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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, July 31st, 2009 - Comments Off on New Boss, Not Quite The Same As The Old Boss
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New Boss, Not Quite The Same As The Old Boss

Anne Thompson moves from Variety to indieWIRE and a new experiment begins.
While Nikki Finke talks about turning her blog into a website by September – we’ll see what it becomes… my guess is still pretty much the same… more pages to view… more freelancers – and Sharon Waxman tries to get the exclusive scoop on whether Michael Jackson washed his hands every time he changed Bubbles’ diapers so she can create ad revenue that hasn’t much shown itself yet, Anne is doing something similar to what Nikki did at Village Voice Media’s LA Weekly, to much more success for Nikki than for VVM.
indieWIRE’s Oscar-season profile – in terms of ad sales – is good, but not great. As we head into another season, Oscar is the Holy Grail of movie site ads. Sites with access to voters get premium prices. Enter Anne.
With Ted Leonsis in fiscal control and spending, indieWIRE is now getting serious about selling ad space. And this will be the ad team’s first really big test. Even before Anne’s arrival, indieWIRE’s media kit’s first image is an Oscar statue in a screen grab of an Oscar story.
So the question – Can indieWIRE convert Anne in to at least $150,000 in ad sales this season? I would estimate that this is the figure at which both sides are happy in the marriage.
Keep in mind, it is likely more than Nikki ever earned for Village Voice Media in a given year. They aren’t going to get there on page views and normal CPMs.
If you are a critic or a writer, you should – as I am – be rooting for Anne and indieWIRE to succeed in this ambition because it suggests more potential than there seems to be out there right now for a lot of high-profile, high-quality writers. The potential for more writers without organized sales efforts earning $50,000 or more (or less) becomes real if this works.
Of course, there is the odd flip side. If Anne becomes the biggest single earner at indieWIRE – which is possible – what does that say about spending to support infrastructure if one person can draw such a high percentage of a site’s revenues?
No doubt, the folks at indieWIRE get this better and have more of an interest in experimenting than Variety did… at least after Charlie Koones left.
Let the games begin.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon