The Hot Blog Archive for December, 2007
Loud Mary
Radar’s gossip blog ran this stupid piece in the great tradition of Nikki Finke… clearly one source… clearly with an agenda… clearly will get people talking before they find a more significant distraction, like the weather.
No one is firing Steven Spielberg. The idea that Spielberg is going and Geffen is staying is, simply, not gonna happen… certainly never at anyone’s behest but their own.
That said, here is what might have actually been floated – Spielberg, Geffen, and Katzenberg are on 3 year contracts which end next year. What is not 100% clear – opinions differ – is whether they can leave Paramount with Stacey Snider before 2010 and how easily they can leave with the DreamWorks name.
Sumner could absolutely try to position the debacle of the exit of SKG after 3 years and as 90% of the flailing studio’s revenue creation – the only way it won’t happen is if SKG bought the studio from Viacom outright, though it is more likely that Spielberg would prefer a red carpet housekeeping/co-funding deal at Universal – just as he spun the exit of Tom Cruise as a firing. But this time, he’s f-ing with the wrong guys. Cruise was vulnerable when that went down. David Geffen will have Redstone’s Viagra replaced with cyanide while he sleeps.
Yes, there could be a fight over the studio name. Yes, Paramount has a longer deal to distribute DreamWorks Animation than for the people who make it, which complicates things. Most complex is pulling out all the top shelf DreamWorks talent that is now employed directly by Paramount. This can, as Tina Turner might say, could go down rough… or easy.
But the idea that Sumner is going to “fire” Steven is the kind of PR spin that will push Viacom B into some trouble. Phillipe Dauman already has a major problem coming in the exit of SKG and they still have no answer to offer the Wall Street community. Brad Grey is likely to go down in history as the Jerry Levin of the movie business, his moves, including bringing in DreamWorks at a massive cost, forcing Viacom to divest itself of its movie studio and at least some cable nets. Trading publicty jabs with Geffen is not going to work for them… as we all thought they already learned from the last publicity debacle.
Really, how will they explain that over 80% of their distribution gross is walking out the door?
There are more charitable ways of parsing the numbers. DreamWorks Animation is really not part of the equation, for either company. It is, technically, an independent company and Paramount only has a distribution deal with them, for which it paid an additional $75 million when the big deal happened. They are in profit on that deal after this year and can expect net revenues of about $40 million a year in future.
On just live action, DreamWorks product grossed $454 million so far this year with Paramount product making $263 million. So DreamWorks live action is only responsible for 63% of their gross domestic revenue.
Still not a great story… especially when only one film from Paramount proper cracked $50 million all year.
The truth is, SKG would be doing Redstone a favor by taking Viacom B off of his hands. If they won
Sweeney Sampling
If you want to have a sampling of the entire Sweeney Todd soundtrack, 30 seconds per song, you can find it on the Amazon.com page, where the pre-order for the Dec 18 release of the album is up and running.
1 Comment »Funny Until Stupid
You know, it’s this kind of thing that makes it all seem futile.
Someone had a great idea. The AMPTP stupidly left the .com URL of their initials available instead of buying it when they built their real website, amptp.org. And someone made a mock site, right out of the great movie, The Yes Men. It appeared on Nikki Finke’s site a couple of hours ago. We linked to it. It’s funny.
But then, the WGA decides to send it out to its mailing list, which takes it from being funny and mischievous to something sanctioned by a striking union
Is NBC/DreamIversal Too Small A Deal To Fly?
A fascinating opinion and news story in the WSJ today about tomorrow
2 Comments »Whose Story Is It?
I know many of you are sick to death of strike stories… and I have found the whole thing much more interesting this week… so here is one more…
When stories that say the exact same thing in a combative situation, I start to wonder, who is telling this story and telling it well? It is even more perplexing when smart, experienced writers like Michael Cieply and Merissa Marr seem to be way too close to being on the same page.
That was the d
Landing In NY
More no-surprises.
The closest thing to interesting was the choice of Julie Christie and the choice to honor last year
All that's missing…
… is a shot of Phil and Marisa saying “ho… hoooo… hoooooooooooo, baby” from Rio!
Two Free Tickets To Support WGA
MCN bought two $75 orchestra seat tickets to this Friday’s WRITE AID – A Benefit Concert to Provide Assistance to Industry Employees Affected by the WGA Strike. Performers currently scheduled include Eddie Izzard, Lewis Black, Patton Oswalt, Sarah Silverman, and Tenacious D.
And they can be yours for free!
We’ll be drawing a winner randomly from entries this Thursday.
It should be a great show, so enter here and go have a great time, both laughing with and supporting writers.
Maybe I Don't Get It
Michael Cieply, now writing at the NY Times, has been around the rodeo more than once. In fact, he is one of the very few industry journalists who was filing stories in the last multi-month WGA strike (then for the LA Times)
So when he writes in a Sunday/Monday story…
“Producers expressed outrage over continuing demands of the writers that were not strictly related to pay.
These include requests for jurisdiction over those who write for reality TV shows and animated movies; for oversight of the fair-market value of intracompany transactions that might affect writer pay; and the elimination of a no-strike clause that prevents guild members from honoring the picket lines of other unions once a contract is reached.”
Starting with the most clearly defined one in respect to writers’ pay, oversight of fair-market value in intracompany transactions is an absolute key item in the current and at least decade-long future of the television and movie business. Five of six real majors own TV and cable outlets. The only one that doesn’t is Sony, effectively disallowed from network ownership because it is a foreign company. There have already been a few lawsuits by producer/co-owners of shows that have been internally dealt. And it will soon be a bigger issue.
Now, perhaps WGA oversight is not a realistic or appropriate option. I haven
Critic Time
The big parade of critics groups
11 Comments »Sunday Estimates by Klady – Dec 9
I hate to get into the middle of some happy hype, but
Stating The Obvious
The AMPTP is not going to settle the WGA strike the week before the two goes on two weeks-plus vacation.
Yes, it will be a way of hurting writers’ mindsets to leave them unemployed and hopeless over a holiday as the studios execs and agents all head to exciting locales to read and relax. The frustration of walking picket lines while the gates at the studios slow dramatically won’t be so fun either.
But mostly, this holdiay represetns 2% of the year. And it’s 2% when there are usually significant expenditures on parties, gifts, bonuses, etc.
I did believe that the strike could end around December 1. But like the strike starting itself, getting to this weekend without a deal pretty much assures another few weeks of delay before a real deal is seriously considered. And all the micro-activities in the meanwhile are just a smokescreen.
I would suggest that the nrxt step for the WGA would be to start behaving more like their counterparts and to set 2 or 3 hard positions that the AMPTP has to agree to before the WGA returns to the bargaining table… absolutes, like the AMPTP did on the doubled DVD residual.
A $250 a year fixed residual on free streaming is simply unacceptable. That’s a quarter cent per download against 100,000 downloads and 1/250th of a cent per download if a years downloads of a show hits 1 million. Forget counting the AMPTP’s revenues… that’s just insane.
But the WGA side needs to continue to offer real options and not just rhetoric. For instance, what if there were two scales for free streaming, based on how many re-runs on network and/or cable an episode accrued? So if a show was replayed twice, say once on network and once on cable, allowing a writer to get significant residual revenue from those two showings, the streaming rate could be, say, $1500 for every 500,000 streams, another $1500 due as soon as streams hit 1 or 500,001 and on?
If a network decided not to rerun an episode, the residual rate would become significantly greater for streaming… say $1500 for every 100,000 streams.
Programming specifically created for the web by WGA members without any other residual opportunities would have to be more, say, $5000 for every 100,000 streams.
My point is… the goal is not “we own the web” or “won’t lose the web.” It’s got to be, we see an evolution, we want the industry to have as much flexibility to adjust to new formats as possible, but we need to get paid if our old pay system is decimated by new technology. It’s not winning or losing the web… it’s the concern about losing the key paydays of network reruns to online streamng reruns that don’t promise to come close to paying as well.
There is the very real possibility that free streaming will be a short-term experiment. The future will be loaded with all kinds of branches off current and traditional ideas. The DVR will eventually change the entire thing, but even short-term, how long before NBC/Universal starts NBC/S, a pay network ($5 a month) for sponsored reruns, like the web, but with the additional revenue stream from cable/satellite, a wider reach, and an entire week’s network schedule available every day, since it basically comes down to 22 primetime hours and assorted other filmed goodies cut in time by a quarter when commericals are removed? No one actually wants to watch a show on a computer screen as opposed to being anywhere in their home watching on a regular TV… the added value online being scheduling. But that will evolve too.
All this stuff about partners and no one pays a plumber a royalty when the toilet flushes, etc… all way off point. It’s simple. If an episode of a TV show can generate $7 million in its lifetime, who much should a writer of the episode – not the showrunner – get paid? Is it $100,000? $150,000? $200,000? More? Less? That is where the answer to this strike is.
Ever notice how divorce proceedings ofter devolve into one party acting so they won’t get “screwed” by the other party? That’s the tone of the strike right now. Whether you want to believe it or not, it is the tone on both sides. Everyone has skin in this game. Sentimentalism is how you keep from settling, not how you settle. Don’t take a knife to a gunfight.
Interesting…
… to me, at least.
I saw The Great Debaters and on the front of the film is a Weinstein Co logo, but under the logo and on the minimal front credits, it says, “TWC,” not The Weinstein Company. Why?
It turns out that the DGA, when a film chooses to have main titles at the back of the movie, the producer’s name can’t come before the title. So while Harpo Productions, which is Oprah’s name backwards, is ok because it’s backwards, the “Weinstein” in The Weinstein Company was not. Apparently, Jerry Bruckheimer’s lightening-struck tree has appeared at the front of movies, with the distirbutor’s logo, in similar circumstances, without his name underneath.
Ah, the glorious details of guild rules…
