However, if it's one of Spielberg's "passion projects" the odds say it's doomed to be an expensive flop.

Examples:

Amazing Stories, a wildly uneven sci-fi/fantasy anthology series that tried to revive the wonder found in old pulp-magazines like the show's namesake and early sci-fi shows like The Twilight Zone, but was too often mired in sentimentality and cliche.

Seaquest DSV, a show set on a submarine where the smartest character was the dolphin, who wasn't smart enough to swim to a better show.

Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, got pretty good reviews and ratings, but was so damned expensive, the network couldn't afford to keep it, though they did try to keep it alive via TV movies, but it was doomed almost from the beginning.

Terra Nova at first it sounded like it was guaranteed to be the biggest thing on TV. You had a show with time-travel, dinosaurs, and Spielberg was personally invested in its success. What could go wrong? Apparently everything.

So why does Spielberg have a reverse Midas touch when it comes to television?

It's born in how Spielberg operates. His organization is very much a family affair, built around a small, tightly knit clique of trusted insiders. Spielberg has a horrible aversion to conflict and confrontation, and this tightly knit clique works very hard making sure he doesn't hear any bad news.

Now within this clique there is, no doubt, some facility to debate and discuss ideas, however if you're outside this clique, forget about it.

So let's look at how shows are made. Basically a network commissions a pilot based on a pitch, and if the pilot gets a green light to become a series, those involved in the show, then have all sorts of conflicts and confrontations that hash out the idea into a television series for better or for worse. It works best when there's a strong creative team behind the show that have a solid vision behind it.

You can't do that if Spielberg is "intimately involved" in the show.

That's the main problem of Spielberg being a key player in a TV show's development. While his presence may get a pilot commissioned, he usually fades away during the important creative process that lies between the pilot script and the green-lit series, because he's got better things to do called "movies."

So you get a dangerous combination, where the projects are often passed off to people who often aren't as emotionally invested in the project as Spielberg. Even if they were, and wanted to fight passionately for the project, the network will insist they defer to Spielberg, and since Spielberg lives in horror of conflict, and is distracted by his movie projects, will go along with the network just to get along, as long as the network pledges to spending truckloads of cash making and promoting the show. Since he's promoted himself as being "intimately involved" he feels compelled to make those sorts of decisions, whether he's giving it 100% of his mental energies or not.

This leads to some pretty weak tea, lacking coherent leadership and world building, and a network shovelling buckets of money into it.

My advice is for Spielberg to publicly recuse himself from nominal leadership of this show as soon as he finds someone with the passion and the will to handle the conflict and confrontations that he isn't willing to.

Then they might have a success.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1171: Devil's TV & Executioner Update.

NBC must be listening to the voice of Satan himself, because they're developing a TV series based on The Devil's Advocate, a 1997 movie starring Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves.

If you don't remember the movie, and there's a good reason for that, it's about an ambitious young lawyer played by Keanu Reeves, who gets recruited to work for the most powerful law firm in the country, and the man who runs it, played by Al Pacino, just happens to be Lucifer himself.

Now I might understand wanting to do a series based on a movie that was a monster hit adored by audiences that opened doors to wider storytelling, and had left the audience demanding more.

Devil's Advocate is not that movie.

At the box office it was a mediocrity, earning $60 million domestically, and doing $90 million overseas, which combined probably meant that it barely broke even on its $57 million production budget.

Was it adored by those who saw it? Most view as a laughable bit of ill-cast camp where Al Pacino overacts and Keanu Reeves does his best impression of a piece of furniture. It gets rerun on cable a lot, but that may have more to do with it being available than by popular demand.

As for wider storytelling… Well, the main plot line, which the series will have to stretch out for the whole run, was probably more fitting for a half-hour Twilight Zone episode rather than a feature film, let alone a TV series. It would probably very quickly devolve into yet another legal procedural, but one that ends every goddamn episode with the head of the firm tenting his fingers and smiling evilly at how well his manipulations are going.

Now the reasoning behind this is probably because of the critical cult success NBC is having with Hannibal, which stars the villain from The Silence of the Lambs franchise.

However, Hannibal doesn't come from a single cinematic mediocrity, it comes from a whole series of books and movies, that have detailed and complex backstories that they're not only exploiting, they're taking them into strange new directions. It's also being made by a team of filmmakers who bring a level of quality in script and visuals that was unimaginable on TV just a few years ago.

Hannibal came about from desperation on NBC's part for viewers and respectability forcing them to accept a daring and compelling vision on the part of the show's creators.

With the Devil's Advocate, I only see the desperation.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe a miracle can happen.

_____________________

UPDATE: Warner Bros. has bought into Shane Salerno's Mack Bolan project, and Bradley Cooper's been signed on for the lead role.

As I predicted, the R-Rated book franchise will become a PG-13 action movie franchise. 

What I didn't predict was that it'll be directed by the director of The Hangover.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1170: Can Hollywood Execute The Executioner?

Screenwriter Shane Salerno has inked a deal with the estate of writer Don Pendleton and publisher Gold Eagle Books, itself an imprint of Harlequin Books, to attempt to bring the character of Mack Bolan, The Executioner, to the big screen, marking the latest in 40 years of trying.

In case you might not have spent anytime perusing the bookshelf at a convenience store or bus station in the 1970s to the 1990s I'll give you the low-down.

Mack Bolan was created by Don Pendleton in the late 1960s for a market that's pretty much forgotten now, paperback novels for men. They started as the simple story of a Vietnam veteran becoming a vigilante when his family falls victim to Mafia exploitation. At first he's just using heavy calibre weapons to kill gangsters and hippies, but then he ends up working for a covert agency taking on foreign spies and international terrorists. He's even been cited as an inspiration for Marvel Comics character The Punisher.

Over the decades dozens of authors have written literally hundreds of Mack Bolan adventures and his name was put on a short lived action/mystery mag, and since the beginning people have been trying to get a movie made. Steve McQueen, Vin Diesel and everyone in between have tried, and usually never get past the development stage.

Salerno is hoping to get a script together, get a star attached to the script, and then get someone to produce the film.

It's an unconventional way to get a movie made, and I wish him luck, but there's a big roadblock that I don't think even the Executioner can blow up.

It's called the "R-Rating."

I'm no expert, having never read a Mack Bolan book, but I do believe that they're known for their over-the-top high calibre sex and violence.

Hollywood has proven to be increasingly reluctant to pull the trigger on an R-Rated action movie that above a certain budget. That's because R-Rated movies have recently hit a wall when it comes to what they can pull in at the box office. Media outlets get iffy about when and where advertisements for R-Rated movies can go, and who can see them.

Since Hollywood can't seem to make a romantic comedy for less than $80 million these days, an over-the-top action/crime thriller made by Hollywood could easily top $100 million budget-wise, and about the same for marketing. That's a lot of money for a movie and the studio will want to hedge its bets by removing what made the franchise's name, making it PG-13 at least so they can sell it to brain-dead teens who have probably never even heard of the Executioner book franchise.

So this project is a high risk venture, no matter how you slice it. Make it like the books, run the risk of diminishing the box office, make it PG-13 and it becomes just another action movie completely indistinguishable from the other action movies.

The Book Report: State of an Industry...

Some have noted that in recent posts about the book industry that may come off as a tad anti-Amazon. Well, I'm a tad anti-dysfunction, and Amazon has recently been the biggest, pushiest, and loudest part of a very dysfunctional industry.  So let's take a look at the industry as a whole.

AMAZON

They're biggest problem is that they want to be more than just the best place to get a book or e-book, they want to be the ONLY place to get a book or e-book.  

They're racking up big losses on the road to monopoly-land so they're picking fights with publishers, authors, and even Disney to take on some of Amazon's losses for them. While some think nationalizing it is the key, I think some actual competition might be just what the business needs.

The feud between Amazon and publishers is preventing the market from reaching a natural price point for e-books.

BIG FIVE PUBLISHERS

The Big Five used to be the Big 6 before merger mania put Penguin and Random House together.

Where to begin?

The industry acts less like an industry and more like a gentleman's club from the 1900s than a real industry. Everything's all very polite, and no one would dare compete too aggressively with a fellow club member.

It's also resistant to change, having been dragged kicking and screaming by market realities into paperbacks, and now into e-books. Even though e-books are a great way to get their mid-list titles moving at a very low cost, they spend more time and effort trying to figure out ways to sink it, than to exploit it. I'm talking about complex DRM, prohibitive pricing, and now Scholastic is thinking of a new "streaming subscription" model where you pay for e-books, but don't actually own them.

Now you might wonder what I mean by "mid-list" titles. Well, those are books written by authors who are not big New York Times best-seller list superstars, or celebrities. They usually write the genre fiction that stocks the shelves and keeps readers entertained, and are the bread and butter of the industry, but many find it harder to make a living now than ever before because whenever the Big Five have any sort of setback or problem, they slash their mid-lists, either by reducing advances to less than minimum wage standards, or just dropping authors completely.

Although they deny it, I suspect that one of the problems that afflict the biggest publishers is that the celebrity based books that land their "authors" massive advances don't sell as well as the Big Five like to claim they do. Take for example the essay collection Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham the creator/star of HBO's Girls. She got a $3.7 million advance on the basis of her celebrity.

But is she really a celebrity?

She gets a lot of hype within the New York centric media, but her show struggles to find more than 500,000 viewers, which even by today's fractured viewing standards counts as a flop. Also her attempts to present herself as a "Jane Average" speaking for the "average girls" sound like the female equivalent of Thurston Howell III trying to make friends in a working class tavern in Akron, by pretending to be "one of them." 

Then there's the big money deals for "novels" "written" by Jersey Shore humanoid stain Snooki, whose fans were either illiterate, or watched the show simply for the schadenfreude of saying "look at those lower order buffoons" but who wouldn't be caught dead spending money on her book.

The Big Five would defend themselves saying "Those were good investments, look at the Best-Seller lists!" Well, I'll get to the problems with the Best-Seller lists momentarily, but let's just say we can't really trust them. What I would like to see is a thorough neutral 3rd party audit that reveals how many of these big money celebrity-author deals, which are made by the dozens every year, actually make money. Then maybe the Big Five might learn to be more discriminating with who they make these sorts of deals with, and how much they spend.

NON-AMAZON BOOKSELLERS

Amazon is more than just a retailer, it also has a division that publishes books and e-books, and has actively recruited mid-list authors who were being dropped or being screwed over the Big Five. However, try to get one of these books at your neighbourhood bookstore, and you're out of luck.

That's because many of the big retail chains and distributors have refused to carry anything released by Amazon's publishing imprints.

But wait, there's more…

Many authors, including some major best-sellers, have deals adapting their work as movies or television series for release on Amazon's video service. They're not boycotted, because they're big sellers signed to big publishers, so there's a wee bit of a double standard there.

I think such a business practice is being used by Amazon to justify some of their own antics. Which creates a seemingly unending cycle of stupid where the biggest victims are the mid-list writers signed to Amazon publishing who can't get their books in stores.

Also, try to order a book at a bookstore, even a major chain, and you will have to wait weeks to get what you want. That's no way to compete with Amazon. That's why I relentlessly advocate the publishers and the booksellers work together at adopting the latest print-on-demand technology to make any book available at every bookstore within a matter of minutes.

SALES METRICS

I mentioned earlier that we can't trust the measurements that tell us what is really a best-seller and what isn't. The premiere list is the New York Times Best-Seller List, and it has a dirty little secret, in fact, the whole thing is a secret, and may have very little to do with people actually buying books.

You see the algorithm is a trade secret of the New York Times, supposedly to prevent anyone from manipulating it. However, it can be, and has been manipulated.

The most obvious case involves the novel I, Libertine by Frederick R. Ewing, a saucy adventure set in Georgian England. It made the NYT best-seller list in 1956 even though it did not exist. It was a creation by radio raconteur and author Jean Shepherd who was unhappy with how the list was managed, and decided to game the system by asking his listeners to order a book that didn't exist. He made up the title, a fictional author, and some plot points in case anyone asked for more detail.

It worked, it made it onto the best-seller list, and Ballantine Books even made a deal with Shepherd to have Theodore Sturgeon write a real version of the book, that too made it to the best-seller list.

You don't think publishers know how to game the system by now?

SELF-PUBLISHING

Publishing your own books may seem like a great idea. Hell, I've done it myself, but guess what, the odds of finding an audience are infinitesimal than if you had a more traditional publisher.

It's next to impossible to be found among the hoards of amateur dinosaur erotica, or set yourself apart from the tens of thousands of wannabes who just slap up their first draft with some eye-bleedingly bad cover-art in the hopes that they'll be the next big discovery.

Traditional publishers offer editors, marketing, and the unmentioned notion that someone separated this bit of wheat from the reams of unreadable chaff. Selling in any serious amount as a self-published author requires a level of luck found only among lottery winners.

That's what I think, feel free to tell me what you think.

The Book Report: Just Who Is Uniting Here?

Amazon has sent out an e-mail to just about everyone on the planet, and also opened a website called READERS UNITED, which they're using to declare themselves as the defender of the little guy against big meanie Hachette, and that all they want is to bring down the price of e-books.

Amazon makes some valid points.

1. E-books should be cheaper than a hardcover since they don't involve manufacturing a physical product, simply formatting an already digitized file and storing it on servers with literally billions of other books.

2. The publishing industry, especially among the Big 5, are slow to appreciate that e-books should be cheaper. The irony is that they don't need to engage in active illegal collusion on the matter, since the top echelons of the Big 5 have a long history of being resistant to change, and a reputation for moving like a herd without having to collude over anything. They treat publishing as a gentleman's club, sans strippers, and act accordingly, refusing to rock the boat.

However, is Amazon really the champion of the little guy in this fight?

Not really.

You see Amazon wants a monopoly on the book business, plain and simple. When you want a book, they want you to go to them and only them.

That's not healthy.

Not for publishers.

Now for writers.

Not for readers.

And actually not for Amazon in the long run.

This is because monopolies follow a pattern: Growth, Power, Decay, then Collapse with some government bailouts in between. The wannabe Monopolists can't avoid this pattern, but they hope to be long retired to their billionaire mega-mansions before the monopoly they created hits the Decay stage.

Building a monopoly is also damaging in the short run. To crush their competition Amazon is using their status as a major bulk retailer to slash their prices to levels no one else can match.

The problem is that Amazon can't match these prices either, and are racking up massive losses that they can't keep up doing forever. They need someone else to start losing money too, and they hope the publishers will go along with them.

Only Hachette isn't playing ball.

Now this is where I'm going to butt my know-it-all nose in.

The problem with e-book pricing is that they are not natural prices.

You see pricing is all about balance.

It's about finding that balance between what allows the manufacturers and retailers to profit, and the price the consumers are willing to pay.

Manufacturers like publishers, and retailers like Amazon, all have expenses. Publishers have to pay writers, editors, printers, technical staff, etc… and Amazon has to maintain offices, warehouses, and a massive tech-support staff. All those have to be included in the calculations when determining a price.

Then they have to include to average numbers of units they move, and how much consumers are willing to pay for what they're offering.

Go too high, and consumers will move on, charge too low, and you can't make payroll.

Amazon wants to go too low, but wants the publishers to suck up those losses so they can still make payroll. The publishers, like any business,  do not like losses, and use any sort of setback in business as an excuse to shit on the non-celebrity authors in their roster.

What both sides need to do is to step the fuck back and let a natural price form and use discounts for special offers and sales. That's what happened to the paperbacks that Amazon likes to cite, and they became a vital part of the business.

If they do let nature take its course they might find that everyone can be happy from the deal, publishers, writers, retailers, and readers.

So take a stand when buying e-books from Amazon and only buy all three of these e-books:

JOE AVERAGE - 2 Four-Star reviews for its mix of superhero action, satire, and even political intrigue.

MINDER - A complex thriller about a killer hired to stop other killers from committing a killing.

STUDIO NOTES FOR LITERARY CLASSICS - A cute little e-book that answers the question "What if the great works of literature had to deal with the meddling that goes into modern movies."

You can't blame me for a little shameless self-promotion.

I like money but never have enough of it.