Hollywood Babble On & On #1069: Invocato a PERNEO

Warner Brothers and author J.K. Rowling have announced that they are working together on a spin-off of the Harry Potter franchise.

Sadly, they passed on my pitch for a movie franchise based on the solo adventures of Voldemort's nose who becomes a private investigator, called I Sniff A Mystery.

It will not involve Harry, Hermione, or Rupert Grint, who I know was an actor, but his name was more fitting for a character.

Instead it will be set in New York during the 1920s, and will no doubt somehow involve jazz, speakeasies, gangsters, goblins, ghosts, ghouls, and other strangeness as it follows wizard Newt Scamander as he compiles his future Hogwarts textbook Fantastic Beasts & Where To Find Them.

Personally, I have no problem with this. It's not like they're trying to drag Radcliffe and Company into doing another sequel. They're working with JK Rowling to make new stories and expanding on the fictional universe she created. Nobody has a problem with new people previously totally unconnected with the originals working on new Star Wars movies. Actually, that's a bad example with the prequel trilogy flashing back into my mind like a painful repressed memory.

I think the fact that she has about half of all the money in the universe and has successfully branched into other projects and genres means that no studio, poverty, or an egotistical desire for artistic respectability could force her to do something she doesn't really want to do.

I feel that while she may be done with Harry Potter specifically she might not feel that she's done with the world she created for it. 

That's what I think, what do you think?

Hollywood Babble On & On #1068: The Runaway Emergency!

Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti declares a state of emergency near the end of August.

It wasn't over an earthquake, a forest fire, the chronic traffic problems, collapsing or the general sense of discontented malaise that permeates big city life in Southern California.

It was about movies and television.

You see working in Hollywood is like attending a convention that never seems to end. You come, have meetings, make deals, and then go off to a different city and state to actually do the work of making movies and television.

As opposed to the golden age of movies and television when almost everything was shot inside Hollywood today very little is shot in the greater Los Angeles area's famous Thirty Mile Zone.

In case you think the TMZ is just a gossip site I'll do a little explaining.

The Thirty Mile or Studio Zone is the area set by unions to determine if a production has to pay extra for filming on location. Filming inside the zone was supposed to be cheaper and easier, but my oh my things have changed.

The thing politicians like to point and blame for the exodus of productions out of California are tax breaks. These allow runaway productions to legally get out of paying the payroll taxes they would normally have to shell out for the right to employ people in a given state.

While that is a factor, and an important, it's not the whole story behind the exodus. So let's try to break it down...

1. FINANCIAL:

A) Tax Breaks: As I said they're a factor. States are willing to sacrifice a small amount in payroll and other taxes that they hope to make up in income taxes on a couple of hundred highly paid professionals and skilled tradespeople working in their state.

California, on the other hand, has some of the highest state taxes on payroll and salaries, in the USA. All attempts to reform or simplify these systems usually die on the vine.

B) Salaries: Costs of living is much lower in almost every state that is not California. That means that  what qualifies as not-quite-good-enough money in Los Angeles, California qualifies as great money in Baton Rouge, Louisiana or Charlotte, North Carolina. So the salaries and per-diem costs are usually much lower.

C) Regulations: California does not make it easy to do anything in their state. It's regulatory regime is strict, and goes beyond the normal strictures of ensuring health and safety. They require paying multiple fees to multiple municipal, county, and state agencies, as well as hiring above and beyond the actual needs of a production. Agencies in other states, on all levels, tend to be more flexible, easier to navigate, and more affordable.

2. ARTISTIC:

A) The Look: When I was a kid I just assumed from television that all of America was either a traffic jammed sprawl, or a semi-arid hilly scrubland.  In fact, the geography of the USA is much more diverse and filmmakers are taking full advantage of that diversity. Why try to fake a New England town in an area that doesn't look one bit like New England, just go to New England.

B) The Talent: Diversity of location also comes with a diversity of talent, both behind and in front of the camera. It's good to have people who look like they've lived in a small town instead of just come down from Beverly Hills.

C) The Community: It's pretty much guaranteed that filming in Southern California is going to be complicated if not aggravating. Cities are poorly designed, and poorly managed, making working in them an occasionally baffling ordeal. Just dealing with the traffic can make anyone scream. A lot of those problems just don't exist in many other cities and towns.

Now these issues raise a question.

What can Garcetti, as Mayor of Los Angeles do?

Of the many problems that are driving away production are beyond the control of the city government. State finances are a shambles and any and all attempts to reform them are blocked by a wide range of forces. The city government is not much better, if not worse. It also has its own inertia caused by differing factions all wanting a piece of the civic pie.

So while Garcetti's made a nice gesture, it's just that, a gesture. Whether he can do something concrete about it, I don't know.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1067: TV Tidbits

Time for some TV tidbits.

DOES COMCAST KNOW WHAT IT'S DOING?

All last year we heard how Comcast was going to rebrand its G4 Channel, which specialized in tech, games, geeky stuff and reruns, into the Esquire Channel, which will be a more upscale lifestyle brand, in association with the magazine Esquire, natch. They cancelled all of G4's original programming, fired all the employees, and generally burned their bridges with everyone associated with the channel.

Now, in a fit of whimsy, they decided that the fashion-centric Style Channel would now be the Esquire Channel instead.

So what about G4?

It looks like nobody knows. Not even Comcast.

WE'RE OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD, AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN.

There are now four Wizard of Oz themed shows being slapped onto the airwaves.

First came....

1. Emerald City on NBC which puts Dorothy and her adventures in modern day New York City, because New York is cheaper and easier to work in than either Los Angeles or Oz.

2. Dorothy on CBS which is apparently some sort of medical drama.

3. Warriors of Oz on SyFy which is going to be some sort of post apocalyptic action adventure show that will no doubt have the same class and quality as Sharknado.

And now...

4. CW's adaptation of a novel called Dorothy Must Die, which is about Dorothy becoming the dictatorial ruler of Oz, and the rebels who seek to overthrow her.

What do you think about this 19th Century English Gentlemen?

That's what I think too.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1066: The Return of Stargate?

MGM is currently flush with cash, thanks to the success of franchises like James Bond, and The Hobbit, and now they're aiming for a three-peat by re-booting the Stargate franchise.

If you don't remember Stargate, it was the artistic peak for the team of Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin.

It starred Kurt Russell as a macho military man, and James Spader as a nerdy archaeologist who lead a team through an ancient alien portal right out of Ancient Aliens, and have to go through a lot of Chariots of the Gods nonsense to save the world from aliens dressed up like Egyptian gods.

The original movie was spun-off into three Canadian produced TV spin-offs, Stargate SG-1 which ran for like forever and a half on basic cable and syndicated reruns, and three relatively shorter lasting spin-offs from the spin-off Stargate: Atlantis, Stargate: Universe, and a 1 season animated series called Stargate: Infinity.

Now let's look at the PROS & CONS!

PROS:

1. The franchise has a familiar name and the movie and the first TV spin-off has a fan base.

2. The plan of a big screen reboot of what looked like a moribund franchise worked for Star Trek.

CONS:

1. Is that fan base as dedicated as the ones that support Star Trek and Star Wars? The TV shows were a model of dwindling expectations and the last series, though it got some good reviews, didn't last very long. 

2. Will that fan base, whose reaction to the news seems to be a shrug, go to the big screen reboot if it has NOTHING to do with the films and TV shows they knew and loved?

3. The Star Trek reboot sold a lot of tickets because they got JJ Abrams, who had tapped into America's love of lens flare, but the films were so expensive, the profit margins on them were relatively thin.

Does MGM have their own JJ Abrams waiting in the wings for this franchise? Can they take the thin profits from an obviously expensive project like the proposed trilogy?

Now I've proposed my own remake ideas for MGM before, a few times, but they don't seem to be listening to me. So let's play a game. You guys tell me if there are any pros & cons that I missed, and what MGM owned film would you remake and how.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1065: Two Little Drips From My Brain Pan

FOX GOES SWEDISH

Fox TV has inked a deal with a Dutch company called Eyeworks to start a program designed to develop Scandinavian writing talent, like this guy...

Bjorn Borkborg writer of "Bork! Bork! Bork!"

Okay, just kidding.

But there's a very simple reason Fox is doing this.

Money.

Scandinavian thrillers and crime stories are hot right now from best-selling books, to successful TV formats. They are also, unless it's being directed by David Fincher, capable of being produced for under $100 million.

HE HAS A POINT

Michael Douglas says that the major studios are afraid of risk...

He has a point. Not a complete point, but a point nonetheless.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1064: 50 Shades Of Careers?

Dakota Johnson

The internet is abuzz over words that they have cast the leads in the movie version of the "Mommy Porn" best-seller 50 Shades of Grey. Actress Dakota Johnson will play the female lead Anastasia Steele and Charlie Hunnam will play kinky young billionaire Christian Grey that taught a generation of young women that abusive relationships are okay, as long as the man is rich and good looking.

I've written about this project before, first about the overall wrongness of the whole thing, and when they were trying to recruit Harry Potter star Emma Watson for the female lead. If you're too lazy to click the links I'll explain, and might even make some new points.

The first problem is the whole issue of that the film is not really based on a book, but a fad. 50 Shades sold truckloads of books, spawned more than a few imitators, but almost as quickly as it appeared, the whole "mommy porn" genre went from the being the future of all literature to something that readers either claimed to appreciate its poorly written lewdness ironically, or a source of mild embarrassment.

Then there's the psychological aspect. The book sold well because women traditional prefer erotic text, while men prefer erotic images. Movies are by definition images, which means that the film, regardless of its literary pedigree will essentially be a soft-core porn film. 

There lies the problem inherent in selling blatantly "erotic" material that offers little more than its own eroticism...

Women may be turned off by the medium, as well as the potential of sharing the theatre with assorted creepy men in dirty raincoats, and men will stay home and get more graphic material on the internet for free and in private. (Remember, Universal has a small fortune invested in this film, they will not let it get an NC-17 rating.)

So called "experts" like to say that "sex sells" but are loathe to admit that it doesn't really sell as well as it used to. When Hollywood pushes the "sexy angle" the audience sees that and sees through all that sexy nonsense. They know that when they're selling sex they're certainly not selling stories, which is the main reason for investing the time and money required to go to see a movie in a theatre.

Sex is basically a special effect these days.

Then there is the casting.

Dakota Johnson, the daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, is at the beginning of her career. This movie could be the beginning and the end of it.

Lest we forget...

Remember Elizabeth Berkeley? She went from the kids show Saved By The Bell to do Showgirls. Showgirls was a relatively big budget production with an "A-List" director and writer, and it was going to make her a big movie star.

The movie tanked, and Berkeley spent years trying to get past being a product of novelty stunt-casting to becoming a working actress again doing guest spots on television.

It could be even worse for Johnson if the movie's successful. Then she'll be pigeon-holed as the "girl who gets nikked," and Hollywood can be brutal keeping an actress from getting away from that. She could end up doing Cinemax and straight to DVD productions and wondering how much cosmetic surgery will she need to keep getting the work that pays for the surgery that keeps getting her work.

And no matter who was cast they will not match the image the readers have in their minds, and each mind sees a different person. Which is not healthy for the movie.

Whether the film will do well or not remains to be seen. I'm not holding my breath about it.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1063: Think Before You Donate...

German director/writer/and producer Uwe Boll wants your money.

You shouldn't give him any money.

You need more details?

Fine.

If you're not familiar with his oeuvre Uwe Boll is nicknamed the "Auteur of Awful." His films are generally reviled by critics, and mostly avoided by audiences outside of a handful of brain-dead soulless cinemasochists.

Now you're probably wondering how a filmmaker can pump out dreck and lose money but keep on making films.  Well the answer is fairly complicated because it involves investors deliberately losing money. During his peak filmmaking period of the late 1990s and early 2000s Germany had a loophole in its tax laws that made losing money a winning proposition for investors.

Here's how it goes. The German government said that an investor didn't have to pay any taxes on any money invested in film production, and only have to pay taxes on any profits. So investors would borrow the money they would invest in Boll's films at a low interest rate, make a really shitty movie, then when it tanks at the box office, claim the money it lost as a deduction on their taxes.

With a good accountant and a tax lawyer an investor could pay off the loan and make a little extra on top just from their tax refunds and deductions.

Now the law changed in 2005 because it had done more harm to the German film industry than good. Boll's output in quantity and budget (but not quality) has dropped considerable since then, which is why he's now going to Kickstarter.

Boll is looking for donors to pay for him to make a sequel to his failed lowbrow comedy Postal, which itself was based, like many of Boll's films, on a video game.

Now there are many independent film projects on Kickstarter that are infinitely more deserving than Boll doing Postal 2. 

Boll had his chance, at his peak he was working with budgets well over $50-$60 million, and he still put out inane unwatchable dreck. Money is no substitute for talent. So why give someone with a track record of having only one talent, and that's punching critics, money better spent helping get something potentially worthwhile off the ground.

Some might give him money out of masochistic irony, others might give him money because they're profoundly stupid, all I can say is DON'T BE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE.

If you have the money to give to film, find someone new, who has the benefit of the doubt at least because movies won't get any better if you keep knowingly supporting crap.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1062: More Little Thoughts From My Massive Brain

First A Question?

This is for any British readers I might have.

I watch an inordinate amount of British TV shows and I've noticed a bit of a mystery. How come every British show with a lead character that's a single driven career woman have an unwanted pregnancy storyline? Is it laziness on the part of the writer looking for drama with little creative effort? Some sort of BBC mandate? Or are British women really bad at birth control?

Twerk It Don't Work It!

Everybody's talking about former Disney starlet Miley Cyrus shaking her bony, tramp-stamped ass to the tune of Robin Thicke's "Is That My Roofie In Your Martini" at the Video Music Awards on a channel that doesn't show music videos.

The ratings were okay, but they didn't set any records, but that's not stopping people from the MTV Publicity Department Parent's Television Council to MSNBC to declare that civilization is coming to an end unless heads roll. It doesn't matter that Thicke was singing the new anthem for the Bob Filner's of the world, an ex-child star was next to nikked.

This isn't the end of civilization. It's more like Hollywood announcing they're doing a remake of a really crappy movie, with the same crappy script, the same crappy director, same crappy editor, same crappy cinematographer who can't keep the boom mikes out of the shot, but this time they have a different star, so it can't possibly be crappy this time.

Miley's merely doing what other teen starlets try when their careers hit the skids after tasting mega-fame thanks to the stupidity of tween girls. They try to go "adult" by getting tramp stamps, wearing skanky clothes and doing skanky stuff on things like the MTV VMAs.

Her attempt at a movie career is pretty much over. Even at her peak the only film to crack that precious $100 million "can be a real movie star" line was an animated family film.  I could do a voice in an animated family film and crack $100 million and it wouldn't make me a movie star. And let's not forget her last movie:

Which was judged so bad by the producers they literally sat on it for over a year, and only gave it the bare minimum release they were contractually obligated to do. They preferred to lose their entire budget rather than be publicly associated with that big steaming pile.

What does she have left?

Shameless publicity whoring on the VMAs which exists solely for shameless publicity whoring for MTV.

It won't work. Her album won't sell, and her future movies won't sell, so all she's got left to do is take up drugs, mental illness, and get a gig as a judge on a reality talent show after her parents put her through rehab and under a conservatorship.

Double Feature Follies!

Paramount is rereleasing their really expensive hits World War Z and Star Trek Into Darkness as a double feature.

It'll be called the "We Spent Too Much On Them Night At The Movies."

NBC Has A Fever, & Instead Of More Cowbell It Wants More Germs!

NBC has made a deal with ex-ER executive producer John Wells to develop a pilot based on the 1990s disease thriller Outbreak. If you don't remember, Outbreak was about an outbreak of an ebola type disease in a small town thanks to an evil monkey, and while Dustin Hoffman and his team struggle to save the day, an Army General played by Dustin Hoffman keeps trying to blow it up because that's what Army Generals do when they're bored.

Now Outbreak was a hit when it came out, 18 years ago, and NBC had tried doing something similar in 2005 with a show called Medical Investigation, which lasted one truncated season.

But I'm sure it'll work this time.

What do you think about this Nineteenth Century English Gentleman?

I thought so.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1061: Little Thoughts From A Big Brain

NEW WAY TO DO TV?

Lionsgate and European TV production company Tandem have inked a deal to co-produce projects based on their relatively new business model.

That model is to pre-sell the show to markets all over the world before trying to get it on an American network like they recently did by selling the show Crossing Lines to NBC.

Now the plus side of this model is that it sort of takes the creation of television shows out of the hands of network executives. Since many network executives don't really understand things like storytelling, character development, and common sense.

On the downside their next project is supposedly a sexy crime series about handwriting analysis.

Not too sure about that one.

WHO GETS NO JACKSON

Peter Jackson will not be directing an episode of Doctor Who in the foreseeable future.

Officially they're saying he doesn't have enough time.

Unofficially it's because he wanted to expand the script for 1 episode into nine hours by including scenes from old scripts from Blake's 7.

BATFLECK

Ben Affleck's been named the new Batman.

The internet promptly shit its pants.

Personally, I think he's a little old, but since they're deliberately going for an older Batman, and seems to have grown beyond the whole Bennifer debacle that defined his early career to be reborn as a serious director and actor I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Just don't let Matt Damon in it. He's starting to annoy me.

SPEAKING OF AFFLECK

To do Batman he's dropping out of directing a feature film version of Stephen King's first epic tome The Stand.

Probably a smart move. The complete version of King's book about a deadly plague and a battle between good and evil is over 1,000 pages long and has a massive cast of characters, plots, and subplots. Any feature film version would be just a cheat notes version of the novel, which had already been done as a miniseries over a decade ago.

If they're so adamant of remaking the damn thing, they should probably do it as a "event" series, let's say where the second flog-the-dead-horse season of Under The Dome is planned to go.

But that would be logical.

SPEAKING OF BOOKS

A new documentary on the life of reclusive author JD Salinger says that some previously unpublished works will be released soon.

The weird part of the story is that it's all Knight Rider fan fiction.

Comic Book Confidential: Oh, Canada, Oh, Comics

The Justice League of America from DC Comics will soon be no more, and in its place will arise...

Yep.

The Justice League is going Canuck.

Should you care?

Probably not, even if you're a comics fan.

It's yet another one of the never-ending series of "events" that comics publishers grind out to spur brief upticks in sales so they can say that they're still in the comics business and not in the business of feeding the more lucrative movie and TV franchises with characters.

If you're just a casual comics fan who has been out of the loop for a while and think that this event is your way back in, you probably shouldn't care either.

Like every other event storyline it will probably require detailed knowledge of every other event going back to Crisis On Infinite Earth in the mid-1980s, even though DC promised to have rebooted everything back to their roots with their New 52 event.

Plus, it shouldn't last too long anyway because they probably have five more events in the hopper for 2014.

Which brings me to the fundamental problems with comics.

They're too hard to get. You either have to order them online or go to any of the dwindling number of specialty shops to get them. The days of casually browsing and buying them at the corner store are deader than a dodo. Chain retailers don't even want them anymore because their size and profit margins make them more hassle than they're worth.

They're too hard to get into. If you're a kid who like superheroes forget trying to get into superhero comics, because too many require specialist knowledge of story-lines and characters that occurred before your birth. If you want to get into an A-List character you better be ready to pay, because the really popular ones can appear in over a dozen separate titles, and if you can't keep up with all of them, you're going to be shit out of luck knowing what the hell is going on when the next event occurs.  

Even if you do wade through all the tons of material you need to fully get a character you like, then POW, they have an "event" kill off, change, or replace the character you like for cheap publicity that rarely interpret into increased sales.

Then there's the whole "we don't need kids" attitude found in the comics industry.

Where do you think new readers come from?

Right now comics are targeted at 30-40 somethings and the younger people needed to replace them aren't coming. Kids crave stories of good versus evil, the more outlandish the better, it goes back to all that Joseph Campbell "Hero's Journey" stuff which is probably hardwired into our brains.

What do comic books offer kids?

Usually ridiculously over-sexualized characters and situations that will make the kid's parents toss the comics in the trash for being trashy.

I have nothing wrong with a something being sexy. My family's latin motto translates to "Hooray for Boobies" but there's a line where you go from being sexy to sleazy. Not only that the exaggerated anatomies and ridiculous poses are insulting to women and to the intelligence of readers. Plus it makes the people who do buy comics look like perverts who are unable to use the internet to find pictures of real nikked ladies.

Comics are in the business of selling stories, preferably fast-paced stories of excitement and adventure with fantastical characters and settings. They are the gateway drug for readers, especially the genres of science fiction and fantasy.

Lose the young readers, and eventually you'll end up with a lot of dead franchises no one really cares about that you can't revive no matter how much money you throw at them.

Like The Lone Ranger.

No one wants to repeat that mistake.