Nobody Knows Anything, For Real This Time

William Goldman’s famous Hollywood aphorism “Nobody Knows Anything” has never applied with as much profound depth it does now.

Hollywood as a collective definition is composed of several large interlocking systems, all designed to create, produce and distribute entertainment content. Most are being crushed by the coronavirus lockdown. Going through the process beginning to end:


• Pre-production is still going strong. TV writer’s rooms are staffed via video conference, and scripts are still being optioned. Projects are still being greenlit, and everyone is positioning for the days that will follow COVID-19.


• Productions are dark. Thousands of film and TV show production companies are shut down, crews on furlough, sound stages empty, equipment unrented. Film and TV Production are collective endeavors, ones that require a lot of close contact (for example: during shooting, an average cinema camera rig has three sets of hands on it) so it won’t be safe for a long time. News and some forms of reality TV have the edge here: “American Idol” is experimenting with a remote contestant format, which is better than nothing.


• Live theater is utterly dark. Hamilton is playing at precisely zero venues worldwide.


• Streaming services and cable are doing incredible business right now. Industry leaders are worried about the medium-term health of this sector: If the astounding level of unemployment continues, subscriptions to streaming services and full-service cable will start to dwindle as people find them increasingly unaffordable.

• The big hit to Hollywood: Film Exhibition. Movie theaters are closed, and the prospects of movie-going returning to prior levels any time soon is increasingly uncertain. In fact the very survival of movie theaters is in doubt: AMC may be looking at bankruptcy protection (something they do once a decade or so, but still).

Movie-going has been derided constantly in the age of streaming as a dinosaur, a relic of the pre-television industry. This is what most of this post is going to concentrate on, because I do not think people really grasp how absolutely vital the movie theater ecosystem is, and how losing them will profoundly affect almost every other aspect of the entertainment industry.

Studios operate on a “tentpole” model: big, well-publicized films released to thousands of theaters worldwide and provide revenue through box office sales for other productions. To turn a profit for these films, which are generally budgeted over $100 million, huge theater capacity is required, hundreds of thousands of butts in seats. Marvel, the newest large studio, operated on the tentpole model 100%. Others operate downmarket, packaging independent films made on modest budgets.

But all this machinery has stopped.

I’m offering two prognostications for the future of the motion picture exhibition industry, both on the extremes.



FULL RECOVERY SCENARIO



A seating diagram programmed to create a safe space around each sold seat.
A mix of singles, 2s, 3s and 4s shown. Nobody is placed in the middle of a row
so they do not have to pass close to anybody else. Capacity is reduced 75% to 80%.

When the states start slowly opening up theaters again, social distancing guidelines can be put into effect to assure patrons who are going to be VERY VERY NERVOUS about going into a darkened windowless room full of strangers.

The way I came up with (which no doubt the theater chains are implementing) is centered around the fact that most theaters are based on reserved-seat ticket sales. When a block of seats is purchased, the seats around them are condemned for the screening to maintain a 6-foot defensive space. If strict contact rules are allowed— two parties per row to eliminate close passing for the aisle, which is always ass-to-face— theaters can be filled about 25% of capacity. This does not allow for full sellouts, but it is at least equal to a modest weekday crowd.


During these first few weeks or months people will likely be treated to low-budget fare. Independent films, genre comedies, horror films: films with modest budget and the possibility of getting a return even in lower-capacity venues. Studios can and will reserve their large-budget tentpole films until they can get enough screening capacity to make releasing them a worthwhile risk. (a lot of big-budget films are frozen in post-production as well: visual effects houses are not operating, and a film the scope of something like Avengers: Endgame can’t be finished off on somebody’s iMac at home.)

Once the curve is safely flattened theaters can go back to full capacity, though it remains to be seen if people will feel confident enough to pack themselves into sellouts for quite a while. Some late-summer big-budget releases— the sequel to Wonder Woman being an example— are sticking to their release dates, betting the huge audiences are just waiting for the all-clear.





Bravely sticking to a mid-August
release date. Notice it's already
been moved down from June.

COLLAPSE SCENARIO

Major chains, empty but still paying huge rents for their their multiplexes, go out of business. Theaters that survive see persistent poor box-office as people, still spooked by COVID-19, stay away.


Without a way to recoup investment for big-budget films, the studios release them streaming at a loss. Streaming and on-demand represent a revenue source, but compared to theatrical release box office it’s tiny, ancillary, in the old days a way to slightly round up the numbers.

If the financial downturn continues and people cancel subscriptions, even this outlet will become even more problematic. Without a path to profit studios will eventually stop green-lighting big-budget films entirely. For movie geeks who hate comic-book movies this sounds heavenly, but remember that big films finance small films. The Lord of the Rings trilogy financed a decade’s worth of modest-budget New Line films.



Without theaters, the theatrical distribution system will collapse. This will create chaos: non-chain theaters that managed to stay open will have nothing to screen. Drive-in theaters, the only healthy subsection of the exhibition industry, will collapse as well when they run out of films to screen.



This bleak scenario ends on your TV: Streaming, on-demand and TV will be the only outlet for scripted entertainment. The big franchises will likely be broken up into series and miniseries. Cable and premium, already increasingly turning to series to attract viewers, will start to shrink: many of the add-on premium channels show endless theatrical films, and with that source of content gone add-ons like Starz Action and Showtime Comedy will start vanishing.



The other problem is the eternal conflict: Hollywood versus The Internet. If the theater industry collapses, the Internet wins— and never forget the old hacker battle cry: “The Internet wants to be free.” People naturally EXPECT films to be cheap or even free when they’re on TV. Additionally, any film put out on streaming is available for torrent download within hours. In my job as a post-production profession I’ve always advised indie filmmakers to only put your films on streaming platforms when all other revenue streams— festivals, optical media— have been exhausted. Once it’s online, you’re done making money off it.

 But with all the eggs in the TV screen basket we’re back to the ability of people to pay for these services. If hard times persist, many of them will end up cancelling, which will drive revenue even lower.

Well, those are the extremes. I think the reality will be somewhere in-between: some chains will close, some big-budget films will be canceled, and it’s going to be tough to make a living in Hollywood for a while.

But really: nobody knows anything.

Harley Motherf***ing Quinn

[Warning: adult language and situations. No spoilers, though.]

Harley Quinn, voice supplied by "The Big Bang Theory's"
Kaley Cuoco. So less of the insane Brooklynite attitude from
previous iterations, more of a scary SoCal girl.

I don’t review TV shows that often, animation almost never, and I’m not a comic book fanboy. But I chanced upon a review on io9 that was so intriguing I had to check it out— and I was not disappointed.

“Harley Quinn” is a comedic adult animated web-based show now streaming on DC Universe, behind an $8-a-month paywall. It tells the story of Harley Quinn, the Joker’s lover and sidekick, as she dumps him and tries to invent herself as an independent person and supervillain in her own right. She does this with the help of her best friend / roommate Poison Ivy (Lake Bell, a wonderfully dry voice performance), and her crew of minor villains who I would know if I actually read comic books.

Harley and Poison Ivy, roommates. These two characters
may be the most 'shipped couple on the internet. So far
they are depicted a just close friends, but the season
is not over yet.

The dynamic between Harley Quinn and Joker has been well-documented, and they’re even going to make it big deal out of it in the Margot Robbie-starring live-action film coming out next month. Her character has been described as suffering from dependent personality disorder: in her former life she became so obsessed with Joker while treating him in Arkham Asylum she abandoned everything to become his often-abused sidekick. As a super villain origin stories go it may be the most mundane one ever: Harley was a victim of abusive, manipulating partner, a trauma untold thousands of people are suffering every day in the real world. It has given her character a special resonance with fans: even though Harley is a supervillain, her personal emotional issues have a human scale and her efforts to break free of her abusive partner make her even more relatable. The show does not shy away from this unhealthy dynamic, and in fact it casts most of her personal growth as an anodyne to Joker, her romantic obsession transformed into professional competition. Harley a fun character, given considerable depth: she is "a bad guy, but not a bad person," and her story arc probably has her headed to antihero status.

The creators of “Harley Quinn” made a strange but ultimately transformative decision: As it is not a broadcast show there are no real restrictions to language and content, so they decided to make a show for adults. It's a bit of a shock. To give a feel for the dialog:


Harley (to Joker, in a subconscious confrontation): “You think you created me, but no one did. My fucked-up parents didn’t create me. Neither did Jessica Sarner when she lied to the whole fucking camp and said I lost my virginity to a horse! A HORSE!” (applies baseball bat to Joker’s crotch: he doubles over) “Neither did those cops who questioned me for hours about what happened to Jessica Sarner! And YOU sure as hell didn’t fucking create me, Puddin’!”

And the sexual innuendo is of the single-entendre variety:


Bane (to Joker on phone): “Harley is at Penguin’s nephew’s Bar Mitzvah.”
Joker: “She crashed the stupid thing?”

Bane: “Yeah. Seems like she’s doing pretty well. Brought a tiger. Pretty cool!”
Joker: “What? Anyone can buy a tiger. You know she has HPV, right?”
Bane: “Most sexually active adults do.”
Joker: “Shut up!”

Dr. Psycho, after the second time he called someone a c**t.

Yeah, the filter is off and this makes it for fairly exhilarating viewing. There are some limits: no female nudity (yet*), but lots of pixelated male crotches. The show even has a line, and one character crosses it: Dr. Psycho, one of Wonder Woman’s nemeses, is blackballed out of the Legion of Doom for calling her, in the heat of battle, a c**t. (it’s the only profane utterance bleeped on the entire show.)

I know adult-oriented animated series are not exactly a new phenomenon: “South Park” is 20+ years old, seriously raunchy, and the movie was legendary in that regard. Every episode of the immensely popular Adult Swim series “Rick and Morty” is filled end-to-end with bleeps and blurred-out genitalia.

What makes “Harley Quinn” exceedingly unusual is the fact it is camped dead center in the DC Universe. It is not a sidecar, like the way Deadpool— the foul-mouthed, violent antihero from Marvel— is a sidecar, peripheral to the X-Men universe (several X-Men make an appearance in the sequel) and completely walled off from the big-money Avengers universe. Deadpool will never crack dick jokes with Captain America. (Professor X, maybe.)

In her show Harley regularly interacts with the big hitters, Batman and Superman and the like. The iconic superheroes they spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make movies about. And by “interact,” I mean when Harley meets The Batman in the first episode, she adamantly insists he is called that because he fucks bats.

Wonder Woman, eating her own brand of breakfast cereal,
realizing all the ground rules have changed.

This juxtaposition turns an amusing series into a surreal one. What we have is a series which has IP-critical superhero guest cameos— and they basically stand in inhibited silence while a collection of supervillains dance around them, calling them out with ripe curses and sexual innuendo. The decision by DC and Warner Bros. to execute this vision is mystifying.

The other exhilaration that comes from ”Harley Quinn” is how this adult theme remakes every character anew. All the profanity and frank sex talk draws attention to the eroticism that rushes like a deep undercurrent under all superhero stories.The supervillans and superheroes depicted in the blockbuster movies are (mostly) extensions of their juvenile, sexless origins as juvenile, sexless comic-book characters, still hewing to a long-gone 70-year-old Comics Code. Not on “Harley Quinn:” on that show, everyone depicted are People Who Fuck.

People Who Fuck are all around us: it is the normal state of the human race. The great majority of DC and Marvel movies and TV shows still depict their intellectual property as non-existent from the waist down, like Muppets. This is my biggest peeve with the MCU: missing the normalizing dimension as People Who Fuck, for all the significant kisses and long, lingering gazes they’re all just cardboard simulations of real people.

This is the liberating synthesis of “Harley Quinn,” the result of the thesis of comic book characters mixed with the antithesis of real-world People who Fuck. Even though they are set in an unbelievable, unrealistic universe of magic and superpowers, the characters depicted within seem more real than any version of them that came before.

*One of the most confounding things about Adult or R-rated entertainment of late: no problem with profanity and verbally describing sexual situations-- but nudity is increasingly rare. I think, in the case of this show, the influence of the internet is the major deciding factor. If the showrunners ever decided to show Harley Quinn running around with her tits out, every fanboy image server on earth would promptly explode. So that will never happen.

Quentin would have been PISSED

With nothing compelling on TV and a movie pass burning in my wallet, I decided to attend a roadshow screening of The Hateful Eight.

I've sort of fallen out with Tarantino lately, what with his ardent passion for turning junk movies from the past into faux-junk cinema and utter devotion to pointless nihilistic gore and over-the-top vengeance stories. It's all part of his huge movie-geek thing-- but something of substance DID come out of it. The man cares about old-school widescreen cinema: so do I. That's where our Venn diagrams intersect.

He went through an extraordinary amount of trouble to create a roadshow release of The Hateful Eight. The last film I remember seeing in a proper roadshow release was Apocalyse Now, a credits-free 70mm screening with a program provided. The Hateful Eight goes a few steps better, with a musical overture, intermission and a three-hour program length.

At least, that's what I understand is supposed to happen.

The fun part: going out with a big ol' 65mm
camera and shooting cool lens flares.

December 28th's  last screening was supposed to start at eleven at the Daly City 20. I got there early, paid the $3 up-charge and staked out a seat near the screen, pleased they had curtained it for crazy wide 2.76:1 Ultra Panavision. Two young women-- practically the only female-only party in a half-full show-- stopped on the way in and noted the smell. Sure enough-- this was the fourth screening of the day and Quentin's core audience demographic had filled the auditorium with a heavy, funky, manly fragrance.

11:00 became 11:10, then 11:20. No movie. The floor manager appeared, handed out rain checks and promised we'd be up and running in about ten minutes. At 11:40, he came back and cancelled the show. So, in the end I did NOT see The Hateful Eight-- but I got two movie passes and three roadshow programs out of the experience, so not a total loss.

The floor manager and I chatted just before he called the screening off. Apparently the theater got all the hardware for a 70mm screening just before it was supposed to start. The projector was refurbished, and at the end of the roadshow screening they will haul it away and 2K digital shows would take it's place. The problem was the projector was just plain broken: it simply would not pass the wide film, some sort of mechanical failure. This cancelled screening was not the first one they had to axe either. Roadshow screenings have gone dark all across the US and Canada in regular intervals.

Hey: Quentin Tarantino and The Weinstein Company are trying very hard to give the audience a taste of the widescreen glories of the past, and more power to them for it.  The thing is: they're giving audience a taste of not just that, but the entirety of photomechanical projection technology.

For each of The Hateful Eight roadshow venues they had to ship in a 70mm projector, set it up and align it, and station a projectionist exclusively to handle the thing. (I'm sure they had to bring in flatbed film platters in some places as well, but not Daly City: they still had one Christie system left). These projectors are likely vintage Century or Todd-AO machines they bought used and had mechanically refurbished. But without the infrastructure and expertise to maintain these machines, they break. They didn't break as much in the past because they were so common.

DP70 35/70mm projector.

Back in my movie theater management days a surprising number of theaters I managed had 70mm capability. In the 80s United Artists had the presence of mind to buy up and install a lot of DP-70 Todd-AO projectors made by Phillips/Norelco in the Netherlands in 1955 or so. The reasons for buying up these machines was twofold: they were very solidly made and reliable for regular 35mm screenings, and even the dopiest non-union assistant manager could switch them over to 70mm. Even with dopey non-union assistant managers running the shows, there were technicians available for overhaul and spare parts were in abundance in every projection booth (sometimes even spare projectors). This all made the average screening in the film era a reliable thing.

Nonetheless, there were a lot of moving parts and flying film and things went off the rails all the time. I am personally responsible for destroying a $3000 reel of 70mm: I started a screening of Bonfire of the Vanities in 70mm blow-up (why? WHY?) forgetting to engage the feed platter motor. Reel One wrapped around the hub and was torn to shreds. Fortunately we could switch to 35mm until a replacement reel arrived (and Larry Levin finished yelling at me).

Digital projection has as we all know, transformed the moviegoing experience. For the audience the changes have been subtle: the picture is more steady, screenings more reliable, and unfortunately trailers nearly endless. the films still "break," though, but they do it digitally: It was reported that an opening night screening of Star Wars: The Force Awakens glitched a few minutes in and skipped to the very end of the film. Digital Cinema's most profound change happened in the booth: no moving parts. Films are loaded via hard drive. The roar of the average film projector (which was terrifyingly loud when running 70mm) has been replaced by the hum of cooling fans.

Like I said, big praise for Tarantino for bringing back Ultra Panavision, but it's a kind of stunt, like wiring theater seats to shock people. My cancelled show was part of this whole retro-technical stunt rather than the continuum of modern Digital Cinema technology, and as such none of the backups were available. There was no 35mm print backup or a spare digital projector. He's giving people a taste of the old film days, but it's so late after the passing of this technology it's definitely a double-edged sword. Part of this is sheer hubris: it's easy and cool on the front end to go out and shoot a film with 65mm Panavision cameras and hand-restored 1.25X anamorphic lenses. On the back end it's not so easy: conforming 100 theaters to a nearly dead film format is a tall order indeed, a stunt not as easily pulled off.

So I'm gonna try again soon to see another roadshow screening, but this time I'm going to a theater that isn't in the sticks (Daly City: I'll bet they installed the less reliable refurbished projectors in the outliers). Sheer law of averages means next time the projector will light up.

Behind the Curtain

While I'm waiting for the Weekend Box Office Report to upload, here's a peek behind the scenes.

You may have intuited that practically every episode of the Report is done solely by me, Daniel K.  I put the camera on a tripod and hit the start button, do the report, and then just get up and turn the damn thing off. Also over the summer, you may have noticed that I had focus problems often that I just couldn't (or usually just didn't bother to) correct. Also, I was using the mic on my Nikon D3200 prosumer SLR, and everybody knows those things are nowhere man.

The last month or so, I've stepped up my game in two ways. Number one, I started using my iPhone as a mic. You put it in your shirt pocket and it's pretty good sound, with little ambient background noise. The other one is the focus problem. I'd set the focus before by sitting in the chair and pointing the camera back at the tripod head. Clever but not effective, as you saw. What ruined it, apparently, was that I have weak lights and it resulted in a very, very shallow focal plane.

And that's why THIS became necessary.

It turns out that if you take the box my iMac came in, turn it on its side, and balance an Amazon shipping box on top of it, it's about the height of my head sitting in a chair. The head shot is so the Autofocus has a face to recognize. And no, that's a test headshot, I've never tried to get work with it. I mean, ugh.

So now I focus on this bizarre device, start rolling, push it out of the way and sit down in the chair, and it looks good enough for YouTube anyway. Next up, this week's report! 

Ex Machina: Tech Bro Frankenstein

In the 1985 John Hughes comedy Weird Science two high-school-age geeks combine their technological talents to the only end they find logical: to create a perfect woman. Being 1985 and all, the preferred medium of creation is a personal computer and scanner. The result was Lisa, a magical sexy Mary Poppins who, though she may not have made all of her creator's dreams come true, leaves them far more popular in high school.

Films reflect the times they are created in, and the mid-80s there was a streak of optimism in science fiction.* Maybe it was that fact tech was still on the edge of larger society. We had cool home computers, IBM PC-ATs, Apple Macintoshes and and the occasional Amiga 1000, but no real internet to speak of. We were in full control. Fast-forward exactly 30 years…

"So, what would you little maniacs like to do first?"
It's so charming and innocent in retrospect that
a woman who just materialized out of a computer
would have to even ask that question.

Ex Machina, currently out in limited release and will be available for download June 1st, is the Millennial generation's answer to Weird Science. Caleb (Domhall Gleeson, who played the protag in Frank), a gifted coder in a very large tech firm, wins a contest to spend a week with the firm's CEO, Nathan (Oscar Isaac, Llewyn Davis himself) in his private underground lab in an isolated corner of what seems to be Iceland. Caleb finds out he is supposed to deliver the "Turing Test" for indisputable cybernetic self-awareness to Ava (Alicia Vikander), an android of Nathan's creation. Ava is a stunningly good combination of seamless VFX and perfectly executed, full-body acting by Ms. Vikander, by far the best part of the film. Caleb quickly falls for Ava, who is confined to a glassed-in room. Tension soon develops when, during a power cut when Nathan's cameras are knocked out, Ava says that Nathan cannot be trusted. A strange power struggle develops between the secretive Nathan, the inquisitive (and smitten) Caleb, and Ava, who may well be manipulating him to prevent her erasure and gain her freedom.

All in all, it is a fascinating movie which asks some rather important questions about our current relationship with artificial intelligence, a popular cinematic subject these days (Autómata, The Machine, Chappie, etc.). However, in the late second act the limits of writer-director Alex Garland's vision become apparent. You never quite get ahead the central plot of the film, but you realize there is only one outcome for this story and that is the one that happens. Afterwards you are left with a large series of "what ifs" and "what the hells" similar to the questions audiences had after screening Prometheus: Not nearly as much or as bad (Prometheus squandered a lot of the goodwill of the fans of the Alien film series) but a realization that this film could have been much more if a few more rewrites could have been knocked out. Notes:

We just got our second-round VC funding, bro!

• The world of Ex Machina is both abstract and almost depressingly familiar. From my vantage point here in the Bay Area this stylized science-fiction world looked like something I see every day here. The interiors of Nathan's lab-- clean concrete walls, glass doors, hidden LED lighting-- looks like the inside of every tech start-up I have ever seen (with less stuffed animals and ironic wall art, maybe). Nathan and Caleb are absolutely spot-on Silicon Valley techies: overachieving expert coders with limited social skills. They wear skinny jeans, sweats and hoodies in neutral tones, drink expensive-looking beer and vodka, and eat sushi. They are engaged in the ultimate code geek endeavor: creating the perfect girlfriend.

• Sexy female robots have been around since at least the 1920s (Maria from Metropolis). Ava is clearly a part of this continuum, which explores the fetishization of technology. This is the fist film I can remember where a robot's sexuality is held up as a question: Caleb asks Nathan why he would muddy the waters of a Turing Test by introducing something as distracting as giving the subject AI a female body. Nathan's answer was, amazingly, ten minutes of hanging a lantern on this subject: all lifeforms come gender-specific, sex makes life fun, it makes the Turing Test more interesting, and shut up that's why.

The answer to the encroachment of AI and the
inevitability of both the Singularity and the
eventual extinction of the human race: Drink up, bro!

It was odd to waste so much time on the Fembot question because it has been answered long ago: YES, quite a few men find the idea of female robots sexy. Ask anyone from Japan. Hell, Svedka Vodka is betting their whole ad campaign on it. When you get right down to it,  Ex Machina could be a long mediation on the problems that would arise if the Svedka robot babe was actually created. The tech bro main characters drink enough to qualify as their key demographic.

• Seen at the Sundance Kabuki in San Francisco, up in the balcony of Theater 1. This is their biggest screen and back when the Kabuki was an AMC theater I saw some amazing stuff there: Jurassic Park, Fargo and the industry screening of Starship Troopers. The balcony is amazing now: there are tables between seat pairs and you can order booze from the 3rd floor bar. I spent half the screening a little ticked off that I wasn't drinking an IPA with my popcorn.

So ultimately I'd recommend Ex Machina-- but you may be happier about it if you wait for the download.

* Doing the research for this piece I have to say the biggest surprise was what a banner year 1985 was for science fiction films. Aside from Weird Science, Back to the Future, Brazil, Cocoon, Enemy Mine, Re-Animator, Legend, Lifeforce and Return of the Living Dead all came out that year. The only franchise installments of note were Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, both rather good films.

HBO: Rich Weird Men Behaving Badly

Michael Douglas IS Liberace. It was the first time
Douglas ever portrayed a non-fictional character
in a movie-- and he nailed it.

I need to share an insight. Mind you, I'm not the first person to have this insight: it builds on an article by Brian Lowery in Variety.

There is something very unusual going in at HBO. The mysterious Powers That Be seem to have a fixation-- one that pokes right through the films and shows they approve, fund and broadcast like broken glass in a paper bag. I'm going to paint the idée fixe these executives seem to be obsessed with a sweeping, and ridiculously simple, comparison of two of their most recent cable films:

• Behind the Candelabra: A Steven Soderbergh HBO film about a wealthy, powerful white man (Liberace) who made life sheer hell for everyone around him.

• Phil Spector: A David Mamet HBO film about a wealthy, powerful white man (Phil Spector) who makes life sheer hell for everyone around him.

Lowry's article expands on this weird parallelism of these films-- wealthy decadent jaded men who channel their desires onto the lesser people in their orbit and force them, again through their power, to suffer for them as well. (BTW: Candelabra was an amazing movie; Phil Spector is talky and dull.) He concludes that HBO execs actually understand and sympathize with the moral universe these men inhabit. Phil Spector may or may not have shot Lana Clarkson; Liberace may or may not have screwed over Scott Thorson in the palimony settlement. It's not much of a stretch to believe cable execs live in the same world as the troubled men portrayed in these movies, a sympathy that may have tweaked the characterizations a bit.

Enoch "Nucky" Thompson
(Steve Buscemi). What he lacks in
brawn he makes up for in menace.

This is a decent read on these films-- but then there's THIS: What I believe is this theme's long, long tail:

• "Game of Thrones:" An HBO series about wealthy, powerful white men (Joffrey Baratheon, Jaime Lannister, Tywin Lannister, etc.) who make life sheer hell for everyone around them.

• "True Blood:" An HBO series about wealthy, powerful white men (Bill Compton, Eric Northman, various vampire royalty) who make life sheer hell for everyone around them.

• "Boardwalk Empire:" An HBO series about a wealthy, powerful white man (Nucky Thompson) who makes life sheer hell for everyone around him.

• "Deadwood:" An HBO series about a wealthy, powerful white man (Al Swearengen) who makes life sheer hell for everyone around him.

• "Curb Your Enthusiasm:" An HBO series about a wealthy, (sort of) powerful white man (Larry David) who makes life sheer hell for everyone around him.

• Game Change: An HBO film about a wealthy, powerful white man (John McCain) who makes life sheer hell for everyone around him--by selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate. I'm not being partisan here: Much of the film focuses on the very real suffering of the staffers charged with getting Palin ready to campaign.

• The Girl: An HBO movie about a wealthy, powerful white man (Alfred Hitchcock) who makes life sheer hell for Tippi Hedren.

All of these shows are the puzzling evidence that points to a simpler explanation of HBO's thing about powerful white guys screwing over their financial and social inferiors. I believe it all started here:

Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) in his natural
environment: checkered tablecloth, Pellegrini water.

• "The Sopranos:" An HBO series about a wealthy, powerful white man (Anthony Soprano Jr.) who makes life sheer hell for everyone around him.

It is difficult even now to fully illustrate what a profound effect David Chase's epic mob series had on American broadcasting. It redefined HBO from a movie channel to a prestigious destination, appointment television in the days before DVRs and binge-watching. It launched the style of hyper-serial series storytelling that is now the norm on cable and broadcast. "The Sopranos" was also soaked in gore-- bloodletting became an expected dramatic feature, spreading from premium to basic cable and now even to broadcast ("Hannibal" is as bloody a show as I've ever seen, and it's on NBC). It was The Show That Changed Everything.

Most importantly: "The Sopranos" dispensed entirely with a central character viewers could comfortably identify with. Tony Soprano was a cold-blooded mob boss, a man who was defined by his shrink Dr. Melfi as a sociopath. He killed without remorse. He was also affable and he loved those in his circle-- but his actions invariable led to the suffering of those in that circle. It was an absolutely fascinating push-pull with the audience, something David Chase admitted he struggled with: He wanted the audience to love Tony, so he made him charming-- but he made sure this charm was countered by frequent glimpses into his repugnant, immoral soul. Tony Soprano was lovable, chummy, loyal, repellent, unknowable and sick. This push and pull made for irresistible television.

Found this online. Makes my case perfectly.

In short: which executive would NOT want to emulate such success? So as a result we still see David Chase's story and character dynamics all over the airwaves. Tony Soprano's basic character traits can be found in all of the above-outlined shows-- in Dexter Morgan and Walter White and Don Draper as well. Weathy, famous television executives may very well feel sympatico with the wealthy and famous, but their primary concern is attracting eyeballs-- and thus keeping the jobs that made them that way.

Of course HBO does offer a counterbalance to this hegemony of Caucasian Male One Percenters. Most of their miniseries-- from Band of Brothers to John Adams to Mildred Pierce-- do not share these values at all. No, there's not much of a counterbalance to all that privilege, and it may or may not be the right or even fair sort of answer to this trend. It can be embodied thus:

• "Girls:" An HBO series about penniless, struggling white women who make life sheer hell mostly for themselves.

The Hobbit: The Law of Diminishing Dwarves

My wife has really, really been looking forward to seeing The Hobbit for weeks, ever since she re-read the novel. And I was very curious about seeing what the new HFR 3D (48 frames per second) process looks like. So tonight we went to go check it out at the Cinemark San Mateo-- where we found out after buying tickets that they don't have HFR. Refund in pocket, we drove to Redwood City, where they did.

Basically, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey delivers it's promise: It's a dose of Middle Earth, just as detailed, grand and handsome-looking as any part of the LOTR trilogy. In fact, a lot of the characters from the trilogy show up-- Galathriel, Saruman The White, Frodo Baggins-- even though they aren't in the original book.

There are two basic area to look at with The Hobbit, which despite some harsh reviews had a champion opening weekend ($89 Million)-- the production and the new HFR 3D process:

The Production: I remember when New Line announced they were going to make the Hobbit into a prequel: It was quite exciting news, and a lot of fans were enthused about it. When they announced, not long after the initial news, that it was going to be a two-part epic, people generally shrugged. But when, during pre-production, they said The Hobbit was going to be a trilogy, there was some alarm. The covers of the book it's based on are closer together than any of the other Middle Earth books: that's a small amount of jam to spread on a lot of bread.

Let's look at the arithmetic of screenplay adaptation at work here. The Lord of the Rings trilogy of books totals 1,550 pages. The total running time of all three movies is 558 minutes. The general tally of a standard formatted screenplay is roughly a page a minute, so we can assume the three scripts together total less than 600 pages. This leaves the screenwriters with the standard job of reducing, cutting out characters and plotlines. But The Hobbit is 310 pages long. If they divide it evenly, that's about 103 pages of novel to turn into each movie-- which roughly lines up with where The Unexpected Journey, which is 169 minutes long, ended. There is over an hour of screen time to pad, and it shows.

Peter Jackson has added elements from Tolkien's unpublished memoirs, such as The Quest for Erebor, but you can feel the stretch as the film unwinds. Bilbo Baggins does not leave his hobbit-hole until nearly an hour of screen time has passed. Radagast the Brown Wizard shows up for an extended and fairly pointless sequence. Those LOTR characters ain't just cameos: they have a extended conclave mid-movie as well.

The most interesting, and glaring, change is the addition of an orc villain. Azog, a very minor character in the book, was the Orc king who killed Thror, the father of Thorin Oakenshield, the leader of the dwarf company headed to Erebor. In the movie he's now the nemesis of Thorin. He's also a very tall orc with blue skin, and bears an uncanny-- and even suspicious-- resemblance to one of the huge aliens from James Cameron's Avatar.

Thorin Oakenshield. Dwarf or Klingon? You decide.

There is also another issue, something inherent in the original story, which leaves The Hobbit at a disadvantage compared to the precedent films: the lack of charismatic eye-candy. The LOTR trilogy had, up-front and rock-star handsome, Humans and Elves: Aragorn, Legolas, Eomer, Boromir and even his brother Faramir. I remember the spontaneous applause that broke out during the closing credits at the opening-weekend screening of The Return of the King: throaty, manly yells for Frodo and Sam, schoolgirl screams for Aragorn and Legolas. With The Hobbit the heartthrob is (apparently) Thorin, a hair-covered dwarf set against a mob of a dozen-odd undifferentiated, hair-covered Dwarves. He just doesn't have that ineffable "it."

High Frame Rate 3D: I've read a few reviews for The Hobbit and they all make comment on this new process, where the film was shot at double the frame rate, 48 frames per second, and projected at the same speed. I also remember reading about the hooting and brickbats at the last ComicCon when they screened a sequence for fans in HFR 3D. The general consensus is this: it makes the film look like it was shot on video. It gives the film a cheap-looking patina, like "The Teletubbies" or a soap opera.

You know what? It's not that bad. Sure, there are some scenes that look sort of cheesy, especially handheld ones: they look like they were shot on the set with a video camera. And some of the props and costumes aren't quite as convincing as they might look in 24 frame. But generally it looks very good, and the high frame rate is only mildly distracting. The cinematography is lush and the effects blend seamlessly: this is what you notice first.

Still, I'd venture a suggestion: If anyone was going to make a 48 frame per second feature in the future, I'd use it on a real-life feature, like a comedy or a rom-com, something that does not have a lot of effects or makeup or weird costumes. The impact of a film like The Godfather or Dodgeball or Mulholland Drive would have been greatly enhanced with such an startlingly vivid format.

On the other hand, the high frame rate effect is offset, unfortunately, by the 3D. There was nothing wrong with it as executed in the production: it just suffers from having to put those glasses on and the dark, color-muted, washed-out look all 3-D films have.

Still, it's worth seeing. Remember the awful disappointment you felt when you saw Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace? The Hobbit is nowhere near that bad-- It's just a big-screen example of the Law of Diminishing Returns.

Jar-Jar Binks gets an appropriate home

In news that may or may not have used the cover of Hurricane Sandy to keep it quiet, The Walt Disney Company has acquired Lucasfilm Limited for just over $4 billion.

We're on the verge of a branding mash-up the likes of which has never been seen by media consuming public. Mickey and Goofy, Simba and Aladdin, Fozzie and Kermit, WALL-E and Mr. Incredible, Thor and Iron Man and The Hulk are now allowed (and will likely be required to) cavort with Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Mon Mothma and Count Dooku. The mind reels.

And the topper: A new Star Wars film is in the works. Now that George Lucas has taken his payoff and retired to his private valley, long-time Lucasfilm producer Kathleen Kennedy is starting up a new series, with Star Wars: Episode VII slated to release in 2015.

I can already see the direction Disney is going to take with their new intellectual property: Big, fast and fully integrated. New themes for the theme parks. New kiddie shows for the Disney Channel (Star Wars Babies? has that been done before?). They'll make their $4 billion back in no time.

For old-school fans like me, the ones who saw Star Wars back in 1977 and witnessed the franchise's sad decline, this is either great news-- or the big, final step into oblivion. It's obvious that the rock in the road in terms of the last three Star Wars films has been George Lucas himself-- his feeble kiddie-pandering, his dull political pontificating, and his peculiar and depressing take on morality. His decisions were impediments that prevented the second three films from reaching the heights of the first three.

With Lucas himself out of the way (after having written the treatments to Episodes VII, VIII and IX, which is his right, of course), and if Disney and Kennedy draft writers and directors with vision, the franchise may again achieve excellence.

If they fail to sieze this opportunity, get ready for endless versions of "The Star Wars Holiday Special," from 2015 to the end of time.

Kickstarting Indies To The Curb

This a few days old, but my old writing partner turned a post from Deadline Hollywood, Nikki Finke's website, which was quite an eye-opener. It concerns Kickstarter, a very cool website where people can crowdsource funding for various creative projects.

Charlie Kaufman and his producing partners ― former Community showrunner Dan Harmon and Dino Stamatopoulos ― do not want to deal with Hollywood, and now at least for one project they don’t have to. A stop-motion animation adaptation of the Kaufman-written play Anomalisa raised $406,237 for the film’s production in 60 days via the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. “We want to make Anomalisa without the interference of the typical big-studio process,” according to a pitch video that Harmon and Stamatopoulos’ Starburns Industries put up on the project page. The film raised more than double the money the producers were asking from 5,770 Kickstarter backers.

These guys broke the Kickstarter record for film funding. Surprised? Not me. Is this good news? Not really. I was wondering how long something as wonderful as Kickstarter could last.

Kickstarter was specifically designed to give filmmakers outside the industry access to funding. Don't get me wrong: Kaufman and Harmon and Starburns have every right to use Kickstarter. But they shouldn't. Anyone with CAA-level representation and the ability to take meetings at a studio shouldn't. Basically, anyone with recognizable star power shouldn't.

Why not? Because they have an unfair advantage over the vast majority of other projects seeking funding. If I was some starry-eyed fellow with $1000 to give away on a film project, and I had to choose between giving it to an indie project written by John August with Johnny Depp penciled in for a cameo versus a digital feature written by Elmo Nobodyski from Rustbeltville featuring Jane Nobody, guess who gets my money? Which contribution gives me bragging rights, Hollywood cache and a T-Shirt with a star on it? Pretty obvious choice.

Celebrity--  admiration for sports heroes, movie stars, political heavyweights, what have you-- exists because it's a basic component of human social behavior, a deep part of our collective brain wiring. Throughout history and undeniably before it, people have always created hierarchies-- even when they aren't needed. We seek out great men or great women to personify our values and channel our aspirations.

This is why it is risky to invest millions of dollars in a movie with no recognizable stars. (And yeah, Pixar does this all the time, but they're a solid brand, which is a form of non-individual celebrity.) And this is why, even if an indie film on Kickstarter may be a superior idea to one offered by a Hollywood insider, it'll never outdraw it in terms of funding.

Kickstarter is a zero-sum game. There are only so many investors with so much money they're willing to donate. If the trend continues, and any Industry pro with the itch goes to Kickstarter to raise money for pet projects rather than ask a studio or (God forbid) use their own money, the long shadow their celebrity casts will make all the truly independent film projects offered seem that much dimmer.

The thing that makes Kickstarter wonderful is it's basic attitude of altruism. Donations are made to creative efforts of all kinds where the donor expects nothing in return but the satisfaction of giving a leg up to a project they feel is worthy. The presence of celebrity-driven projects debases this altruism: Even if donors get no return on financial investment, they get something back: the intangible return of celebrity association, a very real claim that some of the fame they contributed to rubbed off on them. This weakens Kickstarter's mission of creative altruism-- a plain example of Gresham's Law, bad money driving out good.

This couldn't happen, right? A bunch of Hollywood operators couldn't monopolize something as inherently democratic as Kickstarter, right? If I recall, The Sundance Film Festival was supposed to be a showcase for independent filmmakers. But the Industry discovered it-- and now Park City is not much more than an outlier of the TMZ, so insular that an alternative festival (Slamdance) had to be created to give indie filmmakers any sort of chance. So yeah, it can definitely happen again.

Walden: now on X-Box and PS3

A TPN:BOW Repost, showing that I was getting my curmudgeon on 4 whole years ago! --s

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

–Henry David Thoreau, from his book Walden, 1854

Quite honestly, I believed the line “quiet desperation” came from this source below. I still think most average English-speaking people of a certain age do as well:

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time

Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines

Hanging on in quiet desperation in the English way

The time is gone, the song is over

Thought I’d something more to say

–Roger Waters, from “Time,” by Pink Floyd, 1973

Either way, the aphorism doesn’t apply anymore. Here’s why:

[Quite a while ago, apparently], as my bandmates and I tried like hell to load out of a rehearsal space to make room for the next booked band, the conversation took a philosophical turn. Not the best way to turn a conversation when you’re in a hurry, but that’s the way things go.

We were all being somewhat affected by the changes and vicissitudes of the middle years. We were tallying up various minor maladies we were suffering, recounting the ill fortunes that have befallen the friends and family of all the members of late.

Glen, the quiet, reserved rhythm guitarist, asked, perhaps not all that rhetorically, if this is what the future held for all of us—a series of increasingly unhappy tidings, the eventual closing of life’s doors of opportunity until only one remains.

David, the talented lead singer, brought up the “Quiet Desperation” quote. We all agreed.

Then I thought about it for a bit. We had all just finished damaging our hearing for three solid hours with rock.

What do people in America do to inject some distraction and excitement into their empty lives? They do something cacophanous. This is becoming the Age of Noisy.

• Movies are LOUDER than ever. Almost all multiplexes are equipped with three-thousand-watt, DTS-SDDS-Dolby Digital compatible auditoriums. The average IMAX theater is equipped with 10,000 watts of audio power.

• TV is LOUDER than ever. The HDTV broadcast standard includes 5.1 surround sound.

• Video Games are LOUDER than ever. The gentle “beep-boop” of Colecovision has long yielded to game fare like HALO in its fully 5.1 surround sound capable, subwoofer-shredding glory.

• The Internet is LOUDER than ever. Try to enjoy surfing the web sans computer speakers sometime. [actually, the advent of phone apps may have quieted things down in this area a little-- but not much.]

• The friggin’ WORLD is louder than ever. In my neighborhood, there is a 1:1 correlation between people who rent their dwellings and people who own LOUD gas-powered things. (Noticed I said “people who rent:” People in my area who OWN their dwellings are either too busy working to pay mortgages or too old to be into new-fangled whiz-bangs.) Big shiny motorcycles, just like "American Chopper:" They run them up and down the streets most weekends, not really having anywhere useful to go. They also own those little gas-powered razor scooters, hot-rodded cars, gas-powered RC cars, etc. etc. The outstanding neighborhood annoyance is a guy with a LOUD Harley-compatible bike equipped with a fairing—into which he installed a stereo. So the entire block gets to hear him rev his bike, turn up his now drowned-out stereo, rev his bike again, re-adjust his stereo, and so on and so on. It’s the most foolish thing on two wheels I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been to the circus.

How are we, the citizens of consumer-culture Western society, personally reacting when faced with a quiet moment? Do we take stock, accept the silence as an introspective moment of Eternity visited to our hectic existences? Or do we drown that mother out?

Admittedly, some people do accept and even seek out quiet and solitude, and use this stillness to enrich their soul and accept their place in the Universe. But not enough, not nearly enough– and our own technology has made it far too easy to turn to entertainment to fill the void. Could Walden have been written if Thoreau had DirectTV?

The mass of men lead lives of noisy desperation.

–Skot C.

Talking Back to The Screen: the Movie

People can sometimes foster an intense bond with their favorite films, which is what fandom is all about. The question is: What can be done about this intense bond, aside from seeing the film over and over and buying all the action figures and video releases?

The traditional answer was to join a fan club and seek out people who share your interests. Studios love fan clubs-- it's the right kind of adoration, and best of all it supports the ancillary marketing industry.

Still, if you wanted to go further, and you were handy with a camera, you could make a little tribute film (God knows I've made my share). Some of my favorite stories in this area are those of fandom gone seriously overboard: in particular, that kid who built the Enterprise bridge set in his mother's basement-- becoming the perfect 10.0 on the “Trek-O-Meter.”

Perhaps the ultimate fan tribute of all time was pulled off by three kids from Mississippi who took seven years to create their own shot-for-shot adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Apparently, Steven Spielberg was impressed. Why not? These teeners did it the old-fashioned way: using the movie as a script and painstakingly recreating all the scenes by hand. Gotta admire their gumption-- and since what they made will never cut into the Indiana Jones revenue stream, why not embrace it?

The trend in fandom (or at least film geekdom) we're seeing now is repurposed Hollywood films. It's much, much easier to rip a DVD, re-edit scenes from it, and post the results on YouTube than it is to make Captain Kirk's chair out of plywood or fashion a huge rolling booby-trap boulder out of papier-mache.

 In the early days of this tendency, the results were clever and justifiably famous: The recut of The Shining as “Shine,” a trailer for a romantic comedy, showing not only the deftness of the creator's editing skills but the hollowness of RomCom cliches.

Later that same year (2006) somebody re-edited Mary Poppins as a horror film-- not as clever as the “Shine” trailer, but still effective.

Woefully, it has become too far easy to cut up feature films. It's the “mumble core” effect: more and cheaper ways to make films has not resulted in a flowering of new auteurs, but rather a wave of mediocrity and unreleasable movies. If you want an idea of the current state of things, go to YouTube and type “Hitler on” in the search box. (Of course, in a perfect reversal of this trend, some wiseacre took this overused scene from Downfall (Der Untergang, 2004) and, in Raiders Adaptation fashion, reshot it word-for-word.

What are these innumerable Hitler rants with funny subtitles? Not much more than Talking Over the Movie. It's more or less the same as what those “movie talkers” do, keeping up an imaginary two-way dialog with the big screen. Or what you do, in the privacy of your own home, adding witty commentary to “American Idol.” it is the quickest, least clever, and most immediate reaction one can have to a film or TV show.

But just when I was completely exasperated with the entire deal, my sister turned me onto a new example of a repurposed movie, and a clever and hilarious one at that: “Guy On a Buffalo.” Like “Shine," this is an example of how someone with a good sense of humor and talent-- in this case, Austin-based musical talent-- can take a nearly forgotten drive-in B picture from 1978 and make it into something amazing-- Talking Over the Movie done well.

And how does Hollywood feel about all this? They hate it, of course. It's not as bad as bit-torrenting whole movies or TV series, but it is a basic intellectual property violation. Still, nobody has ever been prosecuted for re-purposing films on YouTube-- so long as there is no profit in it.

In fact, they may be getting into the act themselves, throwing in the towel and joining in. One of the pre-release trailers for Man On a Ledge (2012) features one of it's stars, Elizabeth Banks, talking over a trailer for the film. It seems a bit like DVD commentary, but it's so funny-- and so totally at odds with the action-drama genre of the film she's talking over-- that it's quite clear the studio has given up trying to be serious. If someone is gonna talk over our film, the producers must have reasoned, let it at least be someone with talent, and on our payroll.

The End of Film

Sometime in 2009, the last professional 35mm motion picture camera was assembled.

The three major camera companies-- Panavision, Aaton and ARRI-- have since been devoted to designing and improving their digital cameras. The 35mm cameras that made them famous are still out there, and they still service them, but to quote Deborah Kaufman on Creative Cow, "someone, somewhere in the world, is now holding the last film camera ever to roll off the line."

Meanwhile, the number of movie theaters screens set up for digital projection surpassed fifty percent of all screens, and they're installing over seven hundred new projectors every month. This is a net gain, I think: the days of scratched prints and out-of-frame shows may be history. But with the exception of IMAX (a 65mm process that grows in popularity every year) film print delivery will eventually become rare, then a sort of historical curiosity. I can see a time not far off when you will have to visit a subsidized rep and revival theatre (a museum screening room, LA's Cinematheque, or the Packard-supported Guild in Palo Alto, for example) to see what a projected 35mm print looks like.

It should surprise nobody that film has been virtually dead in television production for years, but what's weird is how the tipping point came: during the near-shutdown of Hollywood due to the SAG labor dust-up in 2008. TV's move to AFTRA contract players, who had a deal with TV producers so long as the film were made digitally, made film use in TV production vanish overnight.

As far as movies go, we're living in strange times. Sure, the major films shot digitally look a lot like their 35mm predecessors. But the shallow focus and squeezed bokeh of Panavision, the red circles of film halation on point-source lights, the organic grain density of the photochemical process: these are 20th century artifacts, remnants of the analog world.

We're well into the 21st century now, and the precise, pure color of digital cinema is steadily becoming the norm. For filmmakers, this may well be a good thing: 35mm film stock is, and always has been, phenomenally expensive stuff. For the cost of 20 reels of color negative and processing for same, you can go out and buy a RED ONE 4K Digital Cinema camera and capture an unlimited amount of footage at the same resolution.

For film enthusiasts, this progress is sort of a mixed bag. In the days of film, the cost of stock set the lower bar for film production. Film production needed high-level financing, and financing requires return on investment, which requires things like actors, competent lighting, coherent scripts and decent post-production standards. A few years ago the opening up of film markets to zero-budget films spawned the "mumble-core" movement and The Room (D. Tommy Wiseau, 2003). There are thousands of kids out there, energized with all sorts of personal cinematic epiphanies, running their hands over their DSLRs, ready to roll-- and the image resolution at their command rivals any professional camera. Watch out.

On the other hand, It's important to remember that Hollywood is a system: It's stock in trade is slickly made, big-budget creations populated with familiar faces, available to be seen in a darkened auditorium or on a major network near you. This system was created because of the needs of film: To tell a story using the low-sensitivity nitrate stocks of the time, you needed a studio to shine a lot of lights on actors, sets on stages where scenes could be repeated reliably, and access to development labs for workprints. The film studios remain, though the film itself is gone.

Then again: if we can have cars without gas engines and computers without keyboards, we can have film studios without film.

Hollywood's Immune System

In order to see Contagion comfortably, I chose a late, late showtime: 10:55, the last showtime at the Tanforan 20. From what I'd read about the effectiveness of Steven Soderbergh's new thriller, I wanted at least a few rows of seats between me and the next moviegoer. There were only 8 or so in the auditorium, and nobody was coughing. (but there was, as there always seems to be in late-night movie screenings these days, a couple dragging their toddler-aged kid along.)

Contagion is a very good, very scary film. Soderbergh calls it a horror film, evading the "thriller" tag, and he has a good point. Good horror plays on primal fears-- remember that grotty dude hacking away without covering his mouth at Starbucks last week? Sure you do. That, coupled with the always-unsettling glimpse of the thin veneer of society peeling away at the epidemic's later stages, creates feelings of rising unease as the film progresses. And as it uses Soderburgh's signature multiple-storyline style, you're never quite sure which of the Oscar-caliber ensemble is going to bite the dust next.

Later in the film there are plenty of scenes of National Guard troops in digital camouflage and Hum-Vees keeping roadblocks. This aspect calls back to the discussion about Torchwood: Miracle Day, which covers remarkably similar ground concerning profound social disruption. But here's the thing: the high-concept sci-fi idea of everyone on earth inexplicably granted life everlasting is sort of fun to think about, but the hard-science idea of an unstoppable virus wiping out millions is not only depressing and scary to ponder, less than 100 years ago something very similar actually happened.

Aside from the micron-sized and therefore un-telegenic virus, there's a human villain in this piece: Alan Krumweide (Jude Law), a crummy, weedy fellow who sows fear and misinformation and false hope in alternative medicine cures through his blog. In a film that focuses on the selfless efforts of government scientist to save lives (a la Outbreak and The Andromeda Strain) he represents the conspiracy nuts, the anti-vaccine moms-- the whole, weird anti-science know-nothing movement that seems to depressingly be steadily gaining traction in larger society.

But I think there's something more subtle going on here. This is at least the second major feature film which paints a harsh picture of the internet in general and social networking specifically. Recall the tone of The Social Network, a film that exposes Facebook's roots as a crude sexist college diversion and it's founders as litigious snobs or prickly sociopaths. And in Contagion, it's made clear that everything would be going so much better for humanity in general if it were not for some nutty blogger from San Francisco (surprise: Hollywood yet again portrays the Bay Area as a scenic loony bin).

And why shouldn't establishment Hollywood view the Internet in the worst possible light? As far as the studios are concerned, it's a disease.

I think such negative depictions of internet culture in major movies are a sign of Hollywood's immune system going into overdrive. Even now, there is little the internet and social networking can do to help studios sell tickets: viral hits like Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project are so rare they've become cautionary tales (as in: never mention either of them when you're pitching a script). In realpolitik, internet film marketing is just another money-suck for which studios are obliged to staff buildings full of web designers and marketers to create feckless web presences for their movies.

The internet has come to represent nothing less than a full attack on Hollywood, a galloping infection that attacks both control of product and the bottom line. The studio buys a script, and they have to make sure it doesn't get uploaded somewhere. Greenlight, and there are even more potential leaks. Outright piracy begins generally at the first pre-screenings right through general release, eating away box-office as effectively as a blood-borne parasite eats red blood cells. As whole films fall into bit-torrent oblivion, snippets of their films get cut out and put on YouTube or Daily Motion and there's little to be done about that either. Finally, even the home video market and it's tidy widget-style sales model is being sapped by streaming services, offering the same film for a fraction of the cost of a DVD or BluRay version.

As falling revenues draws the industry into existential crisis, we're seeing it's immune system deploy T-cells and leukocytes, out to destroy the malignancy. Expect to see more.

Once upon a time, internet culture as depicted by Hollywood was a rich source of pseudo-high-tech, blatantly unbelievable tropes: "I'll have to hack their IP with a custom-written worm to access their triple-encrypted password. And… there it is!" Remember Hackers (1995) with Angeline Jolie as "Acid Burn" and Jonny Lee Miller as "Crash Override?" Hoo-boy. But that was then: the era of that sort of fun-loving naivete is over.

Apple Comes Out Swinging: Hits Below Belt

One of the biggest changes in the film industry right now is happening outside the general scrutiny of the public. Several months ago, Apple rolled out the highly anticipated new version of Final Cut Studio, thier well-used, well-loved professional-level editing suite. Skipping right over versions 8 and 9 to a cool Roman 10, the new product rolled out as FCPX.

It was a resounding failure.

The new program has a completely different user interface, key shortcuts and throughput capabilities. It won't export edit decision lists, capture video from tape sources, and it's not backwards-compatible-- if you have a legacy project in Final Cut 7 and want to port it upwards, you're outta luck. It bears a strong resemblance to iMovie, the free, consumer-level editing software that comes with your laptop, so much so that post-industry wags dubbed FCPX "iMovie Pro."

At some point, I understand what Apple was trying to do: make a clean break with a system that utilizes a more powerful core engine. The core engine is the video processor system that drives all the renders and makes things like FCP work. From Final Cut 1 to Final Cut 7, they've all been driven by the QuickTime engine, which was state of the art about a decade ago. FCPX utilizes an engine based on AVC and AVCHD, which is state-of-the-art (and is used by most prosumer camcorders these days) and blazingly fast.

The problem here is the calculation Apple made that professional users of FCP, a billion-dollar market, would blindly follow on the brand name alone. These professional users have deadlines, large libraries of legacy projects, and mortgages to pay-- and can't spare the time to dick around with a product that, fast as it may be, is "unsuitable for professional workflow."

People seem to have a fixation on Apple as a cutting-edge, market-making company with unique ideas, and they're right. But innovation is risk-taking, and that means Apple is less a cautious computer hardware company and more based on a movie studio model (As Steve Jobs was a founder of Pixar, this isn't a surprise, I hope.) Invest in a far-out idea, market the hell out of it, shove it out there and hope for a blockbuster. This worked for the iPod, iPhone, iPad and a lot of other stuff. It DIDN'T work for the Apple Lisa, AppleTV, and the Cube. And now it didn't work for FCPX.

If you need an example of a traditional computer hardware company's approach to marketing, consider the Toshiba laptop. They're completely reliable machines, tough and robust-- and they barely change from model to model. a 2011 Satellite looks like a 2001 Satellite. Toshiba bases their business model on market share, not market making.

But innovation becomes something of an ethical issue if you have thousands of users dependent on you for their livelihood. If that's the case, innovation becomes self-serving: killing legacy compatibility and altering features beyond usefulness makes the upgrade risky for most. And there is a definite show-biz angle to this story: A lot of people, from movie studios to indie-film hacks, cut their movies on the Final Cut Pro platform. There is a good chance that TV show you just watched, the movie you just saw, or the DVD you just got from Netflix, came to you through the FCP workflow. (Not your Blu-ray, though: more below.)

And yes, this has affected my business in a big way. I make DVDs for a living, and the suite of programs in FCPX does NOT include DVD Studio Pro. (this is somewhat understandable, as DVDs haven't changed all that much in the last 6 years or so, so upgrading the authoring software is sorta redundant.) Fortunately, the fine folks at Adobe have a wonderful suite of recently hotrodded editing and authoring solutions-- the Creative Suite. They saw Apple stumble badly with FCPX and are sweeping up market share with half-off offers for switching to Premiere 5.5-- and have subtly altered the look and feel of it to something approximating classic Final Cut Pro. I'm already using Premiere and Adobe Encore to author BluRay-- a format Apple still refuses to support! So I'm gonna persevere with FCP7 and DVD Studio pro until they rot off my hard drives (or a new Mac OS refuses to open them anymore) then head across the street to Adobe.

Apple has a right to do whatever they want with their products, of course. But as the legal aphorism goes, your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose. And there are quite a few video pros out there with bloody noses looking to hang out with a less pugilistic company.