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Saturday night’s American Cinema Foundation panel at the American Film Institute in LA, moderated by media critic Cathy Seipp, was fascinating on several levels.
The theme of the event was “Mass market, smart content,” and featured four TV writers/producers/directors: Paul Feig (creator and executive producer: “Freaks & Geeks;” director: “Arrested Development;” director and writer, the feature film “I Am David;” author: “Kick Me: Adventures In Adolescence” and the upcoming “Superstud: How I Became a 24-Year-Old Virgin”), Scott Kaufer (executive producer: “Boston Legal;” writer: “Gilmore Girls,” “Chris Isaak Show,” “Murphy Brown”), Rob Long (co-creator and excecutive producer: “Men, Women & Dogs,” “Love & Money,” “George & Leo;” executive producer: “Cheers”) and Tim Minear (executive produer: “The Inside,” “Wonderfalls,” “Angel,” “Firefly”). Together, they tackled the issue of how successful television writers manage to keep their distinct viewpoints when writing for the mass market.
I believe wholeheartedly that there is no such thing as ‘the mainstream,’ and that the mass market is dead, and being replaced by a mass of niches. I also believe that the mass media is not being destroyed, merely altered radically, and individuals are being liberated from the mass by the unprecedented choice of personal relevance that (thanks to things like blogs, mp3s, TV on DVD, podcasting, and TiVo) they have today – and that choice of personal relevance is increasing exponentially at a rapid rate. So the topic of the panel was extremely appealing to me as a total geek on the social ramifications of emergent technology tip.
I guess I forgot that these guys write some funny stuff, and that they were going to make me laugh – which they did, in a big way. Some of my favourite exchanges and lines:
CATHY SEIPP: How do you react to people who say they never watch TV?
TIM MINEAR: I run them over with my Mercedes.
SCOTT KAUFER: After seeing [the movie] JFK, I thought, “Why don’t I make a movie called Oliver Stone, and just invent shit?
ROB LONG: What would you have to invent?!
PAUL FEIG: That he’s nice, he’s respectful of women…
TIM MINEAR (on not being allowed to have a serial killer character use the word retard): The network thought the serial killer was being awfully insensitive.
I did not want to hit the guys over the head with the beliefs I laid out above, so I asked them if they thought that TV series on DVD (which they all seemed to agree was the best thing to happen to TV in a long time, even if the lack of leadership in the Writers’ Guild means that they get screwed out of decent earnings, receiving only 2 or 4 pennies per DVD sale), TiVo, and that greater choice of personal relevance is going to affect what they do in any significant way. Every panel member had something to say about that, but the most interesting answer came from Paul Feig, who said that the bottom line is that the show that draws the most advertising revenue wins, and it will always be that way.
Except I am sure that it will not always be that way, and that the advances in emergent technologies and the rebirth of niche will bring about that dramatic shift a lot sooner than we may think. The business model of broadcast must change if it is not to die (and with only 12 per cent of US viewers getting their TV via antenna these days anyway, ripping it down is not a bad idea). As viewers (read: customers) get used to having that personal choice of relevance, they will throw their attention (read: value) to the places where they can get it: cable, satellite, and the internet. And if you think advertisers will not pick up on that and move their ad spend accordingly, I have some stock in broadcast that I would just love to sell you.
The kicker being, I do not believe that advertising revenue is going to be the bread and butter of TV on cable, satellite, and the internet. Sure, there will be ads in the world as long as there are lazy, clueless companies who believe in “just in case” marketing. But the costs of that kind of marketing are rising, the effectiveness declining, and profits down as a result.
Which brings us to my point: This drive to niche dovetails very nicely with the need of companies to put customers at the beginning of the value chain instead of at the end of it. The increasing emphasis on the individual also means a move from push marketing to engagement marketing. So instead of wasting a great deal of money on a TV ad, a company can spend a fraction of that on, say, developing great blogs to provide value and engage the niche they are targetting. (They can throw some podcasts up there while they are at it.)
So here is the question I really wish I had asked the panel: Ten years from now, who exactly is going to be spending the kind of money on network TV ads that they need to maintain this broken system? And if that money isn’t there, will you be running over non-TV-watching freaks with your Kia instead of your Mercedes?
I watched the beginning of Dirty Harry on the telly (before remembering that I already have it on DVD), and have just heard Clint Eastwood deliver the first version of the do I feel lucky? speech. And I just want to say something that I have long felt, which is that he delivers the line, at least on that first occasion, very badly. They should have done a retake. The actual “do I feel lucky?” bit is gabbled, and you can hardly hear it. There should have been a slight pause between “you’ve got to ask yourself a question” and “do I feel lucky?”, but there is no pause. The sentences just before are fine, but this particular bit sounds like an uncomprehending read-through, not a performance at all. I realise they did not want to upstage the rerun of the same lines later in the movie, when the real Bad Guy is asked the same question, but I reckon they downplayed it too much.
Not that I blame Clint Eastwood. Or, I blame him only if he was the one who chose this particular take. But I presume that this was the director, or maybe the producer. Actors are usually helpless in circumstances like these. Time and again, they get called bad actors, when it was really bad directing and bad editing.
Otherwise, excellent movie entertainment, full of good sense about the deterrent value of chasing and punishing criminals and the pointlessness of worrying too much about what makes them become criminals. The important thing is to hunt them down and lock them up, or worse. (One of the biggest reasons why they become criminals being that they do not expect this to happen.) This is a lesson which the USA’s rulers now seem to be learning fast but which our rulers here in the UK (see the comments on Tuesday’s murder posting) are still only groping towards.
Most of the mere people in both countries have of course always known this.
Thank goodness for the movies. On this particular issue, insofar as they have argued anything at all, they have mostly argued very sensibly.
And let no one kid you that movies like Dirty Harry are just “mindless” entertainment. When people call a movie mindless, it generally means that it is actually rather mindful, but that the mindfulness involved is something that the complainer would rather not face. So, he claims that there is nothing to be faced. It was the same with the (ridiculously titled) Death Wish series. Those movies are crammed full of ideas.
And mostly very good ones. When Bronson chalked up his first kill in the first of these movies, cinemas everywhere erupted with spontaneous cheering.
Since I am already on the subject of Mars… the X-Plane flight simulator now includes a number of Mars ports at which you can land your SpaceShipOne. Here is a recent announcement of the Mars extensions to the X-Plane product:
Trans-global flight on the planet Mars is now available to X-Plane
pilots. If you don’t have the Mars Data CD set….go to x-plane.com and buy it!
Over 70 ‘marsports’ have been constructed, several with ILS and GS, to provide the Mars enthusiast (like myself) an opportunity to explore the future home of human beings…today!
X-Plane users may either download the complete Mars X-perience package, or simply the apt.dat and nav.dat files. The MXP .zip file contains Custom Scenery, maps, and the “Cydonia Station” shuttlecraft. The SS1MARS is a modified version of SpaceShipOne engineered to tackle the thin Martian atmosphere (original X-Plane flight model created by Curt Boyll).
This data has not been tested on XP-8, but Robin Peel has indicated he will be giving it a run very soon.
You can find out more about it here.
 Credit: DreamsensesI wish I could afford the hardware upgrade so I could play too!
Jim Plaxco of the National Space Society tried some creative processing of Mars image data with artistic rather than scientific goals in mind. Some of the results are quite to my taste; others are more for lovers of the abstract.
I cannot help but imagine art such as this in the lobby of some Martian corporate headquarters or perhaps in the Marsport Bigelow reception area.
Jim has a website for his artistic renderings. This is a web site under-construction and at present contains only a fraction of his work. I recommend you check back every few weeks.
 With permission of the artist, Jim Plaxco
Mark Holland is, as Instapundit would say, on a roll just now. I wonder if some things that were said at that Friday meeting I seem to want to keep mentioning has something to do with this. Mark was there, and seemed genuinely surprised by the high esteem in which his blog is held by all those of us present who are familiar with it. Maybe that encouraged him. It would be good to think so. If so, this nicely illustrates the value of old fashioned face-to-face contact. “I really like your blog” is not the kind of message that carries quite as much conviction if you cannot see the whites of your admirer’s eyes.
Mark writes about (and/or links to) many things (crappy old British sex comedies, the sport of bicycling, politics in Slovakia) but he told me something rather intriguing that I do not recall reading about at his blog, although this could just be me.
Mark and some friends attended a Bruce Springsteen concert some years ago, in a Manchester football stadium. He and his mates arrived early for the thing, and took their seats way up high in the stands, about a quarter of a mile from where the performance was going to be given. Then, a Big Person approached them. They were unnerved. But no. The Big Person guided them from way back and way high up, right to the very front of the assembly, into Bruce Springsteen Heaven. And they duly watched it all, feet away from The Man. (Sorry, Boss. Sorry.)
Thinking about this some more, I reckon that it makes sense, is probably often done, and is therefore not news to those readers and writers of Samizdata who are also regular attenders at rock gigs. But I am not such, and if you are not this either, allow me to reinvent the wheel for you.
What do you absolutely not want in the front few rows of the crowd at a major pop gig? Two things, I suggest. One: Uncool People (old, ugly, dressed in corduroy jackets, etc.). And worse, two: empty seats. Such horrors would completely spoil any video footage of the event. When everyone is standing in a scrum, this is no big problem. (Presumably uncool people can simply be dragged backwards from the front, and cool people dragged forwards.) But in an all-seater stadium, such as this was, with individual seats booked, there is the real threat of horrors in those vital front few rows.
So how do you prevent these? Answer, you do not sell the front few rows, but instead handpick the people at the front from the early arrivals, like a night club queue minder picking out cool people for a club. Mark, being cool and several degrees cooler back then, I dare say, was, together with his (I assume) comparably cool mates, selected for the front.
You might at this point be expecting one of those blue MORE things, after which the significance of this is explained in more detail and its relevance to lowering income tax etc. is all gone into with proper thoroughness. But, that is all.
I bought a DVD of Nabucco the other day. It’s the usual story: boy meets girl; girl’s father attacks Jerusalem; Hebrews carted off to Babylon. “Sack, burn the temple,” says the King of the Babylonians. “This cursed race shall be wiped from the earth.” But first, let’s all have a sing-song.
I saw it in Hong Kong a couple of years ago. It was the Latvian National Opera, so I was watching Latvians, in China, pretending to be Jews in Babylon, and singing in Italian. Well that’s all right. I can take a joke.
– Harry Hutton last Friday. More about Nabucco here.
I am watching the BBC’s Culture Show, and they are telling a sad little story. Apparently, the regional theatre companies of Britain have, during the last five years or so, enjoyed a bonanza of government money. There has apparently been a mini theatrical renaissance in the provinces. Hurrah!
But now, the horrid government is imposing a pay freeze, and this “great achievement” is in jeopardy. For the sake of a few more million quid, this great achievement could all collapse. Woe!
I could have told them. Never, I would have said to them (had they thought of asking me), depend upon government money and the promises of politicians. Never get addicted to the contents of the public purse, for they can be snatched away from you without warning. Renaissances funded only by politicians have a way of dying very prematurely. Getting money from mere customers may be harder in the short run, but once you learn the trick, you have a foundation you can build on more confidently.
Probably all this is just the political machine doing what it does. It spends. It cuts back on its spending. Occam’s Razor says that this is what is happening here. But, although it was not discussed on the show, I wonder if the end of the romance (that is to a Times on Line piece, which may be a problem for some, but it tells this story better than any other I could find) between New Labour and the Luvvies – caused by such things as New Labour going to war in Iraq, and the Luvvies going to war against the war in Iraq – might have something to do with this story of theatrical feast and threatened theatrical famine.
Last night I started to get into the mood for the Capitalist Ball (that being a link to David’s piece about it last year), which will take place in Brussels this evening, by playing waltzes by Johann Strauss II, on my medium- to lo-fi hi-fi machine.
And what lovely music it is! I remember reading that when Herbert von Karajan got hired to conduct the New Year’s Day concert in Vienna, in 1987, he experienced a sense of both musical and personal renewal. This makes perfect sense to me.
With these waltzes, marches and dances, the symphony orchestra had its one great age of pop superstardom. Before then, pop music was played in taverns and in the open air, and classical music was for the aristocracy. As the audience for orchestral music widened, and as the symphony orchestra widened with it, composers like Brahms and Dvorak, in among grander works like piano and cello concertos, and symphonies of course, also wrote dances for the orchestra. But there was about these pieces an air of down-market music being ever-so-slightly elevated by these grandees of the concert hall. The music of the Strauss family was the genuine, popular article, the purest example of orchestral popular dance music ever created.
In Italy, opera was enjoying a similar period of genuine popularity, where high art and popular art were similarly united.
With arrival of the twentieth century, and the age of electronic recording, and then of electronically enhanced instruments, pop music and classical music again went their separate ways. While the classical musicians concentrated on recording what would now be called their back catalogue, the popsters switched back to more raucous sounds, more suited to the limitations of early recording, and then more attuned to their new audiences, no longer beholden to the musical conventions of an earlier epoch. And opera also divided, the torch of popularity being handed on, via operetta, to the stage ‘musical’.
Meanwhile, the once imperial city of Vienna has been dining out on the music of the Strauss family just about ever since, first for real as it were, and then – and now, still – in reaction to the very different and disappointing reality by which it was increasingly engulfed, and to which it made its own baleful contribution, in the form of the influence and perverse inspiration it supplied to the young Adolf Hitler. No wonder the Viennese still prefer the Beautiful Blue Danube version of their past to more recent horrors. (The moment of transition, when what had been a joyous reality was sliding into history, was memorably captured by that other Strauss, Richard, no relation, in the waltzes he wrote for his opera, Der Rosenkavalier.)
But the music of the original Strausses still plays on. As the centuries pass, it seems all too possible that, horrifying though they were, the wars and massacres of the twentieth century may eventually be topped by later and greater horrors as yet unimaginable. The slaughters that now seem to us so uniquely evil may in due course seem only banal, like the murders and feuds of the Italian Renaissance, which we now think of as the mere backdrop to all those wondrous paintings. But those waltzes, dances and marches of the century before the one just concluded – the waltzes especially – will never be bettered.
At the Capitalist Ball, one of the organisers has just told me, there will be a French swing band in action. A different and later style of dance music, but one I am greatly looking forward to hearing.
Until today I knew nothing of Pete Doherty, but this poor woman knew far too much about him. She had the extreme misfortune to live next door to him.
Ms Latteck, who shared a wall of her maisonette in Bethnal Green, east London, with Doherty, said she had decided to speak out after being incensed by the glorification of the singer as a modern rock legend. “He is presented as some kind of hero. He is not. The truth is that he made me very sick with incessant loud music, day and night,” she said. “It was like having a 100 watt speaker at full volume in my bedroom. The walls and furniture would shake.”
That is the Telegraph version of this horrible creature.
Here is the kind of thing that Ms Latteck was complaining about:
He went into jail rambling and incoherent, but is set to emerge as a poet. Pete Doherty, the drug-addict pop star, will find himself pursued by publishers as well as paparazzi when he emerges from HMP Pentonville tomorrow after being jailed following a rumpus that left a documentary-maker with two black eyes and a broken nose.
Already famous for his drug-fuelled antics as the former frontman for The Libertines, as well as his on-off relationship with the supermodel Kate Moss, Doherty is being seen as a hot property after agents learnt that he had been scrawling volumes of verse since his teens. Publishing houses are bidding to sign up the wayward star, who is due to be released tomorrow on bail after being charged with robbery and blackmail. A source close to Doherty, 25, said that he had been approached by a number of publishers.
Now I know what you are thinking. How good is the Horrible Creature’s poetry? Well, ask a stupid question.
I would like to see the Horrible Creature’s poems make an enormous amount of money, and for all the money to be given to Ms Latteck, with just enough set aside to enable the Horrible Creature to buy enough drugs to kill himself. That is surely what the wiser sort of publishers would prefer. The Horrible Creature is the kind of person who does more good for his fellow humans when dead. When he does die, which surely will not be long now, those who want to can enjoy his poetry and have fun telling each other what it all means, without anyone having any longer to put up with him. Art is often like that, I think.
Rows of dutiful school children in matching desks and matching school uniforms can then study his poems for their GCSE English exams.
Tonight, for about the twentieth time, they showed the movie Pretty Woman on the TV, on ITV2. I like this movie, but I do not like the slurs cast upon the ancient and noble, and thoroughly beneficial, art of asset stripping.
The Richard Gere character is an asset stripper. He buys companies, takes them apart and sells the bits, for more than he paid for all the bits when they were bundled together. This character is contrasted unfavourably with the old man whose warship building company the Richard Gere asset stripper character is busy buying as the movie proceeds. The asset stripper wants to take over the warship company and turn the land it occupies into a place where people will live, in houses and flats. But eventually, we are asked to believe, the asset stripper sees the error of his asset stripping ways, and switches to helping the old bloke to make yet more warships.
Yes, you got that right. Asset stripping is presented as worse than arms manufacturing. And the Pretty Woman herself, the Julia Roberts character, says that the Richard Gere character is just like her. Both screw people for money. This is a cheap shot, based on two different meanings of the word “screw”. But screwing – as in having sex for money – is not that terrible either. And assets strippers do not screw people in a bad way. They buy their property, usually for a better price than they would get from anyone else.
Just where prostitution fits into the wider economic scene I will leave for another day and another argument. No doubt it contributes to economic wellbeing in all sorts of ways that I cannot now think of, although it is not a job I would fancy. But what I do know is that asset strippers do something very valuable. When economic resources are tied up in activities with an insufficient economic future to justify their use in this way, it makes perfect sense for someone to unbundle them and release them into the wild, separately. That there are people who specialise in doing this, who are always on the look-out to ply their trade, injects huge vitality into the economy of the world. Asset strippers ensure that existing resource uses are always questioned, and that the future, when it does emerge unmistakably, is not smothered by the past.
This is beyond the pale. It is completely insensitive and at a time like this, what idiot would shoot an advertisement for TV that used suicide bombers? Appalling…
…Yeah. But I must confess, I howled with laughter.
It would be fair to say that when I heard that 70’s space opera ‘Battlestar Galactica’ was going to be remade, I was dubious: face it, the original made Star Trek seem like Shakespeare. Moreover when I later discovered that a leading character in the original series called ‘Starbuck’ (well before the term became synonymous with coffee) was going to be ‘re-imagined’ as a woman, I became downright contemptuous: “Oh gawd, another sickeningly politically correct bit of drivel spewing forth from Hollyweird”. Moreover womanising hard drinking cigar smoking Starbuck was one of the few engaging characters from the original series.
In a sense I acquired the DVD of the mini-series more as something to blog about, so I could actually say I had seen a piece of science fiction that was worse than that hymn for a limp-wristed California vision of ‘inclusive transnational socialism’ (well, maybe not all that inclusive), called Star Trek, a series which hit its nadir with the execrable Enterprise. So yes, I fired up this disc with extremely low expectations.
The show starts slowly, setting the scene in some detail, such as the fact we foolish humans were the ones who actually created the Cylons, the show’s homicidal robotic bad guys, and that Battlestar Galactica itself (more or less an aircraft carrier in space) was an obsolescent relic of a pervious war against the Cylons some 50 years earlier and was due to be retired from service after many years of peace. We see the back story of Gauis Baltar, who in the original series was a comical pantomime style ‘villain’ and arch-traitor, and who is this time ‘re-imagined’ as a deeply flawed genius (sort of a cross between Albert Einstein and Bill Gates, brilliantly acted by James Callis) who is psychopathically self-centered and thus tricked by an all too human looking ‘female’ Cylon into unwittingly dooming humanity. All better acted, better directed and far better written than I expected but only Baltar was particularly engaging initially.
But then the Cylons make their move…
Wow. A show which truly, truly, truly does not pull any punches and proffers a middle finger to the sugar coating of so much of Hollywood’s offerings that are aimed at the mainstream. We see nothing less that genocide: the steady nuclear annihilation of the human race. We see men women and children (yes, children) killed pitilessly in one of the darkest bits of sci-fi TV drama I have ever seen: the Götterdämmerung on 12 planets. Moreover we see the handful of dazed and traumatised survivors on the Galactica and the refugee fleet which forms around this last remnant of the human military, act like, well, people who have just seen their entire civilisation and 99.9% of their species exterminated by an implacable enemy.
In many ways this is a story that owes much to the dramas set in World War II that were made in the 40’s and 50’s and posit that there is a great deal more to being in command than saying “Make it so”. Even the look of the Galactica itself is a million miles away from the antiseptic interiors of Star Trek’s spaceships: it has manually opened pressure doors, old fashioned wire cable intercoms and chinagraph pencil plotting tables that would not have looked out of place on USS Yorktown during the Battle of Midway. As in that earlier genre of movies from a less timid era, heart rending decisions are forced on characters, and not just the military commanders (who I am pleased to say actually act like real military commanders in Battlestar Galactica) but also the new president of the colonial government (very well played by Mary McDonnell), who is faced with desperate no-win life and death choices. The biggest surprise for me however was the character of Starbuck, who I was simply determined to hate. Actress Katee Sackhoff plays Starbuck as a hard drinking cigar smoking tomboy and does so with an almost feral gusto and real panache. Her hard bitten mocking grin, snappy dialogue and the almost maniacal gleam in her eyes had me won me over within about 15 minutes.
I have no idea if the series following the mini-series will live up to its potential but damn, it is nice to see such a refreshing bit of drama in the science fiction genre.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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