writer
… aesthetic styles - patterns for communicating feeling and thought- become dull with use, like carving knives, and since dullness is the chief enemy of art, each generation of artists must find new ways of slicing fat off reality.
— John Gardner (via vanityismyonlychild)
Hi Class. Today we are going to be learning about ‘Turnaroun’. It’s grim shit.
When a project goes into turnaround, it means that the studio that bought it initially, and has been developing it, no longer wishes to continue to do so. Basically, you are being dumped.
The project now has $X…
Last night at the One Story Debutante’s Ball, I was talking briefly to a friend who was complimenting me and Colson Whitehead on our ability to maintain our focus on our work while also being on social media. Colson has written about it and what he said was basically consistent
This is an idea I’ve been thinking about for a while (witness my last two posts), but I found it put really nicely in this New Yorker piece about YouTube:
Kyncl’s relationships in Hollywood would help in securing premium content; and, more important, he understood entertainment culture. He brought “the skill set of being able to bridge Silicon Valley and Hollywood—an information culture and an entertainment culture,” he told me. The crucial difference is that one culture is founded on abundance and the other on scarcity. He added, “Silicon Valley builds its bridges on abundance. Abundant bits of information floating out there, writing great programs to process it, then giving people a lot of useful tools to use it. Entertainment works by withholding content with the purpose of increasing its value. And, when you think about it, those two are just vastly different approaches, but they can be bridged.
”In TV, airtime is a scarce resource, and quality programming is scarcer still, and expensive to create. Writers spend months or years developing an idea, which they then pitch to network and cable executives, who make decisions based, at least in part, on their “gut.” The majority of the ideas never get produced. If a project is green-lighted, the networks or cable channels buy it and fund its production, and the creators have to give up some or all of their control over the material.
But on YouTube “airtime” is infinite, content costs almost nothing for YouTube to produce, and quantity, not quality, is the bottom line. “YouTube green-lights everything,” as Tim Shey, the director of the site’s division for coaching content creators, YouTube Next Lab, told me. It’s up to the audience, not the executive gut, to decide what’s worth watching. “I’ve worked in TV, and I’ve been the one green-lighting projects,” Shey went on. “Believe me, the YouTube way works much better.” Kyncl told me that at Google it makes no sense to bring “a gut-based decision-making process to a culture that is based on numerically quantifying everything. Ultimately, that kind of decision-making gets rejected, as if it were a foreign body.”
via Will Robert Kyncl and YouTube Revolutionize Television? : The New Yorker.
PEOPLE WILL TELL YOU IT’S ALL ABOUT “LIKABILITY” BUT THAT’S A MARKETING WORD. IT’S MEANINGLESS TO WHAT MAKES FILMS WORK. OUR FAULTS, DEMONS, QUIBBLES AND ROUGH EDGES ARE THE VERY THINGS THAT BIND US AND ATTRACT US TO ONE ANOTHER. IT’S HOW WE COMMUNICATE SUBCONSCIOUSLY. IT’S HOW WE KNOW THAT WE ARE NOT ALONE IN WHAT WE BATTLE. THAT WE ARE NOT ALONE IN THE TOUGHEST CONFLICTS IN LIFE. SAY WHAT YOU WILL, BUT HULK TRULY BELIEVES THAT’S WHAT MAKES MOVIES WORK. THE RELATION OF FAULTS. IN ONE OF HULK’S DISCUSSIONS WITH COMIC/PODCASTER KUMAIL NANJIANI, HE EXPLAINED IT SO SUCCINCTLY AND BEAUTIFULLY: “You see a guy who spills coffee on himself and you go ‘Oh okay. I’m that guy.’” IT’S A VERY SIMPLE WAY OF PUTTING SOMETHING SO UNIVERSALLY IMPORTANT: EMPATHY IS THE TIE THAT BINDS. SO WHY DOES IT SEEM SO UTTERLY LOST IN TODAY’S FILMMAKING? WHY ARE WE SO CAUGHT UP IN THE NATURE OF ALLURE? WHY DO WE FIXATE ON THE MYSTERY AND THE COOL? YOU COULD SAY IT’S JUST MARKETING, BUT IT’S NOT. WE DO IT OUT OF THIS HORRIFIC NEED TO REALIZE OUR FANTASIES. WHY ELSE WOULD WE HAVE INVINCIBLE BADASSES BEATING UP PEOPLE IN COOL WAYS AND EXPECT THAT TO BE DRAMATICALLY COMPELLING? WHY DO WE ABANDON DANGER AND MENACE IN THE NAME OF CONFUSION AND AMBIGUITY? WHY DO WE LOSE SIGHT OF THE REASONS THE AUDIENCE ACTUALLY WANTS TO ESCAPE? AND WHAT ACTUALLY MAKES THEM DO IT?
— Film Crit Hulk Smash: HULK VS. THE JOHN CARTER SCRIPT| Badass Digest
Just because you don’t have a job doesn’t mean you qualify for unemployment checks. Take the case of convicted killer Anthony Garcia, who managed to collect more than $30,000 in unemployment while he was in jail from 2008 to 2010, according to the Associated Press. Garcia managed to get his father and two (read ‘em TWO) girlfriends in on the apparent scheme to bilk the unemployment system. They would get the checks, cash them and then deposit the money in his inmate accounts and those of other gang members. Thanks, EDD! Garcia, who also goes by the name “Chopper,” is quite a character as far as murderers go. In 2008, he confessed to killing a rival gang member in 2004—a case that had gone cold up until a detective with the sheriff’s department recognized his tattoo depicting the murder at a Pico Rivera liquor store.
(Source: laist.com)
If any of us were as well taken care of as the sentences of Henry James, we’d never long for another, never wander away: where else would we receive such constant attention, our thoughts anticipated, our feelings understood? Who else would robe us so richly, take us to the best places, or guard our virtue as his own and defend our character in every situation? If we were his sentences, we’d sing ourselves though we were dying and about to be extinguished, since the silence which would follow our passing would not be like the pause left behind by a noisy train. it would be a memorial, well-remarked grave, just as the Master has assured us death itself is: the distinguished thing.
— William Gass, On Being Blue (via botchedandecstatic)
In every field, at every level of education, men earn more than women. That’s the grim takeaway of this new report [PDF] from the U.S. Census Bureau, which assesses the value of a higher education in the United States—and illustrates the persistent pay gap between male and female employees who hold comparable degrees. In short, education is valuable, but it’s most lucrative if you’re male.
— Women Make Less Than Men at Every Education Level - News - GOOD
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
— Banksy, from Cut It Out (via zaschell)
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A few people seemed confused by my last post on why Hollywood is wrong about piracy, so I wanted to clarify a bit.
I’m not suggesting anyone get rid of distribution. I am suggesting that piracy is not the threat Hollywood is making it out to be.
It’s best practices in many industries to give away a certain number of copies of your books or songs or images for free - because the more eyeballs that see it (or ears that hear it) - the more money it makes in the long run. This might appear counterintuitive to the kind of corporate executive who manages intellectual properties like commodities - who believes that media should be sold and managed like the goods on the shelves at Walmart. Reduce shrinkage. Prosecute shoplifters. Spend a fortune on traditional advertising, but show no one the actual product til they buy.
However, selling TV and movies is very different from selling a 24-pack of toilet paper. People are going to talk only so much about consumer goods like toilet paper - in person or online - no matter how good your marketing is. But people want to talk about culture. That’s one of the main things we talk about - we identify with what we like, we reference culture to signal we’re part of the gang who likes Bon Iver and Game of Thrones and Annie Hall, we use stories we saw in movies, TV or books to help us make sense of the chaotic mess that surrounds us in our own lives - we enjoy telling each other about what we’ve seen. It’s part of the fun of being human.
And Hollywood wants us talking about their shit. Because out of ten people - if two of them are talking about a movie they saw, the chances are far greater that the other eight may go buy a ticket. Or pay somewhere else down the revenue stream.
But to get more people talking about it, you have to seed the storm cloud a bit. They’re starting to catch on - like when they put Portlandia’s season premiere online before it aired and ratings in key demos jumped 81%. But that kind of thinking needs to extend across the entire industry, not just TV, which is used to giving its shit away for free.
Piracy achieves the same effect, though less formally. If Hollywood were to formalize the practice - legitimize piracy, make downloading titles fast and easy and inexpensive, none of this would be a problem. And yeah, certain distribution arms might have to change to accommodate this, but distribution always has to change to accommodate new technology. Outdated industry models will wither and die in the face of new technology and new consumer preferences. This is what market pricing is all about - letting consumer demand set prices. And if that’s readjusting prices downward, resetting what could be seen as a speculative bubble so that inflated movie budgets have to go away and huge marketing campaigns are replaced by good word-of-mouth buzz, then so be it. The industry will be healthier for it.
