You Asked For It 2: Electric Boogaloo!

My reader Q&A has got me some other Qs.

Nate Winchester asked... 

Do you think some folks could start making cheaper content to be spread out there? (and/if some are already doing it on blip) 

Question 2: With all this revolution, what do you think could be the minimum spent to get a movie/tv show to "look" decent enough without that infamous "in the basement" style a lot of cheap movies have? (looking at you '80s)

Making the content is relatively easy thanks to new technology.

Getting it out there, especially online, is also relatively easy, also thanks to new technology.

The tricky part is getting noticed amid all the noise so that your work can start paying for itself.

A good illustration are the new YouTube channels that make original content. There are some entertaining shows being made, but they seem to be always outdone in viewer numbers by a video of a cat chasing a laser pointer.

Getting it into theatres and on television has similar problems.

Distributors, exhibitors, and networks want you to either have a track record that they can understand, or flash around a lot of money to show that you mean business and can consistently provide them with product that will deliver bums in seats.

People think crowd-sourcing will revolutionize entertainment models. It might, but the trends seem to indicate something different. Some may mock rich celebrities doing Kickstarter campaigns, but with so many projects asking for money, you're probably going to need a rich celebrity involved in your project just to get the notice you need to raise the money.

In short, making it is relatively easy, all you need is money and time, getting it out there is also relatively easier than it used to be, but being noticed above the static is a positively herculean task.

Your second question about exactly how much it takes for a production to look professional?

The short answer is somewhere between 50¢ and $100,000,000.

The long answer is that it all depends on two important factors:

1. Talent. How good is your crew? Especially the cinematographer? Can your producer & production manager make dead presidents cry by squeezing everything they can get out of every dollar? Can your prop, costume, and special effects people deliver for the money you have? If the answer to all these questions is "Yes" then you have a chance.

2. Time. The chief thing a budget buys a production is time. For a low budget production to look professional you must not only buys enough time to do it properly, you have to manage that time right to get the most out of the resources you have.

You asked two very specific questions and I gave you two very vague answers.  

                                    Ain't I a stinker?

You Asked For It!

You had questions, and I have answers. Let's get the ball rolling....

Blast Hardcheese asked... 

Hey D, didya know that Sony's looking to make an Angry Birds movie? Hand to God, not kidding here. Look it up. 

OK, I guess that wasn't really a question. More like leaving a flaming sack of dog poo on your doorstep. Err, sorry about that...

I did hear about Sony's plan for an Angry Birds movie. By the way, sorry to see this news...

I hope the county lockup has internet access.

Next question....

Rainforest Giant here, 

1. How much is netflix spending on their original content? How do they recoup the costs? Do they anticipate the value added will bring more subscribers? 

2. If they can produce their own content, can they more wiggle room with negotiating with other parties? 

3. How do independents make a comeback? 

4. Finally, how much does setting a story in historical times add to the cost? 

Looks like a cluster of questions from our local hairy behemoth.

1. Netflix is is little reticent about giving out exact numbers, but some say that's it's substantial. As for how they recoup their costs... Well, I'm assuming they're going to follow the model HBO business model which follows the model of gym memberships.

Gyms make money by getting a lot of people to buy memberships when they make their New Year's resolutions, go twice, never go again, but keep paying the monthly membership fee out of habit. HBO attracts subscribers by getting lots of media attention for their shows because they're the network that's allowed to have nudity. They then hope you forget to cancel your subscription if you lose interest in the show that got you to subscribe in the first place.

Now once in a while they get real hits, like The Sopranos, and Game of Thrones, but they're not necessary for HBO to keep going.

Now Netflix is its own boss, so to speak since unlike HBO it's not part of the Time-Warner empire, so they may add sponsorships later on. I don't think they'll do straight up commercials, because people would probably skip them, and if they skip-proofed them, people would unsubscribe, but they might add a "Brought To You By" at the beginning.

2. Content is king. The world is awash in outlets, but there's not enough content to fill them. The studios are used to being the kings of the content providing jungle, but the new outlets come with new ways of making content. The big studios can be outdone while by leaner cheaper providers. So this does give the outlet/content makers more wiggle room when negotiating with the studios, because the studios don't have the sort of shared monopoly they once had.

3. Short Answer: Don't do what Hollywood wants them to do, do what Hollywood doesn't want them to do.

Too many independent films have Hollywood as their target audience, when they need to pursue the general public as their audience. Sometimes that means challenging the shibboleths and attitudes of Hollywood itself.

4. The cost of making a historical period film depends on these key factors:

A. The period you're trying to recreate. What kind of costumes do you need? What kind of props? How much do they cost to make or rent? Will you need CGI to recreate an era, and if so, how much?

Starring in my own historical epic.

B. The location you're making the period production in. A production that might be prohibitively expensive to shoot in California, might be cheaper to make in Hungary. Need a castle, they have castles you can rent instead of trying to build your own on a backlot. Eastern Europe is a boon to the historical productions.

C. Just how big you want to make it. Do you want massive clashing medieval armies? Do you only need a suburban house, one family, and one wacky neighbour from the 1980s? 

So the short answer is, it depends on the specific production.

"NEXT QUESTION" he bellowed in all caps.

Sean asked... 

Although it has gotten a great deal of good reviews STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS is taking a lot of flak for a great deal of fan service near the conclusion. What are the dangers of fan service in movie making? 

For those who aren't hep to the lingo the kids are using these days, "Fan Service" is when something from a popular franchise does something to make the fans of that franchise go "squee."

Sometimes it's a reference to a specific character, prop or event from the depths of the franchise's history, other times it's putting a popular character in a skimpy outfit for the more lecherous among us.

The danger of fan service in movie making is that you need a bigger audience than a TV show or a comic book. That means you can't make your movie just one big in-joke or the bulk of the ticket buyers you need to make a profit are going to "Huh?" like a dog pondering a grape. That will hurt your word of mouth, and potentially can harm your ticket sales.

Next question!

Vincent asked... 

Hi Furious, This blog does a fantastic job of detailing the incredible incompetence and ridiculous meddling and politics that go on, seemingly, behind the scenes of nearly every major Hollywood film (and most minor ones). However, there are films, every year, that are both amazingly successful, critically acclaimed, and simply good. With all of the executive suits doing their best to ruin movies, how is it possible that we still have good movies made each year? 

Thanks for the compliment, FEED MY EGO! 

FEED IT!!!

But back to your question. Executive suits rarely go out to deliberately bad movies outside of the SyFy originals. However, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and the road to shitty movie-making is paved with the input of so-called "experts."

You see the people who run studios are constantly searching for some sort of magic bullet or panacea that will guarantee that a movie will be good, and more commonly, successful. That's why every two years you'll hear some story about a math geek who says his computer program will guarantee hit movies, and they always end the same way, someone will buy into it, lose a fortune, and it'll be another two years before someone else says "This time we've got it right."

The fact is that all creative endeavours are a total crap shoot. You can put the odds in your favour by using talented people who have a passion for their work, but even then, there is no way to tell how good the finished product will be.

Now when it comes to studio interference three things come into play:

1. Beating the "Meddle" Detector. Every executive has a line where they deem a project worthy of their meddling. Usually that line in about money. If the project is big and expensive the executive suits can't help but get involved because their jobs are on the line. But if the project is small and efficient, and done by filmmakers who know what they're doing, it's not worthy of executive attention.

That's how the Coen Brothers and Clint Eastwood have been able to do whatever they want.

2. The Broken Clock Theory. Even studio executives can be right once in a while. One story, which may even be true, was that Francis Ford Coppola delivered an approximately 90 minute first cut of The Godfather because he thought that's what the studio wanted. Robert Evans, who was running production at Paramount then, hated this cut because it was just like all the other failed gangster movies, and told Coppola to forget what the experts were saying and put all the family drama back into the movie. The family drama was what made The Godfather an epic instead of just another crime movie.

3. Filmmakers With Clout.  If a director has a hot commercial track record and the financial and moral backing of a major source of investment capital, then the studio may not interfere.  However, this can be a double edged sword because too often a filmmaker with this clout can fall into the trap of self-indulgence.

ILDC asked... 

I'm now convinced after almost immediately laying off employees and shutting down productions, Disney only agreed to buy Lucasfilm because George wanted it off his hands. That, and Iger felt he needed to spend a few billion on an acquisition every four years. Did they literally only want the rights to Star Wars? 

Maybe.

I'm not a mind reader, so I can't say anything about the exact motives behind certain decisions. I think Disney/Iger saw a franchise with potential not only for movie/TV opportunities, but merchandise, and jumped on it.

But I'm not sure they put much thought into what they were going to do once they got it, considering Lucasfilm had a bunch of commitments that Disney is trying to get out of so they can reinvent the franchise into a wholly Disney operation.

Next question:

Blast Hardcheese asked... 

Here's a poser. The new "Star Trek" made $70M domestically, and that's categorized as 'ooh dear, that's less than we expected'. 

I remember (back in the old days, when oil hadn't been invented yet and dinosaurs roamed) a $70M haul *total* would have been a Good Thing, let alone an opening weekend. 

But that aside, are we finally seeing the cracks in the current blockbusters-all-the-time business model for the major studios? Have we finally sated the appetite for bombastic CGI stuff?

Good to see the guards are letting you get online.

I too can remember when a $70 million total box office haul was a good thing. I can remember that if you hit $100 million total you were considered a blockbuster.

But those were the days before studios spent the equivalent of the GDP of a small European country to make a movie. 

I don't think that we are seeing the end of the $250 overwrought extravaganza. While too many cost too much to make money without breaking records, the ones that do break records make the guys who gave them the green light look like geniuses.

However, they're not so much the problem as the overall hyper-inflation of film production, distribution, and marketing costs. Technology and expanding outlets means it should be cheaper to make movies and get them out into theatres and onto TV screens. However, the whole business model is so dysfunctional that even projects you think would be modest in the whole budget department are unbelievably expensive.

A good story that illustrates this point was when Warner Brothers passed on doing an adaptation of The Thin Man starring Johnny Depp. The reason they passed was that the producers and director were unable to give them a budget for under $100 million.

Now if you're familiar with The Thin Man you would be flabbergasted to think that it couldn't be done for under $100 million because 2/3 of the action in the original novel, and the original movie TAKES PLACE IN ONE HOTEL SUITE.

Now it's supposed to be the best suite in the city, but not worth going over a $100 million budget.  That means that the people who wanted to make the film were literally planning to waste tens of millions of dollars on time and trouble that were not necessary to make a decent adaptation of the story.

Hollywood is literally forgetting how to operate within reasonable financial constraints. Which is another way executives have failed.

Thanks for the questions. 

Hollywood Babble On & On #1022: Fall TV Preview: The CW.

The broadcast networks are putting out their Fall TV schedules and the CW is up first. So let's take a look and toss in a few dollops of snark where it's needed...

CW FALL 2013-2014 SCHEDULE

New shows are in UPPER CASE & BOLD; NN=New Night

MONDAY

8-9 PM – Hart Of Dixie (NN)

9-10 PM – Beauty And The Beast (NN)

TUESDAY

8-9 PM – THE ORIGINALS 

This is a spin off from their teen vampire soap-opera The Vampire Diaries which is also based on the premise that walking corpses that feed on the living are somehow sexy to teenage girls.

9-10 PM – Supernatural (NN)

WEDNESDAY

8-9 PM – Arrow

9-10 PM – THE TOMORROW PEOPLE

A bastardization re-imagining of a British science fiction show from the 1970s. The original show was about average looking teens who develop superpowers and defend the world from alien invaders. All of the promo-materials say that this is about a bunch of 20 something models with superpowers who defend themselves from sinister corporate/government types in suits.

As someone who actually watched the original show when he was but a wee shaver I feel compelled to rate this a "Feh."

I also doubt this new show will have the same trippy opening credits as the original...

When you're 5 years old that's as good as peyote.

THURSDAY

8-9 PM – The Vampire Diaries

9-10 PM – REIGN

It's allegedly about Mary Queen of Scots, but a preview clip I saw made me think it was about a bunch of California mall rats forced by their parents to participate at a Ren Faire.

FRIDAY

8-9 PM – The Carrie Diaries (NN)

Moving this show to a dead night for its target demo tells me that they want to cancel it, but spent too much money putting it on the air to just give up on it at this stage.

9-10 PM – America’s Next Top Model

Gotta question? Then CLICK HERE and leave it in the comments. I'll be answering them all as soon as I got enough to fill space on this blog.

ASK ME ANYTHING!

It's been a while since I've asked you, my lovely and fragrant readers, to ask me any questions about the business behind popular culture. So click the comments and ask me anything.

There's no reason for this picture.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1021: Eat This Movie...

Just when you think Hollywood has hit rock bottom creatively, it starts digging.

Production company Benderspink has announced that they're developing a movie based on the restaurant chain Medieval Times.

That's right, a movie based on a restaurant, where tourists go to watch people in faux medieval garb risk life and limb recreating jousting tournaments on horseback.

What's next the family saga "The Olive Garden" or the intense thriller "Boston Pizza," or the sexy farce "Hooters: The Movie?"

Now this shows the difference between how Hollywood producers think, and how things work out in the real world.

Hollywood Producers think that this is a slam dunk project and here's why:

1. There's a familiar brand name, and audiences adore familiar brand names.

2. They can slap together a by the numbers script about scrappy nobodies fighting for the jousting championship in no time without creating a single original element.

3. It's guaranteed to be an orgy of product placement, and you know that audiences love it when movies tell them what products to buy.

Now here's how that thinking clashes with the real world.

1. Audiences only really like familiar brand names in movies when that brand name is associated with stories that deliver excitement and adventure. The brand names of restaurants, even ones that offer dinner theatre in the form of faux-medieval fights that have all the historical accuracy of an MGM musical, are not associated with excitement and adventure.

2. The corporation that owns Medieval Times is going to want script approval to protect their brand. That means that anything that has the potential to show the company in a negative light in the slightest way will be excised and sanitized into becoming one big fat 90 minute commercial.

3. Audiences will accept a certain level of product placement, they help pay for movies to get made, but if you push it too far you end up with...

Thus endeth the lesson.

Hollywood Babble On & On 1020: Dungeons & Dragons & Courtrooms & Lawyers.

Warner Brothers announced that they are going to make a Dungeons & Dragons movie inspired by the venerable table-top role-playing game.

Hasbro and Universal Pictures then declared "AW HELL NO!" saying that they own the rights to any D&D based movie due to an amazingly complicated rights deal involving Hasbro, game maker Wizards of the Coast, and at least two Hollywood studios and who truly owns the movie rights to what elements of the game.

When I saw this story I was immediately hit with a powerful mental image.

It wasn't of noble heroes battling mythical beasts in a fantastical setting.

Far from it.

Instead I saw two dogs in a junkyard fighting over a broken fan belt.

A lot of noise, a lot of kicked up dirt, and maybe even some blood drawn, all for something that the winner probably wouldn't know what to do with.

I know I'm sounding like yet another judgemental cynic on the internet, but I have some facts to back me up.

Those facts are that it was done before, badly, really badly.

The tagline for the Dungeons & Dragons movie was "This is no game," and it wasn't much of a movie either.

That didn't stop them from making two super-cheap direct to video sequels that hardly anyone saw and nobody liked.

So you're probably wondering why Warner Brothers would be so eager to try again even though the previous three attempts were dismal failures.

It all boils down to one word:

"FRANCHISE"

Warner Brothers wrapped up the hyper-lucrative Harry Potter movies, The Hobbit will be wrapping in a few years even if they stretch the little book to five movies, and they're unable to get a decent DC Comics movie off the ground without Legendary Pictures holding their hand, they need a nice big blockbuster genre franchise with a recognizable "brand" attached to it.

Enter Dungeons & Dragons.

It's enjoying a resurgence in popularity with other table-top games because people like the social aspect over the distance inherent in computer games. It's also a game, unlike Battleship, that is literally built around story-telling.

Think about it, you have a bunch of people sitting around a table. Each has a character, a situation for those characters to solve that involves action and monsters and exotic locales. The Dungeon Master then uses the rules to guide those characters through the situation until they reach a conclusion, literally composing a story as they went along.

Tell that to a studio executive and they'll say...

But they would be wrong.

Wrong!

Wrong!

WRONG!

You see unlike Harry Potter, or a comic book, the story-telling of Dungeons and Dragons is uber-personal. It doesn't have the singular vision of a single author, or in the case of a comic book a team of authors, story-wise it has literally hundreds of thousands of authors.

Each player has their own vision of a D&D type adventure in their mind, because that's where the D&D action is. There are also no set-in-stone characters to build a movie franchise on, merely settings, classes, and races.

Now people do create D&D based novels all the time, and the fans seem to like them because the books are perceived as one person's personal vision of the places and creatures of the game being presented to entertain other fans. However a movie has a lot more weight on its back than a paperback novel. Because it's such a rare event, and would be by nature, an expensive production it's expected to be the definitive representation of the entire D&D franchise as a whole, not just one facet of it.

That might be well nigh impossible.

That is unless they do a live action movie of the 80s D&D cartoon.... that might work.

                         I kid....  I kid....

Hollywood Babble On & On #1019: Jumping the Shark

(The following is an excerpt of my work in progress book about the business of pop culture.)

I'm not going to assume that you're familiar with the term "Jumping The Shark," because not everyone is as internet hip and savvy as I am, which is bad, because I am not at all internet hip and savvy in any way. But I do know what this term means.

It comes from an episode of the long running sitcom Happy Days, where all the characters went on a trip to California and retro-cool icon The Fonz somehow saved the day by going on water-skis and jumping over stock footage of a shark. It is at that moment that fans say the quality and viewership of the show began to decline until the show became a sad parody of itself with only a few remaining original cast members simply showing up for the paycheques, and not much else.

This is the flip side of shows that get cancelled before they get a chance to succeed, these are shows that succeed early on, but are kept on the air well past their sell by date, and finally end up on proverbial life support.

This situation leaves us with two questions that scream to be answered.

Why do these shows burn out?

Why do they stay on the air even though they are burnt out both creatively and with audiences?

Let’s answer the first one…

Why do they burn out?

There are several reasons why a show may burn out creatively.

Old Writers. Writing television is hard work, and many writers can just run out of fresh ideas, and they can fall into some pretty common creative traps. I’m talking about repeating story-lines, relying on familiar and/or popular catch-phrases, contrived situations, or just going for really silly and hackneyed bits to fill time.

New Writers. Sometimes the writers that made a show a hit don’t stick around. Sometimes they leave for what they hope are greener pastures, sometimes they are forced out of the door either because their work is slipping, they got too expensive, or for some internal personal-political reason. They are then replaced by writers who don’t know the characters and stories that they’re supposed to be writing for with the same depth or interest as the people they replaced.

Meddling. Scripted television is a writer’s medium, but it’s also ripe for meddling by people who think they know story better than the people who write them for a living. You have the production company, the studio, the network, and the stars all perfectly willing to jump in with their two cents at the first opportunity. Sometimes this meddling can tear a show in a bunch of different directions. The production company and the studio want the show to be more family friendly for syndication, the network wants it to be sexier for ratings, and your star actor wants to change his image from loveable nerd to action hero. 

That’s just some of the things that can go into forcing a show over that proverbial shark.

Why do network’s keep shows on after they’ve jumped the shark?

The three most common reasons are:

MONEY. Sometimes the show may be dead creatively, but enough of the audience sticks around to keep the show profitable. Network logic is that it’s still better to have a sinking ship that’s making at least some money than take a risk on a replacement that could completely flop from the beginning.

CONTRACTUAL OBLIGATIONS. Other times the networks have contractual reasons to keep a show on the air. They could include wanting to keep a highly paid star in something that generating at least some revenue until their contract is up. Sometimes they’re just trying to get enough episodes to make a good syndicated rerun deal. 

STUBBORNNESS AND HOPE. And then there are situations when the people running the network are positive that they can fix the problems and put the show on top again.

Of course if a network refuses to give up on a show it could lead to the dreaded retooling, which is a topic all by itself.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1018: Will A Legendary Partnership End?

I think I should start this post with a little history.

Back in 2000 financial whiz kid and nerd culture aficionado Thomas Tull set up Legendary Pictures a film finance and production company with $500 million in financing from various investors. In 2005 Legendary signed a deal to exclusively co-produce/finance 40 movies with venerable mega-studio Warner Brothers Pictures.

It didn't take Legendary long to become a major player in the field of big budget blockbusters. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find a hit coming out of Warner Bros. outside the Harry Potter franchise that didn't have the distinctive Legendary logo at the beginning. They succeeded in getting Warner/DC's top superhero characters out of their studio imposed hell with Batman Begins, and the upcoming Man of Steel, with Christopher Nolan and his merry band of cinematic tricksters.

Now you would think that with the contract coming due very soon that there would be no doubt that Tull and Legendary will sign on the dotted line to renew such a lucrative relationship, and that Warner Brothers would be eager for him to sign.

According to reports that's not the case. Tull hasn't yet decided if Legendary will re-up, and the folks running Warner Brothers don't appear to be too bothered if he does or not.

WTF?

Seriously though, I know their record hasn't been perfect, no company's output is, but there have been more aces than jokers in the deck that Legendary and Warner Brothers have been dealing.

So why aren't both sides eager to keep this boat going full steam ahead?

Now if this was an isolated incident, I'd probably just chalk it up to personality clashes between the management of Warner Brothers and the folks at Legendary Pictures. They do have very different management styles, especially when it comes to developing projects. (Legendary actually finishes developing properties within the lifespan of a Galapagos turtle.)

However, this is not an isolated incident.

In fact, I have a hard time remembering any time a studio and an outside co-producer and financier had a healthy business relationship. Most end with resentment at the best, and expensive litigation at the second best, and the complete financial collapse of the financier at worst, no matter how many hits they produce.

Now I can go on again about studio bookkeeping, the self-fulfilling idiocy, but instead I'll dip into movie history for a little parable.

Let's a take a moment to consider Hyman Roth, as portrayed by Lee Strasberg in the classic gangster epic The Godfather Part 2.

Now much is made about how Roth is an old man in a profession, organized crime, that is not known for its long life spans. He is also rich and powerful far beyond his humble appearance, even bragging that he and his partners are "bigger than US Steel."

What's his secret, is it because he's tougher than all the other mobsters?

No, he succeeded because he's smarter. Because he follows the dictum that he always makes money for his partners.

When he forgets, and lets his desire for revenge on Michael Corleone for the death of Moe Green get the better of him, and not only does he lose almost everything, he ends up dead in the arrivals section of an airport.

Before he was blinded by ulterior motives he operated as a proper capitalist, making sure everyone he did business with was happy. But when his ulterior motive got the better of him, he ended up ruined, indicted, and leaking blood onto a thin synthetic airport carpet instead of being retired in Miami with a million bucks under his mattress.

Working with the studios is like working with Hyman Roth with the ulterior motive. Studio management almost never looks solely at the profitability of a partnership. They usually have some ulterior motive, usually involving their own aggrandizement (rather than Roth's desire for revenge), that ultimately sours the relationship between the partners.

That's why successful partnerships between financiers and studios usually end badly. The people running the studio like the success, but they hate having to share money and credit, and do everything they can to end that partnership, preferably with the partners destroyed so the studio can claim all the money and praise.

I wish this stupidity would stop, because if it doesn't the movie business could face...

YOU ASKED FOR IT!

Some readers had some comments that I think are worthy of a response.

Ken Begg asked... I'm increasingly surprised that Disney hasn't released remastered editions of the original versions of the older Star Wars movies on DVD / BluRay. Get rid of all the lousy additions George Lucas shoved down the fan's throats. This would result in instant money, and make the fans happy, buying Disney further cred. 

Hell, release the Star Wars Holiday Special. It was always incredibly petty of Lucas to have had just a bug up his butt about that.

While I didn't like the changes Lucas made to his movies, I will acknowledge that he had the right to make those changes. The movies were his property.

What I didn't like was that he constantly refused to release a decent DVD version of the unsullied originals, and declared that the memories of the original fans didn't matter because it was his toy and they could go pound sand. Which was a tart blend of hypocrisy and arrogance since back in the 80s he fought so hard against Ted Turner colourizing the black and white classics he grew up watching.

Disney could release a "Classic Edition" DVD/Blu-Ray and probably make a few gazillion easy, but knowing George Lucas and his love of micromanaging and denying that he ever made a mistake might have made him put something in the sales contract to keep them from doing it.

If there isn't some poison pill in the contract, just pressure Disney to release the originals. If they can make money off of it, they will do it.

As for the Star Wars Holiday Special, I have to say that I have to agree with George on that one. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. I remember seeing it as a little kid, and thinking: "This doesn't make any sense, and it's making my brain hurt."

Next comment...

Rainforest Giant here,

How hard would it be to combine the budgets from two or three of those scyfy channel abortions they churn out?
I mean they put up one or two new ones a week. So why not take some time and actually do one half-assed right? Or combine some of their properties into one show? Have 'Face Off' do the makeup for a couple movies and cross-promote with tie-ins all around. Give some money to people doing decent web shows like 'The Guild'.

I watched the first episode of 'Defiance' and it wasn't too horrible but there were no surprises. I am not sure if I'll keep watching. 'Continuum' was simply boring I quit watching that already.

They didn't have to reinvent the wheel with their Battlestar Galactica prequel thing. I guess they thought that having a fifteen year old girl who is too stupid to stay away from murderous morons was the way to go.

Somebody could produce some scifi for kids Saturday morning tv (do they still do that?). It wouldn't have to be too perfect kids don't demand that (look at 'Power Rangers') but they do want it to be engaging and fun. Any reason that cannot be a gateway drug to good science fiction/horror?

I don't think it's about money when it comes to the crapulence of the SyFy originals and their ilk. Only the major studios think massive amounts of cash are necessary to make decent science-fiction and horror.

There are ways to make those kinds of genre films on a budget, but they require resources that SyFy and other straight-to-DVD-cable producers have a shortage of.

Those resources are imagination and the ambition to create work that does more than just fill time on a schedule.

If they had those resources they would have put together something involving their other shows, which actually is a pretty good idea. They also wouldn't butcher popular science fiction novels into unrecognizable messes.

But they don't. Instead they clog the airwaves with crap, and those who actually do make good genre movies on a budget are lost in the shuffle.

-----------

And now a moment of RAGE!

Speaking of lazy b-movies. Last night I was channel surfing and came across a movie called Swamp Devil with Bruce Dern. Though I was only able to force myself to watch about 10 minutes of it I can say without a doubt that it was a perfect example of lazy b-movie making.

Why?

THERE WAS NO SWAMP!

The titular 'swamp' was a pond in the middle of a forest of gently rolling hills in Quebec.

Now if you're going to put out anything with "Swamp" in the title, you better deliver lots of watery places teeming with all sorts of biting things. If you can't afford a swamp then you have to ask yourself:

What would Roger Corman do?

Corman would have hired some eager kid with talent looking for a break into the industry, like a young Robert Towne, or Francis Coppola, tell him the script needs a rewrite because they can't afford Louisiana, they have to shoot it in Quebec. Then he'd lock the writer in a room, like he used to with Robert Towne, and let him out when he was finished. The writer, hoping to make his mark would then change it from a swamp monster, to a forest monster, and make up something that sounded like Quebecois folklore as local colour so they can save money by not trying to make it look like America, contrive a reason for an American hero, and they're off to the races.

It's not rocket science, it's just using a little imagination.