Hollywood Babble On & On #296: Lionsgate Losses

Lionsgate's management may have been able to fight off Carl Icahn & Co.'s takeover bid for a while, but I think their side has been dealt a pretty harsh blow by cold unfeeling numbers.

The mini-major's losses for the last fiscal year topped $163 million ($1.40 a share) which is more than double the $74 million (62 cents a share) which they lost last fiscal year.

This development maybe just what Icahn needs to resuscitate his siege of the company, by bringing up these losses to the very shareholders that gave management a second chance via their sale of a share of their TV Guide Channel and other deals. He can say: "Look what that second chance got you, more losses!" and go on from there.

Lionsgate management is trying to spin this story by tooting how much their revenue went up, beyond even the predictions of so-called Wall Street experts.

And while upward revenue is a wonderful thing, it's not going to do you much good when you have more money going out.

The biggest problem with Lionsgate is that the folks running it don't appear happy running a successful independent film company. They appear to want to be like Universal, Warner Bros. or Paramount and become a massive media conglomerate, humming with buzzwords like "synergy" and "multi-platform."

They appear to have forgotten that when you have a company with a successful business model, you don't fix what ain't broken. Sure growth is nice, but it has to be natural growth, born from success, not from having the corporate ego write checks the corporate body can't cash.

I'm rooting for whoever can take Lionsgate and return it to its roots, as a company that made money by filling in the gaps left by those big conglomerates.

Because if making money can't make a businessman happy, then they're in the wrong business.

Hollywood Babble On & On #295: Miscellaneous Monday Movie Related Musings

1. AND NOW THE LOGO...

The new William Morris-Endeavor Agency has revealed its new logo...
When I first saw this logo I thought is was for some new brand of flavoured water, and that flavour was "water."

The WmE2 is supposed to stand for William Morris-Endeavor/Entertainment. (See, E2 means 2 words beginning with 'E' how brilliant.)

This logo doesn't really inspire confidence in me. It looks to me like the product of foggy-headed focus groups because no one in any position of authority wanted to stick their neck out and make a real decision.

Look at what I did with 5 minutes in photoshop:
Sure, it's crap, but it's still better than the bland bottled water label they picked.

2. CHASE SCENE AT NEWS CORP.

DirectTV boss Chase Carey and his mighty mustache of doom have been tapped by Rupert Murdoch to become the number two man at News Corp..

While I don't know much about Mr. Carey, I do believe he will fit in with Murdoch's barbershop quartet, The Foxy 4.

Hear All About It!!

Here's an embedded audio player with the Mike Hanson Sha'Daa: Tales of the Apocalypse interview on the Dark Fiction Show. I'm listening to it myself right now.



And if you want to order the book, then click my widget...

Sunday Survey Question: Guilty Pleasures

Today I'm going ask you, my occasional readers to offer up a confession, if you will, to your movie-pop culture related guilty pleasures.

I'll start. My guilty pleasure for some reason are British murder mystery TV movies. If a show featuring Inspector Morse, Adam Dalgliesh, or the corpse of the lecherous Lord Autumnbottom turning up in the vicar's rose garden, comes on, I'm going to watch it, and if it's well done, I'll probably enjoy it.

I'm not sure where it comes from, having been inducted into crime fiction via Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Jim Thompson, I was positive that I'd be solely into film noir, and other more "gritty" productions, and eschew the unhip "cozy" genre, but while I love film noir, they are not my secret movie crack.

So what are your pop-culture guilty pleasures?

Saturday Silliness Cinema: 2 Bits of Fry & Laurie

Time for my usual break from ranting about the business of show business to have a larf.

Before he became the curmudgeonly Dr. House, Hugh Laurie was part of the comedy team Fry & Laurie, with longtime comedy partner Stephen Fry.

Today we have a couple of choice bits from their BBC TV show.

Enjoy.

Hollywood Babble On & On #294: More Miscellaneous Movie Musings

1. ENOUGH WITH THE REMAKES

Word is out that a Hollywood studio is looking to remake Girls Just Want To Have Fun, a 1980s high school comedy that was otherwise forgotten as anything but a trivia question because it marked some of the first movie work of Helen Hunt and Sarah Jessica Parker.

My only question is: Why?

The original film didn't really make any sort of effect other than giving some then unknown actresses a paycheck. Plus, it's title was just a blatant attempt to cash in on the popularity of a Cyndi Lauper song. This remake is already dated before it's been made. If they want a high school comedy, just hire some young writers and directors to make a new one for you. It worked for Superbad.

Don't be so scared of new ideas that you're already scraping way below the bottom of the barrel for material.

And don't get me started on the reports that Fox wants to remake Alien.

It was done right the first time!

2. SPECTOR'S GOING TO PRISON

The inventor of the wall of sound will spend 15 to life staring at a wall of concrete. That's right, Phil Spector was sentenced this week, and it looks more like a life sentence at his age. Of course Lana Clarkson, the poor actress he shot, got the death penalty for something that made sense only in the snakepit of Spector's mind.

Didn't Spector know, that when you're rich and insane, you are supposed to be eccentric, not homicidal.

3. ATTACK OF THE GOLDEN PARATROOPERS

Word is that Jim Wiatt, the exiting CEO of WMA, will be getting $16 million as part of his exit package during the merger with Endeavor to form WME.

Now I don't know the details, but I am assuming that they're going to put some sort of non-compete fee into his final severance package. A non-compete fee is when the new management of a company pay the outgoing management an agreed upon sum to ensure that the outgoing management won't start up their own company and compete with them. Usually they have an expiry date of about five years.

This $16 mil might only be the beginning, and I hope that Wiatt gets WME to include a promise not to prosecute him over a non-compete fee. Newspaper mogul Conrad Black was indicted for taking such a fee for himself when he sold some of his newspapers, which led to his ouster from the company by board members who claimed that they deserved a piece of it. Those same board members then drove the company into ruin within a matter of months, proving that it was right for Black to get the money. (Black was ultimately convicted of "obstruction of justice" for moving boxes of records that he had been asked to move by his accusers, it's currently under appeal)

4. WHO WILL HEAD SAG?

The race for the leadership of the Screen Actors Guild is reportedly between actors Martin Sheen, and James Cromwell.

I personally think that whoever wins, they need someone who won't be blinded by ideology, and remember that they are in a business, and that people's livelihoods are at stake, and not to be sacrificed for a cause.

They also need someone who can end the rifts, both internal, and with the other unions, that have plagued SAG throughout this situation, and get the union in fighting shape.

I wish them luck.

A Quick piece of Self Promotion...

Mike Hanson, the creator of Sha'Daa: Tales of the Apocalypse, a novel-anthology hybrid to which I contributed Chapter 6: Dixie Chrononauts, will be appearing on the Ben Eads Dark Fiction Show, on Saturday May 30th, at 11 PM EST.

If you can't catch it live, you can download it as a podcast and listen to it at your leisure.

And if you would like a copy of the book then click my widget...

Hollywood Babble On & On #293: Miscellaneous Musings

1. TIME WARNER DROPS ITS AOL

The Time Warner mega-conglomerate spat out its one-time dominant partner AOL after about 9 years of slowly sinking so it can become an independent publicly traded company.

When the merger happened all the self-proclaimed "experts" were saying that it was the greatest thing the business world had ever seen, and dropping lame buzzwords like "synergy" in all directions like a monkey hurling feces. Now myself, who is not an expert, figured that it was probably going to be an even bigger business blunder than New Coke.

Guess who turned out to be right?

That's because companies are a lot like people. They can grow, but once they hit a certain line they stop getting big and start getting fat, and then have a big corporate coronary.

At the time of the merger both companies had hit the extent of their growth, and decided to do the corporate equivalent of cleaning out an all you can eat buffet solo.

This was the peak of the dot-com bubble, so AOL was extremely overvalued, and when the bubble burst, it ended up with a lot of debt and a business that can be described as stagnant at best.

But that wasn't the only thing that didn't pass the smell test with me when I first heard about it.

You see, in business, companies have a comfort zone, and both Time Warner and AOL were going way past their comfort zones, simply because the dot-com bubble was making promises that no industry could keep. It was a merger based not on sound business principles, but on financial hysteria, like tulip growers merging in 16th century Holland, it just couldn't work in the real world.

But what do I know, I'm not an expert.

2. SMOKE DAMN IT!!

An anti-smoking group is going around Hollywood with this vehicle: (ht- Nikki Finke)
Now I know that movies have the power to sell, that's a given.

However, and I don't mean to sound brutal, but I think a case can be argued that any kid who willingly takes dried leaves bathed in toxic chemicals and wrapped in paper, sets it on fire, and then puts it in their mouth in order to inhale the known toxic gases it emits, for the transient yet addictive joys of nicotine and pretty much inevitable death by lung cancer, just because they saw Hugh Jackman puff a cigar in Wolverine, is not really a tragedy, but natural selection at work.

I mean we've had 30+ years of anti-smoking education, and anyone choosing to smoke these days, should probably puff themselves into oblivion before dipping their toe into the gene pool.

Yes, movies can sell things, history is loaded with examples, but can the "bad-ass" attitude of Wolverine really compete with a human lung riddled with tumors, slowly oozing black slime, and reeking of tar, medical preservatives, and a subtle whiff of putrefaction shown at a school presentation? Because people still have free will, and if it is their will to choose tumor tar lung, then that's their choice and they will have to live with the consequences.

Besides smoking is expensive, inconvenient, and really limp making in a sexual sense to me. If I see a woman smoking a cigarette, no matter how hot she may look, she's automatically deleted from my fantasy file. I'm afraid it's because my imagination is a little too vivid, and there's nothing like the memory of tobacco breath to act like anti-viagra.

3. BAD LIEUTENANT?

Okay, I just caught a preview of Werner Herzog's "re-imagining" of Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, and it raises the question: What does this film have to do with the original?

I mean it looks like it has a different plot, location, themes, and leading character. In fact, the only similarity I can see is that both films feature police lieutenants with drug and corruption problems.

So why didn't they just give the film a different title and avoid the remake controversy altogether?

I mean I'm used to some strange logic in film-making, but this makes less sense than usual.

Hollywood Babble On & On #292: Marketing & Free Markets

Despite record breaking box-office tallies the major studios are asking the marketing firms that handle trailers and advertising to take some pretty major cuts. In response the marketers made this video: (ht Nikki Finke)



If they wanted to make the video more in keeping with the real situation, the people trying to get out of paying for what they want should tell the vendors that they want to keep the money so Grampa, the CEO of the family so to speak, can piss it all away on slot machines.

This whole affair, and this video specifically, illustrates that the people who run Hollywood don't know the first thing about real capitalism.

First, in a truly free market, free of fraud a coercion, the price that's available is what the market can bear. Now some have a little wiggle room for haggling, but that's rare, and even then it's not much wiggle room. The object costs because that's what it costs.

Second is that capitalism is the only system designed to give both sides of every deal what they want. Because in a capitalist system without fraud and coercion everyone is supposed to walk away happy. The buyer gets what they wanted, and the vendor got a good price for what they were selling.

It's simple logic really.

However, this is Hollywood we're talking about, and logic doesn't hold sway in this magical little kingdom.

In Hollywood all business is based on fraud and coercion. From tricking people into signing for a piece of the net, which is never seen, to bullying suppliers with the threat of starting their own internal marketing departments to drive them out of business.

Which takes me to the second stupid thing about this situation.

The marketing agencies that the studios are currently feuding with, were created because the studios didn't like paying so much for running their own marketing departments and shut them down in favour of cheaper freelance contractors.

It's the circle of stupid.

Hollywood Babble On & On #291: Flogging a Dead Franchise

In the aftermath of Terminator Salvation's lukewarm reception producer/director Fran Rubel Kuzui has decided to reboot the Buffy The Vampire Slayer franchise for the big screen sans creator Joss Whedon, or definitive Buffy Sarah Michelle Gellar, or Alyson Hannigan as nerd-goddess Willow.

This shows one of the fundamental problems with franchise films. Hollywood studios are just a little too eager to revamp, reimagine, and reboot any franchise at the drop of a hat, with little or no thought as to whether or not that franchise can be rebooted.

You see, Buffy has already been rebooted and completed. The first incarnation was an uneven and mostly forgotten bit of cinematic camp Kuzui directed almost 20 years ago. The reboot was handled by creator/show-runner Joss Whedon and it became a cult classic that brought a level of wit, charm, and well developed characters to the horror/dark fantasy TV genre.

It also had an ending.

Do you see what I'm getting at?

Then allow me to explain.

The Buffy TV series went farther narratively than the usual "monster of the week" that would be delivered by a lesser series. The characters had arcs, they changed over time, they made new friends, enemies, lovers, and loathers, and it all wrapped up in a big final battle that wrapped everything up and left the characters off to find new adventures in other places.

While the characters live on in a Whedon overseen comic book series at Dark Horse, those who only know it from the TV show, have a sense of completion. It's over, it's done, and let's all move on.

A reboot of a product like that, with already well defined characters, and storylines, seems like nothing more than a shameless cash grab, rather than the promise of something new. Creating new characters and plots for the franchise is essentially pissing in the ears of fans and telling them that it's raining. It's telling the fans that the story and characters they invested so much in during the show's run, was nothing, ignore it, forget it, and give me money for this whole new thing with an old familiar name, because my last Hollywood credit was in 2004. It makes fans feel cheated.

And the promise to make this new project somehow "darker" and "edgier" shows a lack of knowledge of the show that Kuzui is credited as executive producer. The show dealt with grief, depression, insanity, corruption, murder, and often killed off popular characters to serve the story. You really can't get much darker than that, unless you make Buffy a drug addict who only hallucinates vampires and is actually slaying small orphan children.

Buffy is what I call a "Story" franchise, and like the Terminator, it had a beginning, a middle, and an end. And when it was finished, folks accepted the ending and moved on.

Now not all franchises are Story Franchises. They are what I call Premise Franchises. Now it is tricky to tell them apart, but it can be done.

The classic example are the James Bond series. Unlike Buffy it is a story that never ends, because it is really just a premise. James Bond is a secret agent, and he fight international super-villains. That's pretty much it. Some of the stories have character arcs within them, but Bond will still be Bond by the next movie, and there will always be another super-villian. Unlike Buffy, he will never have a final battle and close the hellmouth that attracts supervillians like moths to flames.

That's why Bond goes on, through half a dozen actors, and even more writers and directors. The same can be said of superhero franchises, which deals more with the hero meeting new villain premise over an overarching storyline.

Now many thought Star Trek was a Story Franchise, but recent events show that it's actually more of a Premise Franchise. The premise being Kirk goes to Uranus to wipe out Klingons, visit strange new worlds, etc... etc...

Maybe that was because the original series already established the potential for alternate timelines, several times over, and the reboot using that premise didn't offend the geeks.

Buffy doesn't have alternate universes, it just has Sunnydale, and a once ditzy girl and her friends being forced to grow up in order to save the world.

So if you want to reboot a franchise, you must first establish whether or not you're going to make people feel cheated by seeing it.

It's just that easy.