Hollywood Babble On & On #918: The Magic Formula?

I remember Justice Society / All-Star Squadron comics from my childhood that featured a character named Johnny Quick who was originally created in the 1940s. Quick, as the name implied, was a super-speedster like The Flash but what differentiated him from The Flash was he didn't get his super-speed from combining lightning and chemicals, he got his power from mathematics.  All he had to do was recite the mathematical formula "3X2(9YZ)4A" and ZOOM he could break the speed of sound without breaking a sweat.

Now you're probably wondering why I'm rambling about an obscure comic book superhero whose powers come from the creator's inability to divine the difference between mathematical formulas and magical spells.

Well, the answer is simple.

Because Hollywood can't tell the difference either and there's going to be a lot of money pissed away before bitter reality sets in.

You see some Japanese mathematicians took a look at some successful movies and formulated a formulaic formula that they claim will predict if a film will be successful or not.  It has to do with the length of time used to promote the film before its release, combined with online word of mouth, star power, and quality of story.

I won't get into the details, because it's all pure bunkum.

That's right BUNKUM I SAY!

History is littered with so-called experts claiming that they have used science to crack the secret to movie success. The most recent was Relativity Media, who frequently bragged about how their computers could spot a hit when it just a glint in the screenwriter's eye.

How did that work out for them?

Well, they sure as hell dropped a lot of overpriced bombs, alienated their partners, and had to be bailed out by billionaire Ron Burkle who bought a big chunk of the company to keep it afloat.

Those things wouldn't have been necessary if they were pumping out hit after hit.

All this talk reminds me of the time Sony bought Columbia Pictures. Legend has it that at the first meeting the executives from Sony's head office told the guys at Columbia that from now on they should only make hit movies.

Well, if there was a way to make only hit movies they would do it.

It's very rare for people to intentionally make movies that will bomb at the box office. I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, recent years has seen dozens of guaranteed box office failures being made and released, mostly because they made fashionable political statements, and their failure gets them pats on the back for "courage" at the more fashionable parties.

However, movies cost a lot of money to make, and you can only do so many of what I call "statement turkeys" before the spigot of Other People's Money gets cut off.

Outside of that, most movies are made with the intent of making money. They filmmakers may not be expecting their flick to be a blockbuster, but they're hoping to at least make enough scratch to make another movie.

The biggest problem I have with people claiming to have found the magic formula is that too many variables get missed.

The font of all these variables is THE AUDIENCE.

You can measure interest, and word of mouth via the social networks, but they don't really give the complete picture. Sure a given picture might be getting great buzz on Twitter, but that's a relatively narrow demographic consisting of Twitter users.

When it comes to the audience there are countless factors ranging from money, mood, access to theaters, and whether or not they give a tinker's damn about the commercials. The combination of these factors are different for every individual, and they're literally millions of these individuals out there.

The best any movie studio can do is to get good stories, make them into good films at a reasonable cost, and market them well to their target audience.  Even then it's still a crap shoot. Something might have all the right ingredients, follow the formula laid out by these mathemagicians, and still fail to click with ticket-buyers.

That's why I must put on my curmudgeon hat and declare all this supposed foolproof formula pure hokum. 

Of course it being hokum is not going to stop the studios from wasting fortunes trying to mash movies into this formula, but hey, they still think people go to movies to see stars.

Hollywood Babble On & On #917: Movies Slipping & Sliding

Movies haven't been the number one option for entertainment since TV knocked it off its perch in the 1950s, however, it's popularity as a regular entertainment option is currently in free-fall and there's no mattress on the bottom to catch it. 

 

Why is this happening?

There are 4 major reasons for the decline of the movies with audiences...

1. CONVENIENCE: It's a pain in the ass to go to a movie nowadays. The days of just walking down to the neighborhood bijou are long over. To get to a movie you have to locate which theater is playing the movie you want to see, you have to drive over there, because it's usually in a mall in the suburbs, then you have to find a parking space, get in line, buy your ticket, buy snacks, then find the screen playing the movie you want among the 150 at the local googleplex, then find your seat.

If your bringing your kids to the latest animated opus then all those inconveniences go up exponentially.

2. COST: It's expensive to go to a movie. There's the price of the ticket, the snacks, but that's just the beginning, there's also the cost of the gas you burn getting to the theater, and the price of parking, on top of that too.

3. QUALITY: Let's face it, while the Hollywood high-poobahs may like to go around waving around a handful of mega-hits like The Avengers and singing "Happy Days Are Here Again!" but that's just to distract you from the fact that in recent years Hollywood has dropped more high-priced bombs than Curtis LeMay on a bender.

The Hollywood industrial mind-set is to take a familiar name, either in the form of a remake, a comic book character, or even a board game, spend the equivalent of the gross national product of a Third World country on celebrities and special effects, put no thought towards story, and hope that the audience falls for it.

It had worked for a while, but the novelty has worn off. The audience knows when it's being jerked around and will choose to stay at home with reason #4...

4. COMPETITION: The movie's biggest competition right now is TV, with the internet creeping upwards. However I think some form of TV will remain dominant for the next while.

Why?

Because when it comes to the four reasons movies are failing, TV has the movies beat.

The per-hour costs of cable and satellite TV is a mere fraction of the per-hour expenses of going to the movie theater. Even though most "packages" saddle you with channels you never watch, the market will eventually evolve to provide more a-la-carte channel or even programming choices.

Then there's home video in the form DVD sales and rental, or some sort of streaming service. Both are cheaper per hour than going to a movie in the theater, and waaaay more convenient.

That brings us to quality.

Quality programming, shrewdly marketed can be very lucrative because the multiple convenient options the audience has in the TV universe means that you have to bring your "A-Game" in the form of a steady output of quality new programming that has originality and intelligence to keep eyes on you.

The movie business still thinks that everything revolves around teenagers, and that all teens need are tits and explosions. But even teens, the epitome of cultural stupidity, are starting to get bored with it all.

If you see something you don't like on TV, you can change the channel, or turn it off, without the thought that you wasted money and effort to go see this piece of crap.

That's what I think, tell me what you think in the comments.

Hollywood Babble On & On #916: Go Digital Or Go Home?

Christopher Nolan, the master of the intelligent blockbuster, made two announcements at a recent conference of people in the movie business. The first one is that he's not going to do another Batman movie, which is probably a sensible call, and the second is that he doesn't care for digital film-making, preferring to keep using film until they pry the last reel from his cold dead hands.

Okay, I exaggerate his stance a little bit. 

He really just believes that digital film-making hasn't quite reached the technical and economic standards that he thinks film still has, and won't get into using digital cameras until they do.

He might be right, he's way deeper into the current technology than I am, but he's also speaking from a bubble of great comfort. If he wants to shoot on film no studio, especially not Warner Bros. is going to say no to a man whose movies have made well over a billion dollars at the box office in the past 10 years.

Everyone else though has to accept the certain home truth that digital is inevitable.

I can understand Nolan's ambivalence, and I will give him credit for acknowledging that he's not completely writing off digital. That would be like writing off sound or color, a blatant denial of the fact that the medium is changing via new developments in technology, and if you don't learn to use it, you're going to lose it.

I for one welcome the coming of digital technology, for two reasons...

1. It's cheaper than film.

2. It's easier to work with than film.

Now the big studios are thinking that it's a great thing since it chops millions off the costs of production and distribution.

That's a good thing for them, but also a bad thing for them. And what makes it a bad thing for them makes it a good thing for film as both an art & a business.

Does that make any sense to you?

Then allow me to explain...

Right now competing with the big studios has three major hurdles...

1. The high cost of production.

2. The high cost of distribution.

3. The high cost of marketing.

Digital film-making slashes a lot of the expense from production and distribution. Couple that with alternative mediums born from the digital revolution and the marketing opportunities that come from that, the cost of marketing movies can also be brought under control.

Also, digital technology is constantly improving thanks to the intense competition between equipment manufacturers while film has pretty much hit its peak, and I don't see it going any farther. So digital will reach a level capable of pleasing Christopher Nolan a lot sooner than anyone will think.

The revolution will be digitized my friends.

Hollywood Babble On & On #915: This Is Not A Good Sign...

Zombies, those shuffling, moaning, flesh munching and no doubt malodorous undead are big business these days. AMC's The Walking Dead is a big hit, and just about everyone and his brother is making zombie movies, including movie star Brad Pitt and Paramount Pictures.

Brad Pitt's Plan B Productions and Paramount are currently making a film adaptation of Max Brook's zombie novel World War Z. 

They shouldn't be still making World War Z: The Movie, in fact, they wrapped production months ago. But Paramount has sent everyone back to work for seven weeks of re-shoots and have hired Lost/Prometheus scribe Damon Lindelof to rewrite a good chunk, if not all of the script.

That is never a good sign.

Rewrites happen during production, they're inevitable. Sometimes dialogue, or action just don't work when the cameras are rolling, or the star wants to come across more heroic, or the studio president's nephew needs a credit so he can get WGA membership. There are literally a million reasons for rewrites to happen.

However, when rewrites are called months after the shooting has wrapped can only have one reason.

The movie is coming out like total shit.

World War Z Production still of Brad Pitt in the starring role.

Not only that, but all the people involved in the movie: producers, studio executives, star, director and the half dozen writers who worked on the script before and during the shooting didn't see that, at least not until after spending $125+ million.

Ouch.

How the hell did this happen?  The film is based on a best-selling book and minor pop culture phenom by Max Brooks, that captures current fears about disease, irrationally destructive forces, as well as recent face eating incidents, and should have been an easy home run.

Now for those of you living in caves, World War Z, was a novel spun-off by Max Brooks after the success of his how-to book The Zombie Survival Guide.

It was written in the form of a oral history of a ten year long conflict between the living and the undead, where survivors tell their stories of traumas and triumphs.

Now this is where I think Paramount and Plan B and all the others involved may have screwed the pooch. 

You see the original novel is not one big story that you can center a film around, but a bunch of smaller stories from all over the world. The only character who goes through all these stories is the interviewer, but he's not the "star" per se, just the collector of the various stories. He doesn't solve the zombie problem, or save the world, he's just the guy putting all the stories together.

A studio is not going to spend $125 million on a feature film, hoping to make it a trilogy, with a highly paid star/producer like Brad Pitt.

This puts the studio into a quandary, how do they make what is an ensemble story that's scattered all over the world, and turn it into a one-man heroic-lead star vehicle. I think this quandary is the main reason why they need to rewrite at least 1/3 of the movie when they're supposed to be laying down the last of the soundtrack and putting together the trailers.

Now that quandary should have been settled during the script development process, but this is the age of $100+ million blockbusters going into production without a finished first draft, and I don't really expect much, unless Lindelof & Co. perform a miracle.

Hollywood Babble On & On #914: Let's All Rehash!

A few days ago I wrote a post about movies being rehashed into TV shows, and I got this question....

Nate Winchester asked -   What about you, D? Any movies you can pick out/think of which would actually work great as a TV series?

That got me thinking, and that's actually pretty dangerous, so I'm going to post what I think is a good movie-to-TV adaptation premise and I want you, my readers, to post yours in the comments. That way I can steal your ideas to Hollywood for millions! BWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH!!!

Here's my idea...

THE MOVIE: 

FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF

I know what you're thinking it was tried in 1990 & it stank, but I'm talking about an entirely different concept.

THE TV SHOW: 

THE TRIALS OF FERRIS BUELLER

Instead of trying to make another bad show about Ferris Bueller's high school days, draw some inspiration from the roots of the original story. The character of Bueller was based on a high school friend of John Hughes' who could talk and charm his way out of any situation and drove the authority figures around him nuts. That guy went on to become a successful lawyer representing big name businessmen and politicians.

That's where we start: Matthew Broderick returns as Ferris Bueller, middle aged, a rich and successful Washington D.C. attorney, and bored out of his skull because his work isn't challenging anymore. This ennui, expressed by his wry commentaries to the audience, is broken in the pilot episode when he takes on the case of an unpopular billionaire charged with dozens of counts of fraud. The case seems impossible, but he not only wins, proving his client's innocence, he charms the jury so much, they spent their deliberations writing an apology to his client.

Re-energized, Bueller accepts a challenge by his wealthy client to take on more impossible cases. Each week it's a new client, from big money litigants to no-money defendants, and Bueller has to use his brains and charm to win as the challenge becomes a personal crusade.

A running sub-plot in the series involves his friend Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck), now a freshman congressman from Illinois, and married to Bueller's sister Jeanie (Jennifer Grey), and how Bueller "helps" him navigate the fever swamps of Capitol Hill.  There's even a reunion with his old high school flame Sloane (Mia Sara) who works on a big internet news site.


Surround this cast with a roll call of good supporting players/characters as fellow lawyers, clients, politicians, reporters, and sundry townsfolk, and you could have a funnier version of CBS's award winning hit show The Good Wife.


It's not rocket science it's TV.  The first attempt failed because all they wanted was the title, when they should have figured out how to take the story to the next chapter.


Now, put your own movie-to-TV-series ideas in the comments.

Hollywood Babble On & On #913: Forget Originality!

Just when you think Hollywood has hit bottom creatively, they grab shovels and start digging.

Two stories this week illustrate the entertainment industry's ongoing war against originality.

FEUD, WONDERFUL FEUD

The History Channel took a gamble on originality recently by not only resurrecting the long dormant genre of the miniseries, but by making a miniseries about the oft referenced, but little understood feud between the Hatfields and McCoys.

That gamble paid off big time for the History Channel earning them record ratings.

Now you might think that other channels would look at this and think: "Ah, doing TV miniseries based on history and/or literature can find a healthy audience," but if you did, you'd be wrong.

WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

NBC saw this and thought: "A-ha! Hatfield & McCoys are the ticket to get us out from under the all cricket channel in the ratings," and they bought a modern dress re-telling of the feud for a TV series.

Let's look at this idea, it's a blatant rip-off of the History Channel mini-series, and if you read up on the details of the premise, it's ripping off Dallas as well. That will turn off audiences, and the inevitable lawsuits by the descendants of the real Hatfields and McCoys over the bastardization of their family's history will turn off audiences even further.

When we boil it all down, it's doubly unoriginal, and doomed to fail, which means it's the perfect project for NBC!

Remember their attempt to rip-off Mad Men & merge it with the "hot" brand of The Playboy Club? Very few do, since nobody watched it.

I thought the new broom was going to change things over their, but it's like that Zucker guy's still running things.

But that's not all....

WARNER BROS. BREAKS WORLD RECORD FOR MOVIE UNORIGINALITY!

Warner Bros. pictures took a break from dumping yet another Justice League movie into development hell to announce that they're developing a movie based on the Guinness Book Of World Records.

Apparently this is not a joke.

What is it with Hollywood's mind-set that having a familiar name is all you need? The practice has dropped more bombs than Curtis LeMay, but they won't quit, because it seems safer to them than trying to do something original.

Well, it's only a matter of time before we get to this...

See how long it takes folks....

Cinemaniacal: Men On Film

Today we're talking about men in the movies. Chiefly the classic archetypes of manhood found in starring roles in the movies since the dawn of cinema and how they work together and how they've changed over time.

HEROIC LEAD

This archetype is the two fisted, hard-charging, guy who will do whatever it takes to save the day and has the skills, the courage, and the strength to do it, regardless of the odds. They are usually hard characters, who feel they don't need anyone else in their lives because they are dedicated to their heroic cause of punching bad guys in the face. However they can have the flint chipped off their hearts by the love of a good woman, or the camaraderie of his squad-mates.

The Heroic Lead is the guy men want to be.

ROMANTIC LEAD

Now this part is the guy that women (and some men) want to be with. At best they have the good looks, the chiseled physique, to be on the cover of a romance novel.

But they have to be more than just physically attractive. They have to be willing to fulfill the mental and emotional facets of female fantasy. That requires charisma, and sensitivity to female needs. Now they don't have to start off that way in the film, the story may center on their transformation, but if the actor cast in the role can't project those qualities then you're out of luck.

JUVENILE LEAD

When they weren't starring in films directed at the youth market the Juvenile Lead's traditionally has filled two roles...

1. Protege - The classic structure of war/action adventure pictures usually featured the Heroic Lead as the experienced veteran and the Juvenile Lead as the young newbie. As the story goes along the newbie goes from being the rebel, the virgin, or the comic relief to become a veteran in their own right and ready to take over the position of leadership in the righteous cause if or when the the Heroic Lead falls.

2. Love Interest - In films where the lead character is too old or too unlikable to be romantic, the tradition has been to add a romantic subplot usually involving the Juvenile Lead and a young lady, usually related to the old/unlikable lead. 

Now these definitions and who played them were not carved in stone. While some actors were pigeonholed as either Heroic or Romantic leads, many more could alternate between or combine the roles if the script called for it. It was also common in the Golden Age for budding male stars to start out as Juvenile Leads, and graduate to become Romantic and/or Heroic Leads.

But things have changed over time.

Hollywood's obsession with youth, which I call "juvenile dementia" has pretty much eliminated the process of graduating from a juvenile lead to the more mature heroic and romantic leads. Even though movies starring more rugged looking actors perform well at the box office with smaller initial investments, the studios continue to push boyish actors onto the audience as action heroes. Who really wants an action movie starring someone who would scream "not the face" and run away in a fist fight.

And it's not just heroic roles. In romantic roles characters that were once charming, and often sophisticated, now come across as oafish who look like they use the word "dude" like it's punctuation. All that matters to Hollywood are the physical attributes like having 6 pack abs.

Do I see an end to this confusion?

Probably not.

RIP Ray Bradbury

Writer, screenwriter, and all around inspiration Ray Bradbury passed away at the age of 91.

While he had a long and full life his passing is still sad because he's been an active author for so long it was easy to assume that he was somehow eternal. A never-ending fantasy factory who was constantly working on something new.

He was a prolific author of short stories and novels in the genres of science-fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery. To generations he was the gateway drug to the endless possibilities of genre fiction.

He was for me. I can remember picking up a copy of The Martian Chronicles when I was ten years old, and I was hooked. Soon I was picking up every bit of Bradbury I could find at my local library, combing through the collections of his short stories like R Is For Rocket, The Illustrated Man, and I Sing The Body Electric, and other novels like his dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451.

He never really considered himself as belonging to any one specific genre, preferring to view himself as an "idea writer." He was probably the best "idea writer" in history. If you think you have a brilliant idea for a story, the odds are Bradbury probably did some form of it first. He could turn those ideas into words, and those words into dreams as they went on to inspire other writers and readers.

His passing leaves a tremendous hole in the literary landscape.

Goodbye Ray Bradbury, you will be deeply missed.

Hollywood Babble On & On #912: Rehash Big Rehash Little Rehash Into Infinity...

I'm seeing a disturbing trend coming out of Hollywood lately. This trend is to take movie franchises and remake them as TV series.

It's not a new trend, in fact it goes back to the earliest days of the medium. A good example is the 1955 prequel series to the classic movie Casablanca that lasted 10 episodes and a second attempt in 1983 that lasted a whopping 5 episodes. 

Now I'm not saying that all projects translated from the big screen to the small screen are failures or complete creative abominations. 

But for every M*A*S*H* and Buffy The Vampire Slayer style long running classic that comes along there's about ten Dirty Dancing: The Series, and Delta Houses crashing and burning.

However, what strikes me about this latest crop is a certain air of desperation as networks and studios scramble to come up with content while avoiding any new ideas. The latest report I saw is that MTV is trying to find a way to convert the Scream franchise, which fizzled out in part four into a TV series.

Now I'm not going to talk about animated spin-offs of movies, I'm just going to talk about the live-action movies turned TV shows, why the studios and the networks do it, and what can make or break the project.

WHY DO THEY DO IT?

Short Answer: Fear.

Long answer, studios and networks are run by people who are terrified of risk. New ideas are risky in two ways. There's the risk of failure and the risk of success.

If the show with the new idea fails, either as an unsold pilot, or a canceled series the studio and/or the network will lose a lot of money.

If the show with the new idea succeeds, then they have to share more of those profits with the show's creators.

Much like movie remakes these executives will try to cushion themselves from those risk by sticking to properties they already own with familiar titles or premises.

With most of the major studios merged or in some sort of relationship with TV networks, the temptation to do this is increased exponentially.

It doesn't matter that 90% of such projects last less than a single season, the security these executives see in these sorts of projects outweigh the pitfalls.

NOW, WHAT ABOUT THE PITFALLS?

They are many, and what works in one adaptation can damn another. Among them are....

AUDIENCE EXPECTATIONS: The audience has certain expectations when it comes to a TV adaptation of a beloved movie franchise. The more they love the original the more critical they will be of the TV show's cast, look, and story-lines.

Exceed those expectations, and you can succeed, but fall one inch short, and you're doomed.

LIMITED PREMISE:  A lot of movies have premises that do not translate well to episodic storytelling. They're built around one specific event, place, and actions, and trying to make it into a TV series would lead to a much cheaper repeat of the movie on a weekly basis.

REINVENTION: Sometimes a movie can be completely reinvented right down to its foundation when its adapted to a TV series. This can save a series, or it can sink it.

Good examples are the TV versions of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and Ferris Bueller.

Where the movie Buffy was a broad farce, the TV Buffy was much darker, more violent, and the humor was cleverer and the characters were developed into being more than just excuses for jokes or silly scenes.

The TV Ferris Bueller was an adaptation of John Hughes' 80s teen classic Ferris Bueller's Day Off. 

Where the movie was about a smart, smooth, and popular charmer getting away with thumbing his nose at dimwitted authority the TV Ferris was about a smart, but unpopular nerd getting into trouble without neither charm or flair.

Where Buffy seemed to fans like it was getting to the heart of creator's Joss Whedon's original vision, Ferris had no input from the film's creator, John Hughes, and struck everyone who saw as a weak attempt to take a show premise created by someone else, and try to sell it by slapping a previously successful name to it.

That struck the audience as phony, and the show was gone before the end of the season.

I don't see this trend ending anytime soon, in fact, I fully expect it to get a lot worse before it gets any better.

Hollywood Babble On & On #911: We Have A Question!

I got an e-mail that asked a very pertinent question that I'll answer here for all the world to see...

Vincent asked...

Reader and big fan of your blog. I have two questions for you -

First: I hear a lot about power in Hollywood. There are all the random (probably BS) lists about the most powerful people in Hollywood, but what I am interested in is who, among producers and directors, really has true power? Obviously, big names and moneymakers such as Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Scorcese, Chris Nolan, etc have a lot of power and influence, but how far does that really extend? How much control do they *really* have over the films they make? I was reading a very interesting article recently about The Dark Knight Rises and how Warner Bros. wanted it to be released in 3D but Nolan refused. Is Nolan a powerful enough guy to have that say, or are Warner Bros. execs just afraid of making him mad? I'd love to see a post on this with your thoughts, about both Nolan and other big name directors or producers.

Second, you seem pretty knowledgeable about the inner workings of Hollywood. Where do you get this knowledge and experience?

Great to hear that I have some big fans out there, especially fans with intelligent questions.

There are two types of power in Hollywood.

There's Social Power, and then there's Money Power. Often these types overlap, but I'll explain that in just a second.

Social Power comes from a person's status and influence within the Hollywood community. These are the folks that can get you an invite to the "best" parties and fundraisers with the "best" people that you need to network to grow or expand your career.

Not paying the people with Social Power the proper obeisance can actually harm your career, unless you have tons of...

Money Power, which comes from having a track record of making money and lots of it. If you use this power wisely you can make those who seek to interfere with your work back off, for fear that you'll move someplace else, and take the money you make with you.

Now we come to my prime examples of Social Power and Money Power, George Clooney, and Christopher Nolan.

George Clooney is the embodiment of the smart use of Social Power. He hasn't carried a movie anywhere near the $100 million sales mark without a an all-star ensemble for a very long time, if ever. His influence with the audience is minimal, and he can often be a negative when it comes to selling tickets.

But if you go by Hollywood's publicity machine he's the BIGGEST MOVIE STAR ON THE PLANET in big bold capital letters. He gets magazine covers, glowing media coverage, and is constantly touted as the one and only true movie star in the world, and gets A-List paychecks to go with it.

Why does he get this treatment, even though he can't earn it at the box office? Because he is at the epicenter of Hollywood's social elite. He's at the forefront of all the right causes, associates with all the right people, and hosts fundraisers for all the right politicians.

If he feels mistreated, those who mistreat him may find themselves cut out from the Hollywood social swirl. Once cast out, it's extremely hard to get back in, and you might find it hard to get work without the approval of Hollywood's social elite.

Christopher Nolan is the perfect example of smartly managed Money Power. Money Power is all based on trust, which is extremely rare in Hollywood and must be earned.

How do you earn it?

Make shit-loads of money.

And that's what Christopher Nolan does. Not only are his film's commercial successes, but they're pretty good at racking up critical kudos as well, even when he does normally critically reviled "comic book" movies. That's gravy, that increases a filmmaker's status exponentially. Another key part of having money power comes from being aligned with a studio that appreciates money power. 

Warner Bros. has traditionally had a "don't rock the boat" policy as long as the films are profitable and of a high quality.  The last thing they want Nolan to do is to move to another studio, so they give him a lot of sway. However Nolan understands that his power within Warner Bros. is on the "what have you done for me lately" plan, so he must make sure that his films will not only fulfill his artistic vision, but also entertain a mass audience. 

You see Money Power only really lasts as long as the fickle finger of fiduciary fate is pointing at you. The moment it moves onto someone else, you're out on your ass.

That's why it's also smart to build a Social Power base, making sure that you're seen doing the right things with the right people. Because the social power that comes with being in the inner circle is harder to lose than money.

As for your second question: Where do I get my knowledge and experience?

Well, I'm not an elite insider, despite what some may think. I'm as far outside as you can get and still be on the same planet.

What I do have is a little common sense, and a knack to know where to look for publicly available information. It's not like I have legions of secret informants sending me the inside dirt.... or do I?

BWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH!!!

*cough*