Look out, it’s a plug!

The host of Box Office Weekly, anxious to make up for lost time over the past few podcastless weeks, will be appearing as a guest on Priscilla Leona’s radio show this Sunday from 5:00-6:00pm, PST. No matter where in the world you are you can hear it here. I know the show has a lot of fans in Asia and I’d love for you to call in and ask me what the hell I’m talking about. Just remember, it’s GMT -8 hours!

If Priscilla gets enough calls during the show, the station owner will give her a new car. Or a ride home. I know it was one of those.

-daniel k

Box Office Weekly #114 (MP3 - 13 MB - 19 min)

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In today’s show, weekend box office figures, TV ratings and these stories: The Actors strike is more inevitable than ever… hippies just won’t go away.. and in this week’s commentary I explain where we’ve been and where the networks are going. All this and I’m broadcasting from a flying metal suit, today on Box Office Weekly.

DOWNLOAD THE SHOW HERE

BOX OFFICE FIGURES (Courtesy BoxOfficeMojo.com)

TV RATINGS (Courtesy A.C. Nielsen Company)

STORIES WE’RE FOLLOWING:

Act Like You Know What You’re Doing

The Reznor’s Edge

Talkin’ Bout My Generation

Subscribe to TPN :: Box Office Weekly by Email

I missed you guys! How’s it going? Been busy this last few weeks? Me too.

The podcast network has emerged from the rubble of a particularly nasty server crisis, covered with sexy scars and stronger than ever. It’s not just this show, it’s all of them. We are only now approaching normalcy. Thanks for your patience. I hope you haven’t turned to REAL entertainment news in the interim.

Of course, out little troubles here are nothing compared to those of the four major TV networks. Remember them? You used to watch shows on them before you got cable and streaming internet video. Anyway, there is this crazy tradition called the upfronts that happens every year around this time, in which the network present the fall season of shows to the advertisers and try to cajole them into committing money to commercials for the whole season. In the past the even was a huge party in New York, a kind of Vegas-style bacchanalia with networks renting Radio City Music Hall for massive parties. TV stars would hobnob with ad execs. And the booze! Oh, the booze. It was an assault on the senses, designed to wear the advertising people down enough that they would say, “Oh OK. I’ll take 3 minutes a week on VIVA LAUGHLIN.”

Come to think of it, that deal wouldn’t have been too pricey because it only lasted two shows.

Anyway, this year it’s going to be different for a variety of reasons. Chief among them, this l’il writer’s strike thingy. There are roughly half as many shows as normal in the pipeline, thus half as many to sell. Additionally, during the long months without development the network heads all came to a conclusion – pilots cost money. So they decided, after all these years and gazillions of dollars, to avoid making them whenever possible.

Yep, they’re gonna read the script, and decide whether there is a show there based on that. Bad news for actors but good news for writers, I guess.

Of course, the other dominant theme at the upfronts is reality shows. They’re inexpensive and easy to whip up on short notice. All you need is a couple of handycams, a handful of non-union actors, an idea based on another reality show, and many, many editors. You don’t need a script, and you certainly don’t need reality.

Good for news for actors, bad news for writers, I guess.

This attitude toward cheap programming has been extended to the upfronts themselves. Instead of a roman orgy, this years upfronts are more like a last-minute coed party put together while the parents are out of town. Instead of pink champagne on ice, it’s beer in red plastic cups. Instead of Bread and Circuses, it’s biscuits and gravy.

This has the potential to backfire big time. It’s a very delicate dance the upfronts have to do: can you imagine having to sell crap to people who make a living selling crap? In a lot of ways, the Upfronts has been a yearly bribe that the networks can no longer afford. All it’s gonna take is a really nice party thrown by Google and bang! No more NBC.

So nobody is expecting records to be broken this year. What everyone is really watching the upfronts for is: should we bother with more upfronts?

daniel k

I’m proud of TPN:: Box Office Weekly. I believe the editorial and critical content on these pages is of a generally higher level than most media-news blogsites. At the end of the film Ratatouille, the food critic Anton Ego put forth a splendid little summary of what criticism truly is. I’ll excerpt it here:

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talents, new creations. The new needs friends.

Sure, we both take swipes at things that are bad or silly or excessive, but these criticisms are generally leveled at systemic problems (goodie bags, tiny video, labor issues, popcorn prices) or the personal shortcomings of the celebrated (Amy Winehouse, Kate Hudson, Sofia Coppola). We generally leave movies alone to live or die by their own lights, sniping only parenthetically or, in the case of the podcast, through brief, witty, withering wordplay.

What makes me proud of the site is the fact we take the time to highlight new discoveries (”Life on Mars,” “Torchwood,” the Heroic Cheerleader sub-genre, The Met in HD). One of the more satisfying aspect of the general editorial direction here– completely unbidden, mind you, just something Dan and I do– is re-evaluate and recommend older works (Brute Force, Lolita, Basic Instinct). It may not seem like it when the articles are skimmed, but one of the hallmarks of TPN:: Box Office Weekly is a generally positive approach to the creative works of others, reserving harsher criticism for the business itself.

Having said all that, I have to break precedent and go after a film based solely on it’s preview.

Based just on said trailer, The Love Guru™ looks like one of the worst movies to come along in quite a while. Watch the preview if you don’t believe me, or the annoyingly web 2.0 home page. Whatever comedic magic Mike Meyers had has been dissipated: Whatever new or original ideas he brought to his movies seem to have abandoned him. It is also offensive on it’s face, with midget jokes and Indian stereotypes mis-fired by the bushel basket. Meyer’s “Guru Pitka” seem to be another variant on an Austin Powers-type character, a vaguely 60s-era pastiche.

Am I judging The Love Guru™ by it’s trailer? Yeah, for two good reasons: Hey, if you’re marketing a comedy aren’t you supposed to put the funniest parts of the film in it? If this is a Hollywood verity, than something has gone seriously off the rails here. Secondly, from what I could glean (First saw the trailer a few night ago on broadcast: it thudded so loudly, this article had to be created to counter it) this thing is so stunningly reprehensible I believe this break from our editorial practices is something of a public service.

Namaste,

–Skot C.

Due to a few minor technicals involving the ENTIRE PODCAST NETWORK, I’m not going to try to upload a show this week. Smart people within the organization believe the trouble will be ironed out by next week, so I recommend that you simply go to boxofficemojo.com, dig up the weekend chart, and read it aloud to yourself in a chirpy voice. Oh, and rant a little about digital rights management. That’ll hold you until next week.

-daniel k.

Having seen “Arrangements,” I soon saw the importance of getting the film ready for it’s life on the festival circuit. The first step to this end is preparing a definitive tape master: the other is showing those who actually made the film the need to do so.

Really, nobody needed convincing: the short was shot and edited in 1080 HD. However, the Mill Gallery preview screening was from a standard-def DVD. For the time being, SD is the format most people will see this film– as a screening or general-release DVD.

Just last weekend the editor of “Arrangements” prepared a QuickTime version of the final cut. Since it was in HDV format, the file fit just fine on a standard DVD-R. That’s one of the things I like about HDV: the data stream is comparable to standard-def DVCAM, yet has six times the resolution.

This QuickTime, with a little shoehorning and a streamlined data path, laid back onto an HDV tape just fine. This tape is the definitive submaster of “Arrangements,” with resolution and color space matching the final cut exactly. Unfortunately, the Santa Cruz Film Festival requirement for HD projection called for an HDCAM tape master.

HDCAM is the tape standard for high definition broadcast, an update of the Betacam and Digital Betacam form factor. HDCAM decks are exceedingly expensive: a decent recording deck with a useful suite of features runs about US$75,000. No, we don’t have one of those yet. But a dub house in San Francisco owed my company a favor or two and they got the HDCAM dub done for a nice discount.

On the other end of this process, having an HDV submaster meant I had the ability to screen the film easily and in full resolution on any HD monitor. This brings us back to the preview screening at the Mill Gallery: When I left that first screening I thought of Guy’s Movie Night at my friend Daev’s place in Santa Cruz. Weeks before, as noted here, we watched Live Free or Die Hard there, projected from a top-flight, fine-resolution Panasonic video projector onto a 120” diagonal screen.

A few phone calls and some coordination with Chip and another screening was organized. This one was smaller in audience than the Gallery preview, but all in attendance (who included Chip the director; Faye the producer; Matt the DP; Summer the art director; and Gina Marie the star) got to really see the film for the first time in it’s finest, most artistically true form: 10 feet wide, in insanely detailed 1080i, straight from the HDV submaster.

The subtleties of the production could be easily seen in this screening, elements that due to presentation difficulties were hard to see in the preview screening. The clarity of the image complemented the subtle acting in the longer scenes, and made the short montages more startling and lively. Summer’s art direction also became readily apparent, and the level of detail her department put into it was remarkable. the custom-made text on medicine bottles and written forms were easily read: the prop and furnishing placements were also proportional and realistic.

It was nice to be able to facilitate a screening that immersed the filmmakers so throughly in the world of their creation. If anything, it showcased what is possible with High Definition cinema: the technology now exists to allow independent filmmakers to produce images on par with their high-budget kin.

Next up: The SCFF premiere. This phase could prove quite interesting…

–Skot

Box Office Weekly #113 (MP3 - 15 MB - 22 min)

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In today’s show, weekend box office figures, TV ratings and these stories: Britain truncates an American television series… Warner Brothers truncates New Line… and in this week’s commentary I go all Cassandra on you about the industry. All this and not a word from Linda Blair and Vince Van Patten, today on Box Office Weekly.

DOWNLOAD THE SHOW HERE

BOX OFFICE FIGURES (Courtesy BoxOfficeMojo.com)

TV RATINGS (Courtesy A.C. Nielsen Company)

STORIES WE’RE FOLLOWING:

The New Line is Much, Much Shorter

Subscribe to TPN :: Box Office Weekly by Email

When I first came to Los Angeles in 1985, it was boom times for the industry. The recently burgeoning home video market, combined with the popularity of American Films overseas, assured film producers that if you were smart enough with your budget, you could turn a profit out of anything. The weekend I arrived the local six-plex, an enormous crackerbox that only had stereo in two auditoriums, was opening CAVEGIRL, a low-budget comedy from Crown International. They had ascended in that decade making movies based on market research questions. And while it didn’t break records, CAVEGIRL did indeed make money.

Meanwhile, the record industry was on the verge of a renassaisance due to the new technology of compact disks. More durable than vinyl, cheaper to produce, and an opportunity to resell its entire back catalog. Any time you can get somebody to give you new money for something you’ve already amortized, take it baby.

Television was doing okay as well, having enough audience to spawn a brand new cheeky fourth network in the form of Fox. At the time there was some hand wringing about the competition from VHS and HBO but compared to nowadays, they had it great. Living in Los Angeles then was like being a fisherman surrounded by a steady downpour of falling trout.

Well, twenty years has gone by and the entertainment business is scrambling around with nets, desperately trying to be under the next trout. And increasingly, that trout is falling somewhere else. The days of overseas sales of any damn crap ended around the early nineties when even the Koreans started to insist on production values. You couldn’t rely on foreign investor money on the promise of a breast and gunplay. Or was it the other way around? Anyway, that’s why you stopped seeing movies from Crown, and Cannon, and Roger Corman’s New Horizons pictures.

The record industry plateaued, then started to put all their promotional energy into sure things like boy bands, which led to a predictable backlash. Televsion added more cable channels and started carving up the pie so that no one was getting a satisfying piece.

Then arose the internet.

Oh man, is that thing hurting the majors! You can look at the computer revolution as a great tool of democratization. Now you can print your own menu and it will look gorgeous, where before you had to take a list of dishes to the local typesetter. Now you can edit video with equipment costing $500, and it has all the features of an Avid that used to cost $90,000. Everybody wins, except the local typesetter and they guys in Tewksbury who built Avids.

The internet is doing the same thing to distribution. A movie typically ships in two or three cans weighing about 30 pounds each - pretty soon it can be uploaded to your fourplex and you won’t even be able to tell the difference. You used to have a store full of little silver disks, and that’s where you got your music from - now you just call a server and get music.

And while it’s going to save the industry a ton of money, the problem is that distribution is so easy, even you can do it. And admit it, you are.

The major media companies are stuck with these ancient distribution mechanisms, inefficient and expensive to maintain, and at the same time they’re only beginning to figure out how to compete with a college kid who wants to push their stuff around for free. And they’ll come up with something, but not soon and not before there is some serious deadwood clearing.

Let’s face it, showbiz had it so good for so long that everybody makes too much money. That is going to change, whether by conscious sacrifice or by people bidding themselves out of the market. Hello Jim Carrey! Working much lately? In the meantime expect it to get get ugly and gloomy as New York snow. The coming actor’s strike, I expect, will be just as ugly as the writers strike. Both sides will insist that the other needs to make less money, not them. It probably won’t go on as long because the producers have less product in the pipeline so they’ll be compelled to get serious quicker, but it will go on longer than you want.

Some debate about whether America is in a recession; but showbiz is clearly around the corner from one. They say you can’t be too thin in this town. There see? The glass is half full.

-daniel k.

Readers of this blog will notice an essential difference between Daniel’s writing style and mine. I’m not talking about the profound ones: It is self-evident that Daniel is a quick-witted, cynical Hollywood insider, and I’m the droll, semi-academic media observer with a thing for animated chicks. No- I’m talking about title showings.

According to the style manuals a film is a singular work, and should be shown as distinct in text. Daniel uses all caps to delineate movie titles (SHOWGIRLS). I use italics (The Waterboy). Both are correct.

Dan’s convention comes from both the earlier Internet (where italics weren’t an option) and college composition, again to indicate titles absent any other typographical method.

I got my style from college as well. When I was a-studenting the “little red schoolbook” of film theory was “A History of Narrative Film” by David A. Cook. This thick, floppy softbound text was colloquially called the “Cook Book” and was required for a number of film courses, from history overviews to genre-studies classes to screenwriting. In it, all film titles were italicized, and any student with a word processor was encouraged to follow “Cook Book” style.

As I said, both conventions are correct, but they read a bit differently on a gut level. In the default font and type size used in TPN:: Box Office Weekly, all caps look a bit like YELLING, and italics look a bit like whispering.

Just to make matters more complicated, the New York Times and Variety both distinguish film titles with quotation marks (”Saw IV”). As they are publications of record, this is also correct.

Television citations are a little more problematic. Series names are supposed to be in quotation marks (”Police Squad!”), but they are often shown in italics. Dan does his in ALL CAPS, to be consistent. Individual episodes are considered “dependent or abbreviated works” and, like short films, are always supposed to be in quotation marks (”Rendezvous With Death”).

This has been a public service of Box Office Weekly, where stile rains supreem & good grammers is never worng grammers.

–Skot C.

As we’ve learned from better science fiction, our creations sometimes surpass their original parameters. Sometimes they run amok (2001), sometimes they kill everyone everywhere (”Battlestar Galactica,” The Matrix), and sometimes they turn into charming naïfs (Data from Star Trek). Another unusual example can currently be seen during commercial breaks on American television.

Esurance, an online insurance company, created a spokeswoman for their ads in the form of “Erin Esurance:” a Flash-animated, pink-haired hottie who fights evil, global warming and excessive paper use while pitching the easy-to-use online features of her parent company. The “Erin” campaign is not an ad agency concoction: she was created in-house by the Bay Area insurance firm. This is evident by the fluid, line-less, colorful “CalArts” style of animation used in the ads, and in the fact the character is sort of loosely bonded to the company’s message (ad agency creations are strongly focus-tested and rarely exceed the message, the Geico Cavemen being the exception).

Probably because of her strong image branding and the character’s unintentional stand-alone qualities, she’s turned up in some unusual places:

• The first post-strike new episode of “My Name Is Earl” was introduced by none other than Jeff Zucker, the president of NBC/Universal. Big props to his performance: one of the funniest parts of the episode. At one point, Mr. Zucker was demonstrating how one can watch episodes of “Earl” online– after you see an ad, of course. The ad featured Erin Esurance doing her sexy black-suited action thing, which prompted the president of NBC to say: “I once dated a girl with pink hair. (under his breath) Craaa-zy!”

• Another first for Erin: a movie tie-in. She is featured in ad cross-promoting the upcoming summer action/fantasy film Speed Racer. In the ad, she sits in the front row of a darkened movie auditorium, laughing, gasping, enjoying the film. Very engaging.

Her appealing juxtaposition led me to think this whole situation is exactly backwards. What sounds more compelling to you: Yet another CG-heavy film based on some half-forgotten but easily branded kiddie product, or a movie featuring Erin? This ad really sold me– not on the Speed Racer movie, or Esurance, but Erin’s viability as a movie star. (Well, as long as she doesn’t actually pitch insurance during the movie, that is.)

Time to get a new agent, Erin!

–Skot C.