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The Cost of Good Movies

soaringtwenties.substack.com

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Re: The Cost of Good Movies

#31

Post by dragonwriter »

saucymew wrote: post #22
crazygringo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an alternate interpretation: they're watching television now rather than movies. Because the kind of character development and depth of storytelling that can happen in 20 or 50 or 80 hours goes far beyond what you can do in 2 or 3. And the idea that young people can't watch long things due to a lack of attention goes directly against the evidence of the increasing habit of binge watching . Forget about watchin…

Great point, ultimately we're describing two different outcomes on where the current audience are spending their time on vs movies. You posit television series, if I could add to that list, it'd be live streams, YouTube, Discord, etc. All of these competing content genres are eroding the cultural cache and expected value of long film projects.

> All of these competing content genres are eroding the cultural cache and expected value of long film projects.

Serialized (as opposed to episodic) TV series are long film projects; crafted in ~10-hour chunks rather than ~2 hour ones.

Re: The Cost of Good Movies

#32

Post by atleastoptimal »

All this actors-writers artists rights debate as of late feels like the last cries into the darkness before media, culture and the entire dialectic of creation and consumption changes forever and AI becomes THE thing behind everything. Custom generated movies, first person VR experiences, all the pleasures of a world soon to placate humans as their minds lose ascendancy on the cognitive totem pole to artificial intelligence.

Re: The Cost of Good Movies

#33

Post by slushh »

>My favorite model for a distribution platform is BandCamp.

> On much of the free-to-play music, the audience can listen to the album twice before the content locks and BandCamp asks you pay to continue listening to it.

easterneuropeanmovies.com[1] comes close. Obviously, watching movies twice before paying doesn't work. Instead, easterneuropeanmovies.com allows you to watch the beginning of the movies for free.

If artists want a platform like BandCamp, they should create a pool of available movies that platform creators could instantly use.

Now, it's difficult to establish a new platform because it's not enough to program the software. The movies have to be licensed and an audience has to be acquired. If artists already take care of the license side, and if they help with acquiring an audience, they could lay the foundation for their favorite distribution channel.

[1] https://easterneuropeanmovies.com/

Re: The Cost of Good Movies

#34

Post by hinoki »

throwawee wrote: post #15
saucymew wrote: post #14

After finishing reading the article, it didn't mention one anecdotal cultural trend a friend who's teaching film class at his local community college noticed. Every semester at the beginning of class, he'd quiz his students what they've watched. In the past few years, nearly everyone has limited knowledge of current films, let alone old films. He realized young people do not have the attention/habit of watching long-…

It's kind of inevitable. I grew up hearing movies decried as brain-rotting, imagination-killing junk food preventing everyone from reading a good book like nature intended. Of course the medium would be dethroned by something even more accessible. When there's something even more convenient people will latch on to that instead. Expect nostalgia for the good ol' days when social media used to instill community values…

> The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth

Exactly, same as it ever was.

Re: The Cost of Good Movies

#35

Post by glandium »

slyall wrote: post #23
crazygringo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an alternate interpretation: they're watching television now rather than movies. Because the kind of character development and depth of storytelling that can happen in 20 or 50 or 80 hours goes far beyond what you can do in 2 or 3. And the idea that young people can't watch long things due to a lack of attention goes directly against the evidence of the increasing habit of binge watching . Forget about watchin…

But I wonder if their knowledge of TV is also as deep. When I was a kid the TV was filled up with a lot of repeats of TV shows. Things that had been create 10,20 or even 40 years before. I'd watch them because there were not many other options (probably because new shows were too expensive to waste on offpeak timeslots) I wonder what percentage of today's kids would recognize any of the below shows beyond the name (o…

As someone born at the end of the 70s, and not anywhere near the US, I was kind of surprised by how many of those 60s shows I knew. (which also says I never realized they were that old...)

Re: The Cost of Good Movies

#36

Post by mk_stjames »

> But if I did edit a feature length film that became a major box-office hit, I should get some residuals to help tide me over.

This is the line that made me sit and think about this whole construct for a bit.

I've worked as an engineer for multi-billion-dollar companies. I've designed components and whole systems that then get put into mass production and stay in production for years. Safety-critical in some cases. Some of those components are still being made today and still generating revenue for those companies, nearly a decade after I moved on.

Should my work back then be continuously rewarded if that company still uses that design, unchanged, and still generates revenue from it? I've since gone into consulting, and as a private contractor I work similar stints as a hollywood editor- sometimes I do not have a steady client for many months at a time. It would be great if my engineering work for companies past could 'hold me over' via residuals. But that isn't how getting paid for my time works. I just bid my hourly rates accordingly, of course.

You could say stock options in companies are similarly equivalent to residual checks for hollywood, but... it's not. Stock prices aren't always tied to anything rational (although... I don't know how hollywood accounting is either). And they aren't something that are guaranteed to be negotiable or granted post-facto.

What I'm trying to point out here is... a lot of people in Hollywood seem to think they have something special somehow and aren't at the will of a market to set prices. If they want better profit sharing, there should be ways to do that, but its ultimately down to setting your prices and being paid for your time and thats is how it works for nearly everyone else in the world who 'creates' things.

Re: The Cost of Good Movies

#37

Post by nullc »

> Scrolling through it is tough, but not because of too many options, but because too many repeats.

Repeats and already seens.

I seldom want to rewatch movies, I do so usually only to show someone some classic they missed. So I find the interface of netflix (and youtube, for that matter) infuriating in that they seem heavily centered on showing me things that I've already seen and don't have any option to suppress them.

What the heck is with that? While my preference to see something new might not be the majority of their views, I assume that most people will want to see something new at least some of the time-- so why isn't this an option? If anything it should make the service more sticky since they'll have hold of that already-seen data.

Now some better search -- year ranges, category/keyword, credits search, etc. but presumably that would take a lot of work compared to just letting me skip the stuff I've seen or seen recently.

Re: The Cost of Good Movies

#38

Post by dijit »

mk_stjames wrote: post #36

> But if I did edit a feature length film that became a major box-office hit, I should get some residuals to help tide me over. This is the line that made me sit and think about this whole construct for a bit. I've worked as an engineer for multi-billion-dollar companies. I've designed components and whole systems that then get put into mass production and stay in production for years. Safety-critical in some cases.…

I had a similar discussion on Tiktok of all places regarding the Rachel Zellger comments on her playing Snow White.

“I had to sit 17 hours in a Disney Princess dress! I want money for every hour it is watched” and I had a similar thought to you.

I feel like its a good idea but I’ve definitely missed something with capitalism: I thought the notion of being paid for your time leaves the fruits of that labour in the rightful hands of those who “invested” the capital up front to pay you.

If thats the case then getting residuals is directly against that notion at least, but hey, its what they negotiated so good on them.

However, where would that end hypothetically- what makes artistic works more inherently valuable in the long tail? I mean- aside from the fact that we all agree.

Why is design work, or even craftsmanship not rewarded the same? Its not like there is additional work to be done for artistic works.

It it because of likeness? I don’t fully understand.

Re: The Cost of Good Movies

#39

Post by ben_w »

lapcat wrote: post #8
hyperion2010 wrote: post #4

> This is why I introduced the concept at the beginning of royalties for AI work. Ultimately AI is not an alien brain generating texts or images from its own imagination. Neural networks and large language learning models input real people’s intellectual property and output that intellectual property when prompted by someone using the program. The novelness of the output is merely how the IP is reformatted to fit the…

> The crux of the argument is this paragraph. But swap out AI in that paragraph for "writers who have read the classical western canon" and suddenly you realize that no one has original ideas, and that the idea that somehow humans are uniquely capable of being the primary causes of their own thoughts and owe transitive credit (and royalties!) to the great authors of all time, or their estates, is madness. I disagree.…

I would argue that autobiographical content is no less derivative than reading a book or watching a film, then retelling it. Any creativity is in the difference, and only the difference.

Re: The Cost of Good Movies

#40

Post by tpmx »

nullc wrote: post #37

> Scrolling through it is tough, but not because of too many options, but because too many repeats. Repeats and already seens. I seldom want to rewatch movies, I do so usually only to show someone some classic they missed. So I find the interface of netflix (and youtube, for that matter) infuriating in that they seem heavily centered on showing me things that I've already seen and don't have any option to suppress th…

The presumed Netflix UX prime directive: Mask the shallowness/low average quality of the catalog at all costs.

Similar, and as the article notes: Why can't you see an alphabetical list of content by category?

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