Movies 2.0

From the always-excellent Daring Fireball:

Natalie Jarvey, writing for The Hollywood Reporter:

“Amazon has not only scored its first Oscar nominations with Manchester, it has also become the first streaming service to earn a best picture nod. Manchester received six total nominations, including Kenneth Lonergan for directing and original screenplay, Casey Affleck for lead actor, Lucas Hedges for supporting actor, and Michelle Williams for supporting actress. The Salesman, Iran’s selection in the foreign-language film category — which Amazon is distributing in the United States — also received a nomination, bringing Amazon’s total nominations to seven.”

Amazing success story for Amazon. There’s been a lot of talk over the last decade or so that Hollywood was wary of Apple doing to them what the entertainment industry thinks they did to the music industry. In the meantime, Netflix and Amazon are kicking their asses.

I spent the first third of my career in the tech industry, and the next third in film, so I saw from the inside the disdain that both of those worlds have for each other.

Tech entrepreneurs long believed that they could bring across their industry’s tools, ideas, and processes, rethinking how film and television is made and distributed to yield better content and broader audiences.  Whereas the studio execs believed those tech folks were hopelessly naive, and totally out of their depth.

Looks like we now know which side was right.

January 26, 2017

IRL

This morning, on the way to work, I passed [Bob Balaban](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000837/) helping an elderly homeless man on the corner.

And, really, I wasn’t surprised. It seems like something the characters he plays would be likely to do.

That, in turn, reinforces my belief about actors, honed during my years running Cyan Pictures: an actor’s personality ‘in real life’ is usually the average of the characters he or she plays.

That may not hold true in the theater world, where people are willing to suspend disbelief, and actors can further diverge from their actual selves. In a play, if a black guy and a white guy are brothers, we write it off to creative casting; if someone ‘opens a door’ by miming turning and pulling an invisible doorknob, we call it minimalist staging.

But if that happens in a movie, we assume that one of the brothers must be adopted, and that the guy miming opening a door must be nuts. In movies, we’re simply less willing to believe, to diverge from reality. That, I think, constrains much further the range of characters an actor can believably take on. (Unless you’re Meryl Streep.)

Which is all to say, most characters end up only a standard deviation or so away from who an actor actually is.  Average those characters out, and, in my experience, you’ve got a pretty good sense of the real person beneath them all.

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October 23, 2012

Dinosaurs

For the past few years, at least once a month I’ve received an email with the subject “CYBORG DINOSAURS”, which always begins like this:

I am a science fiction writer & I wrote four science fiction stories about dinosaurs. And I do need you to makes movies from my stories?? My first story is Prehistoric park. And my second story is Pterodactyloid man’s flight to Paris. And my third story is Pterodactyloid man gose around the world in 76 days. And my fourth story is Alien Dinosaur Planet………

With this e-mail I do have four drawing of the logo’s of my stories. But I do have allots more drawing of my stories then just the logo’s……………….

As promised, four drawings come attached to each email, all along the lines of this one, for the aforementioned Pterodactyloid man’s flight to Paris:

A cyborg dinosaur.

Amazing! For years, I’ve been laughing about these emails, talking about them with colleagues, and even forwarding them along to friends.

Last week, one of those friends Googled up the author and subject line, and sent back this video:

I am, indeed, going to hell.

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September 5, 2011

Coopetition

After ten years spent in the film world, dipping a foot back into the tech space has been a bit of a culture shock.

Tech people seem happy to help out even strangers at other companies, just for the good karma. Whereas in the movie world, even close friends secretly root for one another to fail, if just for the frisson of Schadenfreude.

I suspect that difference stems straight from the trajectory of the two industries: the tech space’s total market cap is growing rapidly, while the movie industry’s total grosses have held largely static.

In that context, it makes sense for film folks to resent the success of other players: in a zero sum game, others’ wins necessitate your losses. Whereas in a growth industry like tech, someone else’s achievements don’t inherently undercut your own.

In fact, as many tech companies and products benefit from [network effects](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect), others succeeding is likely even a net positive, a rising tide lifting all boats (or, at least, all valuations).

Which is to say that, for whatever reason, the large number of tech people I’ve been dealing with of late have all been remarkably nice. After a decade of dog eat Hollywood dog, it’s a welcome change.

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August 3, 2011

Filmmaker == Hacker

Having split my professional life between the tech and movie worlds, I’ve always been struck by how similar filmmakers and hackers are. For example, both groups:

  • Think about the world as a collection of fascinating material to be mined / problems to be solved;
  • Disdain things that are boring and have already been done;
  • Distrust tradition/authority as a sufficient rationale in and of itself;
  • Respect competence and support meritocratic structure;
  • Work collaboratively and share ideas and solutions (even with ‘competitors’);
  • Are willing to put in huge amounts of work, even when unpaid, just for the love of the game.
  • And, most importantly, want to share the things they pour their hearts and souls into making with as many people as they possibly can.

In the tech world, that’s easy for hackers to do: they start startups, build stuff on their own terms, and then share their stuff with users by building direct customer relationships.

In the movie world, however, filmmakers haven’t had such a direct route; instead, they’ve traditionally had to rely on studios and distributors to build those relationships for them.

Now, sites like YouTube allow filmmakers to share directly. But those sites also don’t generate real filmmaker revenue. And while filmmakers (like hackers) don’t actually care all that much about getting rich, they do at least want to make enough money making their stuff that they can live comfortably, and show their investors strong enough returns to play again as soon as they come up with their next big idea.

With more and more films being made each year, it seems almost inevitable to me that new solutions will emerge somewhere between the studio and YouTube models – solutions that help filmmakers build broad audiences, profitably, and in ways they directly control.

I’ve been giving that a lot of thought of late. Because it seems like that’s a big problem waiting for a solution – and an equally big business waiting to be built.

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May 31, 2011

Yelling to the Sky premiered last week at Berlin, and is headed off next to SxSW; trying to figure out if I therefore need to head there, too.

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February 18, 2011

For Film Investors & Producers

Was just speaking with a savvy producer who had completely missed this, which makes think a slew of other folks who could benefit missed it, too:

In short, Obama just signed into law HR 4853, a tax bill which extends the Section 181 film finance incentive through the end of 2011.

The 181 incentive makes investing in film an immediate, 100% write-off until dollar-back. Which, in turn, both levers up returns (as investors are investing pre-tax dollars) and provides a very effective (and completely legal) tax deferral strategy.

Further details are available in IRS Regulations TD 9312 and REG-115403-05.

If you invested in a film during the 2009 tax year, you are likely entitled to deduct that investment entirely. Feel free to contact us at Cyan for guidance, as we helped lobby for the bill’s extension, know more about its ins and outs than we probably should, and would be more than happy to share info with your accountant.

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January 14, 2011

Former Columbia Pictures co-president Matt Tolmach just optioned the 2010 Black List script The Kitchen Sink. He explains, “it’s more in the spirit of The Breakfast Club than anything, but you get an idea of the title in an early scene where two kids are running from zombies. Those zombies suddenly are attacked by vampires. Just when they are all facing off, there’s a bright light overhead. You realize the aliens have landed and these groups have to band together, suppress the urge to kill each other, and it becomes thematically the enemy of my enemy is my friend. That makes it different than your usual zombie, vampire, alien movie.”

A timely addendum to my earlier “Listed” post.

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January 13, 2011

Listed

Every year, film exec Franklin Leonard publishes the Black List, a roundup of the best unproduced screenplays of the prior year. Some – like Juno or The Social Network – go on to great acclaim. Others seem to set their sights a little lower, floating just on the edge of self-parody.

For example: this year’s Hovercar 3D. The name is pretty much all you need.

Or consider: F*cking Jane Austen. “Two men angry at Jane Austen for creating unrealistic romantic expectations among women today get sent back in time to the 19th century. The only way for them to return home is for one of them to sleep with Jane Austen.”

You couldn’t make that up. Except that somebody (Blake Burns) did. And Leonard deemed it one of the best things he’d seen all year.

That might be hard for non-movie-industry folks to believe. But they likely don’t get pitches all day, every day, like this one that recently floated across my desk: “It’s like The Sixth Sense. But without the ghosts.” Which is what? I see live people?

Obviously, the Black List is ripe for parody, and lists pop up yearly along those lines. This one, credited only to the semi-anonymous “KDF”, seemed particularly good.]

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MY BRIDESMAID IS A SLUTTY ASSASSIN
The night before her wedding, a bride-to-be discovers that her bridesmaid is an international assassin … who has been contracted to kill her fiancée … and also, she’s a total slut.

F**K YOU HOWIE KAPOWSKI, YOU’RE A F**KING MOTHERF**KER
A young man loses his job due to a Lehman Brothers-type financial scandal and returns home to find that his former high school bully is now dating his mother, his grandmother, his stepmother, his ex-girlfriend, and his ex-girlfriend’s mother. Betty White is attached.

THE DARKENING
A mysterious darkness begins to fall across a sleepy town every night.

ROBERT FROST AND THE SUNKEN AZTEC TREASURE OF KING TUT
A reimagining of the life of Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost as a swashbuckling poet who kicks ass.

FRENEMIES WITH BENEFITS
When a young man’s longtime female best friend transforms into an evil zombie vampire, the two start sleeping together.

YEMEN
A CIA analyst relocates to the Republic of Yemen to hunt for an elusive terrorist, but soon finds himself being hunted by the terrorist … his former high school bully.

ESCALATION
A contained thriller set entirely on a shopping mall escalator. A freshly laid off mall employee gets mixed up with a twisted sociopath who forces him to continue going up the down escalator in order to stay alive.

BEAUTY & THE BEAST & VAMPIRES & ZOMBIES & DOUCHEBAGS
Set in a post-apocalyptic world, Beauty and the Beast must join forces to take on an army of vampires who then team up to take on an army of zombies who in turn team up to take on an army of douchebags. Betty White is attached.

UNTITLED RELEVANT FINANCIAL CRISIS THRILLER
A young hotshot securities trader must travel back in time to prevent his company from issuing collateralized debt obligations and unregulated credit default swaps. But things get ugly when the toxic assets begin to fight back.

TAGGED
When a single, socially awkward high school girl accidentally gets tagged in a photo of popular girls on Facebook, her life gets turned upside down for a few minutes. A modern retelling of She’s All That.

THE WEDDING REGISTRY
A bride-to-be, her sister, and her best friend register for her wedding at Williams- Sonoma. But when they realize they accidentally registered for Calphalon cookware instead of All-Clad, they must quickly race back to fix it. A female Hangover.

POST IT
A quirky tale about an off-center middle manager who works for a faceless corporation and his best friend who is a Post-It Note.

SEX NIGHT
On graduation night, five nerdy high school seniors set out to see who can contract the most sexually transmitted diseases. A modern day Superbad. Betty White is attached.

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