For the last few weeks of the year, I’m going through stories I saved, but never posted. Today’s stories are from June 2009:
* One of the more interesting Hwood stories this year was the strange saga of the movie Moneyball. In LA Times article, things seemed to be going along rather swimmingly (to mix sports metaphors about a baseball movie). Some key excerpts:
How did this unlikely project make it to the starting gate? It all started when a woman named Rachael Horovitz decided that she needed some good books to read when she went to Tahiti in 2003 for a much-needed vacation. Having spent years working at Fine Line and Revolution, Horovitz decided to strike out on her own and become a producer. She fell in love with “Moneyball,” not so much for its inside take on baseball, but because it was such a compelling example of a workplace drama. “For me, the movie is a love story about a man and his job,” she explained the other day.
So Moneyball is actually a “love story about a man and his job.”
[about the pitch meeting with Amy Baer at Sony]: “Everyone at Sony was incredibly supportive,” Horovitz said. “Of course, they all asked the same question — how do you make a movie out of it? I kept telling everyone ‘This is a story anyone can relate to, because it’s basically a second chance story. It’s about a guy whose early failure could have doomed him to failure, but managed to turn it into a huge life lesson.’”
Uh, so the movie is really a “second chance story” about a guy who fails, then learns a “huge life lesson.” Okay, got it.
“I personally identify with every movie I’m involved with, which I guess makes me a total narcissist,” [Mike] DeLuca said with a laugh. “But it doesn’t take much of a stretch to see New Line as the Oakland A’s, always having to make do with less while catching a lot of crap from the establishment for the crazy, unorthodox things we did.”
But really it’s an anti-authoritarian story…
And so you see the seeds of at least one of the reasons the project nearly blew up in that nobody seemed to really know what the hell the story was about!
* I started to do an analysis of Pixar and storytelling, starting with a list of their movie loglines:
Toy StoryA cowboy toy is profoundly threatened and jealous when a fancy spaceman toy supplants him as top toy in a boy’s room.
A misfit ant, looking for warriors to save his colony from grasshoppers, recruits a group of bugs that turn out to be an inept circus troupe.
When Woody is stolen by a toy collector, Buzz and his friends vow to rescue him, but Woody finds the idea of immortality in a museum tempting.
Monsters generate their city’s power by scaring children, but they are terribly afraid themselves of being contaminated by children, so when one enters Monstropolis, top scarer Sulley finds his world disrupted.
A father-son underwater adventure featuring Nemo, a boy clownfish, stolen from his coral reef home. His timid father must then travel to Sydney, and search Sydney Harbour find Nemo.
A family of undercover superheroes, while trying to live the quiet suburban life, are forced into action to save the world.
A hot-shot race-car named Lightning McQueen gets waylaid in Radiator Springs, where he finds the true meaning of friendship and family.
Remy is a young rat in the French countryside who arrives in Paris, only to find out that his cooking idol is dead. When he makes an unusual alliance with a restaurant’s new garbage boy, the culinary and personal adventures begin despite Remy’s family’s skepticism and the rat-hating world of humans.
In the distant future, a small waste collecting robot inadvertently embarks on a space journey that will ultimately decide the fate of mankind.
By tying thousands of balloon to his home, 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen sets out to fulfill his lifelong dream to see the wilds of South America. Right after lifting off, however, he learns he isn’t alone on his journey, since Russell, a wilderness explorer 70 years his junior, has inadvertently become a stowaway on the trip.
Then I started in with my analysis:
Here’s a good example. They don’t shy away from an emotional set-up, but they avoid going too far / the maudlin. With Toy Story, Woody is upset about being ‘replaced’ by Buzz. Simple, honest, and something everyone can relate to. Finding Nemo, a father and son separated from each other. Again very basic human emotions there. Both Wall-E and Up have a similar dynamic in that the Protagonists are ‘alone,’ albeit Wally starts out not realizing the how alone he is (until Eve shows up and provides a vision of the life he could have been and could be living), while Carl’s (Up) state of solitude is one infused with absence, loss, grief.
That’s as far as I got. How about you pick up the thread and provide your own take on why Pixar is great with story.
* Found this in Cynopsis:
Father and daughter team Charles and Lindsey Rosin go public with Showbizzle.com today, an intimate little site that documents Lindsey’s efforts to break into the entertainment biz. It’s the home for a breezy twentysomething cinema verite web series about Lindsey and her cohorts’ struggles to break into screenwriting, acting and directing. The show (think Swingers with a feminine point-of-view, a larger cast and a lower budget) looks entertaining and should be required viewing for kids thinking of moving out to LA LA land to chase their dreams of stardom as it delves into the frustrations of being on the outside looking in. But the show is meant to be the sugar coating for the site’s more practical features designed to provide resources to struggling amateur actors and filmmakers. For instance Lindsey’s Dad Charles, a veteran writer/producer whose credits include Northern Exposure and Beverly Hills 90210, will tap friends such as TV director David Semel to provide video primers featuring no nonsense advice about how to position the camera, run a set and direct actors. There’s also a requisite social networking component, encouraging users to form a community and share their stories. Too many of the entertainment-themed web series are nothing more than exercises in celebrity navel gazing. Showbizzle is refreshing in its honesty, its wary-but-not-jaded tone and its genuine desire to help others to succeed.
Another Hwood writer attempting to figure out a way to make money off the Web. The website is here.
* Finally this from the WSJ about Netflix’s future:
Netflix Inc. is a standout in the recession. The DVD-rental company added more subscribers than ever during the first three months of the year. Its stock has more than doubled since October.But Netflix’s chief executive officer, Reed Hastings, thinks his core business is doomed. As soon as four years from now, he predicts, the business that generates most of Netflix’s revenue today will begin to decline, as DVDs delivered by mail steadily lose ground to movies sent straight over the Internet. So Mr. Hastings, who co-founded the company, is quickly trying to shift Netflix’s business — seeking to make more videos available online and cutting deals with electronics makers so consumers can play those movies on television sets.
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One of Mr. Hastings’s biggest hurdles will be persuading Hollywood studios to give Netflix rights to show more and better movies through its Internet service at a time when many studios are protective of their DVD-sales revenues. Late last year, Sony Corp.’s Sony Pictures threw a hitch into Mr. Hastings’s plans when it temporarily blocked access to some of its movies from Netflix’s Internet video service in a dispute over whether Netflix had rights to them.
Home-video sales, mostly from DVDs, last year dropped to $14.5 billion from $15.9 billion the previous year, according to Adams Media Research. Movie rentals remained flat over the period, at about $8.2 billion. The number of DVDs Netflix rents every year — about a half-billion in 2008 — is still growing, and Mr. Hastings predicts the company will still be shipping discs to consumers 20 years from now.
Mr. Hastings, a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur, says he anticipated the demise of DVDs almost from the time he co-founded the company in 1997. The company’s name, coined by Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph, didn’t reference discs or mailboxes. From almost the beginning, Netflix invested in software formulas to crunch data about its customers’ tastes so it could recommend DVDs to them, a technology Mr. Hastings believed would carry over to an Internet movie service.
In contrast, to deliver movies and television shows over the Internet, Netflix has to license them from studios. So far, it has gotten only about 12,000 titles, a hodgepodge of older films such as “Diehard,” episodes of popular TV shows including “30 Rock” and a smattering of new releases.
The main reason: Netflix must compete with television subscription services like Time Warner’s HBO, Viacom Inc.’s Showtime and others that gain exclusive rights to show studio movies on cable channels or through on-demand systems. These pay channels have bigger audiences than Netflix and a longer history of hashing out complicated licensing agreements to secure movie rights. Their lucrative deals can prevent Netflix from getting Internet rights for movies until years after they’re released on DVD.
If Netflix is to expand the titles on its Internet service, it will have to considerably boost its licensing spending, from roughly $100 million last year, according to a person familiar with the matter.
More other stories from 2009 the day after Christmas.
That last story about Netflix is why the internet is going to help save the movie industry.
Rental outlets operate using the First Sale Doctrine. Meaning if they buy a dvd, they have the legal right to rent it, sell it, or lend it out however they like for whatever price they choose. They don't have to pay any royalties or licensing fees. All they have to do is buy the dvd. All the profits after buying it, they get to keep. But it only applies to the physical disc.
Distributing films digitally through the internet isn't covered by the first sale doctrine.
So as dvds go the way of the dinosaurs, studios will be in full control of what price people can rent their films for. The whole Redbox controversy won't matter a bit. Right now studios are pissed that Redbox is putting such a low price on their films ($1 a day). They think it's driving their worth down too low. But the only reason Redbox can do this is because of the first sale doctrine. They own the disc, they can do what they want with it.
When everything goes digital, the first sale doctrine goes out the window. And the studios will regain full control of their films and the prices that they want for them.
I guarantee that when the big digital push happens, they'll see way more profit than they ever did with dvd. They'll have way more leverage than they ever did before to set the price for their digital downloads, as well as digital rentals and digital streaming. No more having to deal with Walmart, Redbox and all the others driving their prices down. They probably won't even have to deal with any retailers at all. They can set it all up through their own studio website distribution systems. You want to rent the latest action movie from Warner Brothers, you rent it directly from the WB website.
This could also benefit writers as well, because writers don't get any royalties when someone rents their movie at Blockbuster. They only get royalties from when Blockbuster buys the actual disc. Then Blockbuster rents out that one disc to a hundred people. This way, the writers can get a piece of every single rental. (So long as they don't get shafted in their contract)
Sweat deal. Internet saves the day! Hooray!