Hollywood Babble On & On #321: Michael Jackson Is Dead, Alas

I managed to avoid the almost non-stop live coverage of Michael Jackson's memorial service, but unless I am willing to move to a cave in Uzbekistan, I just can't escape hearing at least some of the tidbits. The coverage of the memorial scored about 31 million viewers in the USA, a few million less than the last funeral given such coverage, the memorial for Ronald Reagan in 2004.

But I'm not here to talk about ratings, instead I'm going to tell you what I think the memorial told me about Michael Jackson the man and the world he lived in. And I've made a couple of lists...

WHAT I SAW:

1. His coffin was GOLD PLATED. Yep, a solid bronze coffin, plated in 14k gold. I'm sorry, but even an 18th century French market would look at that crate and think it was ostentatious and went beyond the line of tacky, to the realm of just plain nutty.

2. People are criticizing the family for putting his young children out on stage to somehow defend their father to wider world.

3. Many of the speakers went beyond telling the world about his success as an entertainer, but instead declared him the greatest entertainer who ever lived, and giving him credit for things like the election of Barack Obama, which occurred about 20 years after his last major hit album.

4. Many of the same "friends and associates" are now trying to squeeze something for themselves out of his death, from his former personal videographer/manager (and former gay porn producer) selling insider tidbits to the highest bidder, and even Barbara Walters, ignoring the wishes of the grieving family to score some illicit footage with a spy camera.

5. The family is supposedly arguing over where to bury him. Some want him in Neverland, hoping to make it some sort of Graceland type theme park, while others want him buried someplace else where he could rest in peace, and not be part of a package tour, two-bits a gander.

WHAT THOSE THINGS TOLD ME:

1. I associate waste with Michael Jackson. Wasted potential, wasted talent, a thousand wasted opportunities, and millions in wasted dollars. What purpose does this coffin serve other than to promote some sort of image of Jacko as a mad wasteful royal wannabe, and giving the mutant grave-robbers of our post-apocalyptic future something worth stealing after society totally collapses in 2059? Like just about everything in Jackson's life, there were a million better things that could have been done with those resources, but those things weren't done for reasons that really don't make any rational sense.

2. Personally, I think those kids have enough baggage to deal with, and making them part of the on-stage circus just strikes me as exploitative. Of course exploiting and emotionally scarring children is a Jackson family tradition, and that's according to Michael himself.

3. This shows the tendency to glorify the man way beyond his accomplishments. He had a lot of hits, and one ultra-mega-hit album with Thriller, but his career really didn't have the longevity or artistic adaptability necessary for supreme greatness in entertainment. Everything he did after-Thriller was pretty much indistinguishable from Thriller, with the addition of extreme plastic surgery and crotch grabbing to his repertoire. Also the rush to sanctify Jackson was pretty much a slap in the face of people like Martin Luther King, and the other African Americans who did way more than him, with apparently a lot less appreciation.

He was a great entertainer, his past success showed that, but he wasn't the greatest, and while he did a lot, he didn't change the world in the ways these people claim. And let's not forget how many of these same people wouldn't touch him with a ten foot pole when his sales were in the tank and he was being accused of child molestation. Like Jackson's life, and Hollywood itself, there's no restraint, and a bloated sense of importance.

4. Too many of the people who claimed friendship with Jackson are now trying to profit from him, and his death. It tells us a lot about the nature of fame and personal relationships. He used his personal relationships to get attention, and henceforth profit, and they in turn try to use their relationship with him for profit.

5. Everything associated with Jackson always seems to end in an argument, and usually in litigation. It's only a matter of time before the lawyers get involved, and then things will get really ugly, and no one involved will be safe.

Of course the big lesson of all this is that Jackson wasn't just an entertainer, he, and his memorial, was the embodiment of Hollywood itself. The wasting of potential & talent, the exploitation of innocent people, the overweening self-importance and ego at the expense of reality, the sleazy and corrupt nature of personal relationships, and even in death, everything ends in arguments and inevitable litigation.

He could have been a movie studio.

Hollywood Babble On & On #320: No Camp Hollywood This Year

According the indefatigable Nikki Finke the annual Camp Allen Big Money Confab is on again this year in Sun Valley, Idaho and that no studio or big media honchos were invited.

OUCH!

Now some folks are saying that it's inevitable, everything's going on the internet, and that for some reason the internet won't need professional quality entertainment content, but I beg to differ.

I think it's the studios' own damn fault that they weren't invited.

This camp is where the uber-rich gather, plot world domination, realize that they already dominate the world, pat each other on back, have some beer and barbecue, and then talk about where they can put their money to work.

One of those places where their money doesn't work is Hollywood.

Hollywood had it good during the hedge fund/sub-prime boom of the last few years, investors literally had money to burn, and when you're trying to dodge America's convoluted tax system, there's no better place to burn it than in the convoluted money system of Hollywood.

We're talking about a system where a film can make hundreds of millions at the box office, sell hundreds of thousands of DVDs, exponentially beating the costs of making and marketing, and still lose money.

This is the self-fulfilling idiocy that I've been talking about since I started this blog.

For those unwilling to look in my archives for the definition of that little nugget of unwisdom, I'll restate it here.

A self-fulfilling idiocy is a plan devised to solve a perceived (but not necessarily real) problem, yet this plan is so stupid, that only a complete idiot cannot see that it will cause even more (and all too real) problems in the future.

It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy, only with more stupid.

Hollywood thought that they had a problem, namely that they weren't making enough money for themselves. So they created their convoluted accounting system that takes what should be a simple business and making it needlessly complicated.

The management tells the shareholders that it's to protect their interests and guard their profits, so the shareholders went along, at first.

Then the idiocy kicked in.

People who had profit participation in individual films started getting screwed out of their fair share, so they started demanding more money up front.

The studios then started spending more on "stars" causing costs to go up. To recoup the costs they started going after the unions. The unions started fighting back, getting more and more money up front, causing costs to rise even more.

All during this time the studio management started hiking their own salaries and perks to levels more befitting an 18th century French monarch than a mid-level business man.

Real profit margins began to shrink, but the investors stood by and let it happen, partially because of the tax write-offs, and partly because of the real money made by the occasional mega-blockbuster.

Costs keep going up, more in tune with the inflation rates of Zimbabwe than the real costs of making movies, and real margins continue to shrink. But they can continue to count on outside investment to keep them going because Wall Street was swimming in cash.

It basically went from being a business to a Ponzi Scheme, where instead of the first investors making the money, it's the management that scores the cash, through their salary and perks.

No one seemed to mind until the Wall Street money train came to a screeching halt. Suddenly investors started demanding actual returns on their investments, and the studios were gobsmacked, because they literally don't know how to do that.

So you get studios finding it hard to find financing, even though box-office numbers are strong, because who wants to toss their money into a black hole?

Which is why Hollywood was left out of Camp Allen, it's about opportunities, not idiocy. If Hollywood wants back in on the whole deal, they better get off their duffs and reform how everything is done in Hollywood, from the top down.

Hollywood Babble On & On #319: Money Musings From the WTF Files...

1. VIEW THIS?

There's a report going around the interwebs that a major studio is planning to do a big screen movie based on the Viewmaster.

I hope that it's a joke, not unlike my attempt at a Hungry-Hungry Hippos movie rumour, but a lot of people seem to be taking this Viewmaster movie seriously.

For those of you who don't predate Nintendo, the Viewmaster was a toy that looked like red plastic binoculars, but they didn't work like binoculars. You had to get a little cardboard circle, ringed with tiny photo-slides, shove it into the Viewmaster, hold it up to the light, look in, and you would see a 3D picture of the 1965 World's Fair.

Doesn't that just scream a big budget motion picture?

Which is why I hope it's a joke, because it's beyond ridiculous. Viewmasters may have pictures, but they certainly don't have any of the motion you need for a motion picture. They're the sort of toy that you use a little on Xmas day, toss in a box, and never think of again until years later and you're cleaning out your basement and say, "Hey, my old Viewmaster," look in it one more time, and then toss it back into the box until the scene repeats itself again when you're with your grandchildren and packing for you trip to the old folks home.

It's such a lame idea I'm certain that a studio is probably going to drop a few million on it.

2. MICHAEL JACKSON IS STILL EXPENSIVE

This time it's the taxpayers of California who are shelling out a reported $2.5 million for the police, and other sundries overseeing today's media circus.

AEG, the concert promoter and host of this event, has refused to pay for these extras, even though they are trying to use this event to suck some cash out of Jackson's legacy.

Now any other state would have said: "Whoa there pardner, no moolah, no memorial."

But this isn't any other state, this is California, otherwise known as fame's doormat.

A state that's paying vendors and suppliers with IOU's because it HAS NO MONEY, is taking a $2.5 million hit that it can't afford because it involves someone famous.

If AEG refused to put up the money for the police, fire, and ambulance services that have to oversee such an event, I'd have given them a big fat no. They could do it in another city, I wouldn't care. And don't talk about tourists will somehow pay for it by spending money in LA, and boost the economy, but I can't see it having that much of an effect. The state's economy, tax system, and government has become a massive black hole, where if you don't get your money up front, you're probably not going to get it at all once it's been picked apart. It's like studio bookkeeping, but writ large, and as a philosophy of governance.

Also, it's the principle of the thing. The state of California has to stop being a doormat for anyone and anything that can rouse some media attention, and get down to business.

I'd have billed AEG, and then billed the major media outlets like CNN, Fox News, and the networks for the right to cover the event. If they complain, tell them to sue, and remind them who the judges work for, and that by the time they get it to court, the event will be long over.

Sure, it's extortion, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

Hollywood Babble On & On #318: Furious D's Remake-Reboot Round-Up

1. AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON
Reason for disgust- The film was done right the first time, and the fact that it's sort-of sequel American Werewolf in Paris was so quickly forgotten, shows that CG werewolves aren't all they're cracked up to be.

Reason for hope- Dimension is part of The Weinstein Company, which is broke, so this cinematic abomination getting made highly unlikely, and even if it does, Harvey's better at finding excuses to not release films than release them, it could still fail to see the light of a full moon.

2. RED DAWN
Reason for disgust- Red Dawn was extremely 80s. With the media telling us that nuclear annihilation was right around the corner, a film showing the conventional invasion of America by communist forces was a refreshing change of pace. Sadly, the Soviet Union obviously skipped the MGM story conference, because they collapsed about 20 years ago, which mean that it ceased to exist before the movie's lead characters were born.

Reason for hope- I can't see one. This is going to waste a lot of money for the already cash strapped MGM, unless they decide to turn it into a comedy and hire the South Park guys, America, fuck yeah.

3. CONAN THE BARBARIAN
Reason for disgust- I have a sneaking suspicion that they're going to draw their inspiration from neither the first film, or it's audaciously sword swinging source material, but will probably just rehash that cinematic abortion called Conan The Destroyer.

Reason for hope- At least Brett Ratner is reportedly not on the project anymore. Hopefully someone who appreciates the blood and guts nature of the source material, and didn't make X3

4. ROBOCOP
Reason for disgust- Robocop was a film about the 1980s, a very different time than the 2010's. It doesn't really age well, and slick special effects are not going to update it, especially after the bitter aftertaste left by the awful sequels, and the cheapo Canuck TV series.

Reason for hope- I can't see one.

5. CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON
Reason for disgust- The film was great for its time, its creature suit was revolutionary, and created some scary and impressive imagery. Nowadays there is nothing impressive about special fx, audience see CG, and yawn, because it required no craftsmanship or artistry.

Reason for hope- At least Universal won't have to pay for the franchise. Other than that, I got nothing.

6. LOGAN'S RUN
Reason for disgust- Another film that was for and about its time. I can't really appreciate the film out of the context of the 1970s. Plus, the original was truly made by Jenny Agutter in that flimsy little outfit.

Reason for hope- A smart director and screenwriter could make it a brutal satire of Hollywood's obsession with youth and unbelievable standards of physical perfection, but that's highly unlikely. It'll probably turn into some sort of Matrix rehash.

7. FAHRENHEIT 451
Reason for disgust- While it was a brilliant novel, the concept of burning all books to control information, seems quaint in the age of the internet.

Reason for hope- I can't see much hope here, there are just too many temptations for Hollywood to screw it up.

8. T.J. HOOKER
Reason for disgust- The original show was an unremarkable cop show made a cult favourite by the off kilter charisma of William Shatner as the middle aged patrol sergeant teaching his rookie partner the ropes.

Reason for hope- Outside of Adrian Zmed getting work in a cameo role, the only real reason is an updated version of this scene on the big screen.



I understand that Charlize Theron's new agent Ari Emmanuel is negotiating for her to get the part.

Saturday Silliness Cinema: July 4th Edition

Sorry for not posting yesterday. Slow news day combined with this lingering flu, and my ongoing agent hunt kept me from posting.

Since today is the American 4th of July holiday, I found what can only be described as the ultimately American comedy clip, it's Don Rickles at the Roast for the quintessentially American comedian Bob Hope (who was an immigrant), and in it the Viceroy of Venom takes shots at Hope, then Governor and future president Ronald Reagan, evangelist Billy Graham, WW2 General Omar Bradley, Dean Martin, and a whole truckload of others.

Enjoy...

Hollywood Babble On & On #317: Miscellaneous Movie Musings...

1. ASTEROIDS? WTF?

Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, is taking time off from carrying Paramount, to go to Universal to adapt a big screen live action version of the Atari video game Asteroids.

For those of you under 35 who don't remember Asteroids, you basically control a little trial, that flies around the screen, blasting strangely geometric "asteroids" with you mighty pixel cannon. Take a look at this picture to bask in its amazing eye-popping graphics.

Now I am not the type to think video game adaptations are all that great an idea, even when the games have a story, but I'm positively gobsmacked that someone thinks they can make a movie from the video game with even less narrative content than Pac-Man.

In fact, I think Universal got conned.

Face it, if you want to make a sci-fi action adventure with asteroids, slap together a script about rivalry among outer space miners, toss in a love interest, a disaster, and some pirates, aliens, or alien-pirates, after their booty, and call it Asteroids. It's just that easy.

There was no reason for them to go to Atari and spend good money to buy the movie rights to a game that's been mostly forgotten by even the people who made the high score screen. Asteroids is a common word, used all the time, and unless you're going to cast a bunch of geometric shapes, any story would be different from the complete non-story of the video game. But someone must have made one hell of a sales pitch, using terms like synergy, and paradigms, and other shit, and Universal fell for it like country rubes chugging snake oil.

I salute the people who sold Universal Asteroids as a movie, you truly are magnificent bastards.

2. HARVEY WEINSTEIN, CRITIC AT LARGE

Harvey Weinstein, the founder and destroyer of flailing failing indie TWC, recently posted his first official movie review at web-site The Daily Beast. Now if Harvey decides to keep doing movie reviews for a living, because he's certainly not making anything as a producer, he's going to need the sort of blurbs that will get his name onto movie posters again. So here are a few for him, gratis, because I know he's broke:

-"A brilliant independent movie, I could sit on it for years."

-"This film sucked so hard, I was looking for my name in the credits."

-"This is the sort of praiseworthy film I would crush with one of my multi-million dollar Oscar campaigns."

-"I passed on this script, so you know it must be good."

I hope you can find a use for them Harvey.

3. IN DEFENSE OF GWYNETH

Poor Gwyneth Paltrow, she's being attacked again for unfavorably comparing the USA, the nation of her birth, and the cradle of her career, to another country, this time Spain.

Well, I've decided to not attack Gwyneth for these statements. In fact, I think she has a good reason for making them.

This is a woman who has spent her life surrounded by rich people, and rich show-biz people. She has no idea what it's like for the people who live with incomes under seven figures, and it shows.

Her upbringing is the wealthy equivalent of being raised in the woods by inbred hillbillies who ain't got no knowing of dem dere folks who live in dem dere towns and cities and ain't got no hankerin' to learn about dem either. Except instead of a shack in a holler, it's a house in the Hamptons, or Beverly Hills, and the only Americans she knew who aren't rich are usually the servants, and they're only allowed to speak when spoken to, and even then it's strictly "Yes Mistress."

She's not a pretentious twat who hates her country, she only knows rich America. Blame them for the bad impression, not her for her ignorance.

Hollywood Babble On & On #316: When Smart Becomes Stupid & Stupid Becomes Smart

There was a time when Hollywood did very well with adult movies. I'm not talking about those "adult movies," I'm talking about movies for adults. The sort of films that don't rely on big explosions, and big special effects, including big cleavage, but instead were centered more on plot, dialogue, character, and often dealt with mature and intelligent themes and subject matter.

Nowadays it looks like most major studios avoid such films like the plague, preferring to have big robots smash each other to pieces for big bucks.

I think the blame can be divided two ways, 40% belongs to the audience, and 60% to Hollywood.

WHY IT'S THE AUDIENCE'S FAULT:

1. Demographics 20%: During the first "youthquake" that hit Hollywood in the 1950s independent producer Samuel Z. Arkoff estimated that the ideal target was the 19 year old American male, because he was the bellwether taste-maker at the time. Since then that has skewed younger and younger, and included the new phenom of "tweens."

These are the demographics that dominate audience buying habits. They either buy their own tickets, or decide the films that their parents can see, because they have a lock on the family's disposable income. Plus the younger viewers will go to see the same film again and again, putting a merely popular film into the realm of the blockbuster.

The problem is that if you want the true definition of an idiot with the attention span of a over-caffeinated gnat, it's a teenager. It's not a personal attack against them, all teens are idiots, I was an idiot when I was a teenager, so was you, and everyone you know. It's a scientific fact.

2. POOR URBAN PLANNING 10% & LAZINESS 10%: The days when you could walk down the street to your local neighbourhood theatre to see a flicker show do not exist for the average person. The bulk of people live in suburbs where it's just not easy to get anywhere, so going to a movie is no longer a casual thing, it's an event requiring a lot of logistical work. You have decide on a movie, find a theatre that's showing it, load up the car, find a parking space, which you probably have to pay for, stand in line at the Cineplex with a bunch of pimply little teenyboppers who are buying tickets to the PG film so they can sneak into the R rated movie next to yours, buy your ticket, buy your snacks, find a seat, etc...etc...

Most older folks think about all that and say: "Fuck it, I'll rent it from Netflix in a few months."

But they're not the only ones to blame....

WHY IT'S HOLLYWOOD'S FAULT:

1. SKYROCKETING COSTS 20%: The costs of making a film have been affected by an inflation unseen outside Zimbabwe. When you include the costs of distribution and marketing you could spend a minimum of $60-$100 million to release a "low budget" film.

Now this inflation is not a natural inflation, caused by the laws of supply and demand. It's an artificial inflation caused by poor business practices, but it's still making it extremely risky to make a film that doesn't have the potential to be a blockbuster.

2. OSCAR WHORING 20%: One of the worst things to have affected the Academy Awards was when Oscar movies became a genre onto themselves. At one time those films were called "prestige pics" and their purpose was to not only put bums in seats, but to win prizes and critical praise.

At some time in the 1990s, when Miramax began to dominate the Oscars, the shift started where putting bums in seats came in after the prizes and critical praise, and in many cases way after. After a while, lack of commercial success became a sign of Oscar worthiness, and you had films being made not to be enjoyed by the general audience, but by the narrow audience of Academy voters, who ironically, usually don't pay to see such films, preferring screeners given to them by producers.

I guess the best way to sum it up, is that Oscar films don't have to be good, because they're not being judged on if they're well made or not, but on whether they're important, and sincere enough to be worthy of an Oscar.

3. INABILITY TO ARGUE 20%: In places where everyone thinks alike people rapidly lose the ability to argue. In a social circle that includes a variety of opinions people say: "I disagree, and these are my points," which then get some counter points in return, and vice versa, until either one side wins, or they at least agree to disagree. However, toss disagreement into a milieu where the overwhelming majority agrees on just about everything, and suddenly things shift. The argument then goes: "I disagree, I may have points, but I'd rather impugn you and your motives as the main thrust of my case."

There is no place more wrapped up in group-think and conformity than Hollywood. Just do a survey of how they vote, and they tend to come overwhelming on one side of any issue.

It wasn't always like this. Hollywood was one big floating argument, especially during the early 1970s, the golden age of the mature political film. You had a more conservative "old guard" in a debate with the young whippersnappers who were coming out of New York television and later the first film schools. And these films took the form of a debate. Both sides would be presented in an intelligent and mature way. If the filmmaker had a political axe to grind, they at least tried to convince you, the viewer, that Nixon was evil, or that nuclear power was going to kill us all, with arguments.

Sadly, without the intellectual rigor that's born from constant debate, you see one side being passed on as angelic, and the other demonic, with no gray areas. If the villain, makes what could be construed as a valid political point, there is always included a "gotcha" moment where it's shown that he doesn't really believe any of it, he's just a posturing hypocrite. Because they believe that the audience is too stupid for a real debate with well rounded characters on both sides, and has to be spoon-fed that the filmmaker's side is good, and any other side is pure evil.

Of course such a stance is not going to win over the folks in flyover country who make films profitable, because they don't vote the way Hollywood does, and are considered part of the problem by Hollywood, and treated accordingly on screen.

These factors create what I call the Perfect Storm of Stupid. So called smart films get dumber, there's no profit in making dumb films smarter, because the target demographic isn't going to get it anyway, and audiences start to avoid the "smart" films because they come across as cliched as the "dumb" films, tedious in their self-righteousness, with an added soupcon of being insulting, not only to their intelligence, but also to their existence.

How can Hollywood pull itself out of the stupid spiral and start making films that make money without being dumber than dishwater?

Well, I may be a smug know it all, but even I have my limits, because it would take a complete shake-up of not only how Hollywood does business, but it's internal culture, as well, to make any sort of progress.