Does anyone in the comments actually have experience in working with agencies like CAA & William Morris besides watching Entourage?
It is hard to tell the full details & long term prospectives with Amazon studios but Hollywood is about 100x harder to work into compared to any online app or service. An online service you can build & market anywhere and it doesn't matter who you know. Hollywood is exact opposite, you can write it from anywhere but you need to be working in LA and be friends with plenty connected people and work with good agents, lawyers, management, etc.
Amazon studios
61–70 of 91 posts
Re: Amazon studios
#62I'm not sure if Amazon Studios represents real democratization of movie-making, or if Primer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film) does. Of course cult classics like Primer are few and far between, just like successful startups.
Re: Amazon studios
#63I can't believe there hasn't been a single comment on how ridiculously horrible the introduction video is. I honest to god cannot figure out if this is some absurd conspiracy or joke, but that video looks like it was produced by a middle schooler with an istockphoto account using imovie.
Am I retarded? Is this really a joke? I don't get it...
Re: Amazon studios
#64Re: Amazon studios
#65Hmm, concentrate power into a single company? And you thought Holywood was bad?
Re: Amazon studios
#66Sounds like its designed to feed into the existing system
Re: Amazon studios
#67I'm not sure if Amazon Studios represents real democratization of movie-making, or if Primer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film) does. Of course cult classics like Primer are few and far between, just like successful startups.
How was Primer democratic? It was made the same way every other great low-budget film was made: a talented, single-minded and dedicated director.
Re: Amazon studios
#68Amazon has got it's fingers in so many pies ... and they all taste so good,
Amazon's monopsony in the e-book market scares me. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/11/cutting-...
What? After the price fixing conspiracy from Apple and the Big Six, publishers set eBook prices (via the agency model). That is why eBooks can cost more than paper backs:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/01/20/amended_class_...
Re: Amazon studios
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mazin's argument is that if you were good enough to write a script that grosses over $60 million you could get a better deal than $600,000 for the script. But I don't know if that's true. First time spec sales over $600k are very, very rare. A number of things have to come together in a way the resembles luck more than anything else for that to happen. For an established screenwriter, sure, they could do better. For…
First-time specs rarely sell for much higher than the low sixes. After that, a writer usually finds himself jobbing around town on low-paying rewrite and polishing gigs on existing studio projects. It could be years before a young writer, hot off the sale of a spec script, ever cracks mid-sixes on his next payday. And he may even sell multiple specs, never to see a single one made. So I'd argue that Amazon offers a c…
So it's not a great deal, but script writers rarely get great deals.
Re: Amazon studios
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's basically a tradeoff. You have a higher chance of getting picked, but a much lousier payday if you do. Nevertheless, it might actually be a decent bet for newbies to the screenwriting trade. As you've mentioned, and as I concur, your odds of getting discovered in Hollywood are somewhere just shy of your odds of getting beamed aboard the Enterprise. So Amazon's system represents a slightly better way to get a cal…
Your odds are astronomically worse with Amazon, actually, because by submitting to them you grant them an exclusive option on your work. Hollywood works in the opposite way, with studios competing (and, thus, cutting bigger checks) for good scripts. There are hundreds of ways to sell a script in Hollywood. There's only one way to sell a script on Amazon. So, if your script's been floating around for a year or two and…
Well, Hollywood also has a reputation for simply stealing a script if they like it.