Jus change the law so total tax write offs put the film into public domain rather than destruction
Deleting and destroying finished movies
301–310 of 369 posts
Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
I create multiple movies, one works well and I think to myself I pay too much taxes this year. I sell the next one for 0 dollars to my cousin so I can write it off immediately. If the movie works, money stays in the family, if it doesn't I already got deductions and it was a no-op for my cousin.
Oh no, you are presenting a simple problem that would take you, cryptonym, all of 30 seconds to figure out a solution to since you are obviously smart enough to think things through. In fact, you could even cheat by looking at the other responder who responded before you suggesting a public auction which is what I was alluding to by saying "anybody" as in you must allow all people (within reason) to compete to purcha…
Can you provide 3 obvious problems of how the parent post is incorrect? I am curious of your thoughts.
Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies
#303Commenting 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…
IMO this is a labor relations issue and it's exactly the sort of thing that unions should be negotiating with studios, just like they negotiate film credits and residuals and all kinds of other things.
The real victims here are people who signed the contract to do the work, many of whom probably got box office participation who are going to be denied some of their compensation through no fault of their own. And even people with no stake in the box office presumably did the work for "experience" on their resume that is essentially getting disappeared.
I think this problem is somewhat self limiting because film makers signing contracts with WB are going to add clauses to prevent this from happening again.
Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies
#304Could 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 can reasonably imagine a movie that has negative brand value. In a ridiculous scenario, imagine if the first attempt at Iron Man 2 was 90 minutes of Robert Downey Jr engaged in hardcore sex and shouting racial slurs at people. Even if some people are interested in watching (or even buying) this, it should be clear that a studio has the right to destroy it.
The studio spent $100m to make this thing. Maybe a competing studio would like to buy it for $50m so they can destroy the MCU or whatever. But the studio considers the brand harm to be so great that there is no way that they'll sell it. Should the studio have to artificially reduce their expenses by $50m because of this potential buyer even though the studio in no way agreed to this price?
Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> This isn’t saying the tax break is bad, it’s saying that deleting a film is what’s bad. That's a true statement, though. What's wrong with saying that? And if you change the tax breaks, you can get the desired behavior without imposing additional rules.
That is not necessarily true. Studios can still decide that a movie is sufficiently bad that it is a brand risk and will still refuse to release it even if they cannot deduct some or all of the expense to create it.
Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How so? They aren’t selling it. So its value is $0. If its value is $0, I should be able to buy it for that price.
That’s not how private property works. The owner doesn’t have to sell to you. Have you ever had a car totaled? Just because the insurance company salvages your vehicle doesn’t mean you get to buy it for that value.
The thing is that they claim it's value is X to the Tax Man.
Then someone says "I want to pay 1.1 * X for that" and they say "it's worth more" - what are the tax implications?
The same applies when they claim that X = 0. They're doing a disservice to their shareholders if they won't sell something worthless for money.
There's a celebrity president facing the courts for a similar play, the same thing was worthless when having to pay taxes for it and priceless when using it as collateral for a loan =)
Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh no, you are presenting a simple problem that would take you, cryptonym, all of 30 seconds to figure out a solution to since you are obviously smart enough to think things through. In fact, you could even cheat by looking at the other responder who responded before you suggesting a public auction which is what I was alluding to by saying "anybody" as in you must allow all people (within reason) to compete to purcha…
Can you provide 3 obvious problems of how the parent post is incorrect? I am curious of your thoughts.
> a public auction which is what I was alluding to by saying "anybody"
I think this is their main objection, not sure there are 2 other things?
Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies
#308Earlier 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…
Should this apply to everything? Someone buys a cupcake. Instead of eating it they throw it away. Is the person that made the cupcake owed something more than the $ they already got for it because the cupcake was not eaten and so their time fell into the void? How about all the people that built a house or car that a movie production destroys? (less often now that everything is CGI). Also, if the movie sucks, it ofte…
If I had a cupcake shop, someone came in to buy a cupcake, and then immediately threw it on the floor - I'd be aghast. Regular people take pride in their work. Market abstractions of "it's yours now" don't approximate how people actually feel about the objects they produce. People don't want to be alienated from their labor!
Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies
#309Where 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…
Where do you draw the line? If someone buys the Mona Lisa and burns it for the tax credit, is the owner to be prohibited from doing so based on the public interest?
Yes, explicitly! There are these things called "moral rights".
"The moral rights include the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work. The preserving of the integrity of the work allows the author to object to alteration, distortion, or mutilation of the work that is "prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation"."
I'm sure it applies even though Leonardo is long gone.
Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Someone buys a cupcake. In this case someone made a cupcake. Instead of selling it to potential customers, they destroy the cupcake and claim it was a tax-deductible expense > Also, if the movie sucks, it often reflects badly on all of those people. They try to get work on a new movie, people look at the old movie, see it sucks, don't hire them. So why are so many bad movies released then?
> Instead of selling it to potential customers, they destroy the cupcake and claim it was a tax-deductible expense But isn’t that thing actually common practice? If a bakery accidentaly ruins a batch of cupcakes they toss them to the bin. And of course the ingredients and labour involved in those cupcakes will count as an expense. They had costs (some flour, some eggs, some employee time) and they had zero income fro…
The failure in this analogy is that it's not the baker tossing away the cupcakes, it's a tax accountant in the background.
A baker creates a batch of cupcakes. They're about to sell this batch to a customer, but then the tax accountant comes in and tells them to toss the batch because the customer might not like them. So the batch gets binned, despite neither the customer or the tax accountant having tasted any cupcakes.
Then they write that off as a business expense.