Anonymous Content’s Steve Golin & Alix Madigan

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to outline any past achievements and supply information about current pursuits.

Oscar Glut

So now is the time when Oscar stories are coming out of the wazoo.

And it’s all so polite.

For instance, I am a fan of both Anne Hathaway and James Franco. Liked both of their movies this year.

Both were box office flops, especially when held up against expectation.

If you wanted to go younger, wouldn’t the popularity call be to Joseph Gordon Levitt – of Inception and the surprise hit (500) Days of Summer last year – and perhaps the overexposed-like-a-Kardashian-lately Gwyneth Paltrow of Iron Man 2? Or Emma Watson? Or Mila Kunis (whose Black Swan, btw, is now over $200m worldwide.)

It’s this strange place we all go to when discussing “what’s good for the show.” It’s as stuck between business and art as every other conversation about the film business. Shouldn’t the conversation about why Franco and Hathaway were hired be about how charming, smart, talented, and likable they are? But even as they are younger than most Oscar hosts have been, we’re still talking about age and reaching out to a new demographic, like it’s the MTV Movie Awards.

This has got to be the most unpleasant week for Oscar nominees as well. Prepping and preening endlessly for a party over which you have no control.

But at least we have 3 million media stories.

Hysterical! Nikki Ceases & Desists Sharon

I love this so.

The ultimate in entertainment journalism ouroboros…

In this corner, the madwoman who threatens everyone she talks to with excluding them from her site’s increasingly deep in minutiae, uninteresting coverage of the industry, thus gaining her “exclusives” of anywhere from as much as 6 hours to as little as 3 minutes.

In the other corner, one of the least well regarded journalists ever to cover the movie business beat, she does steal content, though she passionately defends the behavior as “the way it is” like her idol, Arianna. But primarily, that acquisitiveness comes from bigger outlets than Deadline.

It’s hard to know who to root for. Nikki is right on some level. But Nikki’s definition of EXCLUSIVE is self-serving and to so degree, absurd.

You have to respect the game as it was set up decades and decades ago. The person with the relationships that get them the first sniff of the press release posing as news gets the Exclusive. People have earned a lot of money for having those relationships, Michael Fleming right up at the front of that line. But we’re not a two trade, no interest in reporting town anymore.

Almost nothing printed on Deadline is “news” as the front page of a newspaper would define it. Someone wants the word out. They give it to the person who is the best strategic fit. It can be about that outlet being the best one for the news to come from or it can be, as noted above, that they are feeling threatened by a “journalist” and they’d rather protect themselves than risk a fight that can go right to the top of the studio. There is no bigger context developed by reporting, as a rule. it’s just today’s press releases and who gets handed what.

Nikki has done a brilliant, horrible job of taking control of this game. There is no question that she dominates. But she dominates with fear-based manipulation, not journalism. In hiring some of the best liked writers out there, she has both kept herself at a distance. But her rage still drives her mythology.

The irony of this cease & desist remains… people give information to Deadline to get it disseminated, not so Nikki can rage on about exclusives and toldjas. They want Sharon and everyone else with a website to “steal” the story and spread it. More often than not, every potentially interested journalist’s phone or e-mail inbox rings with the “news” within an hour of Deadline (or LAT… or NYT… or whomever…) running it.

It’s comedic that anyone would try to use the Hot News Doctrine to maintain control of entertainment news. Seriously. It is to laugh.

Not as funny as, “It often can take weeks of working our deep sources to report and write our posts,” however. Yeah… holding a story for weeks because your source wants you to or has negotiated with you to do so is not “working deep sources for weeks” in my journalistic book. Nor should it for you readers.

And with all due respect, how does Nikki or anyone else know what Sharon and her minions are reporting and what they are stealing? This is the part I am excited to see, hoping a lawsuit develops.

This is the problem with most of the lawsuits – including the ones threatened against me and never C&Ded… feeling left out – Nikki conjures up. She’s have to prove that Waxman is not reporting these stories. Cue the line up of Nikki Whisperers, for all of Hollywood to see and the owners of the corporations to see. Her sources would have to stick up for her in court. I want to see Ron Meyer on the witness stand explaining how he gave information to Nikki and refused it to Sharon or Variety or LAT… and why.

Of course, the real question about all of this legal wrangling is, “Why now?” Is the answer the photo of Nikki that Sharon published? Is it competitive anger over the Motion Picture Home story? Was the award season, the advertising part of which basically ended yesterday, not quite what Nikki hoped? Does Nikki see a chance to kill off The Wrap once and for all? Or could this all be a conspiracy to get Bill Condon to make Sharon a character on The Nikki Show?

Of course, Sharon and her backers are not Deadweird Hollywood. Not quite as easy to take down. But The Wrap could be teetering. And this could scare away another round of funding. And then, I think Sharon’s suit against Nikki would be more fun!

Is Nikki forgetting that the first rule of Source Club is not talking about Source Club? Could it backfire hard on her?

All I have to do is sit back and watch. I don’t really read either site much anymore. Deadline is mostly the parts of the trades I never read even back when they were The Trades and The Wrap has occasional moments of being interesting… but few and far between. I like Steve Pond and for a guy who has hated on me, Jeff Snieder does it in a funny way. So I’ll have to see the battle light up on my RSS feed.

“EXCLUSIVE: I’ve learned 2-time Oscar winner and Academy favorite Tom Hanks will be the first presenter and name winners in both the Art Direction and Cinematography categories right off the bat. ”

WOW… that’s important news worth suing over, Pete Hammond! Bring on the lawyers!!!

LMAO.

Get Your Malick On

It’s unnamed Malick. It’s A & McA, together again for the first time. And waving wheat or grass or whatever that is…

Clarifying My Position On Netflix (And Many Other Things)

In another thread, krazyeyes wrote; “Just curious DP . . . what would Netflix have to do for you to post something positive about them?”

krazyeyes, I think I point out in every one of these posts, in some way, that they have pushed the envelope and built out two great ideas.

What I keep writing about with Netflix is not that they are bad or the service is bad. Others have complained about some of the details. I have not.

What I am writing about, against a tide of rose-colored media lust for this company, is that a major tide is turning. And people – especially the media – are so busy cheering on a company that beat the system with an innovative idea and hard work that they don’t want to acknowledge the treacherous path ahead.

Regardless of public statements to the contrary, Netflix itself sees the edge of the cliff. There is no other way to explain the huge content deals they are making. The public tends to see the service and the success with subscribers and the innovation and disregard the details. But the details today are not the same for Netflix – or any company seeking to be in the ongoing streaming business – as they were just 18 months ago.

Here’s an analogy. Banana Republic. I was an early fan of the stores. And early on, they really were out finding things that they weren’t manufacturing, but finding all over the world. As they grew, they added some manufactured goods, mostly favorites they couldn’t fulfill demand for by purchasing as they found it. Then, they were bought by The Gap and almost immediately, they became a style brand and the idea of one-offs showing up in the store lessened drastically. Within a couple of years, the business was a slightly higher end version of The Gap. And that is where it remains today.

Nothing wrong with that.

But it’s not what it was. It’s not what I loved when I happened upon it 30 (or so) years ago .

Netflix has gone from cleverly seeing DVD as an opportunity to skip the brick & mortar and to use the mail for home delivery, making more money per wholesale purchased DVD than a business with more physical overhead. Great. They got into content ownership for a moment… numbers didn’t work… they got out. Smart cookies. DVD continues sliding and Reed Hastings & Co get serious about streaming. They move a lot faster than big corporations and they realize that they are able to rape & pillage the majors, really, and build a very strong streaming base by paying a small percentage of what pay-TV pays for content by dealing with the pay-TV companies, who have rights that aren’t being exploited. Brilliant.

And the company grew. And the subscriber base rose. And the stock price went through the roof.

And then, all those companies who were happy to be getting a little something extra in their pay-TV deals because of streaming noticed.

That was when the game became bigger than Netflix or any other service provider (aka middle man).

This is not a criticism of Netflix. They have seen the future. And that’s why they are risking so much to try to get ahead of the tidal wave. They’ll say absolutely not, but I would say that they are looking to be another Banana Republic. They are a brand name with good customer relationships and a very, very healthy subscriber base already. I will be surprised if a consortium of 3 major library companies, at least 2 of which are ongoing major studios, doesn’t buy Netflix by 2014 as their streaming base. Reed Hastings has already started selling off chunks of his stock. But something like Sony/MGM/NBComcastUniversal seems like the right fit. WB is already heading down their own in-house path, as Time-Warner already has in the cable business. Disney is going to be the crown jewel of the streaming business and will either marry Apple or find their own way some other way. Fox doesn’t always play well with others. Lionsgate is a very valuable commodity, but a bit schizo about what it wants to be as a business.

The only really funky possibility is Netflix becoming so overvalued by the market that it buys/merges with Viacom… in which case, they have the Paramount and CBS libraries in house and probably end up buying or dealing with Lionsgate as well.

Point it, there is a tipping point where the cost of content and the availability of the technology turn a company like Netflix into a service business for the studios it is sharing revenues with… unless it becomes one of those studios.

The one scenario that seems impossible to me is that Netflix keeps doing business as it is now doing for more than the next 2 years. The brand and the reality of their product and the massive costs they are now incurring make for a house of cards. Can’t work.

But they can adapt. And they have before. And it is 100% clear that they are already 3 steps ahead of the media coverage of their story. We’re all screaming, “Look at the butterfly!,” and they are already in the cocoon, figuring out what butterfly they will be next.

And getting back to me – ah, ME! – this is how I cover this industry. It is very, very rarely because I have a personal connection or interest in something. I despise it when the media starts becoming obsessed with a story that they refuse to really think about. It’s Pretty Girl Syndrome. The media gets blinded by the surface and rarely gets serious about what’s under the hood. And then there are these media analysts who are insane self-promoters who throw out junk stats left and right. (Just read a piece this morning about Apple’s next announcement and how the last people to look to for insight about what will be announced are The Analysts, who TechCrunch claims are wrong over 98% of the time.) So media “reports” their opinions like its gospel…. even if the same analyst gets shown to be wrong over and over and over again.

I have no problem with Paramount. But they were floating on distribution-only deals for a few years. And when they started making movies again, due out this year, I immediately wrote about this potentially being their very best year under Brad Grey. They don’t even need to have the highest grosses they have had. But the net and profit picture looks better in 2011 than it has in a very long time.

I have no problem with Warner Bros. They make massive movies and are always at the top or near the top of the Market Share chart. But Market Share is bullshit. So I look at the details, for them as for every other studio. Have a savaged a couple of their movies? Yes. Have I sung to the high heavens about some of their movies? Absolutely. Including movies that it seems like no one else would support.

And I am not in love with Fox. But just like every other studio, there is the surface the public sees – the movies – and there is the business, which is rarely dug into. I get along with some of the people over there who are hated. But that’s true of every studio. And I assure you that there are people at Fox who think I am just a loud mouth asshole. (And sometimes, I guess I am.)

Writing about movies is 50/50, personal and professional. You have personal reactions to films. Nature of the beast. And there are objective ideas. And as a critic, one must balance these out to be fair, smart, and useful to readers.

Writing about the movie business is 100% about the business for me. Some of my very favorite people in this business have been known to say to me – often – that I hate ALL of their movies. It’s a bit exaggerated, but like every other sane adult, 80% of what comes out is negligible. And in that other 20%, there is a range of like and love and dislike and hate. At a studio, that usually means that there are 3 or 4 movies a year about which someone is actually considering my opinion seriously. And if I am lukewarm or dislike 3 of the 4, I hate ALL their films.

Does it matter, really? No. They are going to market the films and perhaps awards-chase the films and I am just a voice to be forgotten, ignored, or to jiggle loose some sense of what the negatives might be.

But back to the business side… what I don’t do is go along with the pitch. And 90% of what you read about the movies business – maybe more – is coming from publicists – personal, studio, or corporate – and it’s not just about protecting clients. It’s about positioning the whole machine. And when a top studio exec talks to a journalist for publication (on the record or on background), the spin is all the more acute.

Also, I have learned a lot about how this machine works over the last 15 years. When someone passionately tells me that my source on something like a production cost number is wrong, I don’t take that with a grain of salt. I take it seriously. I also have to take sources who tell me things that people don’t like to read seriously. I also have to seriously consider whether the team I believe in – like WGA or SAG – is making strong choices, no matter how well intended.

It fascinates me when people get upset with me and claim that I see my self as some self-appointed moral guardian. Well, I’m a writer and I’m an editor. What the fuck do you think the job is? This is when journalists make me nuts. At what point do we so disconnect from reality that we forget that we are judging all day long. We choose what to write. We choose to believe or disbelieve our sources, either seeking out more sources or not. What makes so many journalists think they are above judgment?

From the very start of my work as a journalist, I felt that if we were going to judge every single thing about Hollywood every day, we were up for debate as well. It’s only fair. Not to be hunted like witches or Communists. But that we have a responsibility that comes with our bylines to reach as hard as we can for truth and not just for today’s fishwrap. We are all going to get it wrong sometimes. I get it wrong too. But i have learned, the hard way, that the thrill of the chase can mess up your perspective badly. You want every story to be fresh and exciting. You want everything to be EXCLUSIVE. You want to be the best at your job. But particularly now, with every week being speed week, it’s harder to be heard… so journalists get louder and sloppier, lowering their own standards and the rest of our standards with them. Because you know, the people handing out the info in the movie business are not interested in you, they are interested in getting their version of events to the most people possible. To them, it’s math. So if you are going to question them in a real way – and not just scream at their staff members and then bend over and give them the best —-job of their life – you aren’t going to get what you want. So eventually, it becomes a competition for who can take it and give it hardest, fastest, wettest.

Proud moments.

Who am I to judge? No one. I am another person. i just have better seats than many of you. And the silent majority around here has better seats to a lot of this than I do. That’s why they are sources and not journalists.

I am just trying to jailbreak perspective. And I can’t worry whether that sounds arrogant. That’s the dictionary definition of the job.

It’s not personal. It’s strictly business.

And when it is personal, it’s my business to tip you to that.

BYOB 22311

Another $200 Million A Year For Reruns

Netflix has now done deals with CBS and Disney for television reruns of primarily older shows – including Star Trek! – that will cost the streamcaster and estimated $200 million a year… or about $14 a year for every household currently subscribing to the service. These non-exclusive deals join, so far, EPIX and Relativity Media to put Netflix’s content costs over the $700 million a year mark… or slightly more than $50-a-year per $96-a-year subscriber.

This does not include any of the future, similarly costly deals the company will have to do with Universal, WB, Fox, Disney, and Sony – perhaps through third-parties, like Starz – to offer streaming content. There are also more television deals to do.

The streaming bubble is a real boon for studios. Libraries that had gotten wildly devalued are suddenly worth premium prices to streaming companies looking to grow or maintain position in the arena. Streaming has gone from a marginal revenue business to a $2 billion-plus a year chunk of business in less than a year. Eventually, this bubble will burst for the middle companies and everything will re-set. But for now, studios couldn’t be happier… unless they are still in line for the next deal… praying that this hyperactive spending will continue.

Meanwhile, who is screwed?

The Unions, who basically gave away the streaming business like they gave away the DVD business years ago. Unions members are likely to end up getting less than 1% of the revenues created by this new spending on old product. Sigh…

Is Amazon Streaming Going Up Or Down Stream?

Well, the good news is that you can now stream The Incredible Mr. Limpet anytime you want (as long as you have an Amazon Prime account). You can’t do that on Netflix. And I am sure this will be the heart of the Amazon ad campaign.

After a bit of looking around, my quick impression of the new Amazon streaming system is that the design is good, the streaming is solid, and you need to by a Roku to see any of this on your TV set… and it’s not clear that Amazon will allow this for free with your Prime account. Plus, it’s hard to search just the films available for this streaming program and quality of the image does vary. Some seems HD or close to it… and some of it looks like an old VHS.

Comparing it to Netflix, the programming Amazon has seems more than 80% available on Netflix. The biggest single group of shows in the ctaegory Amazon calls “Amazon Instant Video › Prime Eligible” come from a company called Egami, whose stand-up specials and the like represent 375 of the 1669 Prime Eligible shows listed.

But there are library films from Sony, Warner Bros,and other majors and mini-majors that stream on Amazon and don’t on Netflix at this time, Like Mr Limpet or Stripes, Batman Returns, etc.

Both seem to offer the full IFC, Magnolia, Music Box spectrum.

Finding stuff is confusing, as “Amazon Instant Video” that is not ‘Prime Eligible” still costs 3 or 4 bucks to rent. And there really is no store, as such. Of course, this is also true on Netflix, where you have to go to the individual movie page to find out if something streams.

But, for instance, we want to see the third in the Millennium Trilogy… it stream on both services… we’ll watch it on Netflix because we can watch it on the big TV and not just on the computer… and we didn’t have to buy another machine to do it. I suspect this will be true of Amazon soon and that they too will do a download deal with Sony’s PS3 and other platforms. But not yet… still early…

Overall, this ois a big step behind Netflix and Hulu on TV access alone, much less program variety. But the same issues that apply to Netflix apply here. It’s all about the cost of content and control of content. But we’ll always have Mr. Limpet. At least, I hope we will.

3 Years After New Line Was Gutted, Ready To Become WB Library Brand

I hate to splash a little reality juice over Deadline’s as-dictated-by-Jeff-Robinov spin on New Line’s fate at WB, but it doesn’t take a studio chief to know that New Line was never really an 8-film-a-year proposition for WB. Within months of bringing over some bodies from Robertson Blvd, the staff started being pared down. And after going through the backlog of already-produced New Line product in 2008 and 2009, 2010 saw WB release just 4 New Line-generated films, one of which was a sequel (S&TC) and one of which was an attempted reboot of A Nightmare on Elm Street. And again, 4 films are on the schedule for 2011, including 2 more sequels and just 2 originals. There is also a Walden-backed sequel, in 3D, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, that will liekly be released by WB distribution, whether or not the New Line brand is attached.

If the studio and Steve Carrell ever decided on a director Burt Wonderstone, which was intended to be shooting now, I can’t find any information towards that end.

So that leaves Rock of Ages and The Hobbit(s) as the only significant non-sequel product that WB seems committed to moving forward on.

Sounds like WB is finally shuttering NL, as they intended to from the start, and Toby Emmerich is getting a producing pact that will let him get paid on future sequels and Rock of Ages, keep an office, etc.

Do the math. Toby Emmerich was given a contract in late February/early March of 2008. 3 years ago. Time’s up.

Or can you believe the hype… that this is some urgent shift in plans… oy.

Meanwhile, Shaye & Lynne’s Unique Features got Elf up on Broadway… and it’s now gone. The only other project of their announced slate that still has a little heat under it is a Barry Levinson version of the Larry Gelbart muscial City of Angels. We’ll see.

Oh, how I love show business.

Playing Telphone

The Lara Logan story continues…

In recent days, some major media figures who might have some inside perspective have now been cautioning that ‘sustained sexual assault” may not include rape after all. Good for Ms. Logan. I hope it did not. But bad for communication, as if this turns out to be true, CBS’ statement on her behalf is even more problematic.

And today, NPR’s ombudman offered this group of comments that had been removed from the NPR comment boards in reference to the Logan story:

Here’s a taste of the anonymous comments that were taken down:

“They’re Arabs, what do you expect? They’re nasty people from the dirtiest place on earth.”

Well, certainly unpleasant and engaging in offensive stereotypes. But not nearly as harsh as I assumed they were.

There seem to be two kinds of banned comments. 1. Women shouldn’t be doing men’s jobs, and 2. Egyptians/Arabs/Muslims are a scummy breed.

I disagree with both, on principle. But is this kind of discourse, which also permeates the rest of the conversation in subtle, more indirect ways, really in need of banning?

I would get, “Blond whore got what was coming to her,” being pulled down. That’s a specific personal attack. But “women shouldn’t be covering mobs” may be a bad argument, but does it cross the same line?

Shouldn’t we be strong enough to engage the first thing we know comes to many people’s minds… should she have been there? I am on the “should have been there” side, but if I can’t defend it and I’m not even willing to engage those who think it reflexively, perhaps my argument isn’t strong enough.

Also, even in the NPR piece, the Ombudsman offers, “Western journalists might not have dug into this topic had it not been for Logan’s forthrightness.”

The topic is sexual harassment in the Middle East. So journalists who cover the issue responsibly are to be commended, but some commenter whose take on it is raw and excessive gets silenced? Where’s that line?

For me, this was like a one-two punch. So CBS suggests she was raped… and the degree to which her assault was sexual is now being questioned, gently, by people like Barbara Walters, who knows virtually everyone in the network news world. NPR says Logan is being attacked again, in comments, and removes some… and it turns out that the attacks were unextraordinary examples sexism and xenophobia. I don’t question the motives of either organization, but I do question the methods used and how they seem to have misled many people.

Nothing makes the attack on Lara Logan okay… or even “more okay.” But my concern in this entry is not about her and her story, but about two of the biggest and most trusted media outlets in the world and whether they did right by their listeners/watchers/readers.

The Final Arthur One-Sheet… A Co-Star Is Born

(The last official version… with Gerwig added unofficially by Photoshop.)

The A.C.E. Tribute Reel For Michael Kahn

Tribute to Michael Kahn, A.C.E. from Carsten Kurpanek on Vimeo.

Klady’s 4-Day Estimates

Okay… let’s start with the stupid overreaction at the LA Times to the possible non-reoccurrence of an event that happened once in the history of the movie business, now being posited as a change in the overall movie business. (Can you hear my eyes rolling?)

In 2009, two January releases grossed over $100 million domestic. It has never happened before. It didn’t happen last year. In fact, in the entire history of movies, these were the ONLY two films ever to launch in January – there are a bunch of Oscar holdovers from the year before that went wide in January and went on to $100m grosses – that EVER grossed $100m… period. And The Green Hornet may join them as the 3rd such film EVER.

So the trend piece must be that box office is up this January, right? No. OF course not.

Perhaps we need to have a broader perspective. 2009 was one of four times in movie history when two films, released in either/or January or February grossed as much as $100m domestic. It looks like 2011 will be the fifth such occurrence with both The Green Hornet and Just Go With It heading to that mark, both from Sony btw. So things must be okay, right? No. Of course not. Oh… and Gnomeo & Juliet could well crack $100m too, which would be the first time in history we had three Jan/Feb releases hit that mark. Still, not good enough not to launch a negative trend piece.

The illogical of suggesting that comparing one film from by an actor and the next one and claiming it is even close to scientific is obvious. It’s like saying something is wrong with the box office because Sam Worthington did $760 million in Avatar and then just $164 million in Clash of the Titans. People must be sick of effects movies… right… WRONG.

Box office inspires some of the most moronic trend stories of all. Why did the box office look like it did this December? The movies, stupid. No blockbuster leaves a lot more room for mid-range films to do even better. Why didn’t The Dilemma do as well as Paul Blart: Mall Cop? The movies, stupid. To start with, Paul Blart was well positioned as a broad family comedy. The Dilemma was an adult comedy set around issues of cheating on your spouse. Obviously, with Ron Howard and Vince Vaughn, they were hoping for a lot more money. But people could tell you from the “gay” controversy on, the film never got real traction.

WB opens a Liam Neeson action movie in February that doesn’t quite match the opening of what was, by far, the best Liam Neeson opening or gross with him as the leading man and we’re supposed to be discussing what’s wrong with the box office? It’s the movie marketing, stupid. “I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.” Great sell.

Meanwhile, Justin Bieber’s concert film is already the #3 concert film of all time and may pass Miley Cyrus, given the surprising hold Par managed this weekend.

Trend stories suck.

Out.

Film Lives

Mark Harris, the very highly esteemed author of Pictures at a Revolution wrote a piece for GQ called The Day The Movies Died.

And as much as Pictures was a movie lovers’ book, this article is a classic bit of movie hating. It’s right out of the Crabby Old Man school of movie thinking, except Mark modernizes it by getting past the Spielberg/Lucas arguments and lays the blame on Simpson/Bruckheimer.

BOOOOR-ing!!!

Am I the only one who loves the films of 1968 – 1974 and is still sick to death of the fetishistic obsession of a generation of writers and film lovers with the period? I can’t imagine so. It’s like the old New Yorker cartoon with New York being 90% of the planet and everything else an afterthought. For these guys and gals, film history seems to be The Great Train Robbery, Birth of A Nation, 1939, hat tip to the Germans, and then film really begins with Targets and ends with Jaws.

It’s like an old man who can’t get over the girl who let them get to third base in the backseat of the car in high school. It was great. It was new. And it makes everything else seem boring. But dear God, let it go already!

Scott Rudin has now put himself in the lexicon of film discussion – surprisingly for the first time – with the phrase, “The scab you are picking…”

And the scab Mark is is really picking in this piece is corporate ownership and vertical integration of the studios, not any one movie or aesthetic trend. Mel Brooks got the joke right 25 years ago in Silent Movie, calling Gulf & Western – then owner of Paramount – “Engulf & Devour.” (He was working for pre-News Corp Fox, so he was safe.)

Harris also makes the incredibly false leap that is almost inevitable (99.7% of the time) that one makes when they choose any one film as The Exemplar… in this case, more the modern exemplar of Inception than of Top Gun. Harris writes off all the dismissals of Inception as The Next Trend like a person might write off all the obviously troubling things about that person across the room at a bar because he/she makes her/him wet/hard. “So what, he has a crack problem… some people can do crack socially.” “So what if she stalked the last six guys who so much as kissed her… I think we have a real connection!”

Of course, Harris sets up anyone saying anything that suggests Inception isn’t an exception to the rule as a downer. But that’s just bullshit. And to make the point clearer, I’d love to see the piece where he argues that Alice in Wonderland is not just the exception to the Tim Burton rule and that studios should expect every Burton film to do over a billion dollars from now on… or even better, every film made from a classic novel that appeals to kids.

Worse, Harris’ embrace of ‘Inception can be a model” is not what Hollywood is afraid of… it is EXACTLY what he is otherwise accusing Hollywood of doing. And in fact, Hollywood has done EXACTLY what he claims they are not doing in EXACTLY the model he tries to smack around… comic book movies. Bryan Singer did X-Men without any action on his resume or any effects work. And it was a modest hit that grew. That’s what every studio wants. And that is why Christopher Nolan ended up doing Batman. And that’s why Nolan was allowed to make Inception, which was a bigger risk that WB would have liked, but was made financially safe by laying off most of it to Legendary… and had they known it would be such a hit, they would have loved to have financed it alone.

But again, Fox laid off a big piece of Avatar less than a year before release. (That’s another title I’d love to see Harris embrace as a singular piece by a major filmmaker that did good. But the film doesn’t have the street cred, so it gets shoved to the back of the closet by the fetishists.)

Look at the history of comic book films. Sam Raimi and Jon Favreau were off beat choices, but not on the artiste track. Burton, Singer, Ang Lee, Gavin Hood, Timur Bekmambetov, Guillermo del Toro, Simon Birch‘s Mark Steven Johnson. All reaches. Most of them, incredibly talented reaches.

I know it’s easy to look at the very top of the box office and to see kids movies and action mediocrity. But look at some of the other $100m movies last year. Black Swan, Due Date, The King’s Speech, Robin Hood, Salt, Shutter Island, True Grit, The Karate Kid. All idiosyncratic. All got funded, released by a studio, and had great box office success. You can argue each movie, but just because The Karate Kid was a spin on the old series doesn’t mean that original ideas were not included and that the film stands separately from those earlier films. And True Grit blows the hell out of the Hathaway film… with due respect to nineteen sixt f-ing nine.

My point is, movies aren’t dead. Commercial cinema has been greatly bifurcated, but there was plenty of popular shit back in 1969. The Love Bug (#2 for the year!), Hello Dolly, and Paint Your Wagon were all there in the Top 10. So were the in-cinemas-now-as-remakes True Grit and Cactus Flower.

Thing is, I don’t want to sit here defending studios and The New Ol’ Days. There is plenty that sucks. There are many reasons why studios fail to produce more quality product that challenges audiences. The dollars generated by spectaculars, for kids and 4-quadrants, is seductive. The system is already suffering its excesses of the last few years.

But good gosh a’mighty… does Mark Harris really think that risking 100s of millions of dollars on a smart film whose box office was driven by beautiful special effects even more than the idea, is a smart model for studios to chase? Should this be what they are all after? Because dollars to donuts, that film will fail 8 out of 10 times and in doing so, fewer quality films of moderate budgets will get made by those studios.

It’s so easy to mock those who dirty their hands with red & black & green ink, dismissing them from intentions to execution to outcome. But it’s cheap, lazy work. I will GLADLY read Harris’ book on Blockbusters, good and bad, that is as deeply and thoughtfully researched as Pictures is. Because the devil is in those details, not in broad, attention-grabbing headlines like “The Day The Movies Died.”

“And you know what you’ll be saying – a bunch of losers sittin’ around in a bar. ‘Oh yeah. I used to be a salesman. It’s a tough racket.’”

Scott Rudin is going and doing likewise, gents. Harvey Weinstein is going and doing likewise, gents. Chrsitine Vachon is going and doing likewise, gents. Tessa Ross is going and doing likewise, gents. Etc, etc, etc. There are plenty of people out there, striving to make great art and some are even succeeding. Some of them are even getting movies made at studios.

You can’t make twelve $200 million movies a year at ANY studio. You can make one or two. That’s why Inception isn’t a model. Because you will bankrupt your business – or come as close as you can in the corporate world these days – chasing incredibly expensive art. And you know, I would have been thrilled to see Chris Nolan’s $70 million version of Inception. I would bet that I would like it better… and the box office would be cut by 75%.

Beware Old Man Disease. If you think movies died 24 years ago, you may be catching it. It can be cured. It’s not fatal… especially in very smart, very talented, very well intended people. You just have to back away from the cheap headlines and triple the length of your articles, so you can do more than memorialize a Rudin quote, but help readers understand how a guy like Rudin survives in a climate that so embraces the kinds of films he has no interest in making. Now, THAT would be a story!

The Daily Makes A Smart Choice, But A Soft 1/2 Package On Iron Man EFX

If you can tell the story of the effects of a movie in less than four minutes, you probably aren’t offering anything much for an audience that really wants info.

Well, not probably… definitely.

This piece is beautifully produced and too shallow for an HBO First Look.

Advice to The Daily… run this on your site… and do a 10 minute piece that actually informs people who are serious about being informed. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be in the Shallow business. But the iPad market is the market that wants more, not less. It’s not mass market, looking to pay for frivolous.

What I was thrilled by the prospect of, when The Daily was announced, was a daily paper that gathered the best of the News Corp worldwide family of papers. That I would subscribe to, in an instant. But not to this thing.