Hollywood Babble On & On #806: Wait, Did Someone Listen To Me?

Paramount has dropped Warren Beatty's proposed movie about eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, which has since been picked up by New Regency Pictures, which is partnered with 20th Century Fox.

Now no one is saying why Paramount, which has a long relationship with Beatty, dropped out, but I will bet dollars to Daleks that it was all about money, specifically the film's budget.

You see, the chief thing a movie's budget buys a filmmaker is time. Warren Beatty takes an unholy amount of time to make movies, and unlike fellow directorial tortoise Stanley Kubrick, doesn't really include the time in his budget estimates. Beatty's last film Town & Country was a pretty generic romantic comedy and Beatty was just supposed to be the star, but Beatty's demands for rewrites, retakes, and re-shoots, meant that it took over 3 years to make, had a production budget of $90 million, another $15-$20 million in marketing and distribution costs, and lost $100 million at the box office.

Now usually when a star of Beatty's tenure and stature goes to a studio to get a movie made the studio traditionally just hands over a blank check, because nobody says no to a big star. It was a practice that led to the Town & Country boondoggle, and while I didn't suggest dropping the film altogether, I did suggest that the studio have a very serious chat with their star.

If you're too lazy the click the link, I'll summarize. Basically I said that if I was the boss of the studio, I'd sit Beatty down, and tell him, bluntly if I had to, that if he wants the film to be made he'd have to do it differently from anything he's done before. Beatty's method is to take horrendously long periods of time, and horrendously large amounts of money to make movies. If his demands can turn a romantic comedy into a $100 million+ loss, then what will he do with a period piece that is, by it's nature, a more expensive film. I'd tell him that if he wants to make his movie, he'd have to do it for reasonable money, and within a reasonable frame of time. If not, as the Catalan oath goes, then not.

Well, it looks like Beatty's chosen the "not" because the film is gone from Paramount, and now at New Regency, which is run by Arnon Milchan, a long time friend. I wish him luck, and I hope that he makes a good film at a reasonable cost, so that films that don't involve superheroes can be seen as commercially viable entertainment again.

Now I must come to the scary part of this blog.

Either someone at Paramount actually read my post and took my advice, or, someone in Hollywood has actually tried to act with a little common sense.

Which I think is a sign of the rapture.

Hollywood Babble On & On #805: Television Reboots Sci-Fi & Fantasy

SOURCE CODE TAKE A QUANTUM LEAP TO THE SMALL SCREEN...

Duncan Jones' sci-fi thriller Source Code is being developed as a television series.

If you haven't seen it, Source Code is about an Air Force pilot trying to stop a terrorist by reliving the last 8 minutes of the life of one of the terrorist's recent victims through a fancy machine code-named "Source Code."

Let's look at the pros & cons of this idea...

PROS:

1. PREMISE: It's a very catchy premise, and has a lot of possibilities, putting a sci-fi twist on the traditional procedural.

CONS:

1. PREMISE: It was actually sort of done with Quantum Leap back in the 90s. If you don't remember that show Scott Bakula played a time traveler who assumes the identity of people in history in order to "make right" something that had gone wrong, with the help of a hologram of his friend Al, played by Dean Stockwell, and an unseen supercomputer named Ziggy. People will start making comparisons even before the show is made, like what I'm doing right now.

2. STORY: The premise runs the very serious risk of becoming repetitive unless some serious calories are burned by the people running it. In fact, the original film was based on the tenet of the same 8 minutes repeating over and over again.

3. SOURCE CODE SOURCE MATERIAL: The original film did okay, but it wasn't really the sort of blockbuster that embeds itself into the pop-culture zeitgeist, and make the audience crave further adventures. It might, in time, become a more widespread cult favorite, but it seems that the people pushing for the show don't want to wait.

REBOOTY & THE BEAST

The CW Network is looking to reboot the 80s romantic fantasy adventure Beauty & The Beast. If you don't remember that particular nugget it was about a New York District Attorney named Catherine played by Terminator star Linda Hamilton who wins the love of a burly monster with a heart of gold named Vincent (Ron Perlman) who lives in a subterranean community and acts as her guardian angel rescuing her from any and all threats.

Let's look at the pros and cons of this idea...

PROS:

1. FAN BASE: The show does have a dedicated fan-base who would gleefully use the internet to spread the word that their beloved show had been reborn.

2. GENRE: Fantasy and stories with fantastical elements are very "in" on television these days. The audience and the networks may have given up on outer space, but it's never been better for magic and monsters.

CONS:

1. FAN BASE: While the show has a fan base, it's a comparatively small fan-base. Even during its original run on CBS, it never went higher than its first season peak at #49 in the ratings, and went downhill from there.

2. REPETITION: You have to be very careful when building a series around a love story to accept the fact that repetition is a very possible and probable pit you can fall into. Things can become formulaic and comfortable, and very quickly become very, very boring. A lot of work will have to be done to avoid having every episode be about Vincent swooning over Catherine, Catherine's latest case puts her in danger, and Vincent swooping in for the rescue.

Can both series work?

Well, there's a lot of risk involved, but also the potential for reward, so we will have to see if anything comes to fruition.

Hollywood Babble On & On #804: They Don't Know How He Did It...

Hollywood doesn't know history. You can see that whenever you see a period drama from a major studio. But the one thing modern Hollywood really doesn't know, comprehend, or appreciate is its own history beyond seeing what titles from the 1980s they can remake.

This week saw the passing of an important figure in the history of Hollywood, producer and studio executive John Calley, who died Tuesday at the age of 81.

Now I'm not exactly known for saying nice things about studio executives. In fact, I fear that this might be a first, but Calley was a role model for studio executives who knew how to balance movies as an art that's a business and a business that's an art.

It all goes back to the late 1960s. The whole studio system was in trouble. They were faced with skyrocketing costs, dwindling audiences and were blindly chasing fads and gimmicks in the vain hope of winning those audiences back, but were so slow and clumsy, by the time they caught a fad, or a gimmick the novelty was long dead.

Sound familiar?

One of the companies most seriously hurt by these developments was Warner Bros. Jack Warner, last of the founders, had sold it to the Seven Arts Productions, but they faced the same problems, so they, in turn sold to the Kinney National Company who at that time was known as the owner of parking lots and what would become DC Comics.

Kinney put John Calley in charge in 1969, and that's when everything started to change during what I call Warner's "3 Band-Aid" era, a name I came up with when I was a kid in the late 1970s and first saw their logo.

Calley saw all the problems facing the studios, and came up with a solution. It wasn't fads or big budgets that were going to get people away from the boob tube. The company had to make films that people would see as worth the effort of going to see.

That meant new stories told for the most part by new filmmakers. During his run Warner Bros. enjoyed not only box office success, but critical acclaim with films like The Exorcist, A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry, and many others. Hollywood entered a creative and commercial golden age that saved the industry.

He left the company in 1980, only to return in 1989 as an independent producer, then he returned to the corner office, first trying to revive MGM with mixed results, but enjoying greater success as head of Sony Pictures, where he is credited for reviving company after the disastrous tenure of Peter Guber and Jon Peters.

His secret then: Make movies the audience thought worth the effort of going out to see.

He ran Sony Pictures until his retirement in 2003, and without him history is repeating itself.

Movie audiences are down, television's besting the big screen in both quality and quantity, and the studios are scrambling to win them back, blowing big money chasing fads like comic book movies, and big FX extravaganzas.

None of the dozens of executives that each studio seems to have remembers the lessons of John Calley's career.

Make films people want to see, start with a good story, add good filmmakers, keep an eye on quality and budget and the rest will take care of itself.

It's not rocket science.

Hollywood Babble On & On #803: Television Tidbits

IT'S ELEMENTARY MY DEAR CBS:

The CBS Television network is run by geniuses. It has to be. They just bought a simply brilliant idea that came to them right out of the blue.

You see it's a modernized retelling of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.

Isn't that brilliant?

I bet you dollars to dingbats that Stephen Moffat, Mark Gatiss and the BBC are kicking themselves that they didn't think of it first.

Oh wait....

THEY DID!

Not only was this a hit on the BBC, it did very well on PBS's Masterpiece Theater, which is probably the reason CBS is going for it. Why bother doing anything original, when you can just regurgitate what someone else has had success with.

So here are some other new shows that CBS is developing:

APARTMENT MD: Dr. Greg Apartment is a brilliant eccentric physician who battles exotic diseases as well as his personal demons, including an addiction to painkillers because of a malformed toe.

STAR TRIP: A cocky Captain James T. Church leads the crew of the USS Enterprising through a bunch of wild and wooly space adventures.

MUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAPPER: Muffy Autumns may look like a ditzy teen, but she can take out vampires and other monsters with her devastating power slap, for she is the Chose One, the Vampire Slapper!

FOX GETS HAUNTED BY THE SPECTRE!:

The Fox TV network is developing a drama series based on the DC Comics character The Spectre.

For those who are not hep like me, The Spectre is the ghost of a murdered police officer sent back to Earth as a spirit of supernatural divine vengeance on those who escaped justice.

Which brings me to my point and the problem I think will probably sink the series.

Spectre is literally god-like, he knows all, he sees all, and can reshape reality itself at will if it serves his purpose of doling out hot steaming bowls of rich creamy justice on evildoers. There's nothing he cannot know, and nothing he cannot do, and that's the problem.

Weekly TV drama is at its best when it's about characters who face situations that test their limitations, physical, intellectual, and emotional. Spectre doesn't have limitations, he just shows up, turns an evildoer into something unpleasant, and that's that.

That's why he was never considered anything more than a C-List character, whose solo adventures didn't catch on as big as the others, and served better as an enigmatic, and sometimes dangerous entity hovering around the fringes of the DC Universe. The people behind the show may have written a brilliant pilot episode around the character, but I just can't see the show lasting any major length of time before becoming repetitive.

Then there are the villains. I don't even know if The Spectre has any villains that survive their first encounter since all it takes for him to wipe them out is to think about it. A good superhero show is dependent on having good villains. Superman has Lex Luthor, Batman has the Joker, etc... etc...

This leaves the maker of the show these options:

1. CHANGE EVERYTHING: Essentially de-power the Spectre to the point where he actually has limitations to give the episodes some dramatic heft. Basically only taking the name from character and dumping everything else.

Or

2. GO ANTHOLOGY: Center each episode on either the victims the Spectre is avenging, or the evildoers that he's laying the vengeance upon. Though even this method have traps. Centering on the victims may repulse the audience because who wants to see a show where they know the character they've spent a good chunk of the episode getting to know is going to die horribly. Aiming on the evildoer is also a trap, because unless you make them cartoonishly evil and unlikeable the viewer is going to feel some sympathy for them, and then end up seeing them get magically obliterated in the end every week can also be a turn off.

So I'm just not feeling it as a series. A movie maybe... or a mini-series at most, especially if there's some sort of story arc planned, but not an open ended series.

Hollywood Babble On & On #802: Sandler Crosses The Bay Line?

I'll start off with a confession.

I am not a fan of Adam Sandler.

I've always found his immature and occasionally violently angry man-child persona that he debuted on Saturday Night Live kind of grating, and like many people I've made a point to avoid his big screen comedies even as he tries to build a new persona as a leading man in family and romantic comedies. I just can't bring myself to watch more than a few minutes, before the sense that this is all crap just overwhelms me and I have to tune out.

However, his movies are mostly profitable crap. He has a dedicated fan base that can guarantee him a $100-$160 million return on his comedies at the box office, followed by home video and TV sales. So as long as Sandler keeps their budgets in line Sony, his home studio, will give him whatever he wants.

And that's where the serious trouble begins.

Sandler is reportedly a very nice guy in person, and that he has great loyalty to his friends, and is using his position as Sony's golden boy to get movie deals for his friends through his company Happy Madison Productions.

Now Happy Madison Productions' output follows a very strict tier system. If it's got Adam Sandler starring in it, it's on the "A Tier," if it's Rob Schneider or Kevin James, it's the "B Tier," because they might actually sell enough tickets to make money. However, if it's got Nick Swardson, and/or Allan Covert then we're strictly talking "C Tier," because those films are pretty much guaranteed to make barely a ripple beyond the poor critics who were forced to see them in order to shit on them.

Which brings me to the subject I'd rather not talk about, but am forced to discuss.

Bucky Larson: Born To Be A Star.

The film has been a failure on just about every level, especially with critics and audiences, scoring a 0% rating at Rotten Tomatoes and failing to crack the Top Ten, despite its wide release and omnipresent and incredibly annoying ad campaign. Even though it reportedly cost less than $10 million to make, and about another $10-15 million to sell, it will probably still lose money, and its bad reputation and R-Rated subject matter will pretty much insure it doesn't get beyond the DVD discount bin or being late night filler on deep cable when The Killer Shrews isn't available.

I'm sure the only reason Sony gave the film the green-light was to keep Sandler happy, and pretty much considered it a wash out from the beginning. In fact, I'm starting to suspect that the shrill, annoying, fingernails on a chalkboard ad campaign that highlighted just how unfunny, and unpleasant the movie is, was an act of mercy on the part of the studio.

While the studio will recover the $20-$30 million pissed away on the film, I think the damage to the people behind it will go even deeper.

Star and co-writer Nick Swardson can pretty much consider his career in comedy over. Any project he attempts will now have the specter of Bucky Larson hanging over it, and only some sort of miracle, like him curing cancer or defusing a rogue A-Bomb just as the timer hits 00:00:01 can possibly save it.

But I don't think Sandler himself will be as completely unscathed as he's been from all the other C-Tier Happy Madison boondoggles. His name is all over it, as Producer, Co-Writer, and all around midwife to the whole project. It couldn't exist without him, and it also crosses what I call The Bay Line.

The Bay Line is named after director and explosives enthusiast Michael Bay. It's the line where a filmmaker goes from insulting the audience's intelligence to insulting their existence. Bay's films only insult the audience's intelligence, not their existence, in fact, he goes out of his way to praise their existence. The audience forgives him his stupidities, and sits back to enjoy the visceral experience of robots beating the living shit out of each other while good looking people try to emote.

Bucky Larson crosses the Bay Line to actively insult the audience's existence. The title character is obviously mentally handicapped and/or mentally ill, is incredibly ignorant of even the most basic facts of life, and the only excuse they give for this is that he's from the Midwest, and imply that everyone there is like him to one degree or another.

That is called insulting the audience's existence, and the audience doesn't like that.

They'll let you insult their intelligence as long as you give them lowbrow laughs or big explosions, but insult their existence, and the audience will punish you, even if they don't consciously know that they are doing it.

Give Michael Bay a character from the Midwest and he'll be a iron jawed he-man, posing in front of an exploding building, his chiseled features glinting in the sun, telling how growing up on the farm made him strong and manly, as missiles zoom overhead.

Bay is smart, he knows that the bulk of his money comes from putting bums in seats in Flyover Country. So he makes sure not to insult the religious beliefs, lifestyles, attitudes, or nation of those ticket buyers.

Sandler seems to have forgotten that, and created a movie that only people who have spent too long in Hollywood could ever think was funny, or potentially successful. This could cost him dearly in the long run.

Now let's never speak of Bucky Larson ever again.

Hollywood Babble On & On #801: The Actor, The Executive, & The Money

Actor Cliff Robertson passed away this weekend one day after his 88th birthday.

Most young moviegoers knew him as "Uncle Ben Parker" in Sam Raimi's movie Spider-Man, but he was a respected actor with a long career including an Academy Award for playing a mentally challenged man turned into a genius by an experiment in the 1968 movie Charly.

However, I'm not here to offer an obituary. There are people who are better at reveling in the glories of his career than I am to do that job. What I'm going to talk about today is about the time Cliff Robertson, Academy Award winner, couldn't get arrested in Hollywood because he wanted to get someone else arrested, and how it relates to Hollywood today.

Back in 1977 Robertson was a respected actor with a healthy movie and television career when he got a notice from the Internal Revenue Service. The Taxman said that he got a check for $10,000 from Columbia Pictures and they demanded that he declare it with his income and give Uncle Sam his share.

Robertson was flummoxed, not only did he not get $10Gs from Columbia Pictures, there was no rational reason for Columbia Pictures to put his name on a check.

There were shenanigans afoot.

Some preliminary digging showed that the check for $10Gs was a forgery, and the paper trail went straight to then Columbia Pictures boss David Begelman.

Begelman originally started as an agent, and was a very successful talent pimp, before managing Judy Garland's career comeback in the 1960s. After an acrimonious split from Garland, complete with accusations of misappropriation, malfeasance, and outright financial buggery, he was made an executive. Because what else do you do with someone accused of embezzlement and theft.

As boss of Columbia Pictures he headed up a revival of the company from the doldrums of the 1960s, and pumped out a string of hit movies.

That sounds like a lovely comeback story, doesn't it?

Well, it would have been simply lovely if he didn't have a taste for gambling.

Begelman had gambling debts, and to pay those debts he decided to steal.

You see back then it wasn't uncommon for movie stars to send assistants or secretaries to cash checks for what Hollywood people considered small amounts, like $10,000. So Begelman would forge the checks made out to different actors, Cliff Robertson included, send out minions to cash them, and then use the cash to pay off his gambling debts.

Robertson turned over what he discovered to the authorities and Columbia Pictures. Begelman was convicted of forging the check and sentenced to community service. Columbia Pictures suspended Begelman with pay, naturally, and started their own investigation.

For the first and last time in Hollywood history an audit actually found something that was acted on. Columbia discovered that Begelman had stolen an additional $65,000 from them, and had lied about going to Yale in his "Who's Who In Hollywood" entry. So they finally fired Begelman, but refused to make this information public, for fear of embarrassing the company.

Robertson thought this was a stupid way of handling things, and only left the door open for it to happen again. So he spoke out to the press about his experience, and demanded that Hollywood do something about it.

Hollywood did do something about it.

They blacklisted Robertson for three years. He literally couldn't find work with any of the major studios, and when this blacklist was finally broken he had to rebuild his career, this time as a character actor.

Begelman went on to run MGM, for a little while, and bopped around as a producer on various projects, never repeating the success he had at Columbia, until he just stopped succeeding completely and went bankrupt in the 1990s and was found dead in 1995 of an apparent suicide.

Robertson showed true integrity through the whole ordeal, not the self-aggrandizing and often childish grandstanding that Hollywood thinks is integrity. He saw wrongdoing in the industry, and he actually tried to do something about it, even though it really put his career on the line.

You don't see that kind of real career courage anymore in Hollywood, and for good reason.

The punishment Robertson endured, which stunted his career, has had a chilling effect on Hollywood. Lawsuits still happen, but no one really has the stones to really shake things up because they can't afford to risk giving up their well paying careers the way Cliff Robertson did, win or lose. And let's not forget that Robertson never made anywhere near the sort of salaries that today's "stars" pull in per picture.

Of course the studios thought they were being smart and tough when they punished Robertson instead of Begelman, when, in fact, the opposite was true. It made them look weak, it made them look corrupt, and in the long run, it proved to be really, really stupid.

Nowadays anyone who gets the slightest smidgen of clout immediately demands massive up front salaries, huge chunks of the gross receipts, and perks that would make an Ottoman Sultan say: "Wow, now that's overindulgence."

Production costs have an inflation rate similar to Weimar Germany, even though new technology should be making film-production cheaper. Their accounting is a nightmare, they're becoming more and more dependent on fewer bigger movies with rapidly shrinking profit margins, tickets sales are in general decline, and everyone is so busy covering their ass, no one seems to know what the hell is going on.

It's what I call a Self Fulfilling Idiocy.

What I would have done if I owned Columbia would have been to redecorate the Studio Boss's office. Right above the door, visible every time the current Boss looked up from his desk would be the comb-overed scalp of the previous Boss who dared to embezzle company money.

Sure, the authorities might balk at my particular brand of rough justice, but what's the point of being rich and powerful when you can't go all Conan The Barbarian on someone who deserved it.

All right, maybe that's a little extreme, but you get my point. I wouldn't have punished the man who exposed it, and I definitely would have punished the man who stole. In fact, I'd have done the press conference with Robertson, explained how my company wouldn't allow such shenanigans to go on anymore, and then quietly arranged for Robertson to do a movie with my company to show everyone in the industry that there's no hard feelings. Meanwhile Begelman would be cast to the outer darkness with my office catapult.

Sorry, I was going too far again, wasn't I?

Anyway...

There is a "Don't Rock The Boat" attitude among Hollywood's executive class that does more harm than good. The boat needs to be rocked, because something has to get out the shit that's weighing it down or it will eventually sink.

Hollywood Babble On & On #800: Bucky Larson- Born To Kill Comedy

Sometimes I fear for the survival of comedy, looking at this trailer is one of those times...



And that trailer is no where near the marketing abortion as the TV commercial I saw that features some possibly drunk guy popping his head into the shot saying stupid non-sequiturs like "Let's get Bucked up!" and being the only one laughing at his material. I want to hit that man with a baseball bat, a flaming baseball bat.

The ad campaign, though atrocious, seems to reflect the quality of the movie which at the time of this writing has only scored 34% at Rotten Tomatoes, and I'm amazed it's scoring that highly. (UPDATE: That score is now 0% critics 34% apes with head injuries) Though it does seem to solve the mystery behind why Christina Ricci made the jump to TV if this is the best she's getting.

Now to my point.....

From everything I've seen and everything I've read about this movie the pitch probably went something like this:

"We take a guy with a bad haircut that no mentally stable person in the real world will have, buck teeth, and a tiny dick. We'll make him a porn star so we get to show some boobies, and then we'll slap on a happy ending. And don't worry, it'll all be okay, because we're going to make him from the Midwest or some other loser town."

The premise of the country bumpkin making good is an trope going back to Ancient Greece theater. Traditionally the hero, despite their bumbling and naivete, has some sort of inherent native guile and/or overwhelming honesty and decency that lets him put one over on his supposedly sophisticated social betters/tormentors and win out in the end.

I don't get that vibe from this movie.

The vibe I get from this movie is that it was made by people who have spent too long in the upper echelons of California's showbiz scene. There's the assumption that anyone who doesn't live like them must somehow be a loser that suffers from a form of mental retardation, and thus must be shat upon frequently because it makes the beautiful people feel 5% less insecure, and you should find it hilarious. It's got nothing to do with an average Joe pulling themselves up through pluck, luck, and snappy dialogue, and everything to do with the allegedly sophisticated and cool creators putting the lowly common loser down. It's a disturbing trend in comedy and one of the reasons I stopped watching Saturday Night Live oh so long ago.

I blame it all on country clubs.

Back in the Golden Age of Hollywood, the people in the movie industry, from CEOs, to Movie Stars, to the Janitor were barred from joining the mainstream's social elite, usually in the form of being denied membership in their precious country clubs. Because who wanted a bunch of "low class show-folk" polluting their golf courses with their cigars and scandalous personal lives.

This gave Hollywood's denizens a sort of sympathy with the outsider and the commoner that was reflected in their movies. Old comedies are loaded with everyday people "making good" over elitist snobs, not the other way around which it is like today.

Oh how things have changed.

Not only are the people in show business considered the country's social elite, the one time censorious "mainstream money" are running around acting like they're show business in the hopes that it will land them a scandalous reality show and make them both rich and famous.

Gone is the sympathy with the common man and the outsider, and in its place is a desire to win the favor of their colleagues by showing how much better they are from such lowly "average folks," by shitting on grotesque parodies that they really think represent the "average folks."

That's my attempt at dime-store psychoanalysis, but it does explain a hell of a lot. What's your take?

Hollywood Babble On & On #799: Comission/Shmission

Oy.

I hate having to repeat myself, even though it makes it easy when you're running a mostly daily blog like this, but sometimes I have to. Cue former US President Lyndon Johnson & former Defense Secretary Robert MacNamara...
Today's act of brutal repetition comes courtesy of Deadline: Hollywood who led me to producer Adam Leipzig and his new indie film/business blog, (imitator) but specifically to his pondering the need for a National Film Commission for the USA.

Here's what I have to to say on that issue...

NO!

NO! NO!

NO! NO! NO!

BAD IDEA!

BAD BAD IDEA!

Am I clear?

I can speak from experience and I can tell you that if you think the Hollywood film studios are narrow minded and closed off now, you haven't seen them when they're in partnership with the government.

Right now each state in the USA has their own state film commission. Their mission is to lure good paying movie and TV making jobs to their state by offering tax breaks, easy permits, and occasionally subsidized facilities.

While I'm not a big fan of government interference, I can see where the states are coming from. They want some of that money that California's been sucking up for 100 years for themselves, but a National Commission is a different kettle of fish.

Why?

Because any sort of National Commission would be a "partnership" between representatives of Hollywood, and the government.

That's what we call a recipe for disaster.

It's a disaster because what happens when people from big business get in bed with big government? They screw any and all competition and use the power of the state to maintain their position at the top of the heap, whether they actually deserve it or not. When they screw up, which will be often, they'll be protected from the consequences of their stupidity, because the government will gladly give them taxpayer money to save their bacon because they are "too big to fail."

That's called either "crony capitalism" if you're looking at it from the left, or "corporatist socialism" if you're looking at it from the right.

Either way it isn't good.

You have a combination of politicians laying down policies based on short term poll results, whims, and internal political games, bureaucrats manipulating those policies to benefit themselves as well as their friends, the big movie companies who will reward them with cushy well-paying "consulting" jobs and positions on boards after they retire with plush senior civil service pensions.

Protected from the vicissitudes of the free market, because the government will regulate away any competition, and bail them out when they screw up, the film community becomes hyper insular, relying on a smaller and smaller cadre of people for everything, where connections to the bureaucratic elite count more than talent, or an ability to sell movie tickets or attract TV viewers.

At least in Hollywood there is a need, albeit under-appreciated, for the new and the novel. Actors wear out their welcome, and writers and filmmakers get too comfy and lose their mojo, so new faces and new voices have to be found, or they're going to start losing money, and losing their jobs. They are insulated by their parent companies to a certain extent, explaining how some "star" actors and filmmakers keep their careers going long past their "best before" date. However, there is a line that if crossed, will awaken the sleeping giant of their parent company and shake-ups ensue.

You don't get that when government is involved. When protected by taxpayer money and bureaucrats that can't be fired because of their titanium clad contracts, there is no line, and thus, no shake ups, and because of that, no remote desire for new talent.

Two stories from my native Canada can illustrate this point.

I was channel surfing one night, and three shows, one sketch, and two sitcoms, on two different networks, one government run, one privately run, and all three shows were written, or co-written by the same man.

Now the guy was a pretty good writer, but when you include the two CBC radio comedy shows this guy was writing or co-writing that were also running that season, must admit that there is just too much on the shoulders of one man.

Another story that illustrates this is one of my own experiences. In film school I was told about a new initiative to find "new" and "undiscovered" film writers. So I called them up and asked what it took to qualify for the program.

I was told that to be considered "new" and "undiscovered" I had to have had two screenplays produced into feature films that were released theatrically.

That essentially means that if you want to be considered "new" and "undiscovered" you have to be old and so deeply entrenched in the industry, you have to have achieved something less than a dozen English language screenwriters at the time could claim.

That's government backed film-making in a nutshell.

If you want to learn more about this phenomenon CLICK HERE and memorize every word, there will be a test in the morning.

Cinemaniacal: How To Sing A Space Opera

Earlier this week I talked about the Great Space Opera Drought of 2011. For those of you too lazy to click the link, or scroll down the blog's front page, I'll sum it up for you. For the first time in a very long time there will be no new live action science fiction shows set in Outer Space premiering on American television, leaving the British made Doctor Who, pretty much alone when it comes to delivering new stories set in the final frontier.

In that post I explained why the networks and cable channels are leery about putting Outer Space adventure shows, or Space Operas, on the air. Some of them were commercial, some of them were socio-cultural, and all are in that blog, so click the damn link when you're done reading this piece.

Today, I'm going to discuss what makes a good television Space Opera, in the hopes that maybe my advice can somehow get the genre back on the air.

1. CREATE A COHERENT UNIVERSE.

When you create a science fiction show that's going to last any time you need to have all your ducks in a row. You can start by asking yourself these questions...

What sort of culture does your hero come from?

What sort of cultures will your hero meet?

Will your heroes meet aliens, or just different kinds of humans?

If so, what kinds of aliens will you use?

The answers to these questions can be arrived at if you do something very simple. Study history, economics, and Earth's widely varied cultures. They give both a grounding in familiar reality, and inspiration for new stories that you probably wouldn't have thought of before you did your research. Economics, especially economic history, is also important, because it can teach you about the sort of cultures that advance and those that stagnate, and how such cultures interact, because economics is really just the study of human/material/cultural interaction.

And speaking of research, you can't have science fiction without science, which brings us to our next question...

What's the technology level of the various cultures featured, and what rules do these technologies follow?

Now you might think I'm being a nerdy nelly nit-picker, but establishing rules for your technology is really important. In TV space opera technology is like a comic book heroes super powers, it can do incredible things, but it has limits. Superman has his kryptonite, if you need me to draw you a picture. You need these rules because without them you will create problems for your characters, then have them "recalibrate the di-hydrogen monoxide vortex expulsion apparatus"* and suddenly the problem is solved. The Star Trek franchise pretty much flogged that horse to death, so it can only be used sparingly and according to some pretty firm rules.

2. STORY, STORY, STORY.

When you set the premise for your space show, you can easily limit yourself despite being set in the limitless expanse of the Universe. One common trap to establish a limited setting, or a limited purpose to the premise.

A limited setting is when you create a show around a single space colony that doesn't interact with other colonies, or alien races, and just build stories around their struggle to survive in a harsh environment. That sounds all nice and dramatic, but it can also become really boring really quickly. You can only do so many episodes about a small group of people dealing with basic survival issues before you start repeating yourself, and then start grasping at narrative straws, and the audience just gives up and tunes out. Science Fiction, especially Space Opera is about creating a sense of wonder from encountering new things, and your not going to get that with a bunch of people sitting on a rock griping.

Now a limited purpose narrative is another easy trap. That's when you characters have to go around space for a very specifically designed purpose, a sort of single quest for the whole series. I remember seeing an unsold pilot for a science fiction show, it had some clever ideas, a freaky looking space-ship, and some characters with potential. It also had a limited purpose. Basically all the characters were on a mission to rescue a little girl who had been kidnapped by unpleasant aliens who wanted to use her brain.

Sounds cool, for a movie, but when you're doing a series and set out such a limited purpose for your story you have two options. Either extend the quest to the point where the audience doesn't really give two flying shits about the how it's going to end, because they know it's not going to end before cancellation, or build up to a very big ending for that quest, leaving you scrambling for a new quest for your characters.

Grand story arcs are fine, but remember that they have limitations. You must give yourself, and your show wiggle room, or else once that first deal is done, so is your show.

So create a show centered around a premise that promises your heroes will encounter as wide a variety of peoples, places, and things, as you can imagine.

3. CHARACTER, CHARACTER, CHARACTER.

Too many shows have tried to reach for the stars with cardboard cutouts for characters. The Cocky Macho Rebel Who Doesn't Shave, the Stoic Logician, the Rigid Military Guy, the Alien/Android learning about emotions, etc., etc... Create fresh new characters, with their own needs, wants, habits, quirks, and anything else that makes them interesting and human, whether they are human or not.

4. BURN THESE CLICHES WITH YOUR PHASERS.

A) The Glowy All-Knowy Energy Being. What started out as a novel idea and statement about the possible end of the evolutionary process has become not only a cliche, but a great Deus Ex Machina for lazy writers who have put themselves into a corner and need it solved by some time-space bending cosmic know it all.

B) The All One Thing Culture. One thing that used to bug me about the Klingons was how they got to their level of technology, when everyone is a warrior and all they do is fight anything and everything they encounter, and where the hell do they get their food? Did they have some sort of Spartan/Helot type situation...? Anyway, I digress into the realm of nit-picking which is something you need to do when you create your show, so asshats like me don't do it afterwards. The cultures you create need diversity, and from that diversity springs potential for fresh new stories. If a culture absolutely has to be all one thing to make some sort of point, then create a plausible excuse for it. Doctor Who's Sontarans are all warriors, but they didn't evolve that way, or invent their technology. They were genetically engineered and then given technology to fight on behalf of their makers, then those makers died out, it left them with advanced technology and a taste for scrapping the bejibbers out of all comers.

It's not rocket science, it's science fiction.

C) The All One Thing Planet. Habitable planets that are all jungle, all desert, all forest, are all boring. You can have your characters land in a jungle or a desert, but having the whole planet that way is weak science, and boring science fiction.

D) The Obnoxious Alien That Demands The Heroes Follow Some Completely Irrational Taboo Or Face Death. You know what I'm talking about, those contrived situations where a crew member has violates some irrational law of some planet, and the crew has to kiss ass to get them back. One I'll always remember is the Star Trek: TNG episode where Wesley Crusher crushes a flower, and is sentenced to death, and Picard has to figure out a way to solve the situation. My method would have been to burn their cities to the ground until he's returned, but I tend to have a low tolerance for assholes. Anyway, ditch this cliche, it's lazy writing.

5. FIGURE OUT A WAY TO SCORE PRODUCT PLACEMENT DEALS.

I'm being deadly serious here. Networks have to make money on just about every inch of a TV show, that's why they like shows set in the present, or near past, over shows set in the far future. My advice, have a vibrant future with a thriving economy, and that economy just happens to have many of the same products that we enjoy today, but with a futuristic twist.

Anyway, I hope these tips prove useful and we can get some spaceships flying again soon.

________________________
*Techno-Babble Translation: "recalibrate the di-hydrogen monoxide vortex expulsion apparatus" means "jiggle the handle on the toilet."

Hollywood Babble On & On #798: Dear Eddie

An Open Letter To Eddie Murphy

Dear Eddie-

I can call you Eddie right?

Oh, okay, Mr. Murphy.

I'll start off by congratulating you on being named host of the next Academy Awards. It's a big honor, but it's also massive challenge. Yesterday I wrote a little post expressing concerns, in the form of a "Pro & Con" list, to show some of these challenges.

Of course, now that it's official, I feel like taking a moment, as a professional internet butt-in-ski to offer some advice. Because let's face it, Norbit proved you haven't been getting much good advice lately.

1. HIT THE ROAD: When was the last time you performed in front of a live audience? Performing live on stage is not something you can just pick up, it's a muscle, and if it isn't worked out regularly it can get flabby. Film critic Christian Toto makes an excellent point using the case of Chevy Chase. The smooth confident performer from Saturday Night Live was long gone by the time he tried his disastrous talk show. He had lost his footing, it showed, and it stunk like six kinds of dead fish.

Now you have some extra time to prepare, so I suggest hitting the road. I'm not talking about a big-ass publicity soaked comeback tour. I'm talking about surprise appearances in small venues, with small audiences, preferably drunk and unfriendly to get your chops back in shape. You do not need anyone kissing your ass and telling you you're great right now, you need the truth, however brutal.

Nothing like a drunk tossing a bottle at your head to tell you that you need either a rewrite or to work on your delivery.

2. GET GOOD WRITERS: You can't do it all yourself, no one can, and the crowd that usually writes the Academy Awards don't seem to do it anymore either. You and the producers must go beyond the usual suspects and seek out fresh new voices that mesh well with your own.

This will take time, and it will take effort, but it's worth it.

3. REMEMBER THAT THE SHOW IS ABOUT THE MOVIES IT'S NOT ABOUT YOU: When you try to make it about you, like Chris Rock's rather weak attempt at "pushing buttons," Jon Stewart's smug condescension, David Letterman's attempt to turn it into the Late Show, or James Franco's plain indifference, you will always come out looking the worst for it.

Study the greats at the job, Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, Billy Crystal. See how they handled jokes, segues, and banter. Learn how they always brought the subject back to the movies and people being honored, and kept the damn thing moving.

Be humble, be honored to be their, and most important of all, remember that you are their to entertain.

4. SPEAKING OF BEING HUMBLE: Your reputation for being late and demanding precedes you, and you have to shake that. This show is a big opportunity to re-assert your identity as a comedy powerhouse, and stories on TMZ about you driving up the already bloated Oscar budget with the demands of you and your entourage, and if you end up late for a live TV broadcast, they're going to defrost Billy Crystal and replace you, and you'll probably never get a decent part in Hollywood ever again.

Hollywood can be very forgiving, if you deliver success, screw up, and they'll put the blade to you faster than you can say "O-tay."

So be humble, be on time, and be prepared.

Remember, a lot of people are rooting for you to succeed. Please don't disappoint us again.

Sincerely

-Furious D