Category: Film
Hollywood opposes betting markets on film revenue
While the industry’s opposing comments were not yet final on Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Pisano and others said they were expected to cite a host of potential problems. Those include the risk of market manipulation in the rumor-fueled film world, conflicts of interest among studio employees and myriad contractors who might bet with or against their own films, the possibility that box-office performance would be hurt by short-sellers, difficulty in getting or holding screens for films if trading activity indicated weakness and the need for costly internal monitoring to block insider trades.
Among the potential abuses, the studios contend, is that a speculator might leak an early version of a film to the Internet and then profit from its subsequent poor performance at the box office.
The full story is here. I suspect that once you cut past the rhetoric the most important factor on that list is: "difficulty in getting or holding screens for films if trading activity indicated weakness…"
The recorded music industry has collapsed for a number of reasons, but one is that pre-purchase web listening helps consumers avoid songs and albums they don't really want to buy. There are fewer mistaken music purchases today than in say 1986 but of course that also means fewer music purchases. That's good for consumer welfare, even if it's not always good for the music corporations and artists. If the same trend came to the movie sector, many current business models would prove unsustainable. As it currently stands, previews often try to trick audiences rather than enlighten them; sampling a pre-purchase MP3 file in contrast can only enlighten you.
Counterintuitively, introduction of the betting markets could make movies worse in quality (relative to my tastes at least), by inducing producers to focus on making "the sure thing," especially if betting on the movie starts very early. (Keep in mind that the fixed costs of using theaters may require a minimum level of market interest above some threshold.) I don't so much mind bad movies because I simply walk out of them, so I prefer a higher variance in quality than may be socially optimal.
So much of our cultural industries have been built on consumer mistakes and those days are coming to an end, rapidly.
The iPad
Could this be the medium through which the fabled convergence finally occurs?
Most of all, think of it as a substitute for your TV.
It has the all-important quality of allowing you to bend your head and body as you wish (more or less), as you use it. By bringing it closer or further, you control the "real size" of the iPad, so don't fixate on whether it appears "too big" or "too small."
The pages turn faster than those of Kindle. The other functions are also extremely quick and the battery feels eternal.
So far my main complaint is how it uses "auto-correct" to turn "gmu" into "gum."
While I will bring it on some trips, most of all it feels too valuable to take very far from the house.
On YouTube I watched Chet Atkins, Sonny Rollins, and Angela Hewitt.
Note all the categories on this short post!
The Seen and the Unseen in Movies
Loyal reader Lewis Lehe writes to ask about how economics is explained in popular media.
Are there any films/videos/pieces of visual media that show "the unseen" well? Films can only depict a few characters or places, so they tend to underweight benefits that are spread across large groups. Roger and Me is a fine example: we can see the devastation of Flint, but it would be difficult to see the gains from comparative advantage–i.e. returns to shareholders, slightly cheaper cars for consumers and so forth…
If there are no films that do this well, what ways could a filmmaker remedy these imbalances?
Larry Ribstein who has written extensively on economics in the movies notes:
The closest to what you're looking for in a movie speech is Larry the
Liquidator's speech (Danny De Vito) to the shareholders in Other
People's Money, in which he explains why their "dead" company should be
liquidated, despite the immediate loss of jobs, and the money put to
work creating more viable jobs.
There are films and television shows which convey the idea of the invisible hand but unfortunately they are not much about benefits. I am thinking, for example, of The Wire, which uses character but in the final analysis is about how character is dominated by the larger forces of supply, demand, and money. In The Wire drug dealers come and go but the drug market is forever. The Wire also shows how money and markets connect and intertwine white and black, rich and poor, criminal and police in a grand web that none of them truly comprehends–a product of human action but not of human design. (Traffic, the movie and miniseries, shows in a similar way how drug markets connect the high and the low in both the United States and Mexico.)
It's not comforting that in some ways the best vision of how markets work comes from portrayals of the drug market but The Wire does show how a filmmaker could tell the story of the seen and the unseen and still make a successful work of art.
Questions that are rarely asked: why so many retired cops?
JIm Crozier, a loyal MR reader, asks:
Why do cop movies and TV shows so often begin with an older (and often jaded) officer that is just about to retire? It is quite astounding how often this unrealistic plot trick is employed, and the psychological grounding seems weak at best.
I don't have the viewing experience to give you an evidence-based response. I would think the answer might lie in marginal utility theory plus behavioral economics. Perhaps all his life that officer has failed to achieve some desired end, such as catching a criminal, bringing an evil politician to justice, reforming the corrupt police force, or whatever. If the officer is near retirement, we know we are watching a very dramatic story which will define the life and career of that officer for ever and ever. It is harder for the viewer to have the same feeling if the officer has four years, three months remaining on the force. Failure would not mean final failure.
On the behavioral front, our impressions of experiences, and the memories we form, very often depend on what comes last. Judges are more impressed by the group which sings last in the Eurovision contest, even though it is randomized. The viewer thus implicitly knows that the cop really cares about the final segment of his or her career, reinforcing the point about decisiveness and marginal utility.
Viewers, can you do better?
The pre-existing conditions of Nicole Kidman
Kidman injured her knee during the filming of Moulin Rouge in Australia in 2000, resulting in a $3 million insurance loss, and then quit Panic Room in 2001, leading to the insurer having to pay some $7 million for the replacement actress (Jodie Foster). As a result, her public and critical acclaim notwithstanding, Miramax was initially unable to get insurance on her for its film Cold Mountain, which had a budget approaching $100 million. From the perspective of the insurer, Fireman's Fund, she was a definite risk. As an insurance executive noted in an email, "…the fact remains that the doctor we sent her to for her examination noted swelling in the knee." The executive goes on: "The other major fact that can't be changed is our paying three claims for this actress's knees over the years."
To get the necessary policy from Fireman's Fund, Kidman agreed to put $1 million of her own salary in an escrow account that would be forfeited if she failed to maintain the production schedule, and she agreed to use a stunt double for all scenes that the insurer considered potentially threatening to her knee. In addition, the co-producer, Lakeshore Entertainment, added another $500,000 to the escrow account…Having made the all-important move from borderline uninsurable to borderline insurable, she could make movies again. No matter how great their acting skills and box office drawing power, stars cannot get lead roles if they are uninsurable. Great acting skills and box office drawing may make the star, but insurance is what it takes to make the movie.
That's from the new and noteworthy The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies, by Edward Jay Epstein. You can buy it new, in paperback, for only $11.
Ebert’s Voice
Esquire has an moving profile of Roger Ebert who has lost his lower jaw and ability to speak to cancer. I found this paragraph about resurrecting a lost voice–almost ala Jurassic Park–to be compelling:
Ebert is waiting for a Scottish company called CereProc to give him
some of his former voice back. He found it on the Internet, where he
spends a lot of his time. CereProc tailors text-to-speech software for
voiceless customers so that they don't all have to sound like Stephen
Hawking. They have catalog voices – Heather, Katherine, Sarah, and Sue
– with regional Scottish accents, but they will also custom-build
software for clients who had the foresight to record their voices at
length before they lost them. Ebert spent all those years on TV, and he
also recorded four or five DVD commentaries in crystal-clear digital
audio….CereProc is mining
Ebert's TV tapes and DVD commentaries for those words, and the words it
cannot find, it will piece together syllable by syllable. When CereProc
finishes its work, Roger Ebert won't sound exactly like Roger Ebert
again, but he will sound more like him than Alex [the generic voice] does. There might be
moments, when he calls for Chaz from another room or tells her that he
loves her and says goodnight – he's a night owl; she prefers mornings –
when they both might be able to close their eyes and pretend that
everything is as it was.
I have fond memories of listening to Ebert teach the classics like Citizen Kane, Sunset Boulevard and Vertigo during lazy summer seminars at the Virginia film festival many years ago.
Surrogates
Surrogates, the Bruce Willis movie, disappeared quickly but it was better than I expected, a B- (perhaps they should have called it Avatars). Worth a Netflix rental if you enjoy science fiction. Having said that, what I most liked about Surrogates was that it's clear exactly where it went wrong. What follows has no spoilers but it won't make a lot of sense unless you have seen the movie.
In the final second of the climax the key choice of the hero is revealed, even though the plot in no way requires this revelation. It would have been far better to have left the choice ambiguous (think Doubt, Memento and, of course, Blade Runner). Indeed, the script should have been written backwards from the ambiguous choice to all the earlier scenes which justify that ambiguity. (Some of this material is already in the movie but without the ambiguity of the choice it doesn't resonate, e.g. surrogacy would have saved the son but from early on the Willis character is skeptical of surrogacy thus the character's history provides a reason for him to be world weary but it doesn't drive tension as it should.)
The movie should also have been darker (bizarrely, many scenes take place in brightly lit exteriors). The best scene is the surrogate "drug" party where the noir element of surface and underlying reality–of things not being what they seem–does come through. Inexplicably, however, the wife does not partake even though we later learn this would have mirrored her true existence.
For the choices not taken, Surrogates would be a excellent movie to study in film school.
What if famous filmmakers directed the Super Bowl?
Watch it here, this is very funny. The Godard mock is my favorite. I thank Yana for the pointer.
Temple Grandin’s theories on autism
As you probably know, the Temple Grandin biopic, starring Claire Danes, is showing this Saturday evening. Here is Temple on the movie. Grandin has done a great deal to benefit animals, by designing more humane slaughterhouses, stockyards, and encouraging other innovations. She also has promoted the idea of talented autistics and helped raise that notion to a very high profile. I have enormous respect for what she has done and I would gladly see her win a Nobel Prize if the appropriate category for such a prize existed.
That said, researchers disagree with Grandin's theories on autism in a number of ways and my own reading leads me to side with the researchers on some issues. Many non-autistics defer to Grandin on autism because of her life story, her remarkable achievements, and yes because of her autism. I thought it would be useful to offer a more skeptical view of a few of her claims:
1. Autistic individuals do not in general "think in pictures," though some autistics offer this self-description. Grandin repeatedly refers to herself in this context. I don't read her as claiming this tendency is universal or even the general rule, but the disclaimers aren't as evident as I would like them to be.
2. There is little evidence to support her view that autistics "think like animals." Here is one published critique of her theory: "We argue that the extraordinary cognitive feats shown by some animal species can be better understood as adaptive specialisations that bear little, if any, relationship to the unusual skills shown by savants." You'll find a response by Grandin at that same link. I'm not totally on board with the critique either (how well do we understand savants anyway?), but at the very least Grandin's claim is an unsupported hypothesis.
3. Grandin tends to brusquely classify autistic children into different groups. She will speak of "the nerds who will do just fine" (see the eBook linked to below) as opposed to the "severely autistic," who require that someone take control of their lives and pound a bit of the autism out of them. There's a great deal of diversity among autistics, and autistic outcomes, but I don't see that as the most useful way of expressing those differences. Autism diagnoses are often unstable at young ages, there is not any useful or commonly accepted measure of "autistic severity," her description perpetuates stereotypes, and Grandin herself as a child would have met criteria for "severely autistic" and yet she did fine through parental love and attention, which helped her realize rather than overturn her basic nature. That's not even a complete list of my worries on this point; for more see my Create Your Own Economy.
4. Grandin supports some varieties of intensive behavioral therapy for autistics. Many research papers support those same therapies but those papers do not generally conduct an RCT and furthermore many of the said researchers have a commercial stake in what they are studying and promoting. In my view we don't know "what works" but my (non-RCT-tested) opinion is that giving autistic children a lot of fun things to do — fun by their standards — and a lot of information to study and manipulate, gives the best chance of good outcomes. (In any case "spontaneous improvement" is considerable, so anecdotally many therapies will appear to work when they do not; nor is there a common control for placebos.) Many of the behavioral therapies seem quite oppressive to me and if we don't know they work I am worried that they are being overpromoted. Grandin has in some ways the intellectual temperament of an engineer and I am worried that she has not absorbed the lessons of Hayek's The Counterrevolution of Science.
5. Grandin refers to herself as more interested in tangible results and less interested in emotions. She is entitled to that self-description, but it is worth noting that most individuals in the "autism community" would not consider this a good presentation of their attitude toward emotions.
There is a recent eBook (selling for only $4.00), consisting of a dialogue between myself and Grandin, mostly on autism and talented autistics but not just. For instance we also talk about our favorite TV shows, including a discussion of Lost, and there is a segment on science fiction and the future of humanity. I try to draw her out on autism, cognitive anthromorphizing, and attitudes toward religion, but she is reluctant to offer her opinions on that important topic. I would describe the eBook as a good introduction to her thought on autism and society, while also giving an idea of how someone else (me) might differ from some of her basic attitudes.
French-Tasmanian betting markets in everything
Tasmanian millionaire David Walsh takes that speculation to a new level by buying the life of an artist. He has entered a unique arrangement to film an artist's entire life until he dies. The French artist Christian Boltanski will be filmed 24 hours a day in his Paris studio. The Herald Sun reports that the video will be streamed live to Walsh's $70 million Museum of Old and New Art once it opens in 2011. Boltanski will be paid a fee until he dies so the longer he lives, the better a deal it is for him. Boltanski is currently 65. Boltanski has called the deal a game, to win he must stay alive at least eight years. Walsh is essentially gambling that he won't. Filming began yesterday.
The full story is here and I thank N. Mehra for the pointer.
Assorted Movie Links
- Larry Ribstein on How Movies Created the Financial Crisis.
- A perceptive review of Avatar. The best graf:
…[T]he more blatant lesson of Avatar is not that American imperialism is bad, but that in fact it’s necessary. Sure there are some bad Americans–the ones with tanks ready to mercilessly kill the Na’vi population, but Jake is set up as the real embodiment of the American spirit. He learns Na’vi fighting tactics better than the Na’vi themselves, he takes the King’s daughter for his own, he becomes the only Na’vi warrior in centuries to tame this wild dragon bird thing. Even in someone else’s society the American is the chosen one. He’s going to come in, lead your army, fuck your princesses, and just generally save the day for you. Got it? This is how we do it.
- And finally. this is not a good way to open the NYSE.
Projects to ponder, and let’s drink a toast to fixed costs for once
Hans Larsson, the Canada Research Chair in Macro Evolution at
Montreal's McGill University, said he aims to develop dinosaur traits
that disappeared millions of years ago in birds.Larsson believes by flipping certain genetic levers during a chicken
embryo's development, he can reproduce the dinosaur anatomy, he told
AFP in an interview.Though still in its infancy, the research could eventually lead to
hatching live prehistoric animals, but Larsson said there are no plans
for that now, for ethical and practical reasons — a dinosaur hatchery
is "too large an enterprise."
The longer story is here and I thank Bookslut (one of my favorite blogs) for the pointer. Here is Larsson's home page.
The racial politics of *Avatar*
Chris Hayes pointed me to this article, with this good passage:
Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it's like to be a Na'vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode. Interestingly, Wikus in District 9 learns a very different lesson. He's becoming alien and he can't go back. He has no other choice but to live in the slums and eat catfood. And guess what? He really hates it. He helps his alien buddy to escape Earth solely because he's hoping the guy will come back in a few years with a "cure" for his alienness. When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it's only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and nobody will let you be a leader of anything.
I also enjoyed Ross Douthat's take.
Critique of *The Phantom Menace*
Despite some moments in poor taste, I thought this was one of the funniest productions I've seen, ever. It's the only 70-minute video I've ever watched through, if that gives you another measure. That said, I don't think he actually understands the movie he is criticizing. Nor does he see fit to mention which famous economist Palpatine most resembles.
I thank Scott Cunningham for the pointer.
Avatar
It was entertaining but I was expecting to be awed by at least one scene, as happened in Terminator, T2 and Titanic, and I was not. The plot is identical to that of Battle for Terra, right down to the "tree of life." Many scenes I felt like I had seen before. Here is the helicopter gunship scene from Apocalypse Now, here is the men in robot suits battle scene from Alien (and one of the Matrix movies), here are the sky islands from Castle in the Sky, here we have the Dances with Wolves scene(s). I am all for homage but this was pastiche.
The aliens were gorgeous, leggy, blue fashion models. Nice, but Star Trek did the green alien girl thing forty years ago. Personally, I like my aliens to be a little bit more well, alien. All the way to another planet just to find that the girls are blue and the horses have eight legs instead of four? Sad.
I insisted on seeing it in 3D but the effect was not revolutionary and there is still some eye strain. In the end I would have preferred 2D.
I was entertained but I was not enthralled.