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There are two key times of the year in which Hollywood film studios release what they perceive is their biggest and best movies. One of these is “summer”, which on the present statistical definition from AC Nielsen runs in the US from two weeks before the Memorial Day weekend unto Labor Day. The other is the “Holiday Season”, which runs from the Friday before Thanksgiving Day and finishes the first Sunday after New Year’s Day. Immediately after the end of the summer movie season, I wrote a lengthy piece explaining how Hollywood’s finances now work, and how the summer had gone, which of the movies had been successes and which had not, and which movies that I thought were any good. In this piece, I am going to talk about how the Holiday season went – what went right and what went wrong. (I am not going to give quite as much background on how Hollywood’s finances work as I did in that piece. People who have not read it may want to at least go back and skim the first couple of paragraphs). And, to be honest, a lot went wrong. My piece on summer was entitled “Thoughts on Hollywood’s lousy summer”. Well, the Holiday season was in many ways worse. Much worse.
But hey, I can hear you asking. It’s February. Why is Michael only writing now about a movie season that ended more than a month ago? He is really slack, isn’t he?
The answer to that is yes and no. For the last couple of months my life, as Bruce Wayne might say, has been complex. But it is actually more no than yes. (One other reason is that what he has written is simply long and detailed, and it has taken a while to write). Although the holiday season officially finishes immediately after the New Year, in reality it doesn’t. It really finishes about a week after the Academy Awards. (This year the awards are being presented on February 29). To explain why this is so, I am going to have to talk about the history of Hollywood release patterns, and about the Academy Awards.
Some people may be put off by the fact that I am going to talk about the Academy Awards a fair bit in this post. Many people are often dismissive of the awards and regard them as meaningless. While I am often enraged by the fact that the best film/performance does not win, I am not going to agree with this. They mean a lot to the people who receive them, and to the people who award them. And they have a huge impact on what films Hollywood makes, when it releases them, and how many people actually go to see them. They also have big impacts in the careers of the people who are nominated for and win them. Quite simply, the awards are central to vitually everything Hollywood does between about October and February. It is not possible to understand anything that the movie industry does in this period if you do not explain this in a reasonable amount of detail. So I will.
Traditionally, which means before about 1980, most Hollywood movies were released by what is know as a “platform release”. This means that a film would start out showing on a few cinemas in a few major cities. If it was successful on these few screens, it would then start showing on screens in less important cities, and also on more (or different) screens in the same cities. The total number of screens would probably not exceed a thousand, even for very successful movies.
However, in the 1970s this started to change. → Continue reading: Thoughts on the holiday and new year movie season
There are two reasons why I could not possibly let this one pass by without comment.
First, while the free market argument against anti-smoking laws (such matters should be decided by means of individual choice and the exercise of property rights) are both meritorious and rational, nowhere near enough attention is actually paid to questioning the decades-long propoganda war against tobacco. Far too many people have now accepted as fact that inhaling tobacco smoke is a uniquely dangerous activity.
However, it is my view that, while smoking tobacco is not entirely risk-free, the dangers of doing so have been grossly exaggerated.
It has taken some time (these things usually do) but now some people are prepared to start challenging this taboo:
As for smoking bans in “public places”, there are three reasons why they’re unjustified. First, pubs and clubs are actually private property. Second, bars don’t have to be smoky any more, with the air-cleaning technology available. But most importantly: no danger from “second-hand smoke” has ever been proven. Unlike most journalists, politicians and, regrettably, doctors, I’ve gone through all of the more than 40 studies. Only a few show any risk, and it’s statistically insignificant. There are higher risks from drinking milk, using mouthwash and keeping pet birds. I swear I’m not making this up! People who use this sort of “junk science” to stigmatise smokers and to nag and bully us out of our pleasures should be bloody well ashamed of themselves.
So they should. Regrettably, they appear to be all too bloody well pleased with themselves.
Secondly, the above broadside was angrily discharged by Joe Jackson, the Grammy Award-winning British singer and recording artist and that makes it doubly significant. Like everybody else I have grown weary of members of the entertainment industry seeking more attention than they could ever possibly deserve with some conformist, fashionable claptrap about ‘saving the planet’ or similar bunkum. So it is encouraging to note that not everyone in that industry has lost the capacity for critical thought.
My warmest congratulations to Joe Jackson. Twice!
[My thanks to Kevin McFarlane who posted this link to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.]
Ed Driscoll wrote a piece about evolving guitar technology in Friday’s installment of TechCentralStation, and after searching desperately for any thinly-veiled excuse to write about it, I stumbled across an angle.
With a lot of manufactured goods, their production tends to get ‘outsourced’ to the third world because (1) eventually everyone figures out how to do it and (2) capital markets can finance production almost anywhere on the globe. The only thing more predictable than this evolution is that politicians will never stop whining about it.
One trend that Driscoll does not pick up on is that this is also happening with guitars. Just as American streets are filling up with Korean-made autos (more Korean cars are sold here than German cars) the American guitar shops are filling up with Korean-made (and now Chinese-made) guitars. The Korean manufacturer Samick now accounts for almost half of the world’s guitar production. Even Gibson, best known for its estimable and pricey Les Paul (see photo below) is offering high value from its Epiphone series guitars (which Samick builds for them in Korea.)
If you have ever picked up a surviving ‘bargain’ guitar of the ’60s in a pawnshop or a secondhand guitar store — a Harmony, Kay, Eko, etc. — you would likely find cut-rate construction, weak intonation, mediocre playability and thin-sounding pickups. But today’s ‘bargain’ brands offer workmanship and playability that sometimes give the premium brands a run for their money. Danelectro, for example, makes hip, great-sounding guitars that are easy to play and can be had for about US$200.
To give you an idea as to how far this trend has already gone, I personally own a $40 guitar. I was ordering the Line 6 Guitar Port (the guitar-to-PC interface that Driscoll mentions in the article) when I discovered that the vendor was offering the device a la carte for $160 or packaged with an electric guitar for $200. My curiosity got the best of me – how bad can this $40 guitar be? – and I ordered the package deal. And you know what? The cheapo guitar is terrific. It does not hold its tune as well as my main Gibson, but it is easy to play and sounds good to boot.
Driscoll is right that we are not going to see a lot of major innovations in electric guitars anytime soon, in large part because the players themselves are somewhat resistant to change. (Even the most avant-garde noisemakers tend to prefer traditional guitar designs.) What we are seeing instead is global capitalism commoditizing electric guitars and making quality instruments more affordable than ever for a generation of young players.
The sustain, listen to it!
Well, lovers out there, St. Valentine’s Day is rapidly approaching. For those in the mood I heartily recommend the new CD by that wonderful young diva, Norah Jones, who’s debut album has already sold a reported 17 million copies worldwide.
Ms Jones’s success and background got me thinking on an important cultural point. We are led to believe, for example, that globalisation will lead to the extinction of local, unique cultures and the replacement of a sort of mushy global soup. And yet as the writer Tyler Cowen showed in a recent excellent book on the cultural riches possible via globalisation, the growing mix of different cultures possible on today’s world is making possible new directions in areas like music and art. Norah Jones, with her mixed ethnic background and her fusion of country and western, blues and soul music styles, is a living embodiment of what Cowen means.
And she is certainly rather easy on the eye, in case you wondered.
Update: The new album, “Feels Like Home”, which has a more overtly country feel, is excellent, in my view.
Friedrich Blowhard’s latest and pleasingly whimsical posting is called Visual Google. What he was doing was typing in words, albeit words with visual connotations and consequences. Hello “clouds”. Hello “sky”.
Says Friedrich:
It may be an exaggeration to describe a Google search as “found art” but I generally like the results at least as well as a John Cage musical composition.
Indeed.
But now here’s what I thought Friedrich might have been writing about. For some time now I’ve been wondering how you search the net for a picture, when all you have to go on is a bit of picture yourself. Suppose you have a rather blurry or unsatisfactory image, or perhaps a fragment of an image, or maybe a quite good drawing of an image, and you want the Giant Computer in the Sky to tell you what it is, and to show you a far, far better version of it … can you now do that? Are there truly visual search engines out there? And how about a visual description (“cubist woman, with transparent handkerchief in front of her face, crying, lots of yellow, red and blue”) but not the official title? Can search engines now – or will search engines ever be able to – respond intelligently to a query like that?
And how about music? Can you now, or will there ever be a day when you can, go “you know that thing that goes Dah dah de dah dit kabang swoosh …” and get five suggestions for the original track listed for you and ready to roll?
Robert E. Howard’s pulp fiction does not appear to be the stalwart stronghold of libertarianism that one would expect from an Ayn Rand or L. Neil Smith. Nevertheless, writing in Texas when the Wild West was a living memory, not a history book, Howard found plenty of material for his fantasies. The battles of the Aquilonians and the Picts were an odd Old World confection of cowboys and Indians.
The American values of small government and individual freedom have very little to do with Conan’s lax attitude towards property, usually appropriated after cleaving a few skulls. However, as King Of Aquilonia, Conan employed his own brand of statecraft, as he explains to Amalrus, King of Ophir, Strabonus, King of Koth and Tsotha the Wizard as he stands chained and defeated in their hall.
From ‘The Scarlet Citadel’ by Robert E. Howard.
I found Aquilonia in the grip of a pig like you – one who traced his genealogy for a thousand years. The land was torn with the wars of the barons and the people cried out under suppression and taxation. Today no Aquilonian noble dares maltreat the humblest of my subjects, and the taxes of my people are lighter than anywhere else in the world.
What of you? Your brother, Amalrus, hold the eastern half of your kingdom and defies you. And you, Strabonus, your soldiers are even now besieging castles of a dozen or more rebellious barons. The people of both your kingdoms are crushed into the earth by tyrannous taxes and levies, And you would loot mine -ha! Free my hands and I’ll varnish this floor with your brains!
May all those who raise taxes share the same fate!
On a long drive, this morning, I came across an interesting piece on Andrew Marr’s Start the Week programme on BBC Radio Four, a radio station I still cannot quite give up. The thrust of the piece was that free market producers in London’s West End are creating shockingly ‘commercial’ and ‘unoriginal’ shows, and that something should be done about it to make life more interesting for London’s chattering classes. → Continue reading: Krapp’s last government intervention
Just a short posting to say that our man Jeremy Clarkson has been doing a series of shows on BBC2 TV entitled Inventions That Changed The World, and doing them very well, to judge by last night’s episode, which was about The Computer. He was particularly interesting about Tommy Flowers, the man who built the “Colossus” computer, which used valves, and which cracked German codes at Bletchley Park during World War 2. Clarkson also reckoned that Charles Babbage had done pretty well and deserved better backing for his “difference engine”. Babbage never got it built, but, said Clarkson, some techies recently did build Babbage’s machine, and it worked.
But my real point is not how well Clarkson said that Flowers, Babbage and their ilk did with their computers. Rather I want to emphasise how well Clarkson himself did with his TV show.
I missed the first one, which was about The Gun, and I must be very bad at googling because I was unable to find much in the way of blogosphere comment on that show, which must be wrong. But if I can, I will watch later ones in this series, on such things as The Jet, and The Telephone.
For many years now, I’ve been deeply depressed at the unwillingness of TV people, and showbiz people generally, to take technology and technological history seriously. The only history that really seems to fascinate these people is their own. Jeremy Clarkson, for all his flippancy, does take technology and its history very seriously. And he uses that rather over-emphatic style of his, which can get on the nerves when he is merely waffling frivolously about cars, to emphasise truly important points. Thus, of Babbage’s restored difference engine he paused dramatically before saying, with heavy emphasis, that … “it worked”, which is fair enough since that is after all the important point.
So, Clarkson – the man the lefties all hate with a passion, because he makes so little secret of hating them – is doing very well on the telly. That Brunel show really seems to be leading somewhere.
There is a story in today’s Guardian about a new kind of musical gizmo, the sinfonia, which is striking terror into the hearts of West End theatre musicians:
Theatre musicians held opening talks last night with the millionaire impresario Sir Cameron Mackintosh in what they suspect may be a battle for survival against his plan to introduce an electronic “magic box” in place of part of the orchestra for musicals.
Champions of the device, called the Sinfonia, maintain that it “gives more bangs for the buck” than musicians. Musicians say it “steals jobs and cheats audiences”.
First reports made it sound to me like a glorified backing tape. That really would be creepy, with the conductor having to keep time with a predetermined tempo, with a predetermined performance in fact.
However the Sinfonia does seem to be a bona fide musical instrument:
The Sinfonia resembles a synthesiser but consists of two powerful computers and keyboards. It was developed by two professors of music technology.
Older versions, presumably, of that music geek in Fame who played Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (I think it was) all on his own at his high-tech keyboard.
Using a keyboard, the operator controls the instrumental output while watching the conductor’s baton on video.
Virtual orchestras were a factor in a recent Broadway strike. This led to compromise on a minimum of 19-26 musicians for each production.
It occurred to me while reading the story that if costs can be reduced, maybe it will become possible to put on more musicals, thereby creating as many jobs for musicians as ever, and many more for singers and dancers. But the Musicians’ Union cares not for such speculations, and the union-friendly Guardian man ends his piece not with such economic optimism but with this decidedly menacing final sentence:
Last night the Musicians’ Union said it understood there were no trained Sinfonia operators in Britain.
Expect it soon, a remake of that old Kazan classic, this time called In the Orchestra Pit, with the guy in the Brando part now saying: “I could have been a concert pianist.”
U.S.-based music download business Napster, which is now a paid-for service after its chastening battles in the law courts against the music companies, is extending its services to European customers, according to this report. Well, when it comes to stirring up a hornet’s nest of controversy, few subjects generate more angry buzzes than the case for or against the right to download music on the net, in my experience.
If the record companies ever thought that Napster would vanish without trace, they were deluding themselves. Personally, while I have my questions about the intellectual property right aspects to Napster-style downloading technology, there is no doubt that it has thrown traditional business models into the dustbin. But does it mean the death of music recordings, orchestras, book authors and film-makers? I don’t really think so.
As a related point, there is an interesting article here on the website of science fiction publishing house Jim Baen, making a good point about how downloading can, in the medium to long run, raise rather than cut book sales. I suppose that the argument works for music and possibly films as well.
I have no time to expand, because I’m about to go out and about for the rest of the day, but just to say that this, by Julia Magnet for City Journal, is a terrific piece, about the great American movie maker (and about to be novelist, I read somewhere on my googlings for this) Whit Stillman. I adore his movies, especially Metropolitan, but the other two also. (Too bad they are still not yet available on DVD.)
Incidentally, my tastes in Stillman are shared in my corner of the blogosphere. See Patrick Crozier, and Stephen Pollard, who also links admiringly to the Magnet piece.
I won’t comment at length about Stillman, but I will just rattle off a few thoughts about why a devout libertarian like me adores the work of a deeply conservative critic of recent non-judgemental, post-modern, sexually liberated trends in bourgeois behaviour and thinking.
I am conservative in my tastes, in art, etiquette, manners (at least in aspiration), morals (ditto), drug use (for real – I never inhaled because I never touched it – too scary – the case for legalising drugs cannot be that they are harmless). It is merely that I am profoundly anti-conservative in politics, if by this is meant the imposition of my – superior and judgemental – tastes and opinions upon others. Political compulsion corrupts, and should always be regarded with suspicion, especially when what is being compelled is – to start with – genuinely virtuous and admirable. Why? Because then that which is genuinely virtuous and admirable will be corrupted, which is clearly far worse then when something silly and meretricious and wrong-headed is imposed, and corrupted. (That imposing something silly will probably do more immediate harm is true, but that is a different kind of argument to the one I just made.)
I believe that a Stillmanian attitude to social life will eventually win through in the free market of ideas and of institutions. I don’t believe that it has any chance in a world of politically imposed good manners.
That is the kind of conservative I am and the kind of libertarian I am. If libertarianism means assembling a panty collection from one’s sexual conquests and boasting about it, or in saying the first thoughtless thing that comes into your head no matter how hurtful, or in abandoning one’s children for the sake of personal liberation and pretending that one is doing them a favour, then to hell with libertarianism – that is to say with “libertinism”. It is just that the way to spread ideas like mine is to spread them by following one of them, which is not to force people to do things or think things against their will. It won’t work. Be eloquent. Don’t hit people. Argue with them, politely. Take a stand, but try not to be hurtful. Use words.
To put it another way: freedom creates civil society. Political compulsion destroys it.
Commenters please be kind, this was written in rather a hurry. Postings here have been a little thin lately, and I judged that something hasty, about and provoked by the thoughts and movies of Whit Stillman, would be better than nothing. I hope that at least some of you agree. For the kind of thing I would like to have managed, read the Julia Magnet piece.
My thanks to Tim Evans for drawing it to my attention with an email.
There’s a terrific Steyn piece to be read here. I’m not sure if I could have read it sooner, without purchasing the Atlantic Monthly in paper form but I am delighted to have read it now.
Final two paragraphs:
Amid the herd-like moral poseurs, Kazan was always temperamentally an outsider, and his work benefited after he became one in a more formal sense. But, both before and after, his best productions concern themselves with a common question: the point at which you’re obliged to break with your own – your union, your class, your group, or, in Kazan’s case, your Group. The 1947 Oscar-winner Gentleman’s Agreement strikes most contemporary observers as very tame, square Kazan. But, in a curious way, that’s the point. When you start watching and you realize it’s an issue movie “about” anti-semitism, you expect it to get ugly, to show us Jew-bashing in the schoolyard, and vile language about kikes. But it stays up the genteel end with dinner party embarrassments, restricted resort hotels, an understanding about the sort of person one sells one’s property to. Dorothy McGuire and her Connecticut friends aren’t bad people, but in their world, as much as on Johnny Friendly’s waterfront, people conform: they turn a blind eye to the Jew-disparaging joke, they discreetly avoid confronting the truth about the hotel’s admission policies, and, as Gregory Peck comes to understand, they’re the respectable face of what at the sharp end means pogroms and genocide.
That’s what all those Hollywood and Broadway Communists did. They were the polite front of an ideology that led to mass murder, and they expected Kazan to honour their gentleman’s agreement. In those polite house parties Gregory Peck goes to in Kazan’s movie, it’s rather boorish and tedious to become too exercised about anti-semitism. And likewise, at gatherings in the arts, it’s boorish and tedious to become too exercised about Communism – no matter how many faraway, foreign, unglamorous people it kills. Elia Kazan was on the right side of history. His enemies line up with the apologists for thugs and tyrants. Whose reputation would you bet on in the long run?
Well I surely hope that that last rhetorical non-question is correct, and anyway, even if it isn’t, merely agreeing with posterity is not the point. The point is being morally right now, and if posterity is wrong, so much the worse for posterity. That aside, this is the kind of piece that makes me want Mark Steyn to carry on carrying on for just as long as he can manage it. Morally he says all the right things here, and he is obviously so well informed about the artistic issues that no semi-philistine from Hollywood would dare to play the philistine card. Of such pieces are ideological victories fashioned. For as long as there are anti-anti-communists in business, then for so long should they be lambasted until anyone they might influence gets the point.
I am very proud of my little contribution to the anti-anti-anti-communist genre, a piece called Why I Support The Contras. My one regret about this is that it is available in pdf form only, as yet. (I will correct this Real Soon Now.) And now, like Johnathan Pearce in the previous posting, I say, never forget what Communism did and what its disgustingly self-righteous stooges in the West are still retrospectively fronting for.
This (it seems I can read at least quite a lot of Atlantic Monthly on line) makes the same point.
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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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