How I built my Father. (And where I went wrong)

Jonathan Cape's illustrated short "How I Built My Father (And Where I Went Wrong)" is a beautiful and sad bit of magical realism, set in a world where children build their parents from scratch, but still can't always fix them.

Indie Film "INK" pirated; Filmmakers Pleased

Filmmaker Magazine has a great interview with the team behind the Indie film "INK". The text and link to the article are located below.

When I attended the Future of Music Conference this year I heard a lot of talk about all of the opportunities that exist today for indie musicians to create and distribute their products via digital media on the web. Later, at the Flyway Film Festival I heard former Tribeca CEO Brian Newman speak on similar topics in relation to indie filmmakers. The central theme to all of it is that indie artists can be successful without a major label contract or major studio distribution.

In the end though talk is cheap and what looks good on paper doesn’t always translate easily into the real world. I wanted to test the waters firsthand so I created a video podcast featuring live performances by indie musicians. The show runs roughly a half hour and I have been shooting a new episode every week for the past three weeks. In that time I have arranged distribution of the show via all the major video sites on the web. It is also available on TV via iTunes and Roku as well as on mobile devices and game systems.

So far the show has answered all my questions. It is indeed possible to create content of reasonable quality and achieve worldwide distribution using commonly available digital means. In addition it is possible, using these same resources, to cross the divide between computers and other systems such as cell phones, PDA’s, game systems and even TV via Roku and TiVo or AppleTV/X-Box/PS3. It is also possible to do it on a shoestring budget. The experiment, called The Indie Music Show has, to date, cost me around 2.5k.

This week, when I saw Jamin and Kiowa Winans of Double Edge Films sending out excited messages on Twitter to the effect that their movie Ink had been ripped and uploaded to Pirate Bay I was intrigued. I guess I was just sort of programmed by negative publicity to see sites like Pirate Bay as a bad thing. On the other hand, once I thought about it, I could certainly see the exposure potential of putting a project in front of the 140 million users of bittorrent sites worldwide. So I put my show up on Pirate Bay to see what would happen. In two days views of the show on its home page tripled.

It is more tricky for a movie though, since a movie is much more of a one shot deal than a weekly TV show. Most people will see a film once, maybe twice if they really like it and maybe buy the DVD if they really, really like it whereas a TV show needs to attract and hold repeat viewers. From that perspective the major studios and probably most indie filmmakers see a pirated film as lost revenue and so bittorrent remains pretty much unexplored territory in relation to positive outcomes.

Kiowa and Jamin on the other hand seem to be approaching the issue from a different perspective. I wanted to get their views on what is happening with their film and spoke to Jamin about it.

Filmmaker: Why are you guys having such a positive reaction to your film being pirated?

Winans: The last eight months have been a brutal struggle for Ink. We premiered the film at Santa Barbara Int'l Film Festival, signed with the agency UTA, and opened in Denver for a very successful eight-week run. However, indie film distribution in general has imploded. All the indie branches of the big studios have shut down and no one is buying films. So we took Ink out one theater at a time for the last several months ourselves trying to gain some momentum. The little money we made on each screen we used to push to the next screen. Theater after theater we had amazing crowds, reactions, and new fans, yet every decent distributor wouldn't touch the film. We knew we had an audience, but no way to get the film out wider to them. We were getting hundreds of emails, Facebook, and Twitter notes from people wanting to see Ink all over the world, but all we could tell them was "we're trying".

We finally decided to walk away from theatrical and make the film available on DVD, Blu-ray, and download as soon as possible. We figured the only way Ink was going to find it's way was to hand it over to the fans and hope they would run with it. Our hope was that Ink would slowly travel by word-of-mouth over the next year and ideally find it's way.

We knew Ink would likely get bit torrented eventually and accepted that it was unavoidable. However we never imagined it would happen immediately, blow up overnight, and spread all over the world. We were shocked by what was happening and spent the next several hours thinking there was some sort of mistake. But as it turns out, our one-year strategy of word-of-mouth was instead moving instantaneously. I've never seen a Hollywood campaign so effective and so instant as this has been.

Sure we could be upset that the film is getting downloaded for free, but that would make us jackasses wouldn't it? Ink was a $250,000 film with previously unknown actors. Hollywood distributors made it more than clear they saw no future for it. It was too bizarre, a mixed genre, unknown actors, low-budget. They wanted nothing to do with it. To pretend that we're really upset about the torrent would be acting as if we had all kinds of other options. No, we're thrilled Ink is exploding so much faster than we ever hoped.

FilmmakerWhat is the actual number of downloads that Ink has seen since being made available on the bittorrent channels?

Winans: It's hard for us to equate, but last I heard from the experts Ink's been downloaded over a half million times in about five days.

Filmmaker: I remember hearing you talk about making Ink at the Flyway Film Festival and you were saying that you raised the $250,000 budget for the film in part by mortgaging your house. So you obviously have a huge personal stake in the financial success of the film. On the one hand every download on Pirate Bay can be viewed as lost revenue which could be used to offset the cost of producing the film. On the other hand such a large number of downloads can be seen as a form of advertising that exposes the film to a much wider audience. I realize that it is much too soon to calculate the actual impact from having the film made available via pirate channels but what are the best and worst case scenarios from your viewpoint?

Winans: Kiowa and I don't see it as lost revenue, but fans gained. In fact, our revenue on the film has quadrupled in the last few days as a result of the exposure. It's still a fraction of what we need to be making to make it work, but it's a big step in the right direction. People are coming back to our website and buying disks, the soundtrack, posters, shirts, and making small donations. If that continues we'll be in good shape. However most downloaders are not spending money and it's certainly a possibility that they never will if that's the case, we could be hurting.

Here's the irony. We got completely screwed by the people distributing our first feature film, 11:59. We didn't get paid at all from one distributor, and barely from another. In the last five days, we've made more money from donations from "pirates" than we've ever made from a distributor. You tell me who the crooks are. Everyone is concerned piracy is going to destroy the indie film world, but I can say unequivocally that the distribution world is already destroyed because it's primarily made up of scam artists and thieves. If someone's going to rip off our film, I'd rather it be our fans than some sleaze bag feeding on struggling indie artists.

Filmmaker: I have been thinking about why major label bands or big studio films have the success they do. I mean, as often as not, products by the majors are no better than products by unknown artists in many respects and yet the majors totally control the traditional market. The obvious answer is the star power of the people in the film and the enormous amount of money that is spent on marketing. This seems to be why, even with two products of essentially equal quality (one indie, one major studio) side by side on the same "shelf" whether in a store or on the web, the studio film is always the one which makes money.

This is true even if consumers have not yet seen either film.

I wanted a term that would express this advantage in simple terms. I came up with "implied value" as a distillation of all of the ingredients that make an unseen film attractive enough to consumers so that they will invest their money in a movie ticket or DVD. Word of mouth from consumer peers is an important example of how a media project can gain this type of value and one which indie artists can best capitalize on since it doesn’t necessarily require a huge advertising budget to achieve.

From this perspective do you think that having Ink pirated and exposed to the huge audience represented by bittorrent users will increase the Implied Value of your film with the world audience? What is the biggest benefit you see — increasing general awareness of the film or sparking a larger base of word of mouth recommendations? I know from reading your tweets this week that this exposure has already caused Ink to rise to the level of a top 20 movie on the IMDb (Independent Movie Database) chart, which is certainly encouraging but do you see this translating into actual income via theater placement/attendance or DVD sales?

Winans: I don't think word-of-mouth has ever been as powerful as it is right now. Social networks and online communities have changed everything. From the beginning our principal has always been to establish fans and care for them. We're far more interested in creating a family-like fan base than we are in making general films that the studios can distribute. Rising the ranks on IMDB is cool because it's quantifiable in some way and it's nice to see Ink and the actors getting exposure, but we're much more interested in the individual notes that we get from fans telling us how much they love the film. These people are all we really care about because they'll likely be with us for a very long time. When all the hype dies down, they're still going to be our fans. And if we have our fans we don't need anyone else. I think your Implied Value theory is exactly right. Yes, I do think the recent explosion of the film has created new value for Ink. Paranormal Activity's implied value obviously sky rocketed even though it was made for $11k. In the end value really is perception. Each of us want to see the thing the rest of the world is seeing.

As far as translation into sales, the growing implicit value is certainly helping. Because Ink is blowing up a lot of people see it as a bigger film, more of a brand, and thus they're more willing to pay for it.

All this said, it's a scary time. We look at the file sharing of Ink as a great thing, however it works for us because we're a small film. The fact is, most people downloading it are not supporting it financially in any way. From everything I can tell this is not a sustainable model for bigger films. By bigger, I mean anything above $1 million which isn't much. If fans aren't paying for the films, who is? Hopefully it will all work out, but the concern is that the illegal downloading will destroy movies simply because producers have no way to fund them anymore. The only other tested and working alternative that I'm aware of is advertising and product placement and an enormous amount of it. So in the near future our film could be entitled Ink: Brought to you by McDonalds. - written by Mike Johnston (link: http://filmmakermagazine.com/webexclusives/2009/11/indie-film-ink-pirated-filmmakers.php)

Outfoxed: How Roald Dahl's stories for children eclipsed his fiction for adults.

"I could feel him smiling," said Felicity Dahl, widow of the great Roald, of her experience of viewing Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox. "I was thinking, he'd love this." Well, she would know, I suppose. But what am I to do then with my conviction that her late husband would have loathed this? That Wes Anderson, with his glockenspiels and drolleries and minutely faceted interiors, has travestied the raucous spirit of Dahl? And that the ideal Fantastic Mr. Fox movie would be a work of slapdash animation, soundtrack by Mötorhead, directed by Bobcat Goldthwait? I'll just have to sit on it, I suppose.

Rarely can the movements of the muse be charted with any precision, but it appears that around 1959 the tutelary presence that handled Roald Dahl Inc. decided, with very little warning and no consultation, upon a major shift in direction. Ideas for the short stories with which he had made his name in the pages of The New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly dried up, and Dahl found himself temporarily at a loss. It was not a position to which he was accustomed. Long-bodied, dented, worldly, impatient, Dahl came from enterprising Norwegian stock and had been educated in the heart of the British establishment. He was a former WWII flying ace (he fought with the Royal Air Force in Greece and North Africa), a former spy (as an attaché to the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., he had funneled political tidbits back to London), and the husband of screen goddess Patricia Neal. No literary career is easy, but his had gone pretty smoothly, relatively speaking: His first short-story collection, 1953's Someone Like You, had garnered him comparisons with Saki, Somerset Maugham, and O. Henry, and his second, Kiss Kiss, was selling nicely.

But a limit seemed to have been reached. Those grisly, sting-in-the-tail plotlets of his, each with the economy of a black joke—they weren't coming anymore, as he admitted to his publisher, Alfred Knopf. The one about the woman who beats her husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb, then defrosts the murder weapon and serves it to the investigating police officers ("Lamb to the Slaughter") or the sickly baby dosed by her beekeeping father with the healthful secretions of the hive until she acquires "a powdering of silky yellowy-brown hairs" on her stomach ("Royal Jelly") ... now, for some reason, Dahl was writing page after page about a small boy, a group of talking insects, and an enormous airborne peach.

Knopf didn't blink, and James and the Giant Peach was published in 1961. The opening—"Until he was four years old, James Henry Trotter had had a happy life"—could have come from one of the short stories, but within a few lines little James' parents had been dispatched (day out in London, escaped rhinoceros) with a cruelty that was part folktale gruffness, part-Nabokovian élan. He had magically fused his New Yorker voice with one that seemed to issue from the blackest Norwegian forest: brisk, practical, unsparing, mildly atavistic, and quite at home in the bizarre. This was Dahl 2.0. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory came next, and then, in 1970, Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Life, meanwhile, had missed few opportunities to pulverize Roald Dahl. In 1961 his 4-month-old son Theo was critically injured when his baby carriage was hit by a taxi. Olivia, Dahl's first daughter, caught the measles in 1962, slipped into a coma, and died. In 1965 Patricia Neal, pregnant, suffered a massive stroke: Much of Dahl's energy went into her subsequent years-long rehabilitation.

Fantastic Mr. Fox, coming at the end of this decade of punishment, was understandably not the tightest or most elaborate of his works for children. But then that's the foxy thing about it—the book gets by on a scrape of a plot, some top-notch Anglo-Saxon alliteration (Boggis, Bunce, and Bean: You can't beat that), and the charm of its leading man. Ted Hughes had come out with his classic The Iron Man a couple of years before, and there were elements in common: vengeful mechanized digging, for one, as both Mr. Fox and the Iron Man came up against the terrible tractors of postindustrial English farming. Dahl's tale, however, unlike Hughes', was free of mystical overtone. Mr. Fox is simply a dashing paterfamilias under siege, struggling to protect his brood and sustaining a fearful wound, a castration almost, in the form of his shot-off brush—that bleeding tail stump, "tenderly licked" by Mrs. Fox, providing one of the most shocking images in all of Dahl's work.

Can we separate Dahl the Pied Piper, the battered figure at the heart of 20^th-century children's writing, from Dahl the littérateur? The light thrown retrospectively on his early stories is revealing: Their tone of sinuous expertise now seems rather obviously that of an adult spinning naughty tales for an audience of juniors. (Adolescent readers, for example, have always particularly enjoyed them.) Post-Peach attempts to recapture this tone, to go grown-up again, would be unsuccessful: Once the muse had made her move, that was that. Switch Bitch, a collection of creakily pornographic stories that had appeared in Playboy, seemed a relic even in 1974. "She laid a lovely long white arm upon the top of the bar and she leaned forward so that her bosom rested on the bar-rail, squashing upward." (You can catch there a debauched echo of his early hero Hemingway—until the word "squashing," that is, which is pure Dahl.) A 1979 novel, the dreadful My Uncle Oswald, was low-intensity ho-ho smut of the sort that might have tickled his old friend and fellow roué, the world's laziest writer: Ian Fleming.

In the general economy of Dahl's art, however, these books perhaps served their purpose, burning off a spurious sophistication and allowing him to perfect his true style, which was scruff-of-the-neck storytelling. ("Listen very carefully," urges the narrator of The Witches. "Never forget what is coming next.") The slightly ponderous precision with which he had set up his punch lines in Someone Like You became a secret weapon when he wrote for children—an exhilarated, second-by-second focus on the matter at hand. No one who has read it, or had it read to them, forgets the moment in Danny, the Champion of the World when the 7-year-old hero drives a car down a dark country lane, exquisitely slow to begin with but picking up speed, going from first to second gear, and second to third, in a mounting mechanical ecstasy ...

Dahl was not religious by temperament or philosophy, and this seems important. Compare his bristling, stinking, unmetaphorical characters with the watery allegories of the Harry Potter cycle—and his prose with J.K. Rowling's—and you begin to see that a supernatural frame of reference might not always be such a wonderful thing. A good Roald Dahl sentence is a physical event: It can leave a child literally writhing with glee. "The hailstones came whizzing through the air like bullets from a machine gun, and James could hear them smashing against the sides of the peach and burying themselves with horrible squelching noises—plop! plop! plop! plop!" You don't need to know anything about Dahl's dogfights over wartime Greece to enjoy that. He was better at beginnings than endings—"The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar" begins three times—but then aren't we all.

There will be kids, no doubt, who writhe with glee at Wes Anderson's Fox, and more power to them: It has plenty of marvelous qualities. But something grizzled, abrupt, and rough-humored is missing. Something warty. "You can smell the danger, watch your step/ See the friendly stranger, stretch your neck ..." One of Dahl's Revolting Rhymes? Not quite. It's Lemmy, from Motörhead's "Die You Bastard." I think the two of them would have got along very well.

British Books Offer A "Cosy" Antidote To Apocalyptic Horror. Let's Be Civilized, Shall We?

Looking for an alternative to the horrific scenarios of 2012 and The Road? Try the "cosy catastrophe" genre, the Guardian suggests: Stories like Day Of The Triffids and The World In Winter feature a less violent version of the end.

In the "cosy catastrophe" genre, the end of civilization happens more gently, or is passed over altogether, and there's often some hope for the rebuilding of the world. The Guardian explains:

The phrase is attributed to the British author Brian Aldiss, who mentions it in his fascinating history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree, while talking about the author of Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham. While Triffids, with its blinded populace and sinister, stalking plants, could hardly be described as "cosy", it is an example of a largely non-violent, non-destructive doom. Wyndham also wrote The Kraken Wakes, in which an alien invasion gradually destroys civilisation by way of melting the ice caps rather than with death rays and war machines. The book chronicles the rebuilding of a massively de-populated world once the aliens have been despatched.

John Christopher is another British author who embraced the idea of a cosy catastrophe. While his novel, The Death of Grass – which so worried Sam Jordison when he was younger – does feature an ecological disaster that causes often violent social breakdown, Christopher (real name Sam Youd) also wrote The World in Winter, a very much more British version of Emmerich's movie The Day After Tomorrow, in which increasingly harsh winters drive the population of western Europe towards the suddenly more temperate African regions. And then there's JG Ballard, who employed ecological apocalypse in his debut novel The Wind from Nowhere, as well as in his more famous works The Drowned World, The Burning World, and many of his short stories.

Of course, there may be a bit of wish-fulfillment on the part of these authors, as the Guardian quotes author Jo Walton suggesting. The survivors of these catastrophes are often very middle class, and they get to wander around a suddenly depopulated world, with the working class wiped out in a guilt-free way. And then they get to rebuild the world along more civilised lines.

But leaving aside the classist undertones of the genre, who's to say that a collapse of civilization wouldn't be slow and relatively non-violent? And that we wouldn't pull together to rebuild afterwards?

Fox Chairman has "No Doubt" that AVATAR will turn a profit: Therefore it must be true.

20th Century Fox's Fox Filmed Entertainment chairman Jim Gianopulos says claims that "Avatar" cost $500 million (though the NYTimes initially said it "could cost up to") were "ridiculous."

"That's a ridiculous number," Gianopulos told Reuters, however refusing to divulge the actual cost of the film. "It has actually no relationship to the actual cost of the movie. The movie was quite expensive, there is no question about that. But viewed now, from the perspective of its completion and having seen it, it's a formidable work and money well spent."

Will the movie make its money back or even turn a profit? "I have no doubt about that," he said, which is sort of amusing to watch fanboys around the web sort of go, "oh good! It's going to make money!"

We're not saying it won't and we would never count James Cameron out (we sort of did that back in the day with "Titanic" when the press made it seem like an expensive disaster waiting in the wings), but it's still kind of funny to see a dubious quote like this was taken at face value from the geeks and thrown in headlines as truth. What the hell was the Fox guy going to say, "Actually, it cost more than that. We're really scared we won't make our money back and we'll be fucked"???
Meanwhile, James Cameron was on 60 Minutes this weekend, but the appearance was somewhat dry and boring. However, 60 minutes did say that the film cost "roughly $400 million-plus for production and promotion." Also Cameron give us pearls of genius like, "Hell yeah, [I gave the Na'vi character tails]. Tails are cool."

One technical achievement the director is proud of is actually quite sad. "Even when we were doing 'Titanic' twelve years ago, the shot at the bow where [Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet] kiss, we waited two weeks for the right sunset to get that shot. Now we just shoot it in front of a green screen and choose the right sunset later."

Geez, if that's not a sad pullquote for the state of soulless cinema, we're not sure what is. He's also quite modest. He tells crew members that for each project of his they work on they are "going to the Superbowl" and warns them, "don't get on the boat if you're not ready to go all the way." His reputation as a bonafide asshole seems calcified.

Cameron did use and abuse his painful "crowning" metaphor once again. Ugh. "You don't ask a woman if she wants to have more kids at the exact moment when she is having a baby, you know what I mean?," he said, apparently pleased with himself that he's used this analogy about 12 times in different interviews now.

Evidently Cameron is working down to the wire to get "Avatar" complete for its December 18 release date. Though he actually has less time. The world premiere of "Avatar" will take place December 10 in London and its U.S. premiere will happen in L.A. on December 16, but he's tinkering down to the last second. Here's the 60 Minute piece and a chase sequence that was part of the 20 minutes of footage we saw earlier this year.

The Orange/Blue Contrast in Movie Posters

I’m sure you’re aware of Hollywood’s overuse of floating heads on movie posters… but have you noticed the excessive use of orange/blue contrast on theatrical one-sheets? David Chen happened to come across this comic illustrating the Blue/orange contrast, although I’m not sure where it originated or who created it. After the jump you will see a ton of examples of orange/blue contrast, however I must warn you — as the comic says, once you see it, you’ll notice it everywhere.

Change in Copyright Law: A possible solution to news content crisis?

Copyright law reform as one remedy for plummeting profits at traditional news organizations was proposed at a media affairs panel organized by the non-profit Center for Communication and hosted by Fordham University earlier this month.

Former public television executive and current Fordham Professor William F. Baker moderated the event which was called “The Audience: How America Uses its Media.” On the panel: Nielsen executive Gerry Byrne and media lawyer Dean Ringel, a partner at the New York law firm of Cahill Gordon & Reindel.

Ringel advocated introducing compulsory licensing fees for Web-based agregators or re-distributors of news content. Under Ringel’s system, sites like Google would be required to share profits with or pay a fee to any news organization whose content they post, in a system similar to the compulsory licensing system than currently manages rights for cable television and music.

He noted that current copyright law protects the specific expression of information but does not protect the work necessary to obtain that information. Ringel argued that papers like the New York Times, which spend prodigious sums on reporter security in dangerous places around the globe, should get some of the revenue made by third-parties who distribute their content.

Ringel’s proposed system would apply only to sites obtaining revenue from re-posting news content. Sites which did not charge fees or seek advertising revenue, and perhaps even some commercial sites whose readership is below a certain threshold, would be exempt from the requirements.

Denying profits to newspapers and magazines is to “risk depriving our society as a whole of neutral, professional, prepared and analytic information” said Ringel. Dr. Baker echoed Ringel’s statement by quoting Thomas Jefferson: “If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never shall be.” All three participants agreed a reliably informed citizenry underpins any successful democracy.

Legal solutions that prohibit the re-posting of headlines or web links entirely risk inhibiting the free flow of information, said Ringel. A content licensing and revenue sharing plan, argued Ringel, would allow the marketplace of ideas while also assuring that the activity of reporting is properly rewarded.

Bynre, senior vice-president at Nielsen Business Media -- he oversees Hollywood Reporter, Adweek and Editor & Publisher, among many other titles -- spoke frankly about the prospects for economic stability in the news business.

“The TV advertising market in Los Angeles used to be worth $1.2 billion dollars but now the same number of stations are fighting over $500 million,” said Byrne, “and that means that reporters all across L.A. are getting wiped out of stations because there isn’t anybody whose willing to pay for them anymore.”

Byrne, who is a Marine Corps veteran, joked that “Sometimes I feel like it would be easier to put on an army uniform and go fight in Afghanistan or Iraq than it would be to stay in the news business.”

The panel members also speculated on what the media industry may look like in the future.

Agreeing with Dr. Baker’s statement that mobile devices are sure to become more important as media outlets, Byrne said, “Mobile realities are going to explode. Outside the U.S. mobile platforms are way more advanced than we are here.”

Byrne was hopeful about the ability of local media to perform a watchdog function. “Journalists on a local basis are the cleansing system for what goes on in small communities. Thing like whether local politicians or real estate developers are doing what they’re supposed to.” said Byrne. - Evan Leatherwood