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Deleting and destroying finished movies

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Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#171

Post by jfdh6 »

AlbertCory wrote: post #22

Where do you draw the line? If an artist pays a model and paints her, is the artist to be prohibited from destroying the painting because it sucks, and because the model wants credit? What about a music producer who pays a studio band to record a song that turns out to be terrible -- is the producer prohibited from deleting it? It's the tax write off for destruction that's fucked up, as @cnees says. Failures are part…

On the flip side the artists and engineers in the Western Entertainment Industry dont complain about Tax subsidies, govt grants and advantages they have in terms of access to capital, cheap outsourced labour to do boring or dirty work etc. that artists and engineers sitting elsewhere somewhere else dont.

When the rest of the world looks at them, propped up by an extremely unequal playing field engineered by the financial class, there is nothing Fair to see.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#172

Post by interroboink »

hyperhello wrote: post #166
pradn wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does someone have to demarcate exactly where "the line" is to make a judgement on this situation? You can simply ask yourself "do I want to live in a world where this happens" - and any decent person would say "no". The presence of a "slippery slope" is not enough to prevent going down a path, even somewhat. A film takes hundreds of people to create - how does it feel for them to just have years of their lives fa…

Many people believe that banning disliked things is not what laws are for. If it was you’d see the powerful banning everything they didn’t like, making the law tyranny, and the powerless banning everything they didn’t like, and you get the French Revolution.

> Many people believe that banning disliked things is not what laws are for

Surely some laws are for exactly that? Like: murder, rape, theft, etc?

I'm taking your statement a bit out of context, and I don't have much involvement in this overall issue being discussed, but that statement on its own seems pretty off to me.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#173

Post by LoganDark »

interroboink wrote: post #172
hyperhello wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people believe that banning disliked things is not what laws are for. If it was you’d see the powerful banning everything they didn’t like, making the law tyranny, and the powerless banning everything they didn’t like, and you get the French Revolution.

> Many people believe that banning disliked things is not what laws are for Surely some laws are for exactly that? Like: murder, rape, theft, etc? I'm taking your statement a bit out of context, and I don't have much involvement in this overall issue being discussed, but that statement on its own seems pretty off to me.

Those things being disliked doesn't mean a law shouldn't be made about them. They are much worse than merely being disliked, which is why there are laws.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#174

Post by ambichook »

sokoloff wrote: post #159
AlbertCory wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the IRS's eyes, you destroyed an item that had value. Its value was whatever someone was willing to pay for it. Say $30M. If you destroyed it, that was your choice, but you didn't thereby incur a loss of $30M. Any more than if you had dynamited your HQ building.

If you decide to rebuild your HQ, you may well have to destroy the old one, even if someone would have bought it from you. When a developer buys a property, razes it, and builds a new building there, all those costs and actions are permitted. I find it amusing that a studio, who is almost surely getting professional tax advice with full knowledge of the facts and circumstances, is having the legality of the proposed…

> is having the legality of the proposed course of action not just questioned but outright confidently asserted as contrary to the law based on an article that’s light on details.

i'm confused, is the article saying that its illegal, or is it saying that it ought to be illegal? i for one agree with that attitude, or at the very least believe that a studio shouldnt be able to get a tax writeoff for just sending a completed film to the void.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#175

Post by interroboink »

LoganDark wrote: post #173
interroboink wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many people believe that banning disliked things is not what laws are for Surely some laws are for exactly that? Like: murder, rape, theft, etc? I'm taking your statement a bit out of context, and I don't have much involvement in this overall issue being discussed, but that statement on its own seems pretty off to me.

Those things being disliked doesn't mean a law shouldn't be made about them. They are much worse than merely being disliked, which is why there are laws.

I feel like that just moves the goalposts. Instead of deciding what should be law or not, now we are deciding what constitutes "mere dislike" vs "something worse."

It's ultimately the same issue, no?

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#176

Post by dahart »

advael wrote: post #58
loughnane wrote: post #52

Commenting before I've read the article: That's ridiculous. There's no obligation for anyone to bring something to market regardless of how far along it is. After I read the article: Still not persuaded. It reads like motivated reasoning, the person doesn't like things not getting released and says that governments should step in. There's some mention of taxes and lost work, but nothing tht holds water. As an example…

The argument isn't that WB shouldn't be able to scrap projects. The argument is that the tax break for doing this is bad and should not exist

Except the post very much is arguing studios shouldn’t be able to scrap projects. Did you catch the end? “governments exist (in part) to regulate corporations, in order to stop them from doing things that are deleterious or destructive to the public good and to individuals who work for them.” This isn’t saying the tax break is bad, it’s saying that deleting a film is what’s bad.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#177

Post by verve_rat »

froh wrote: post #75

my saddest story there is "frank'n stein" a hilarious comedy movie and theatre play toying with the Frankenstein plot. I've seen the movie and it made ma watch a local play and I loved both. when I tried to get hold of the DVD years later I learned that the heirs to the author Ken Campbell had withdrawn all rights. this removed all prints from all libraries too. the thing is _gone_. because the heirs hated their gene…

That seems... wrong?

You can't unpublish a book by withdrawing the right and force the destruction of already sold copies. I believe DVDs fall under the same first sale doctrine, so this story seems to be missing some details.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#178

Post by ronsor »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #170

Could we not just skip the 30 years of copy right protection or whatever it is now and just release it to the public domain? No money will be made, but if people should want to they can view it. I am sure Internet Archive or some organization would be willing to host such movies, and not make any attempt at making a profit from it. Even better would be to turn all the assets that went into the creating it into the pu…

You're off by almost an order of magnitude there. It's 95 years of copyright protection nonsense, not a mere 30.

Edit: very few would complain if it were only 30

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#179

Post by wmf »

lbarrow wrote: post #54

Without commenting on the larger issue the article brings up, this specific point doesn't survive scrutiny to me: Some of the company’s tactics post-merger were garden-variety ruthless, like eliminating 87 series from its streaming platform Max, so that they won’t have to pay union-mandated residuals to the talent that created already-existing programs or pony up funds to produce more seasons of existing ones (such a…

Financially, HBO's decision makes perfect sense as you said but it still sucks, especially if those series had no physical release. If a book or DVD goes out of print you could at least track down a used copy but for streaming there's nothing.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#180

Post by wmf »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #101
simonw wrote: post #23

I wonder what would happen if a bunch of extremely bankable talent - the Christopher Nolan, Greta Gerwig, Tom Cruise crowd - quietly got in touch with Warner Bros and made it clear that they would avoid working with any studio that had a track record of cancelling completed projects for a tax write-off.

Warner Brothers reportedly lost Nolan for pissing him off with their dumb straight to streaming strategy. And then he made Oppenheimer for another studio. And they still did this.

Nolan has talked about going back to WB in recent months.
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