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All of Hollywood is talking about this video. And the reason why is because of the growing phenomenon in this strike that the Big Media moguls keep talking out of both sides of their mouths. I’ve posted previously about how, one minute they’re using the media to plead that gross participants or deficit financing in the entertainment business is bleeding them dry, and the next minute they’re boasting to Wall Street about incredible earnings and the unlimited future of the Internet.
What the fuck?
Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
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This Lee Arnold guy makes a lot of sense.
“One minute they’re using the media to plead that gross participants or deficit financing in the entertainment business is bleeding them dry, and the next minute they’re boasting to Wall Street about incredible earnings and the unlimited future of the Internet.”
Sorta like how, one minute, the writers are saying they just want a piece of new media “profits”, and the next minute they are saying they won’t stand behind cost recoupment?
What portion of all these digital profits come from work written by WGA members? Directed by DGA members? Performed by SAG members?
Lee A Arnold is wise to the fact the studios fear they’ll go the way of the record companies because of the internet. But the studios have a small window of time now to “strengthen the good that remains.”
At this moment, if they strike a fair deal with the writers, they can maintain and may even thrive as the internet matures. But if they let this Civil War get much past Fort Sumter, they will lose the Old Paradigm of how movies get made in Hollywood forever to YouTubers, Google or whatever fills the void.
No one who fights over money is ever really fighting over just money — or so it is said. Writers are sick of the overall injustice of crafting charms on development exec’s charm bracelets. They are sick of playing slavey to Ol’ Mastuh.
Note to the moguls: set the slaves free before Gettysberg makes you Appomattox yourselves out of the entire studio system as it stands. Then spend some of the hundreds of millions of your own salaries to figure out how to use the Internet keep the motion picture business in business. Here is a clue for you — something Eisner told me and my dad in 1985 during the then nascent cable/vhs revolution: “Story will always be king.”
I think I have this logic figured out. If the shareholders are asking, the profits are in the billions. If the writers are asking, the profits are $0.00.
To me, the remaining mystery is what the hell happened to the federal mediator, and why can’t he make all sides sit down in a room and — through the magic of the media — take a look a the conflicting testimonies? And ask the AMPTP, “Which time were you lying?”
Mikey — Actually, in the Charlie Rose interview the Murdoch clip is taken from, he talks broadly about the Internet’s impact on all media — you’re right that the specific example he goes to after the “golden opportunity” line is MySpace, but he also talks about the potential for using News Corp.’s content online. And the Murdoch quote that Rose makes reference to is even more explicit about his intention to make money off selling content online. (From Murdoch, on the BBC’s Five Live in Jan. 2006: “I think we’re on the eve of a golden age for media, but all these wonderful inventions are nothing if you can not put something on them. You’ve got to have content and that’s what our business is, creating or reporting news and creating entertainment.” That, to me, sounds like the “golden age” he has in mind involves selling WGA members’ work on the Internet.)
The Rupert Murdoch interview was with Charlie Rose in February, 2007. In that comment, he was not talking about MySpace particularly, but as part of a digital revolution.
The quote out of context is a bit misleading, but it is clear in the interview that News Corp intends to use the internet to get content all over the world.
What I think this video really impeaches is the idea that they need to wait and see where the revenue will come from. They are very deep into developing online revenue streams, and to think they won’t figure it out for three years is proposterous.
They want a free ride now, and would demand it again later.
There are very few senior executives in any large corporation who didn’t get to their positions by lying, cheating, and throwing their co-workers and employees under the bus. The movie business is no different. It takes a certain ethical and moral flexibility to rise to the top of a large corporate ladder, regardless of industry. Once they rise to the top they feel entitled and they ultimately come to believe that their employees are greedy nuisances they’d rather not deal with. The few executives who don’t rise to the top through unethical practices usually get there through luck or good connections. There are exceptions, of course, but they are rare. Spend a year at any large corporation in the world and you’ll see the same kind of pathological behavior from senior executives. Why would the movie industry be any different?
I think even a lot of writers are confused about this. Residuals are not a share of profits. Residuals are not paid based on profits at all.
Residuals are a small fee for the use of the reproduction. It is a “manufacturing” cost. If you resell DVDs, you pay the people that made the disk, the package, the artwork, and the people that made what’s actually on the disk. Either for each one, or in bulk that accounts for every one you attempt to sell.
You are not allowed to attempt to make a profit on something without first paying for its “manufacture.” If you sell lamps, you don’t pay for the porcelain, wires, steel and labor AFTER you’ve made a profit. They are the cost of the attempt to make a profit.
Why do you think all businesses require investment? Because you have to risk money in order to make money.
Writers are not investors. They have no say in how the money is spent. That is why they bear no risk. Just like the people building the lamps don’t. That is why they don’t (on a MBA level) share in profits. And why they don’t care about cost recoupment.
Because THEY ARE THE COST.
You have to pay for the product before you can try to make a profit. And if every employer was allowed to skip labor costs for what they are selling, EVERYTHING would make profits. If they could get writers from Vietnam that could write scripts as well as they make shoes for Nike, THEY WOULD.
Duh.
not a writer wrote: when they say “digital,” it doesn’t mean just online video. It means any ads online, and I would wager that the bulk of those advertising dollars are from banner ads, not ads running in online video content.
What do you think drives people to the web sites to see the banner ads? Streaming shows. And those shows have both banner ads all around them and video commercials ambedded in them. Oh, yeah, and product placement in the actual content. Oh, and companies like Warner Bros. also sell you the Internet access to view their ads. And companies like Sony sell yo uthe computers to view their ads.
Enough apologizing for the poor studios. They are making BILLIONS off the writers’/actors’/directors’ creativity. They can pay a small percentage in salaries.
Sickening that you can watch them lie and still support them.
They have to raise money because of ballooning costs and star participations? So they hype the potential markets to potential investors?
just a thought from a cooler head
So they can raise money to cover rising production costs from the investment sector? To hype a new potential market because their profit margins are shrinking from profit participation, prints and ads costs and ballooning production costs? Because the DVD libraries have disappeared but for Disney?
just a thought
Instead of talking about purchasing air time for this video to be shown, how about lobbying/e-mailing cable news shows to show it while discussing the strike? Sometimes they love showing internet videos because it’s so groovy and hip and now. Maybe an Olbermann would play this. Hell, it’s under two mins. You could fit it into a segment on the strike in general.
Just a thought.
It seems that all parties in this conflict are certain about one thing: the future is online. So lets ignore the fact that below-the-line labor suffers most from this strike, and that paying writers for scripts and not for repurposing the products based on those scripts perhaps might be valid if you put writers on a payroll with benefits and so on (like the workers in lamp factories, paraphrasing “Jimmy”).
regarding the promises of the digital age, Lee Arnold made a reference to the importance of the “pipes” (you know, broadband bandwidth). That seems to be true – but I think may be ultimately misleading. The studios have gradually retreated from producing movies, instead focusing everything on marketing and distribution.
As internet is primarily an open P2P communications infrastructure, this completely disrupts the gatekeeper model in journalism (hence the panic in the news industry), or the bottleneck model in, for example, film and music.
In the short term, fighting off anyone who wants to share in online revenue is a solid business purpose (to please stock market analysists). but in the long run, it seems – and I may sound too hopeful here – that talent, creativity and innovation may be a more promising investment.
Assuming for a moment that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL (the “Fab Four”) will win the fight for Net neutrality, they and companies like them will be in control of distribution and access. producers and consumers of content – whether professional or amateur – will have to go through them. but they do not operate on the premise of gatekeeping – more on the level of forwarding, “gatewatching”, annotating, aggregating, and so on.
In other words: what will have lasting value, is compelling content. How it will get to whoever wants to consume it, is in the shortterm hugely important but in the long term tremendously irrelevant.
my 2 cents