Woe Canada: Cry Me A Tax Credit...

Pity the poor Canadian film industry.

It doesn't know the meaning of the word "censorship" anymore.

This week the actress Sarah Polley, who was nominated for an Oscar for adapting the screenplay to Away From Her this past year, but was actually seen by paying customers in the movie remake of Dawn of the Dead, went to the Canadian Senate to decry Bill C-10.

Bill C-10 is a government motion that withholds federal tax credits from film/TV productions that the Canadian government finds "contrary to public policy."

Now Canada's "stars" and filmmakers are screaming "Censorship!!" because they can't get tax credits for their three hour epic musical about incest and necrophilia featuring a choir of singing anuses.*

Now, it has fallen upon me to explain the way of the world.

I guess the best explanation comes from Tom Stoppard, who in a recent reminiscence of 1968 told the story of a group of radical students who were screaming "censorship" because a newspaper declined to run their manifesto on its front page. Stoppard made a very telling distinction:

"That's not censorship, that's editing."

Censorship is when the government forces people by law to not say or publish certain things.

Editing is when an entity or organisation simply refuses to put its money and effort into something it does not want. The Canadian public does this every day when they refuse to pay money to see Canadian movies.

Of course that's the way an logical organisation, be it private, or government, acts.

And we're talking about the Canadian film industry here, where logic is in even shorter supply than in Hollywood.

I guess the best analogy for the behaviour of Canada's stars is that of a spoiled 4 year old who stamps their feet and holds their breath in anger, because Daddy won't buy them new crayons. Sure, all the 4 year old does with the crayons is scrawl the word "poopy" on the wall, flush some down the toilet, and throw the rest at neighbourhood pets, but damn it, they want more crayons and they must get more crayons or Daddy is worse than Hitler!

Accusations of censorship always worked in the past. In the past Canadian governments were centred around the province of Ontario, and Canada's largest city: Toronto, which also housed the Canadian Film/TV industry. Those governments folded faster than The Flash on laundry day whenever Canada's cinema brats threatened to play the "censorship" card. Because being called a censor would get you stricken off the guest list of Toronto's nicer parties and film festivals where the occasional real star from Hollywood might show up.

But like all things, they changed.

Canada's current government is not centred around Toronto, it doesn't care what the Toronto media elite think of them, because since they are the Conservative Party, nothing they do will ever be accepted by them, so they aren't going to cave in.

And it's all the Canadian film industry's fault.

I've written before how Canadian Film/TV has repeatedly squandered opportunities, and has become a narrow-minded, inbred clique that's become so dependent on state handouts they honestly think that state funding is their natural birthright, simply for being part of the "in-crowd." As a local Member of Parliament declared shortly before being ousted: "I am entitled to my entitlements."

Well, the real world doesn't work that way.

You can't force people to read, listen to, or watch, what they don't want.

And you certainly can't demand that they pay for it, and threaten to call them names if they don't.

That's just childish.

______________________________
*I am not exaggerating, just combining certain Canadian films.

A Dream Comes True...

Failed presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has been signed on as a client by the Hollywood juggernaut Creative Artists Agency.

Now my dream project is one step closer to fruition:

Hollywood Babble On & On #81: And Now Politicians Are Involved...

For those of you new to this blog, there's a term I use quite a lot. It's "a self-fulfilling idiocy," a condition where someone tries to solve what they see as a problem, with a plan that can only create new and worse problems, and obviously so at that.

Now this latest chapter in the saga of the self-fulfilling idiocy is all about financial and economic issues, and I know a lot of people find such subject matter tedious. And there's a lot of temptation to keep the short attention spans of male readers by including cheap cheesecake pictures, well I won't go that way...

Okay, maybe a little.

But it's for a good cause.

Because this is info folks interested in the biz of showbiz must know.

The California state senate's judicial committee passed a new law stating that a film can't be sold to a third party for less than its fair market value. (h/t Nikki Finke)

So allow me to explain if you can tear your eyes from Adriana Lima's picture...

Imagine a big media conglomerate: Furious D Media Conglomerate Inc.

Furious D Media Conglomerate Inc. owns a movie studio/distributor (Furious Pictures) and a TV network (The D Channel).

Furious Pictures makes a film that's a big hit. People want to see it over and over again.

TV networks clamour to buy that film for their channels, offering $1,000,000 an airing, because they know it's a guaranteed ratings grabber.

But Furious Pictures doesn't do that.

Instead Furious Pictures "sells" the film's TV rights to the D-Channel for $500,000.

Furious Pictures then goes to the producers, writers, and stars, telling them that the company lost money on the sale, and henceforth, there will be no residuals paid to any of them.

Meanwhile millions in revenues get kicked upstairs to the parent company Furious D Media Conglomerate Inc.

Now I've explained how such shenanigans are the root of Hollywood's troubles with ballooning budgets and massive up-front salaries. But no one seemed to listen, and now governments are getting involved.

Now I'm no economist, but as a Canadian I've seen first hand the effect excessive government intervention has on business. It effectively kills it.

The problem is that the media companies are at fault here because their borderline fraudulent book-keeping schemes have made such a law necessary. They have been unknowingly but literally begging for state meddling for decades because of their short sighted, and now that it's come, it has them shitting kittens.

My solution.

Make the law useless, but not giving it anything to enforce.

Free markets work best free, so let the films be free-- to be sold at a fair price that the market will bear.

In other words:

LET THE MOVIE BUSINESS BE A BUSINESS ABOUT MOVIES!

Hollywood went from being a movie industry town, to a town of accounting trickery that make Ponzi Schemes look like sensible investments. That's not healthy, and now it's attracted the attention of politicians, which is really unhealthy.

Trust me, it's for the best, you'll see up-front costs go down when people actually start getting residuals, as well as lower legal, accounting, and lobbying costs.

But just don't listen to me:
That's right, name me head of NBC-Universal, and not only will I run an effective media conglomerate, my methods will provide a business model that'll get the government off your back.

It's either that or move to another state like Mississippi when the bill becomes law, and then be chased from state to state by it until the entire movie business is run from a sweatshop in Indonesia, and you're wondering why you can't get anyone to make or star in your movies.

That's my 2 cents.

Hollywood Babble On & On #80: The Self Fulfilling Idiocy Strikes Again... & Project Furious

A big tip of my jaunty sombrero to the indefatigable Nikki Finke for these stories of the self fulfilling idiocy in action.

1. Reality Show workers are claiming unpaid overtime. Once again the self-fulfilling idiocy of Hollywood is rearing its overly coiffed and botox injected head. Apparently the producers of a gaggle of money-making reality shows, stiffed the people who make the shows of somewhere around $500,000 in unpaid overtime.

Now I'm sure the producers of the shows in question are patting themselves on the back about how they collectively saved all that money, but they're not really seeing the big picture.

Take a second and think about these points:

• The money that will be spent on lawyers, because this will most likely result in some kind of class action litigation. These lawyers don't get stiffed on their billable hours and their minimum wage starts at about $200/hour.

• The money shelled out to meet the demands of the unions when their respective contracts come up for negotiation. Or failing that, the inevitable strike not meeting those demands will bring.

Suddenly, the $500,000 doesn't seem like such a big savings.

In fact, it looks like the beginning of a multi-million dollar loss.

Of course, that's in the long term, and no one in Hollywood thinks beyond the next quarter, let alone the next year.

2. Harvey Weinstein has pissed someone off again. Which I suspect is a standing headline at Variety. This time he's enraged the NBC-Universal conglomerate by taking the hit Bravo channel show Project Runway over to the rival Lifetime channel. NBC-U is claiming that the Weinstein Co. made the deal with Lifetime in February, while negotiating for a new season with Bravo in March. NBC-U is claiming bad faith negotiation, violation of a "first refusal" clause in the old contract, and the breaking NBC-U CEO Jeff Zucker's heart by Harvey Weinstein.

Weinstein's already lining up the lawyers to fight it out. Except he may have bitten off more than he could chew this time. This isn't some indie filmmaker or small time production company he's dealing with, it's a massive, major conglomerate. Daring NBC-U to sue may be a mistake, especially with Weinstein Co. investors looking askance at how Harv runs things already. They may not have the stomach for an all-out war with a multi-billion dollar corporation.

As for NBC-U and it's Bravo channel I have two simple questions...

1. How the hell did they let it get so bad at Bravo that they only had one, and I mean one, as in singular, show that got any decent ratings?

2. How the hell did they not put the fear of God Almighty, Hell-fire, and Damnation into the producers of that show to not pull a stunt like this?

If I ran NBC-U I'd bring in all the executives of the Bravo channel to my office for a meeting.

Then I'd fire them.

Possibly out of a cannon, I'd have to run that one past the legal boys first, but it would be dramatic anyway.

I'd then cancel all the shows that are creating so much dead air on Bravo, effective immediately. I'd run old movies and TV shows from the NBC-U vault to fill time while I brought in fresh blood and fresh ideas. Abbot & Costello movies & Columbo reruns would probably play better anyway, and it would definitely be cheaper and less annoying.

I would then go on to sue the Weinstein Co. into the stone age, especially if they really did negotiate in bad faith. What's the point of being the big dog when you don't bite the little dog that pisses in your face?

Too bad I'm not the head of NBC-U.

Yet.

That's right Jeff Zucker.

I'm cruising for your job now.

Scared?

CHARLTON HESTON R.I.P.

Hollywood legend and activist for everything from Civil Rights to the Second Amendment Charlton Heston passed away this weekend at the age of 84.

I think the best way to remember Heston was through his films. He brought a powerful presence that burned itself into the screen and into the minds and hearts of moviegoers, and was probably the last classically heroic actor in Hollywood. No matter the situation, be it outlaws or the end of the world, the audience felt that Charlton Heston could handle it. He was also a rebel, doing films that often bucked the mainstream of Hollywood's glitz and glamour.

So here's a list of what I consider Heston's must-see less generally appreciated films, in no particular order:

EL CID: I saw this when I was a kid and a local group showed old films on the big screen at the high school auditorium. Heston and Sophia Loren had an onscreen chemistry that was more than just smoldering, it was positively thermonuclear, and the film was an action packed adventure about a man trying to win a war without losing his humanity.

THE PLANET OF THE APES: The original, with Heston as a cynical misanthropic astronaut, is still the best for its mix of science-fiction, adventure, and satire. It also marked Heston's first foray into a dystopian/apocalyptic genre that he would make his own.

55 DAYS AT PEKING: An often under-appreciated adventure with Heston playing a US Marine helping defend the international embassies from violent religious fanatics during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.

WILL PENNY: Heston's personal favourite role. Gone are the glossy heroics of the classical western, replaced by a low-key gritty realism. Heston's in the title role of a lonely, ageing cowboy facing a world that's moving on without him. A must see classic.

THE OMEGA MAN: The second film in Heston's dystopia trilogy was a strange and off-beat adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. Heston plays a man whose purpose in life has become survival, until the day arrives when his survival gets a purpose. It's dated, hokey, and very 70s in style and attitudes, but Heston makes it watchable.

MAJOR DUNDEE: A must see for Heston fans and Sam Peckinpah fans. On the surface it's about a Union officer using Confederate prisoners to hunt a renegade Apache, and end up battling the French Foreign Legion, but it's also about obsession and duty, not only to one's country, but to the men under one's command, and to their own honour.

SOYLENT GREEN: The final chapter in Heston's dystopia trilogy. One the surface, it's a story about a murder investigation and a deadly conspiracy in a world crippled with over population, but there's a lot going on beneath the surface. It also marks the last performance by Heston's friend Edward G. Robinson, which adds extra power to Heston's performance.

TOUCH OF EVIL: The last film of the classic "noir cycle" directed by the great Orson Welles. Many joke about Heston being cast as an American raised Mexican, but it doesn't really take away from this tale of corruption, murder, and betrayal in a dusty border town.

Heston was an under-appreciated actor and he will be greatly missed.

Hollywood Babble On & On #79: A Tale of Two Types of Movie Stars

George Clooney's period football comedy Leatherheads got tackled at the box office, opening weakly in the #2 slot, in a slow period and making way below the expert forecasts.

Now I wrote about Clooney before when Time Magazine named him the Lost Last Movie Star I hoped that would be the last I'd have to write about him but I'm compelled to explain the situation again.

There are two types of movie stars in Hollywood.

Those who appeal to the audience, and those who appeal to the media.

Audience Appealers are actors like Will Smith, Adam Sandler, and a handful of others who seek that essential, yet often overlooked, ingredient for making a hit movie: The good will of the audience.

These actors use that good will to not only sell the broad crowd-pleasers, but can sometimes sell more "artsy" or "non-commercial" fare. While some may not view most of them as aspirational as the old-time stars of Hollywood's Golden Age they're likable, people can relate to them, and most of all they don't insult the audience.

Audience appealers generate an aura of positivity around them. They present an image of someone who works hard to entertain the audience, because they consider the audience the most important part of their business.

Media Appealers: Build their careers on appealing to media insiders. To them the approval of the audience is secondary to the approval of other actors, entertainment reporters, major critics, and other media insiders.

So you see them make movies that fail, but they keep getting more and more money, because of the almost constant coverage they get in the press, that treats their every fart like a revelation from the mountain.

Now there was a time when media controlled how things were spun and they could make a star who appealed only to them a box-office success. That time is dead, thanks to the internet.

Remember George Clooney's decidedly callous remarks about Charlton Heston's Alzheimer's disease, which he then defended, claiming Heston "deserved it" for his work with the NRA.

The media forgave Clooney because he pandered to their prejudices against Hollywood outsiders like Republicans, Christians, and political/social conservatives, but all the public saw was a rich, spoiled, brat of an actor, cruelly taunting a terminally ill old man with a distinguished career, and a personal life dedicated to many fine causes like civil rights.

You don't win fans by kicking Moses when he's sick.

Just imagine the uproar if a political conservative actor (if you can find one) made a similar comment about an elderly, and terminally ill liberal activist?

He'd be scorned by the media, shunned by the audience, and rightly so. No one likes arrogance and cruelty in their movie stars, whether it's politically correct or not.

And then there's Clooney's air of arrogance, as if stardom was a divinely dispensed by the accident of his birth and by virtue of having a Malibu address, and not by audiences.

That may be how you win friends and influence people in Hollywood, but it's not going to make you any friends on Main Street.

Cinemaniacal: Smoke'em Toke'em Joke'em

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed the resurgence in so-called "stoner comedy" lately?

You, I'm not the only one. Well there's a pretty good reason for that, but, as usual, let's start with a little history.

Comedy, especially film comedy, has always relied on a certain level of stupidity to work. And I'm not talking about the audience falling for a particularly low-brow joke, I'm talking about stupidity in the characters.

The Three Stooges weren't particularly bright, and Groucho had all the brains of the Marx Brothers, and Abbot & Costello weren't the brightest buttons on the shirt either. Laughs were derived from the slapstick antics of a team of people where one was smarter than the other(s) but none were exactly geniuses. But that sort of "team comedy" fell out of favour with movies in the 60s after Martin & Lewis broke up.

That changed in the 1970s.

Two comedians, one from East Los Angeles and one from Vancouver, Canada took their act, which they had honed in hippie clubs and strip joints since '68, and made the jump to the big screen.

This new team was called Cheech and Chong, and they offered a new take on the old fashioned comedy team with edgier subject matter and a new ingredient.

Marijuana, mary-jane, grass, spliff, blunts weed, thai-stick, pot, dope, chronic, or whatever term is hip these days.

Yep, they're act, part satirizing and part revelling in the hippie lifestyle, used marijuana, and in particular it's effects to great... well... effect.

Now why, you may ask, is marijuana funny, and not, for the sake of argument, heroin.

Well it has to do with what marijuana does to the average brain, and this is backed up by science, and the fact that I've known a few pot-heads in my day. (Though I've never used, any smoke makes me gag)

Marijuana makes people stupid.

Xenu knows how many times I've encountered pot heads doing stupid things and saying stupid stuff. I'm sure you have your own stories to illustrate this point.

Heroin, on the other hand, is just depressing, with overtones of pain, illness, disease, death, and despair.

You might be able to extract a few dark ironic laughs from heroin, but it's not really going to make it into a mainstream comedy sub-genre.

Pot and drug related comedy faded from favour in the early to mid-1980s. Some think the culture turned to the right with the rise of Reagan, but I think it may have had more to do with the crack epidemic and cocaine cartel wars that were turning America's streets into shooting galleries just turned folks off the whole scene as entertainment.

Stoner humour still popped up occasionally, filmmaker Kevin Smith made it a part of his View Askew universe with Jay & Silent Bob, a pair of woefully unsuccessful pot dealers in almost all of his films.

But now it seems to be everywhere, from the now defunct That 70's Show, to Showtime's Weeds, and especially in movies like Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle, it's upcoming sequel and Pineapple Express.

Now why is pot-humour making a comeback?

Has society become more accepting of the old herb?

Probably not, what folks laugh at on screen rarely equals what they'll tolerate in real life. But there is another answer.

And that answer is political correctness.

Yep, it's true.

You see, back in ye olden days, when times were particularly insensitive, minorities were often portrayed as stupid, and often held up as a target of ridicule.

This sparked a backlash against blatantly racist humour in mainstream movies, but it also cut anyone but white males from playing "stupid" in movies and television without sparking a complaint or boycott from one group or another.

But there was a way out.

And her name was Mary-Jane.

Marijuana was the perfect excuse for characters of all ethnicities to play stupid. It was self-inflicted stupidity, that was chemically induced, and not bound to any ethnic or religious type.

Besides potheads don't boycott over pot jokes. They just sit there, giggle, and ask for more potato chips.

FUN & GAMES: Who is the Next Who?

You're always hearing media folks declare that a certain actor's going to be "the next James Dean," or "the next Marylin Monroe" and directors are always seen as "the next Hitchcock" or "the next Spielberg."

Well now is your turn.

Tell me who do you think will be the next whoever, and be sure to include your reasons.

Now get going!

I'll be writing more about the movie business as soon as someone screws up.

___________________________________

UPDATE: Judging from the impassioned, and sarcastic, reactions, I think my little game made its point.

You see, you can't really tell which actor is going to be the next Cary Grant or what writer is going to be the next JK Rowling. They and their work exist as the product of certain people working within a certain zeitgeist. Trying to recreate that rare combination is like trying to put toothpaste back into the tube, impossible.

So what can a wannabe media mogul do if not try to rehash the classics of the past, if only in publicity?

Well, those "classics" came along because someone saw something new, and figured it was the right time to run with it. And I think this obsession with the past is one of the things killing Hollywood.

Thus endeth the lesson.

Now, someone in the business end of Hollywood better do something dumb, or this is going to have to turn into another gossip blog. ;)

Hollywood Babble On & On #78: Just Because They're Famous...

There's a rumour reported on many movie/gossip sites that octogenarian pop-tart Madonna is bugging Warner Bros. Studios to let her star in an updated remake of Casablanca and set it in modern day Iraq.

While I hope that the rumours were just a preemptive April Fool's Day prank, it does have that annoying ring of deranged Hollywood truth to it. Madonna is still treated by the media as if she pooped diamonds and puppies when she hasn't had a real music hit with the general public in a long, long time, and has destroyed many films by her simple presence. She is also legendary for a massive ego that still thinks she can be the queen of music and movies and won't stop trying no matter how many miles of film get wasted in the process.

Because of that, it's quite believable that she would think that she could remake a classic film, play a character half her age, and "re-imagine" what was originally an unabashedly patriotic film about self-sacrifice in the fight against Nazism, into yet another anti-American diatribe, when such films are beaten at the box office by slide shows of my Aunt Millie's trip to Akron, Ohio.

She could quite possibly be that self-deluded.

But that's not the scary part.

The really scary part of the story, the part that fills my little black heart with dread, is that such a deranged idea just might get the green light by the studio.

Now logic would dictate that an ageing pop-star with sagging record sales, a grating and obnoxious public image, and a dismal movie record would be the last person for a major studio would trust in a modern updating of that Porky Pig cartoon where says son-of-a-bitch, let alone a beloved classic like Casablanca.

But this is Hollywood we're talking about.

Logic often has very little to do with anything.

There's a chance that the studio might just give her what she wants, and piss away millions of dollars in the process.

Why?

Because she's famous.

But not famous in the way that means ordinary people would pay money to see her in a movie, or buy her albums in large numbers. No, she is what I call "Media Famous."

These are increasingly too very different things.

The media, Hollywood especially, grants the title of "star" based entirely on a concept called "name recognition." Name recognition is the percentage of people who recognize a famous person's name. The higher the percentage of people know the person's name, the more famous they are.

Now can you see the problem inherent in that?

Well, let me explain.

99% of people recognize the name Adolph Hitler.

However, those same people probably won't pay to see him starring in any movie that doesn't involve his painful death at the hands of hungry badgers, or buy his album of Austrian folk songs reworked into gangster rap.

Madonna started out essentially as a novelty act. Her shtick was to provoke shocked reactions from people through childish blasphemies, and overly sexualized posturing. She was able to maintain a certain amount of longevity in her career, by constantly "reinventing" these poses over and over again. And since this novelty was based on attacking the shibboleths of Christian Middle America, the media lapped it all up. The media played along, because it fed the baby-boomer generation's desire to be "courageous" and "rebellious" without any of the consequences of real rebellion.

Then things began to change.

Thanks to the democratizing influence of the internet, the media wasn't the only taste maker left in the world. Shock at Madonna's antics turned to boredom, as it does with all novelty acts, her record sales were a shadow of their former glory, and she faced her greatest fear: being ignored.

But the media stood by her. Hyping her work way beyond her general popularity and status as a taste-maker, especially when she "reinvented" herself again as a "political" pop-star mouthing the same sentiments that all the other celebrities were mouthing.

Now any movie she makes, especially a remake of a classic, would be a tremendous artistic and commercial mega-bomb, but because she has a lot of name recognition, thanks to the constant media hype, she just might get it made.

She's not the only one to use this tactic. Paris Hilton gets movies made, they just don't get seen, and remember that producer who declared to the media that he was casting Britney Spears as The Virgin Mary. If that wasn't a stunt to sucker Hollywood money, I don't know what is.

I just hope, for the sake of humanity, and Warner's stockholders, that all this Casablanca talk is just a really stupid prank.

I really, really do.

THIS JUST IN!!

The following is a Press Release from the Association of Motion Picture & Television Producers (AMPTP):

FROM: B.N. Counter President AMPTP
& Avrile Premiere, Director of Media Relations AMPTP.

For too long the membership of the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers have engaged in shoddy business practises and engaged in outright fraud and theft by denying royalties to the hardworking artists who make movies and TV possible.

Well no more.

From now on we will engage in only honest and fair dealings. Our contracts and accounting practises will be made simpler and more transparent. And all our members will be putting their corporate books online so that anyone, can study our financial standings and see what royalties and residuals we may owe them.

We will also handle all contract negotiations in good faith and not use fine print as a license for fraud.

We will also order the immediate halt of all crappy remakes of classic movies, end reality TV, and have Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, and all other talentless media whores removed to an outpost in Antarctica.

We are also pledging over the combined bonuses of all studio and network CEOs to the formation of a new National Unicorn Preserve in the Malibu Hills.

Thank you.

Sincerely- B.N. Counter.