Hollywood Babble On & On #646: Miscellaneous Movie Media Musings...

Welcome to the show folks...

OPRAH'S LEAVING ALL HAIL THE ANTI-OPRAH

Anderson Cooper will be starting a syndicated daytime talk show and will be replacing the exiting Oprah Winfrey in many markets across the USA.

You can't really get more un-Oprah than Anderson Cooper, let's look at the stats.

Background:

Oprah Winfrey, female, poor working class, African American, from Mississippi, who went to Tennessee State University on a scholarship while working in local radio.

Anderson Cooper, male, rich and privileged (a Vanderbilt), ultra-white (even his hair), from New York City who went to Yale University.

Personality:

Oprah Winfrey presents herself as warm, sensitive, friendly and hyper enthusiastic about things she likes.

Anderson Cooper comes across as cold, aloof, un-emotional, almost robotic.

Weight:

Oprah Winfrey has struggled with her weight for decades and in public.

Anderson Cooper looks like he was born thin.

Career:

Oprah Winfrey, started in local radio, and got a spot hosting a local talk show and took it from the bottom of the ratings to the top of the ratings and then national success in syndication and a media empire which includes magazines and her own cable network.

Anderson Cooper, went into journalism over a career with the CIA, and became a major figure by hosting a prime-time show on what was then the biggest cable news network in the country and watched the ratings for his show, its network, and the importance of both dwindle against the competition.

The only thing they appear to have in common is that both are subject to speculations about their personal lives. Personally, I don't give a rodent's left butt-cheek about the private lives of either.

So the question is, after watching Oprah for decades will they watch her exact opposite?

IMAGINE IMAGINES WRITERS WORKING IN A NEW-OLD WAY

Ron Howard and Brian Grazer's Imagine Entertainment Company is starting what they believe is a radical new experiment that they hope will evolve the creative process.

They're calling it a special "Writer's Lab" and in it writers will be brought together for a year, put on salary and given other financial incentives to create movies and television shows together.

Now maybe it's just me, but I don't think this is all that radical.

Back in the golden age of Hollywood writers would be brought in from all over the world, put on a generous weekly salary for the time, put in offices, and then put to work on creating scripts for the studio. There would also be extra money to be made rewriting each others scripts, and if two or more worked together to create a script they didn't have to split a single pay-check, because they were both on salary.

Sounds to me like a bit of history repeating.

AND NOW, A PALATE CLEANSER

Saturday Silliness Cinema: Merry Xmas Part 2

Welcome to the show folks...

It's time for my usual break from ranting about pop culture and the business behind it and have a little laugh. In keeping with my December yuletide theme, here's Brit comedian Peter Serafinowicz with some Xmas themed sketches. Enjoy.

Hollywood Babble On & On #645: Billionaires, Movies, & Money

Welcome to the show folks....

There's an old saying that nothing make someone a millionaire faster than being a billionaire investing in the movie business. Forbes has an article about the decidedly mixed record billionaires have had investing in the movies. (hat tip: DorothyAtForbes)

At the very best investing in movies is a gamble, and success selling computers, real estate, or cars, doesn't mean that you're going to have success making movies. In fact being a success in one of those fields gives you a very special title when you invest in making movies.

That title is PIGEON.

The movie business is unlike any other industry in the world. The temptations are obvious, it's glamorous, exciting, creative, and sexy, and then there's the money to be made if you have a blockbuster hit. But behind those temptations are a myriad of traps and travails that could leave a once mega-rich player busted flat and wondering what the hell just happened.

So let's have a little thought experiment. Let's imagine that you, gentle fragrant reader, just joined the ranks of the might uber-rich thanks to selling off the mega-successful company you started in your garage. You have billions of dollars in liquid assets, time on your hands, and a passionate love with movies that you want to consummate.

Well, if you're going to do some consummating, you are going to need some protection. Protection in the form of advice from this smug know-it-all like me.

1. REMEMBER THAT ANY IDIOT CAN MAKE A MOVIE. That's true, anyone with money and time can make a movie. However, it takes skill, intelligence, and experience to get that movie into theaters and get people to see it. This requires intense research and planning. You need to find out how every facet of the business works. It's not like selling widgets, it's making movies, and it operates by its own rules. You have to know those rules like the back of your hand, you must know who the players are, how they operate, and who you would like to do business with.

Knowledge is power, but remember that you must...

2. TRUST NO ONE. If you're going to make movies you are going to need partners. Co-producers, distributors, whatever, you can't do it all by yourself without investing pretty much everything you've got. You will need an infrastructure to get the film out there, and to sell it to audiences. Now a lot of the people that will want to do business with you see you as a yokel who just fell off the turnip truck. They will promise you huge profits, Academy Awards, starlets at Sundance who will let you into their designer parkas, and anything else that will get you to sign with them.

Don't believe a word of it.

Believe what you can dig up yourself. Keep up with the research advised in step 1, dig deep, and see what lies beyond the curtain and just who can deliver on the promises, and who can't. Remember the industry is based on fiction, on screen and in the account books.

3. ONLY INVEST WHAT YOU CAN AFFORD TO LOSE. This is key. Even if your partners, are as honest as humanly possible, this is still a gamble. Treat it like a trip to Vegas. The money you brought to the table is the price of admission to the big poker game, and you must be willing and able to lose the whole pot, and walk away.

That's why you must start modestly. Keep the budgets under control, aim for commercially viable properties, and if they succeed, you can build a cushion for riskier projects. Going big budget blockbuster, or hard-core art house awards-bait on your first attempt, without a track record could backfire badly.

4. MANAGE RELATIONSHIPS WISELY. If you do make money on your project, and can keep going that's all well and good. But that doesn't mean you can start stomping around like you're King Kong. Hollywood is based on relationships, if you want to build a viable career as a producer, you have to know what relationships you should maintain, and what you should drop like a dead branch off a tree.

Diplomacy, alliances, and even knowing the right times and places to keep your friends close and your enemies closer are all important. You don't want to be known as a bully, or as a doormat, you want to be known as a tough but fair businessman that compared to you there is no better friend, and no worse enemy.

Then, maybe, you might be able to survive with your fortune more or less intact.

Hollywood Babble On & On #644: Hollywood Foreign Prostitutes Association?

Welcome to the show folks...

It's December, and with the certainty of the tides comes the annual griping about Awards Season. This week TV producer Peter Tolan said this about Hollywood Foreign Press Association and the Golden Globes:

"just a group of whores from other countries... I'm not prone to hyperbole, but the Foreign Press [Assn] really is a bunch of whores. They can be bought... It's really an excuse to go out with people who don't speak English that well and maybe win a trinket. [A Golden Globe] means shit. Fuck the Globes."

The HFPA is a bunch of whores that can be bought.

Let's just file that under "Well d'uh!"

In the grand schematic of the multiverse Hollywood based award, be they from Associations, Academies, Guilds, Circles, Clubs, and Covens, are all essentially meaningless trinkets that have more to do with the maneuvering of the nominees and the prejudices of the nominators than actual quality of the films and the integrity of the process.

The problem is that Hollywood takes these damn things too damn seriously.

I end up saying this every year, the worst thing to happen to the Golden Globes was when the press thought it was some sort of predictor for the Oscars. Sure, sometimes it did honor films that went on to win Oscars, but that's the same logic that tells you to base your schedule on a broken clock because it's right twice a day.

The thing is that you're not supposed to take the HFPA or the Golden Globes seriously. It started out as a charity fund-raising dinner and the agenda had nothing to do with predicting the Oscars or awarding quality.

The agenda was to get together with your friends and co-workers, get shit-faced drunk, hand out prizes as an excuse to rag on each other, and wake up in the morning with a cocktail waitress and no memory of what happened and why there's a live chicken in your living room, and a trophy with Don Ameche's name engraved on it stuck in your chandelier next to the waitress' panties.

That's why they usually stuck to just releasing the results the next morning. Partly for the public to see who won and partly to remind the participants that they were there.

However, the big media conglomerates want to have glamorous gals in glittery gowns on their magazine covers and something to fill four hours of usually dull winter TV-prime time on Sunday night, so they started hyping it up. They conveniently forgot about the whole Pia Zadora incident, and just kept pushing the glamor and the glitz in the hope of making a quick buck. What was once just a fun social get-together became a stress filled media monstrosity that holds way more sway over an actor's career than it should, because despite it's image as a qualifying play-off to the Oscars, it's ultimately meaningless.

It's a triviality, treat it as such.

Hollywood Babble On & On #643: Randoms Drippings From My Brain Pan

Welcome to the show folks....

RUSSELL MAKES A FUSSELL

Russell Crowe wants a sequel to his seafaring adventure Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World. I can understand that, he hasn't had a real substantial hit in a long time, and people are starting to wonder about his status as an A-List movie star, especially after his last film The Next Three Days lasted less than three days at the box office.

But what makes Russell so unpopular. He is a good actor, but he does have this image as a prickly and cantankerous bloke, and the whole toss the phone at the hotel worker incident didn't help, but it shouldn't be fatal to a career. So far he hasn't killed anyone or trashed a hotel room with a porn star hiding in the closet.

And it can't be because he's "difficult" in the old Hollywood parlance. If you look at his filmography filmmakers tend to work with him again and again, chiefly Ridley Scott and Ron Howard. These aren't people who are going to waste time with someone who is hard to work with.

Maybe it's a case of expectations. When he first exploded into Hollywood in the 90s he came across as an old school tough guy with some serious acting chops who was capable of playing classic heroic parts. People had high expectations, and maybe that incident with the phone-toss scarred those expectations. Maybe he should have started out as a coked-out drunken asshole, like Charlie Sheen, and then he'd have been immunized.

MPAA GIVES HARVEY WEINSTEIN A VALENTINE FOR HANUKKAH

The Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board has changed their mind about the Weinstein Company film Blue Valentine. The film was originally rated NC-17 over some sexual content, which made people who actually saw the film go "WTF?" but now it will be rated "R" which folks are saying is more reasonable.

Now I could go on about the inanity of some of the MPAA's ratings decisions, but I'll bet dollars to donuts that they'd give the Justice League porn parody a PG-13 if it could get a bulldog like Harvey Weinstein off their backs.

Which only just shows how broken and in need of reform the rating system really is.

Hollywood Babble On & On #642: Christmas Movies & I See Dead People On Screen!

Welcome to the show folks...

SANTA ISN'T GOING TO HOLLYWOOD THIS YEAR

For the first time in my living memory there isn't a single Christmas movie coming from a major studio this December.

Now some may say that this is just another shot in the ongoing culture war between Hollywood and the predominantly Christian American audience.

I think the answer is much simpler.

Hollywood can't make a decent Christmas movie anymore.

Think about it, what made the Xmas movies you watch every year so great. They were great stories of redemption, belief, and sincere emotion.

Can you imagine anyone in Hollywood capable of producing something like that these days?

Most of the Xmas and Xmas-related movies of the past few years have tanked, mostly because they were either brain dead slapstick farces, dreary FX overloads that had all the warmth of an icicle from Pluto, or something like the direct to DVD flick Santa Paws, the only Xmas related release of any kind this year is a steaming pile of saccharine hoping to grab cash from harried parents with cute puppies and some regurgitated catch phrases and cliches. It's the sort of film I used to make fun of when I was a kid.

Personally, I don't think anyone can top what I consider the trinity of Xmas movies, A Christmas Carol (AKA Scrooge) with Alastair Sim, It's A Wonderful Life, and Miracle On 34th Street, and it looks like Hollywood isn't even going to try this year.

WHEN THERE'S NO MORE ROOM IN FOREST LAWN...

....the dead will walk again in Hollywood.

At least that was the rumor yesterday. Comedian and director Mel Smith made a comment that George Lucas was buying the rights to the images of dead celebrities for use in a CGI movie.

Lucas took a moment from rolling around a bin full of $1000 bills to deny this rumor.

Now Smith was probably joking, but his joke was a little too believable and instantly became the rumor that got people going all over the word.

Lucas is notorious for his disdain for working with living actors, his love of old movies, the people who starred in them, and his dream of making a film without actors in the vein of the films that shaped his childhood.

Personally, I think Robert Zemeckis is going to try it first, finally making a mo-cap film where the characters don't look like re-animated corpses by actually casting reanimated corpses.

What do you think about these stories? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Hollywood Babble On & On #641: Weinstein Company Men

Welcome to the show folks...

Last Sundance festival marked the premiere of the film Company Men. The movie had a heavyweight cast in the form of a resurgent Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, and Chris Cooper, a director crossing over from a successful career in television, John Wells, and a relevant storyline considering the current economic climate. While no one was expecting the film to be a big blockbuster, some said it had the potential to find itself a niche, especially during awards season.

Then the film got picked up by the Weinstein Company.

When that happened I sort of joked that the Weinstein's release plan was to make a lot of promises, then in about 6 months come up with an excuse to bump the film back, and bump it back again, and then finally dump it in the DVD discount bin at a Wal-Mart in Flin-Flon Manitoba.

Well, it turns out that it wasn't a joke, but a pretty accurate prediction, only off by a couple of months.

Now they're promising an Oscar qualifying run in literally theaters, with a wider release in January.

"Sure," he said as the sarcastic irony dripped from his tongue as thick and smooth as tupelo honey, "I believe you."

Which makes me ask this question one more time:

WHY DO PEOPLE SELL THEIR FILMS TO THE WEINSTEINS IN THE FIRST PLACE?

Seriously, because unless it's going to make Bob a lot of cash, or get Harvey qualified for another Oscar, your film is going to get bent over and rogered with a stiff wire brush. It's going to be either re-cut into oblivion, then dumped, or just plain dumped.

Now I know that the indie film market is about as lively as a postmortem Perry Como concert, but it can't be so desperate that the only option is a buyer who buys movies pretty much solely to keep other people from doing anything worthwhile with it.

Sheesh. I'm not the only saying stuff like this, so why aren't these people listening?

Saturday Silliness Cinema: Merry Xmas Part 1

Welcome to the show folks...

Yesterday was my birthday and I took a day off from the blog, but I'm back today and I'm starting a new Christmas themed series of vids for Saturday Silliness Cinema. First up, my sincerest wishes that you all have the haziest, laziest, craziest, and Swayziest Christmas ever.

Hollywood Babble On & On #640: Thoughts On CBS Films By A Smug Know It All

Welcome to the show folks...

CBS Films is having some troubles. Its latest release Faster, is going kind of slow at the box office, and in response to yet another under-performer the company is having a management shake-up.

I've written before about the CBS TV network's latest attempt at getting into the theatrical feature film biz. The original concept behind the company is sound. That concept is to produce and distribute moderately budgeted genre films to fill the increasingly vacant middle ground left between the mega-budget blockbusters, and the award baiting art house fare.

Now that I have that out of the way I have to be blunt, and by blunt, I mean savagely brutal. While the concept behind the company is sound, the company itself isn't sound, and it goes beyond the current night of the Sicilian vespers going on at the head office.

Let's look at the company's two biggest problems...

THE NAME OF THE COMPANY

Now the folks at CBS, chiefly honcho Les Moonves, think that it's key that they slap the precious CBS "brand" on the company. Experts will tell you that it's an important selling point for the new business, but it's really mostly to get the CEO of the parent company a few pats on the back at the country club when the company with their "brand" does well.

However, sometimes a successful brand like the CBS TV network can harm a venture, especially a theatrical feature film venture.

Think about it, audience members see the CBS brand and they think television. They think of warm comfortable entertainment brought into their homes and enjoyed from the comfort of their couch. They do not think about theatrical feature films, and definitely don't think of anything with the CBS Eyeball stamped on it as worth getting off that couch, driving all the way out to the multiplex and dropping some serious coin to see.

CBS would have been much better off calling this new company a completely different name. Maybe start with what the letters CBS mean... Columbia Broadcasting System. They could call it COLUMBIA PICTURES!

What?

That name's already taken?

Dang it!

Okay, scratch that. There is still an entire universe of potential names for this new company that have a different branding than CBS. Someone, somewhere could have figured one out. Legend says that Universal Pictures got its name off a truck shipping plumbing supplies, and that Warner Brothers got its name from some guys who started the company. The point that I'm making is that this new company needed a new brand to get audiences to get off the couch.

MARKETING

Face it, I didn't even know that Faster was being released into theaters until after it started having underwhelming ticket sales.

That's bad, because I try to pay attention to those sorts of things. If you're not reaching me, then you are definitely not reaching the sort who actually have the disposable income to buy a ticket.

Their movies can't directly compete with the big blockbusters when it comes to advertising. That's a given. However, they shouldn't even try. They can't spend their way out of this jam, but they can think their way out of it. I'm talking about looking for ways to promote the films that don't require mega-bucks spent in ad-buys. This can be done, other filmmakers and companies do it all the time. Study the successes and the failures, determine what they did right and did wrong, and form your own plan from what you've learned. It's a lot of work, but in the end it should be worth it.

Then they might be able to make this thing work.

Hollywood Babble On & On #639: Walking Dead Writers Get Their Walking Papers

Welcome to the show folks...

Meanwhile another show isn't being exactly welcome to its writers. Frank Darabont, executive producer and showrunner of AMC's breakout zombie hit The Walking Dead has given the shows staff writers their walking papers. That's right, after the huge success of Season 1's six episodes, he's going into the 13 episode 2nd Season by himself, with planned contributions from the comic's creator Robert Kirkman, and some freelancers.

Really?

I can't say that I'm all that keen on this idea, now I could snark about it based on rumors that Mr. Darabont is hard to get along with, but I don't like to deal in rumors, because I'm not an insider with insider info, I'm as far out as you can get and still be on the same continent. So, in the interest of fairness, which I rarely practice, I will take a look at the Pros and Cons of the business/creative ramifications of this decision.

PROS:

1. I'm assuming that this is somehow going to save the show some money, and the original writers might still be rehired under some convoluted Hollywood style accounting scheme.

2. Darabont's defenders state that the series is following a more British style model. The British model is that the series has a limited number of episodes, and a limited number of writers. Many British TV series are written by a single writer as one big sort of 'novel for television.' The closest a more mainstream American series came to the "one writer" plan was J. Michael Straczynski and his sci-fi series Babylon 5, where he wrote entire seasons by himself for a total of 92 of the series 110 episodes.

3. Other defenders say that the series is pretty much already written inside the pages of Robert Kirkman's ongoing and long running comic book series.

Now let's look at the...

CONS

1. The odds that the original staff writer are going to be rehired as freelancers under some Hollywood accounting scheme are pretty slim. Resentment can come into Hollywood relationships, and other shows love to poach people with time on hits. Especially a come from nowhere, unexpected hit like Walking Dead.

2. While I do advocate the British model for certain types of TV series, and that some shows do better as a limited run miniseries than as an ongoing. These sorts of stories are small scale, and self-contained with an obvious beginning, middle, and end, and often years between each 'series.'

However, The Walking Dead, by the nature of its source material is a large, long, and ongoing sort of serial drama about survival in a world where civilization has ceased to exist.

Yes, Straczynski did it on Babylon 5, but it kind of showed. I was never a big fan of the show, mostly because of parts where plot-lines were stretched out when they should have been wrapped up quickly, and explanations denied when logic screamed for them because asking and answering questions didn't fit with the show's central plan. This could have been avoided if there was a bit more collaboration with fresh eyes and minds, instead of trying to go it pretty much alone.

3. Yes, the series is pretty much pre-written in comic book form. But that's not as easy a proposition as you think. Adapting a pre-existing work is a huge can of worms, requiring an understanding of the source story, the medium it was told in, and the best strategies for bringing the story, themes, and characters to the screen.

An ongoing story like The Walking Dead requires all these and probably then some, including a level of team work that might not be found with a bunch of insecure freelancers.

Now that I weighed the pros and cons I have to admit that I'm still a tad uneasy with this decision, and will have to wait and see how it's going to turn out.