Fleming, Mike
2010
Imagine’s “Transmedia Storytelling” Deal
Explains how Brian Grazer (huge Hollywood producer) signed a first-look deal with perhaps the first true Hollywood transmedia producers: Blacklight Transmedia.
Imagine’s “Transmedia Storytelling” Deal (11.06.2010)
Amiel, John
Amiel, J ~ A Director’s Perspective
“The history of Hollywood can be described in terms of who has held the power to get films made at any given time. Broadly speaking the key eras have been:
Hollywood increasingly caters for the young audience who can “open” the film by turning up in large numbers on the opening weekend. These films are star-driven: a handful of leading actors effectively determine which films get made.
Wicker, Heidi Sarah
Making a run for the border: should the United States stem runaway film and television production through tax and other financial incentives?
483
It is difficult to pinpoint “how many people are affected by runaway production because of the locomotive nature of the industry.”
“Entertainment executives counter the unions’ argument that the decline in production jobs is due to runaway production, saying that the decline is due to a decrease in the number of films made per year and other efforts to cut costs as above-the-line production costs rise while profit margins fall.”
483f
“Proponents of a petition filed with the Commerce Department in late 2001 supported regulations compelling tariffs equal to the amount of the Canadian subsidy of a particular film or television production to be paid in order for it to be distributed in the United States.”
484
“Other labor groups such as the MPAA, DGA, the International Alliance of Theatrical State Employees (IATSE), and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) opposed countervailing tariffs because a possible trade war could result in the loss of thousands of jobs.”
“The petition was withdrawn in January 2002 without prejudice.”
485
“One of the historical benefits of working with a union is that the producing company is assured a certain standard of work and experience, without having to bargain about the workers’ rates and benefits.”
486
“Co-productions are beneficial because they decrease the costs for all parties; foreign entities view them as a “vehicle for collaboration with Americans who excel in technical and creative expertise” and, as a result, better equip them to compete with Hollywood.”
“partnerships generally permit filmmakers greater creative control than if a major studio were the backer of the film or program.”
“From the corporate point-of-view, producing in the United States is no longer cost efficient.”
486f
“While a higher percentage of Canadian workers are unionized than their United States counterparts, the average wage for below-the-line workers is less than in the United States. Further, the “costs related to the acquisition and production of a movie prior to its release,” so-called “negative costs,” doubled between 1990 and 1999, as did the average distribution costs. Entertainment conglomerates dealt with this reality in the 1990s via vertical integration, layoffs, co-productions and other joint ventures, and by conducting more aggressive market research prior to production and distribution.”
487
“”We don’t want to do a TV show in Canada called ‘Pasadena,’ but we can’t justify to our parent company the extra $200,000 per episode it costs to shoot here.”"
“Production revenues in British Columbia, where the popular production city of Vancouver is located, were about $1.2 billion in 2000, compared to $43 billion in revenue for California, furthering the Canadians’ argument that their industry is infinitesimal compared to that of the United States.”
491
“The concept of tax credits for labor expenditures has been gaining support amongst legislators and within the entertainment industry.”
“Ever since the 1920s [...] the entertainment industry has been largely self-regulated.”
495
“North Carolina has consistently ranked as the third highest production center in the country since the mid-1980s.”
498
“From the signing of the Declaration of Independence, capitalism has ruled the federal government’s approach to the arts.”
“The U.S. government should be cautious in its approach, however, not to favor independent or television productions over high-budget feature films, since in the aggregate, high-budget productions do the most damage when they flee U.S. shores. Federal involvement through retraining and displaced worker assistance programs is the least intrusive option.”
“Accepting that runaway production will occur and dealing with the consequences may be a more prudent approach than trying to direct the economics of the entertainment industry from the outset of production.”
499
“In a competitive international marketplace it is neither realistic nor economically practical to completely halt runaway production.“
Cubitt, Sean
2004
Elaborates on the types of cinema that exist in the western world (mostly Hollywood)
8
“”The urges to disorder and totality of the competing modernities of the 1920s, dreams/projections then, seek generalization, institutionalization in the mid-1930s. They seek to control the social gaze—in short, to govern.”"
15f
“”an aesthetic of astonishment,” but also that the subjectivity it promoted was not only flexible and mobile but also significantly social. The dynamism of the cinematograph as event, rather than narrative, induces its spectators not to anchor themselves as the narrated objects of a screen performance, but to mobilize themselves as hectic and excited participants in an event that leads them not to contemplation but to sharing. It is a brief moment of innocence before the regulation of cinema into an industrial formation, an Eden from which the stories of good and evil would soon eject it. But it is vital to an understanding of cinema’s utopian capabilities that we acknowledge how, in this formative instant, it was able to activate rather than absorb its audiences.”
16
“the Lumière cinematograph was anchored not in literary or popular genres of the novel and theater but in the crowd. Social, public, and active, the event of cinema articulated the modernization of urban experience.”
18f
“[The other scenes of the Lumières] are resolutely scenes of everyday life in the modern world among the bourgeoisie, showing their work and their leisure, with a strong emphasis on technological achievements.”
19
“Alternatively, in a familiar if by now largely discredited argument, we might perhaps be tempted to see the Lumières as the fathers not of film but of documentary.”
23
“Film not only opposes the presumption of a “natural” vision that sees the “real” world as an assemblage of objects: it proposes another, synthetic vision.”
38
“Narrative, then, is not an essential quality of film, but only a potential and secondary quality arising from the production of time in the differentiation within and between frames.”
39
“By the same token, the cinematic event, as a process of perpetual change, does not depend on a prior external world.”
46
“The cyborg process that transforms living labor into fixed technologies allows the skills of all the dead to participate in the creativity of the present.” Black Book film idea
“The stolen labor of those lost, anonymous artisans comes back to life when the frame itself begins to move.”
66
“film’s visual coherence depends on suturing light, eye, and brain, optics, physiology, and psyche”
67
“The ending of the well-made film structures everything that went before.”
79
“if it is the case that a film is a product of social forces, then film scholarship cannot ignore the critical importance of individuation as a result of social process, however unwanted or illusory.”
“”If the artist’s work is to reach beyond his own contingency, then he must in return pay the price that, in contrast to the discursively thinking person, he cannot transcend himself and the objectively established boundaries”
“the passage through the individual author actually strengthens the claims of art to communicate the social, something it could not do if it were free of the individuation that so deeply marks contemporary society.”"
“”every idiosyncracy lives from collective forces of which it is unconscious”"
83
“Where the ancients disputed the necessity of ontegeny with theories of autocthony and parthenogenesis, since the birth of cinema we moderns maneuver at the unclear frontier between human and machine.”
85
“The idiosyncracy of the line as a trace of its maker and the idiosyncracy of infinitesimally graduated differences in interpretation are the social grounds on which cinema moves from the presentation of objects to the stimulation of concepts.”
97
“At some point in the near future when historians recognize that the photomechanical cinema is a brief interlude in the history of the animated image, representation will become, like narrative, a subcode of interpretation rather than an essence of motion pictures.” Because everything will be digital and everybody will be empowered to manipulate content if he wants to, the motion picture will not (and already isn’t) a representation of truth. If at all, it represents an idea of the creator(s), but not reality. Lessig’s focus on remix.
100
“A norm offers itself as a model for subsequent makers, a stable structure that can hold good for decades, like the three-minute pop song, or longer, like the Petrarchan sonnet. Norms legitimate particular practices and sanction deviations.” Many motion picture norms are being challenged at the moment!
“The double contingency of cinematic norms is indeed a function, as Parsons argued, of relations between interlocutors.”
101f
Definition Total Film:
“Total film aspires to bring to the audience a diegesis that can be understood, mentally appropriated, totally. By making the world a theme, it calls the audience to possess it as a whole, and to identify their thought with the world imaged on screen rather than with individual figures, though often enough a protagonist, Christ or Tom Cruise, will provide the rhetorical gateway through which absolute possession can be depicted.”
105
“Their fear was partly that the scale of investment required to wire hundreds of thousands of cinemas worldwide, coincident with global economic depression, would cause studios to go for the safest and most standardized forms of entertainment.”
110
“”the montage combination of a series of segments is not interpreted by the mind as a certain sequence of details, but as a certain sequence of whole scenes—and scenes, moreover, which are not depicted but arise within the mind in image form”"
114
“Eisenstein’s challenge in the years after the 1928 “Statement” is no longer to invent a dialectical form of cinema in which sound and image would, through their conflicts, produce an art form of an entirely new kind. Instead, total cinema must face the necessity of their coexistence and act as if with the knowledge that their struggle has already been resolved. At this stage, totality has been achieved by nominating music as the pinnacle of the sonorous hierarchy and the graphic, compositional line as the governor of the visual, thus finding in the analogy between the moving lines of melody and of graphical cinema the core of a newly harmonious and whole filmmaking practice.”
119f
“In some of his earliest writings Eisenstein had already decried narrative along with the star system and the individualist ethos of Hollywood. We should not be surprised that a director who once dreamed of making a film of Marx’s Capital should produce a film that takes the form of a well-formed thesis rather than a well-made play.”
129
“Sixty years later, the montage of effects has become the montage of affects, and total cinema serves no longer the needs of the anti-Nazi struggle, but the perverse desire for the simulacrum that permeates the contemporary blockbuster.”
143
“television, with its ability to transmit live, had usurped the critical priority of cinema. [...] broadcasting usurped the documentary role of cinema”
143f
“In any film, the diegetic world is often more cogent, more coherent than the everyday. When the film is a fiction, the diegesis will also be more symmetrical, more logical, and more just than we know our world of experience to be. As a result, something radically unstable filters into realist narrative diegesis, a competition between the demands of verisimilitude and those of formal elegance.”
149
“So realism runs between two risks.” “realism is “concerned to make cinema the asymptote of reality—but in order that it should ultimately be life itself that becomes spectacle, in order that life might in this perfect mirror be poetry, be the self into which film finally changes it.”" “”realism in art can only be achieved in one way—through artifice”, a “necessary illusion,” but one that “quickly induces a loss of awareness of the reality itself, which becomes identified in the mind of the spectator with its cinematographic expression”"
160
“Hollywood was trying, in the later 1930s, to image success.”
“Some studios did achieve something akin to a stable house style. The characteristic sound libraries built up by individual studios clearly marked their products with an authorial stamp.”
“Though RKO is often pointed out as uncharacteristic in that there was no single genre or stylistic language that singled out its product, its lack of house style and apparent disinterest in searching for one is typical of classicism.”
161f
“Films enact rather than depict social change, especially the evolution of media and communications technologies.”
162
“RKO’s task in the 1930s was to make new objects, to be ahead of the crowd while still in touch with them. It wanted to change cinema, not the world. RKO, like Hollywood in general, inherited a rapidly evolving consumer in the wake of the Jazz Age and the Depression, but it was happier following trends than assuming ideological leadership.” RKO was a bit like the first entarch might be soon.
163 footnote 2
“Sound-on-film technologies were seen as an extension of these existing technologies.” The technology was patented and hindered innovation. Freed from these hurdles sound evolved as an integral part of motion pictures, before it was just an extension. Today’s new technologies are used as extensions as well, but need to become integral parts of a bigger whole.
163
RKO (?): “Formed out of the combined strengths of the Film Booking Office (a small studio established by Joseph Kennedy) together with RCA (the radio division of General Electric) and the Keith-Albee-Orpheum chain, prime sites for film release in major cities, Radio-Keith-Orpheum had interests in telephones and telegraphy, music publishing and recording, the vaudeville circuit, and the NBC chain of radio stations. Not surprisingly, the company turned to the musical.”
“Flying’s [the movie Flying Down to Rio] most elaborate dance number is the Carioca, and one can imagine RKO’s flagship theater, the 6200-seat Radio City Music Hall, opened in 1932, encouraging visitors to take it up as the latest dance craze.”
164f
“Today, films take on postcinematic lives on television, cable, video, and DVD, and so live longer than the time it takes to make them, with important implications for their stylistics. But in the heyday of the Hollywood system, production was long and distribution mercilessly short. To exist in the arc light for those few burning hours lent the films something of their passionate innocence, their innocent criminality, the ease with which they evoked and dismissed poverty, disease, prostitution, addiction, and shame. Where Eisenstein sought to rouse in the name of the nation and Renoir bowed to the preeminence of the world, Hollywood had nothing to present but its own illusion. Its only value, the ground of its existence, was entertainment. Hence the mayfly brilliance of its films; hence their mayfly-brief life.”
166
“Altman and Williams both argue that recorded sound doesn’t reproduce a real world: it represents it. But the Hollywood soundtrack doesn’t even represent the world: it orchestrates a diegesis.”
169
“Sobchack’s point, or a part of it, is that we never see with any other than our own eyes save when we see through the eyes of the cinematic apparatus itself.” Not sure I understand.
183
“Narrative depends on symmetry-breaking: ultimately, there is narrative because the universe is expanding.”
“Through these distinctions and differentiations established by breaking the pure symmetry of zero, the chaos of becoming can be bound into stability.” Not sure I understand.
184
“repetition is primordial, and things or events repeat themselves as ever-renewed copies of an original that does not exist” In the end there are but a few original stories.
192
“With Leone’s 1960s Western cycle (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West), the European vision returned to the U.S. market in hybrid form: an Italian film based on a Japanese original made in Spain with German money and a Californian star.”
210f
“In its competition with television, its pursuit of adult themes and expanded horizons, greater explicitation and more persuasive spectacle, cinema in the 1960s abandoned classical restraint in favor of a televisualization of the profilmic. This is how time is metamorphosed in the new Hollywood, in accordance with its rival, sister medium.”
218
“The Wagnerian ambition for cinema to become a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total multimedia experience, has not been lost: it has been dispersed. The film offers only one part of an experience, the second part of which is provided by the soundtrack, promoted as a discrete item.”
218f
“Toys, computer games, fan fiction and Web sites, novelizations, comics, soundtrack and concept albums, fashion accessories, and collectibles, many of them manufactured by wings of the same horizontally integrated corporation, extended the reach of the event film while reducing the cinema premiere to the status of product launch for a raft of brands on a synchronized lifestyle marketing strategy.” -> entarch
242
“Contemporary cinema is more ambitious than contemporary philosophy, but neither undertakes to understand the universe any longer.”
247
“It is not, then, that the world has become simulation, but that cinema events have become spectacle, addressing atomized audiences intrapersonally, turning their gaze inward as the supposed triumph of consumerism decays into poverty, injustice, and ecological catastrophe.”
279
“What makes moving pictures move, as both affective and narrative devices, is conflict. Resolution of conflict may be commercially necessary, ideologically desirable, and rhetorically acceptable as a way of stopping that movement, but it is rarely the privileged moment that reveals the film’s motivations.”
301
“The concept of “culture,” like its offspring “tradition” and its parent “civilization,” today blocks rather than facilitates the communication of change.” -> painful creative destruction
“History films invite us to inhabit our own societies, cultures, and nations, but to do so they must construct all three. That is the history effect in cinema.”
333
“The task of cinema is to deliver audiences to films, and the task of audiences is to constitute films as objects of consumption.”
333f
“Buying the ticket and entering the auditorium are acts of surrender to the economic and filmic machinery of cinema. Watching (as opposed to necking or walking out) is a surrender to the film itself. Ethnographic research on film, however, is always after the fact, never conducted where spectatorship happens, in the cinema itself where any attempt to elicit a response ruins the experience it tries to capture. Cinema has its own uncertainty principle.” The difference between film and the film industry!
336
“Informationalization is the process through which economic domination becomes information domination.”
338
“”space and time becoming more and more expensive in the modern world, art had to make itself international industrial art, that is, cinema, in order to buy space and time”"
356
“Cinema responds by aiming not for endurance but for extension: to universalize itself in space, rather than to secure its survival in time. Here at last it becomes quite clear why special effects must always be cutting edge: because they are not designed to endure, merely to expand. In that expansion, they will form a void at their heart, a void that sucks in souls, in which the audience audiences, a singularity of blinding energy, in which existence is momentarily obliterated, that we call the sublime.” Not sure I understand.
360
“No technique is essentially avant-garde, progressive, or subversive: every technique is capable of becoming merely technical, a tool for further and repurposed productions.”
365
“Neither total nor infinite, the struggle for twenty-first-century cinema is the struggle for not yet finite, not yet infinite, ecological, human, and technological community. If beyond the dimensionless plenum of the commodity there is to be a cinema effect, it will arrive as an art of time, the struggle to construct what no one ever lost: the future.” Not sure I understand.
958
“This new Hollywood emerged slowly and painfully out of the profound restructuring of the old studios that occurred from the 1950s to the 1970s, and that finally resulted not only in a new business model but also in a new aesthetics of popular cinema.”
“The basic argument set forth by these two authors revolves around the transformation of the classical vertically-integrated studio system of Hollywood into the much more vertically-disintegrated production complex that it has become today.”
958f
“The Paramount decision forced the majors to divest themselves of their extensive theatre (cinema) chains (see CASSADY, 1958), and television drained off the audiences that had previously flocked to motion-picture theatres. The net effect, according to Christopherson and Storper, was a dramatic rise in competitiveness, uncertainty and instability in the motion-picture industry, followed by the break-up of studio-based mass production, whose peculiar process and product configurations could no longer sustain profitable operations. Instead, the system was succeeded by a new order in which the majors divested themselves of much of their former productive capacity and contractual engagements, and became the nerve centres of vertically-disintegrated production networks.”
959
“This turn of events allowed the majors to cut their overheads, to pursue ever more diversified forms of production, and eventually to flourish in the new high-risk Hollywood”
“the majors continued to play important roles in Hollywood as centres of financing, deal-making and distribution.”
“the sources of the majors’ market power [... at least since the Second World War] have resided mainly in the internal economies of scale that characterize their distribution systems.”
“the globalization of Hollywood’s market range (BALIO, 1996) [and this phenomenon actually] appears – for the moment at least – to be reinforcing the centripetal locational attraction of Southern California for motion-picture production activities of all kinds.”
960
“its technical and organizational configuration was marked by quite high levels of scale and a degree of routinization, but nothing equivalent, say, to the typical Detroit automobile assembly plant churning out identical models by the thousands.”
“two other [main] organizational effects flowed from vertical disintegration in the motion-picture industry. The first was the transformation of the studios themselves into something closer to systems houses, i.e. large-scale (though comparatively downsized) establishments now focusing on the production of many fewer and increasingly grandiose films. [...] The second was the emergence of masses of small independent production companies and service providers”
961
“The Hollywood production system today can hence be described in terms of a prevailing pattern of major and independent film production companies [...], intertwined with ever-widening circles of direct and indirect input suppliers.”
962
962f
“Another way in which the majors proceed is to work with smaller production companies, where the latter assume primary responsibility for organizing overall production tasks. The smaller companies involved in these ventures comprise both the majors’ own subsidiaries and selected independent producers in projects that may range anywhere from a niche-oriented film to a high-budget blockbuster. In these collaborative ventures, the majors work in a range of protocols, though in probably the majority of cases these grant significant control to the majors over production and editing decisions. Typical procedures include financing, production and distribution deals, co-production pacts, joint ventures, split rights agreements, ‘first look’ contracts, and any and all combinations of these arrangements.”
963
“Many independents also unilaterally assemble packages of scripts, actors, directors and other assets that they then present to the studios in the hope of securing a production or distribution agreement, though few are ever successful.”
“although the majors continue to dominate the entire industry, and continue to maintain a significant degree of in-house production capacity, they also rely more and more on smaller subsidiaries and independent production companies in order to spread their risks, to diversify their market offerings, and to sound out emerging market opportunities.”
“independent film production has increased greatly over the last two decades, with the period of most intense growth being the early to mid-1980s when a boom in independent film production occurred, fuelled by the growth of ancillary markets”
“The distribution of films made by independent producers is handled for the most part by independent distribution companies, many of them highly specialized with respect to market niche”
963f
“perhaps the majority [–] of Hollywood independents rarely or never come into contact with a major, and work in an entirely separate sphere of commercial and creative activity.”
964
“the two tiers described above are actually complemented by a more indistinct circle of companies as represented by independents strongly allied to the majors together with the majors’ own subsidiaries.”
965
“These four points all allude to important positive externalities underlying the Hollywood production complex, endowing it with strong competitive advantages in the form of increasing returns to scale and scope and positive agglomeration economies.”
“in spite of the centripetal locational pull of Hollywood, expanding streams of production activities have been moving to distant satellite locations since the 1980s.”
“Without effective distribution, the production system could attain neither the scale nor the scope that help to make it such a formidable source of competitive advantages today.”
“Most of the industry is clustered in a relatively small geographic area centred on Hollywood itself, but also spilling over into other parts of the region.”
966
“the industry not only continued to grow in absolute terms in Los Angeles over the 1980s and 1990s, but maintained its high level of relative geographic concentration as well.”
“Decentralization occurs for two main reasons, one being the search for realistic outdoor film locations (which has always been a feature of the industry’s operations), the other being the search for reduced production costs (which is a more recent phenomenon).”
967
‘Creative runaways’: “directed to Canada, Australia, Britain and Mexico, with Canada receiving 81% of the total.”
968
“In view of this analysis, we can obtain a clearer grasp of just why (relatively standardized) television films are more susceptible to runaway production than feature films.”
“pronouncements of AKSOY and ROBINS, 1992, p. 19, to the effect that: ‘Hollywood is now everywhere . . . production now moves almost at will to find its most ideal conditions, and with it go skills, technicians, and support services’, and of HOZIC, 2001, p. 153, who talks about ‘Hollywood’s exodus into worldwide locations’, are both exaggerated and premature.”
“Hollywood today is a large-scale, many-sided, cultural-production and franchising complex, disgorging an endless variety of products designed for many different market niches. The linchpin of the entire system is the high-concept, mass-appeal blockbuster, that is, a big-budget film with a simple but climactic central narrative, an uplifting finale, a major star presence and possessing many marketable assets”
969
“The distribution system disseminates the industry’s products on wider markets, pumps revenues and information back into Hollywood, and hence is a basic condition of the sustained economic well-being of the central agglomeration”
“Employment in the distribution branch of the business is densely developed in Los Angeles alongside the production activities that it serves.”
“Distribution is the segment of the industry where oligopoly is most in evidence.”
“the marketing and distribution costs of many blockbusters today are equal to or even greater than their actual production costs” (Cones, 1997)
“vertical integration has indeed been on the increase of late.”
“For independent distributors, the average domestic box-office per film is $2.3 million, and for majors it is $46.1 million.”
971
“the pioneering efforts of US firms have more or less naturalized American cinematic idioms on many foreign markets, making Hollywood films highly competitive with purely local products”
“block-booking by US-owned film distributors is prevalent in foreign markets, even though it is illegal in the US.”
“The MPAA is a highly-financed cartel representing the combined voice of the majors, and it has proven itself to be extraordinarily aggressive and successful in shaping trade agendas in audiovisual products, as well as in many other political tasks of concern to the industry.”
“the annual American Film Market in Santa Monica [...] has grown over the last two decades to become the world’s largest motion-picture fair, attended by more than 7,000 people from 70 countries.”
“the majors are just as likely to dominate content supply in the new order as they have done in the old. More accurately, we should say that if, in theory, new electronic means of communications allow small producers to tap readily into global markets, the massive resources of the majors will still in all likelihood enable them to gain a decisive edge in publicity and marketing, and hence in sales.”
972
“in the late 1960s [...] imports grew to the point where they represented fully two-thirds of all the films released in the US”
“Much more research, of course, is needed on particular aspects of Hollywood’s operations, including many questions about new digital technologies, creativity and innovation, local labour markets, the institutional fabric of the industry, agglomeration and decentralization processes, corporate organization, marketing, the dynamics of demand, and so on.”
“[A] steady convergence [...] appears to be occurring between the economic and cultural in contemporary global capitalism”
Very good introduction and conclusion!
29f
“Reworking the adage that “all screenplays are also business plans,” John T. Caldwell observes that any screenplay being considered for production
This vast expansion of the original film text suggests that the narratively contained world of the feature film is now the exception, as target audiences are encouraged to extend their consumption into other outlets beyond the initial theatrical screening. To be sure, this process of cross-promotion has existed for some time, whether through fast-food tie-ins or action figures; however, the process of incompleteness suggested by DVDs has helped to reconceptualize film narrative in ways that tie together the fictional world of a film with the economic goals of a studio.”
DVD was an earlier step to / a preparation of audiences for storytelling in an entarch.
57
“Thus, while digital effects provide filmmakers with new tools for telling stories, the true reinvention of cinema is taking place on the margins, often outside of Hollywood, where innovative filmmakers seek new ways to distribute their work.”
64
“[In 2007 each cinema] screen was watched by an average of one hundred people over the course of a single week, typically on weekend evenings.”
78
“less than 15 percent of feature revenues now comes from theatrical box office income” (Caldwell, J ~ Production Culture, 2008, p9).
85
“portable entertainment [iPod/iPhone] may offer new models of attention more associated with distraction and with extending the narrative world of a movie or television show beyond the confines of the larger screens.” The iPhone is not a new outlet for movies, but for extensions of movies. A step towards entarch.
86
“The idea that we’re all going to abandon the multiplex for the supermobile is nothing more than one generation’s fantasy of another.” (Longworth, K ~ Distribution Wars, 2007)
90f
“Blurring the boundaries between promotional and entertainment content, webisodes call for a new language for thinking about the definition of a film text and for thinking about our relationship to this material.”
91f
“digital media have also contributed to the dissolution of a vibrant, unified cinema culture, explaining that “when people prefer to identify themselves as members of ever-smaller cohorts – ethnic, political, demographic, regional, religious – the movies can no longer be the art of the middle.”" Gabler, N ~ The Movie Magic Is Gone, LA Times, 25.02.2007
92
“what might be called the era of “desktop distribution” has actually ushered in new models for the engaged film audiences that watch and discuss films in a variety of public and private contexts, even while providing new avenues for major media conglomerates to reach those same audiences.”
102
“independent filmmakers begin to find new platforms that may place less emphasis on theatrical premieres.”
123
“While crowdsourcing may very well help filmmakers build an audience, it can also shut down possibilities for others, particularly the middlebrow films that may depend upon a gradual, platformed release in order to manage expectations. These shifts have had particularly devastating implications for the major indie studios.”
“Good buzz spreads quickly, bad buzz even faster.” (http://weblogs.variety.com/thompsononhollywood/2008/06/laff-mark-gill.html)
148
“film blogs are perhaps the most significant evidence yet of a vibrant and engaged networked film audience.”
153
“These shorter videos should not be seen as a substitute for longer-form entertainment, whether movies or television, but instead complement, promote, and in many ways depend on the feature films and TV shows they parody.” He’s quoting Miller, Nancy; 2007; Minifesto for a new Age; Wired 15.3.
173
“whatever else digital cinema is doing, it is also quite clearly a means for expanding the sites where cinema can be commodified, for bringing movies to the widest possible audiences.”
“However, the reactions within the entertainment industry to these forms of fan activity cannot be separated from the industrial, social, and historical conditions that shape film exhibition, distribution, production, and consumption. While a number of media companies, including Viacom, have attempted to contain these fan productions, others, such as Fox Atomic, have sought to co-opt them by providing fans with material for creating their own videos.”
174
“the ongoing shift to digital exhibition challenges traditional economic models and exhibition protocols, altering not only the selection of movies available but also our relationship to film as a medium.”
174f
“film is defined not merely as a technological apparatus, but also as Lisa Gitelman reminds us, in terms of the social practices associated with it. Watching a movie in a theater, at home on a DVD player, or on the subway on an iPod enteils far more than the activity of looking at a screen, and in some cases the uses of new technologies, especially portable media players, upset normative definitions of public and private space, requiring people to develop new codes of etiquette to match the new technologies.” check out Gitelman
175
“this anytime, anywhere distribution model also has the effect of reshaping theatrical distribution model based on scarcity, in which there are only a limited number of screens available at any given time.”
“[Nicholas] Rombes observed that with the inclusion of extras on the DVD, audiences were given the perception that movies are infinitely malleable or expandable.” More recently, of course, film texts are expanded even further through additional scenes posted to the web, allowing viewers to broaden their experience of a film well beyond the initial textual boundaries, while also ensuring a seamless mix of entertainment, marketing, and branding. Or course, these supplemental do more than promote specific films; they also promote a specific relationship with the film industry itself, addressing us on DVDs in particular, as connoisseurs, as experts on film culture.”
“these textual materials present an important site for the ongoing definition and “self-theorization” of the production cultures associated with film and television.” see Caldwell
176f
“we are witnessing a vast expansion of DIY and ultra-low-budget film production, due in part to inexpensive production and distribution equipment, leading to a significant transformation of the practices associated with film exhibition. Thus, even though Hollywood blockbusters are breaking box office records, indies face the recognition that many films that had historically played in theaters would now be unlikely to receive theatrical exhibition, except perhaps at a few festival screenings.”
177
“Hollywood studios continue to produce massive blockbusters seen by millions of people, but the sheer volume of movies may have the effect of fragmenting audiences seen while providing individuals with precisely the films they would most enjoy.” He calls this “the loss of a common culture” p177.
“cinema remains defined primarily in terms of theatrical distribution.”
178
“In fact, while studio filmmakers and theater owners continued to criticize day-and-date-releasing, characterizing it in some cases as a threat to the very definition of film, a number of indie filmmakers have recognized it as a viable option for getting their films seen. These models have been successful in helping some low-budget filmmakers find a wider audience, but it remains unclear how these models will be used.”
“blogs in particular at least maintain the imagined experience of the communal experience of watching with a crowd.”
179
“cinema continues to play a vital cultural role, no matter when, where, or how we watch.”
“Just like the world economy, the film industry has burgeoned out of control. It’s inflated and overblown. It needs to let some air out of the bubble and return to a more reasonable size and scale.”
“We’re at a crossroads. So much of what we’ve counted on isn’t working. It’s not a question of old school vs. new school. It’s Lewis and Clark time, the things we’re not sure about, that we hang our hat on, like movie stars.”
“The bigger the movie stars become, the more constricting their roles and the scope of their roles.”
“Bring costs down and they’ll gain more flexibility to make better, more interesting and varied movies. They could lure adults back to theaters and appeal to niche markets without having to play it safe with four-quadrant pics.”
Variety ~ Hollywood’s A-list losing star power (01.10.2009)