Apples and Oranges

I haven’t blogged about the controversial anti-piracy bill that recently stalled in the House and Senate (mostly because there isn’t anything I could have written about it that wasn’t already being said by more knowledgeable folks) but yesterday TheWrap published an article on the topic that really got my attention.

Edward Jay Epstein, who has been railing against Netflix for as long as I’ve been reading TheWrap, just wrote an outrageous article entitled “How the Pirates of the Internet Are Killing Hollywood’s Golden Goose.”  In the article, there is no mention of illegal downloading or off-shore enterprises that manage to avoid U.S. legal jurisdiction — all the usual culprits that the Motion Picture Association of America typically go after when they try to make their case.

No, the “pirates” Mr. Epstein are referring to are content streaming companies such as Netflix.  The reason Hollywood wants anti-piracy legislation, according to Mr. Epstein, is in order to combat the expansion of legal, subscription-based content streaming.

What?

The article is littered with errors and inaccuracies.  He begins by trying to argue that the key to Hollywood’s survival is television licensing fees:

In 2010, according to sources at Time Warner, Warner Bros. harvested over $4 billion from worldwide licensing to TV.  Nearly 80 percent came from just four cable customers — HBO, Turner, ABC Family, and NBC Universal’s cable channels.  Not only did this far exceed its share of theatrical box-office receipts, which were $2.4 billion in 2010, but this licensing is highly profitable: the studio pays none of the cost of advertising, prints or logistics.

This is a meaningless comparison.  How much did Warners get from licensing its movies to premium channels in 2010, or from DVD and Blu-ray sales of those movies, or from VOD returns from those movies?  Epstein doesn’t say.  His point seems to be that television rights are worth more to that studio than theatrical motion picture rights, and any additional information is therefore unnecessary.

Now that he’s set up his premise — that studios need to protect TV licensing fees — he swoops in for the kill.

But these golden geese are in danger of being strangled to death by video streaming.  New age companies, notably Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Google, now compete with cable TV by streaming movies and other video directly over the Internet.

Where do I start?  Let’s go back a paragraph.  He mentions that in 2010 Warners received 80% of its TV licensing revenues from HBO, Turner, ABC Family, and NBC Universal.  HBO (which is of course owned by Time Warner) won’t do business with Netflix or the other streaming companies, so that revenue is not jeopardized by streaming.  But ABC Family and NBC Universal each recently extended multiyear deals with Netflix, for record-setting amounts of cash.   In fact, when Netflix and NBC renewed their deal last July, Amazon swooped in and signed a similar deal with NBC, essentially giving NBC twice as much money for the same content rights.  And then when ABC Family renewed with Netflix in October, Amazon did it again!

Is Epstein claiming that Warners is not sharing in any of the added revenues that ABC and NBC received from those deals?  It just doesn’t seem plausible that some of that additional money won’t find its way back to the production companies that supplied the content.

Here’s where it gets really weird.

Netflix, for instance, offers unlimited streaming for $1 extra a month with its mail-in service, Amazon offers free streaming to its 10 million Amazon Prime customers, and Google offers YouTube free.

Where has Mr. Epstein been?  Netflix raised their prices last summer, splitting their DVD-by-mail and streaming services and thereby infuriating their customers in the process.  And Amazon Prime doesn’t give programming away for free.  It charges $79 a year for the service, which includes access to content on their new Kindle Fire devices as well as faster shipping on qualifying on-line orders.  And YouTube?  You can watch a bunch of cat videos on YouTube for free, but you’re not going to find episodic copyrighted television content.  There is no hard and fast rule about which clips are forced to get pulled from YouTube if they are found to infringe on a studio’s copyright (some studios, for instance, choose to look the other way when copyrighted music videos or excerpted scenes from movies or TV shows appear on YouTube as long as certain conditions are met, conditions that vary from company to company), but, by and large, if a studio asks YouTube to take down copyrighted material, the clip disappears.

“I don’t see how cable can compete with free transmissions,” a savvy top executive of Time Warner told me, pointing out that Netflix, after sublicensing Starz’s content, offers it for a fraction of what Starz charges its subscribers.

Again with the free argument?  Netflix isn’t free.  It charges its customers a separate $8 monthly fee for streaming services.  And Netflix has been forced to pay increasingly high licensing fees to the studios in order to retain content rights to popular programs and remain competitive with Amazon.  And the Starz deal is old news, as it was signed long before streaming exploded in popularity.  Epstein goes on to say:

No doubt Starz will end this bargain rate when its Netflix contract ends in October 2011, but so long as transmission remains free, streaming will chip away at the cable audience.

So this article, published on January 19, 2012, references negotiations that were taking place between Netflix and Starz way back in the second half of 2011, before September 1, 2011, when Starz very publicly announced it would not be renewing its deal with Netflix (reportedly leaving $1.5 billion on the table, according to the LA Times).

Did Mr. Epstein simply cut and paste his data from a previous article that he wrote prior to the extremely public tussle between Netflix and Starz?  Maybe.  It would be ironic if he did, given that he’s supposedly writing an article about copyright infringement — though, of course, in this case he’d only be guilty of stealing from himself.

The Hollywood studios not only risk losing billions of dollars in licensing revenues, but their corporate parents own almost all the big cable networks.  Since anti-trust law prevents the studios from meeting to restrain trade, they must act through the MPAA.

Is that the real concern then, that media conglomerates may have to rethink how their cable divisions will pay for and receive content?  What of the recent explosion in licensing fees paid to the studios by Netflix and Amazon Prime?  Shouldn’t studios look forward to discovering additional revenue streams for their content?  No mention of this in Mr. Epstein’s article.

Enter Dodd.  While technically prohibited from lobbying Congress until 2013, he can provide guidance to the MPAA’s massive D.C. lobbying operation.  And as a former chairman of the Democratic Party and former head of the Senate Banking Committee, he knows how the who-gets-what system in Congress works.

Wait a minute.  Dodd is not simply providing “guidance” to the MPAA.  He is that group’s president and chief lobbyist!

The PR-acceptable issue that Dodd can use his considerable skills and connections…and lobby Congress is internet piracy.  So we now have the MPAA-supported Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).  The formidable roadblock to it is the powerful influence that the internet titans have over the Obama administration.  Hence the current war over SOPA.

Honestly, this last bit of editorializing is nonsense.  Who exactly is Mr. Epstein speaking for?  (In another paragraph, he seems to lend his support to Net Neutrality legislation, which, if enacted, would punish services such as Netflix by forcing their customers to pay additional fees for content streamed over the internet — in other words, another bit of MPAA lobbying that would favor the major studios.)  He makes no mention of the fact that anti-piracy legislation was severely wounded in the past few days, or of the enormous public outcry against it.  Epstein writes as if the highly successful blackout spearheaded by Wikipedia and Google this week, leading to sudden reversals among previous sponsors of the bills on Capital Hill, never happened.  And he also somehow manages to get in a dig at Obama?

Regardless of ones own personal views on this issue, it’s a major stretch of the facts to argue that internet piracy legislation was somehow necessary due to the business practices of streaming companies such as Netflix, and it’s downright irresponsible for a publication such as TheWrap to make such an insinuation.

The Impending Studio Meltdown

Hollywood may not follow the Mayan calendar, but 2012 projects to be a disastrous year for the studios.  Just as the American auto industry refused to end its reliance on gas guzzling sedans and SUVs when it became apparent that sales from those vehicles were about to collapse, so too have the major studios either missed warning signs completely, or, worse, recognized the signs but decided to keep going with their current business strategies anyway, until the whole system is run into the ground.  The auto industry was recently bailed out, and Hollywood’s bailout, for the next few years anyway, will come from overseas box office.  But that’s a losing proposition.  Producers can’t figure out what domestic audiences want these days, and the notion that for every hit movie aimed at American tastes their will be another completely different movie specifically tailored to foreign audiences just doesn’t make sense.  Tintin, despite its technological wizardry, 3D surcharge, or the fact that it was directed by Steven Spielberg, has underperformed considerably in the U.S., while making up for those losses overseas.

Is that the new model?  I hope not.  The Tintin comics are extremely popular in Europe, and that is surely why Paramount went ahead with such a large scale project in the first place; but how many of those types of properties are waiting in the wings (can the big budget 3D version of Asterix be far behind)? And remember that Paramount bet more than just a reported $130 million on Tintin: there’s a sequel already in the works, this time directed by Peter Jackson.

What a mess.  What a god awful mess.  2011 was bad enough.  Box office was down about 5% from the previous year, despite higher ticket prices and 3D surcharges.  It turns out, in fact, that attendance was at a 16 year low.  Think that will turn around any time soon?  Think again.  According to Ray Subers at Box Office Mojo, we have as many sequels, prequels, and reboots to look forward to in 2012 — 27, if you can believe it — as were foisted upon us in 2011.  That article lists a handful of titles that Hollywood is banking on to rescue their sliding box office numbers in the coming year: The Dark Knight Rises, Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2, The Hobbit, Avengers, The Hunger Games, and The Amazing Spider-Man.  But don’t be fooled.  As we saw this past year, a few blockbusters, even when they reach the coveted billion dollar box office mark, can’t save an entire industry.

And let’s look at those supposed sure bets.  Dark Knight Rises will almost certainly approach a billion dollars in receipts, though it will likely need to do it without the glowing reviews enjoyed by its predecessor.  Critics can’t wait to take Christopher Nolan down a peg or two, and this may be the best chance they get in a while.  Tom Hardy has received a lot of buzz as the villain Bane, but he’s no Heath Ledger; and no matter how disturbing his performance is, it will be no match for Ledger’s Joker.

The overall tone of the trailer smacks of desperation to me, a pulling-out-all-the-stops style of filmmaking that makes for a great trailer but an over-the-top, exhausting movie.

The previous Twilight movie, from Summit, earned less domestically than any of the other Twilight sequels — not a good sign.  By splitting the final book into two parts, it took a page out of the Harry Potter release strategy, and will surely be hoping for a Harry Potter finish.  But the Twilight franchise hasn’t built up nearly the goodwill with audiences necessary to achieve that kind of outcome, and Part 2 will probably earn around the same as Part 1 did — in other words, a ton of money, but not enough to make anyone forget about the the rest of Summit’s projected losses in 2012. [Update on January 9th: The Hollywood Reporter and TheWrap are both reporting that Summit may merge with Lionsgate in the coming days.  I have to admit, it's not entirely clear to me why two smaller studios would want to take on the risk and debt associated with running a larger studio.  Over the weekend, a movie produced by a division of Paramount dedicated to creating inexpensive horror movies such as Paranormal Activity was the number one film at the box office.  The Devil Inside, a movie with a million dollar budget, easily beat out other films which cost over a hundred times more to produce.  This is certainly good news for the studio releasing the film, but not necessarily good news for an industry accustomed to making much more expensive movies.  I suppose an argument could be made that a Lionsgate/Summit partnership would be better positioned to compete with the majors, but couldn't a persuasive counter-argument be made that bigger will not automatically equal better in the foreseeable future?]

The Hobbit looks to cash in on the overseas box office gravy train, and probably stands the second best chance of any film in 2012 to cross the billion dollar mark.  The Lord of the Rings movies were uniformly dull, but they made money by positioning themselves as cinematic events analogous to the Star Wars films.  You’ve probably forgotten that there were three Lord of the Rings films, each one more pretentious and plodding than the last (culminating in a final film that was just awful enough to win Best Picture), because, frankly, there is no appetite for those movies anymore.  I’m guessing you don’t own the disks, you don’t watch the films when they play on cable, and probably the only time you ever think about stupid Frodo and his idiot friends is when somebody references “precious” in a bad movie or sitcom.  But when The Hobbit is released this coming December, I’m also guessing you’ll be sucked in once again, hoping for that “event” experience at the movies that we all supposedly crave.

As for Avengers, The Hunger Games, and The Amazing Spider-Man, look for them to be this year’s contenders in the “most anticipated titles that underperformed” category.  Avengers features superheroes from not one but three hated franchises: Thor, Captain America, and Hulk.  It also features Iron Man, but how many times can you base a superhero movie around Robert Downey’s ironic detachment?  And The Hunger Games is no Twilight, despite what Lionsgate would have you believe.  If anything, it has more in common with I Am Number Four, a movie based on a young adult book series that didn’t cross over with thirty-something moms.  If the moms don’t show up en masse for The Hunger Games, and the movie needs to rely on teenaged girls in order to reach blockbuster status, then it too will be a casualty of overblown expectations.  Finally, The Amazing Spider-Man looks like it could be in real trouble.  Have you seen the trailer?

Maybe Sony believed that people went to see the first three movies because they loved the character.  Wrong.  There’s nothing special about the character.  They loved Tobey Maguire.  This new version stars the guy from The Social Network.  No, not Jesse Eisenberg, the guy who played his business partner.  No, not Justin Timberlake, the other guy.  What’s his name?  Good question.

What does the rest of 2012 look like?  Let’s put it this way: if you like crummy movies, you’re going to be very pleased.  Universal has a yet another American Pie sequel, four kids movies, a movie based on the Battleship board game, one of two competing Snow White retellings, four action movies (Denzel Washington, Mark Wahlberg, Keanu Reeves, and a Bourne movie without Matt Damon), a movie based on the Ouija board game, and the musical version of Les Miserables.  Possible highlights include three Judd Apatow comedies, an Oliver Stone drug war movie, and a comedy about competitive college a cappella groups.

Not blown away?  No worries.  Warner Bros. has a comedy about competitive church choir groups, a Zach Galifianakis/Will Ferrell comedy, a kids movie, a horror movie, a Clash of the Titans sequel, a movie based on the Dark Shadows TV show, a Nicholas Sparks weepy with Zac Efron, a Godzilla movie, a high school party comedy, a Jack and the Beanstalk retelling, a Sylvester Stallone action movie, and a 3D version of The Great Gatsby (as well as the new Batman and The Hobbit).  Possible highlights include a Steven Soderbergh movie about male strippers, an L.A. 1940s crime drama with Sean Penn, a Ben Affleck-directed CIA flick, and an Alfonso Cuarón film with George Clooney, set in space.

Disney isn’t even trying to be a real studio anymore, though it’s hoping to appeal to more than just little kids with John Carter and, of course, Avengers.  It’s also re-releasing two animated films in 3D, has three new animated films (including one from Pixar), another nature movie, and a movie about a make-believe kid born in a backyard.  Possible highlights include a feature length version of Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie.

Unimpressed?  Sony is sure to satisfy with a Ghost Rider sequel, two animated movies for kids, a movie based on the 21 Jump Street TV series, another Men In Black sequel, an Adam Sandler comedy, a Kevin James comedy, a remake of Total Recall, and a new James Bond movie to go along with the Spider-Man reboot.  Possible highlights include a thriller with bike messengers in New York, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a new Kathryn Bigelow war movie about killing Bin Laden, and a Meryl Streep dramedy about marriage.

No?  Doesn’t do it for you?  In that case, Paramount is sure to get you excited with an Eddie Murphy comedy, a G.I. Joe sequel, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, a low budget horror movie, the Titanic 3D re-release, and World War Z, a big budget zombie flick.  Possible highlights include more craziness from Sacha Baron Cohen and a Seth Rogen comedy with Barbra Streisand.

Still not sold?  Fox is your last shot then, with a Three Stooges movie, the George Lucas WW2 black fighter pilot movie, a weird Cloverfield/superhero hybrid movie, The Phantom Menace 3D re-release, a Reese Witherspoon action comedy, a drama about public school teachers, an Alien prequel, a Ben Stiller/Vince Vaughn comedy, another Wimpy Kid, another Ice Age, a Taken sequel, a movie about surfing, a Billy Crystal comedy, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.  The only possible highlight I can see on Fox’s schedule is Ang Lee’s version of Life of Pi.  Prometheus, the Ridley Scott Alien prequel, has a cool trailer, but it’s a horror movie, and as bad as 2011 was for movies in general, it was even worse for horror movies.  I’m sort of, kind of, a little bit looking forward to it, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

Among the current trends, this whole fairy tale retelling craze has to be the worst.  The conventional wisdom in Hollywood must have been that fairy tales would score with audiences by combining familiar storylines (conveniently in the public domain) with modern sensibilities and eye-popping special effects, in order to appeal to children and adults alike.  But there is zero empirical evidence that this will work, if recent attempts by the television networks are any indication.  It’s as if a genre appeared out of nowhere and took over Hollywood without at least one major success to point to as an example.  Last year’s Red Riding Hood bombed, and I don’t expect much from this pointless, doomed experiment.

I also noticed that Judd Apatow is once again being asked to supply audiences with some of the only comedies worth seeing this year (there are a bunch that he either produced or directed on the schedule, including Wanderlust, The Five-Year Engagement, This Is 40, and the as-yet-untitled movie he’s directing).  And the comedies not produced by Apatow are being made by disciples most closely associated with him, notably Seth Rogen.

There are also four 3D conversions of older movies to look forward to.  Haven’t seen Titanic enough in your lifetime?  Maybe you were unmarried the first time it came out, and now you have a bunch of toddlers.  Perfect!  It’s a heartwarming tale for the whole family!  The other conversions are Beauty and the Beast, Finding Nemo, and The Phantom Menace (the thought of a 3D Jar Jar Binks is actually quite disturbing to me).

There are the usual number of computer animated 3D movies to take the kids to, as well as a whole bunch of high profile releases from Lionsgate (home of Hunger Games), Summit (home of Twilight), Dreamworks, and Relativity (which has the other Snow White movie) that I didn’t cover in this post.  [Update: indeed, it's never been harder to distinguish a slick "studio" film budgeted at $100 million with a competing movie from a "mini-major."  Schwarzenegger makes his return to the big screen this summer in The Expendables sequel, a Lionsgate release that in years past could only have been produced by one of the larger studios.]  And it goes without saying that each year there is a movie or two that initially starts out under the radar but soon catches a wave of internet buzz and positive reviews.  Who knows what that movie will be this year, but, whatever it is, will it be enough?

Predictions are a dime a dozen, so I won’t go too overboard.  But, let’s face it, there isn’t much on the schedule in 2012 to inspire confidence.  There certainly aren’t many upcoming studio releases that accomplish anything beyond continuing the industry’s reliance on “tent-pole” blockbusters and animated hits for kids.  A generous reading of this year’s titles would be that Hollywood plans on sleepwalking through yet another year, resigned to leaving the awards and accolades to “specialty divisions” or independent studios such as The Weinstein Company.  But this may be perhaps the worst moment in recent memory for Hollywood to be phoning it in.  The competing pressures from video games and the internet have finally reached a tipping point, and this could be the year that a high profile movie tanks so badly at the box office that it takes other movies down with it.

If life were a movie, Hollywood may be hoping that 2012 borrows its plot from The Producers: make bad movies on purpose and then watch as a few of them become accidental hits.  In past eras, this wouldn’t have been such a big deal — there simply weren’t enough viable, competing alternatives out there to take audiences away from the movie-going experience.  But this is nothing like past eras, and studios should be genuinely concerned.  In the last three decades, the major studios decided it was in their best interests to feed our appetite for blockbusters.  If and when we decide we’ve had enough, or if the quality of the product is so terrible that we finally decide we can’t take another bite, then it’s not as if the studios can tweak the menu or hire a new chef.  To continue this annoying food analogy further, movies are as disposable today as hamburgers at a fast food restaurant, and you don’t really get a chance to improve on fast food.  You’re making junk, and when people stop eating it, you’re done.

To Buy Or Not To Buy

After the huge dust up that occurred this past weekend when Philip Bloom announced on his blog that someone high up at RED [update: okay, who are we kidding -- extremely high up!] demanded he return his Epic camera for a full $80,000 refund — this after Bloom had been writing for months about how, while he was thrilled with the Epic for the most part, he had encountered various technical issues and malfunctions with the camera — I thought it might be interesting to pose a simple question:

When does it make sense to buy a video camera?

There is no simple answer, obviously, and many variables must be taken into account — but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any answers to be had.  For starters, if you make your living shooting weddings, or corporate events, you definitely need to purchase a camera.  For the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that you’re able to earn $700 per event as a freelance shooter with your own camera.  The Panasonic HVX200 was a pretty good investment in its day, even though the P2 cards were a gigantic waste of money that was never recouped.  Today, a better event camera would be the Sony EX3 — a very popular choice for event work in Boston, where I live.  An EX3 rental will run you about $300 per day, meaning that once additional accessories are factored in, you’re looking at pocketing between $300 and $400 per event.  Purchasing an EX3 will set you back around $8,000, so, after ten gigs (at this hypothetical $700 rate) you will still not have made any money.  After the same ten gigs with rented equipment, you’ll only have about three grand in your pocket, but at least you won’t be in debt.

However, there are other persuasive reasons to buy a Sony EX3.  If you own an EX3, you will often get hired because you own an EX3.  In other words, a lot of broadcast work in Boston is set up to accept EX3 footage, so a DP with an EX3 is at an enormous advantage when it comes to getting freelance gigs from local news stations or local production companies.  It’s hard to imagine that there will ever be a local news station that would be equipped to handle Epic footage, and many of the smaller post-production facilities that work on local spots are similarly unable to handle the enormous speed and storage requirements of RED footage.

If you’ve owned an EX3 in Boston for the past few years, and you have a good reel, you’ll be able to hire yourself out with your gear fairly regularly.  Probably not for narrative projects, but certainly for events, regional spots, and local news.  It probably still took you a while for the camera to pay for itself, but eventually you came out on top.

There are cheaper cameras than the EX3, for sure.  Documentarians have been working with the 5DmkII for years now, and, at $2,500 for the body, it would be impossible to argue against the logic of that investment.  A documentary filmmaker must follow his or her subject for weeks, months, or even years at a time, so renting equipment on self-funded, low budget projects simply isn’t an option.  The 5D is by no means the ideal documentary camera — no auto focus in video mode, no HD output to an external monitor, etc. — but it does a pretty terrific job.  Check out this behind the scenes video that was shot on a 5D by Peter Hainzl in conjunction with the short that Nino Leitner just shot on a Canon C300.

13:59 – BEHIND THE SCENES from Peter Hainzl on Vimeo.

Ed Burns, who went with a RED ONE on his previous indie, chose to shoot his latest feature on his own personal 5D.

Nice, right?  I owned a 7D for years, so I can attest that the 7D footage would not have looked as good.  But the 7D, and the Panasonic GH2 — my current camera of choice — are terrific options for freelancers shooting training videos, CEO interviews, and events ( even though the 7D — as well as the 5D, for that matter — suffers from that annoying 12 minute footage limitation, which is a serious deficiency when it comes to event work or even documentary work).  The GH2 sold out from almost every single online vendor last week when it was priced at $699 with kit lens!  That’s an insane price for a camera that is easily hacked to shoot exceedingly well at high ISOs.  If you are a freelancer, and you picked up a GH2 last week on a whim, it wouldn’t take you more than one or two gigs to recoup what you spent.  That’s almost the definition of a no brainer.

Speaking of Panasonic, the AF100, priced at around $5,000 for the body, is also a decent option for experienced shooters.  My only problem with the AF100 is that I haven’t seen much proof that the footage is any better than what you can get on a hacked GH2.  Sure, it shoots 60P at 1080, for all the zillions of times a year that slow motion is required on corporate gigs.  Until Panasonic or someone else makes a truly professional, fast, image stabilized zoom lens for micro four thirds cameras, I’m not sure I could recommend buying an AF100 over the GH2.

The RED cameras, along with Canon’s new C300, are specifically built for narrative work, not event work or local news.  You could probably get away with showing up solo at an event with a C300, but I doubt it will be a popular camera with freelancers.  For starters, it’s expensive, starting at around $17,000, if Web reports are accurate.  But, beyond that, it will have a reputation as a narrative camera.  There is no auto focus or auto exposure.  Even Sony’s F3, which starts at around $13,000, has gained a fairly decent following with Boston DPs who make their living shooting local spots and the like.  But the F3 makes a lot of sense for shooters who want to graduate from the EX3.  The C300, on the other hand, is aimed at DPs who come from backgrounds in film or narrative television, and also at 5D users who are looking for their next camera upgrade and have made a sizable investment in Canon lenses.

But I foresee two problems with the C300.  First off, the majority of narrative projects only happen if they are sufficiently funded.  What that means with regard to cameras is that most movies shot on expensive cameras have budgets, studio or production company backing, and perhaps even pre-negotiated distribution.  The problem is that these are precisely the types of projects that don’t require a DP to own and provide his own camera.  I’ve been on a whole bunch of professional film, television, and advertising sets in my day, but I’ve rarely seen a camera that wasn’t rented.  Why?  Because the DP doesn’t get to choose the camera.  Sure he gets a voice, but he doesn’t get final say.  It’s not his project.  There are directors, clients, producers, and various creative personnel who all need to agree on which camera is chosen for a particular job, and more often than not the decision comes down to cost.  It’s much trickier to hire a DP who is billing separately for equipment, or who is adding equipment costs onto his labor costs.  It can be done, but usually on much smaller projects with smaller budgets — projects that pay less and are more suited to cheaper equipment anyway.

Secondly, on larger productions, one camera isn’t enough to do the job.  Even on an indie feature, it’s preferable to shoot with a second camera if you’re going to have any chance of getting through your pages without spending the whole day on coverage.  The majority of projects that have budgets beyond what the filmmaker is personally willing to invest will almost always rent two or more cameras.  It protects the production in case of technical issues, provides some additional insurance in the event of damage, and is expensed in a way that can be directly passed along to the client or the studio/production company.  So even if a DP were hired on a narrative project and provided his own camera, a second or third camera would need to be rented anyway, and it’s not realistic that a professional show would get one camera from the DP while going through the hassle of picking up the others from a rental house.  The logistics alone, not to mention the billing, would get pretty complicated.

It’s also worth noting that the new RED cameras — the Epic and the Scarlet — require additional technicians on set.  Every RED shoot I was ever on came with camera techs, who would sit at a separate table furiously imputing data into laptops.  Not a deal breaker, if there’s money in the budget for additional crew, but on lower budget work it could pose serious problems.  The Epic in particular, as well as the similarly priced Arri Alexa, are so expensive to own that one begins to wonder just who exactly is buying them.  A production company that shoots broadcast spots or series television would surely be a good candidate, but for the individual DP who relies on work-for-hire, it would take a heck of a long time to pay back an investment of that size.  Also, The Epic and Alexa would be overkill on just about any project not destined for theatrical distribution or HD broadcast.  It would be insane to shoot a CEO interview on an Epic, but, if a DP has bought the Epic, then you can be certain he’ll try to use it, and charge for it, every chance he gets.  What that means for DPs is that they could end up getting paid less than what they should be getting for providing a top-of-the-line camera.  More often than not, in a city like Boston anyway, where we don’t shoot a lot of series television, a DP would be bringing an expensive camera to a project that is in no position to afford the rental costs of that camera.  Not exactly a viable long-term business strategy.

But that’s the reality DPs with pricey cameras may face.  They’ll run into trouble using their cameras on well funded projects — because those productions will require multiple cameras, will be renting their equipment anyway, and may decide to use a camera different from the one the DP happens to own — while, at the same time, it will be hard to use an Epic or a Scarlet, or even a C300, to get local news work (I’m guessing they’ll have an easier time with the F3).  Will they rent their camera out to other productions to make a little money on the side?  I wouldn’t.  If anything happens to that baby on someone else’s gig, I’d be screwed.  Finally, DPs will have trouble billing clients for what their equipment is truly worth, in effect donating their camera to a project that probably doesn’t deserve that kind of generosity.  I can’t think of a single talking head corporate interview — which ends up getting uploaded to YouTube or embedded into PowerPoint decks — that would benefit from being shot on an Epic or a C300.

A lot of aspiring filmmakers want to own the C300 or the Scarlet, but they need to be aware that they’d be making a very expensive purchase at an exact moment in time when so many filmmakers are posting their shorts on Vimeo and receiving zero compensation.  A similar fate is being met by indie feature directors whose films, if they’re lucky, are screened at festivals before getting posted online for little or no remuneration.  In case after case today, because of the specific pressures that the internet has created for filmmakers, musicians, and writers, the artist receives no financial compensation.  The exposure they get online has become a substitute for compensation.  These days, the overwhelming majority of independent filmmakers work on self-funded projects that are not monetized; their work is created on spec and is posted on the internet for anyone to watch for free.

Why should low budget filmmakers feel compelled to use the best available cameras for projects that probably won’t make any money?  Is that even fair?  In 2010, writer-director Lena Dunham made Tiny Furniture in her mother’s apartment, on a Canon 7D.

I’m guessing the entire budget didn’t cost as much as the purchase price of a single C300.  The film ended up getting modest theatrical distribution, meaning Ms. Dunham was already way ahead of the game, and then went on to perform admirably on-demand.  Today she’s working with the likes of Judd Apatow.

Everyone wants the best gear.  It’s human nature.  But now we’re in a bizarre new phase of the HDSLR revolution, in which camera manufacturers, realizing they probably didn’t charge enough for the 5D and 7D, are trying to convince us that expensive cameras are still spiritually connected to the HDSLR movement.  They are not.  They are in every respect priced for professional, well funded work.  Ask yourself this: if the 5D had been priced at $17,000 when it came out in 2008, would it have had the same impact?

It’s truly astonishing that the debate has shifted so quickly, in such a short period of time, to which expensive camera is worth owning, rather than whether to own one.  Before the 5DmkII, I didn’t personally know any Boston DPs-for-hire who owned their own RED ONE (I’m sure there were a bunch of them, but you get the idea).  The only productions using the RED ONE in 2008 were renting them for TV spots and some broadcast narrative work.  Then the 5D came out and it was priced so affordably for what it could do that it was crazy for filmmakers and freelancers not to buy one.  Almost overnight, self-funded projects could afford the film look, and the rest was history.

Ancient history, perhaps.  The HDSLR phenomenon may have ended while we were all out trying to make a living.  Camera manufacturers have certainly wised up, that’s for sure.

What’s New Is Old Again

Why is it so hard to resist summing up the year that was?  Was 2011 really so different from 2010 that it requires its own year-in-review?  There were some fascinating developments in film distribution and video production in 2011, but if by chance you spent the past year doing time in a Turkish prison, and only had information from 2010 to go on, the truth is you probably didn’t miss much.

These are some of my hopefully-not-too-pretentious thoughts on the matter, in no particular order:

1.  It’s really hard to make a dent in the culture. 

There’s a lot going on in the world, from natural and environmental disasters to global economic collapse.  Next year’s presidential election is already in full swing, and each week another huge political story seems to drown out just about everything else.  Meanwhile, on television or at the movies, the usual reality programs or CGI-heavy blockbusters capture everyone’s remaining attention — that is, if folks aren’t tweeting, or at home playing Xbox, or setting up their timelines on Facebook instead.  In 2011, it seemed, the notion that a small indie movie could capture the public’s attention has officially become antiquated.

2.  Television fills a cultural void. 

Popular shows such as Boardwalk Empire and Curb Your Enthusiasm, on HBO, continue to captivate, if with somewhat diminishing returns from seasons past.  Mad Men took the year off, but a couple of new shows really broke through for me: Enlightened, with Laura Dern and Mike White, may be the single best new program on television,

while Showtime’s Homeland and Fox’s The New Girl, with Zooey Deschanel, have kept me coming back for more.  The current seasons of some of my favorites from last year, including the aforementioned Boardwalk, but also Bored to Death, Modern Family, and The League, have been passable at best.

3.  All of Hollywood’s eggs are overseas, in the blockbuster basket.

The theatrical distribution model in the U.S. may be about to crumble, but that won’t slow down the studios.  And a blockbuster just isn’t a blockbuster anymore unless it earns A BILLION DOLLARS in box office.  Did you see Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2?  No?  What’s wrong with you.  They each made A BILLION DOLLARS.

4.  Hollywood still doesn’t get it. 

Once again, December will mark the simultaneous release of half a dozen studio films we’re expected to see between Christmas and New Years.  This year’s high stakes gambles include Hugo, Spielberg’s War Horse, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close with Tom Hanks, and Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (as well as, on a much more modest level, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Young Adult), and that’s not even counting the specialty titles, which will clean up at Oscar time anyway.

Meanwhile, there were a handful of solid releases that came out earlier in the year that were actually pretty good.  If you were in the mood for a mainstream flick during a month that didn’t start with the letter D, you could have caught Midnight In Paris, Moneyball, The Ides of March, Drive, The Help, or, if you were feeling really brave, The Tree of Life.  But there were so few worthwhile Hollywood releases in 2011 that, as I argued in a recent post, if a well-reviewed, modestly budgeted film (around $30 million) had the least bit of advertising to support it this past year, it was almost guaranteed to make money.

5.  Indie films released in theaters between January and November don’t make money. 

It’s a trend that’s been developing for a few years, but now it’s beginning to seem permanent.  The only indie titles that had any marketing push behind them this year, and thus had any chance of catching on with the public, were Another Earth, Sarah’s Key, Beginners, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Like Crazy, or Win Win, but, in the end, box office never materialized beyond the same $10 million indie ceiling we saw last year. Our Idiot Brother was the only Sundance film to make any real money ($25 million), but reviews were noticeably lukewarm, and the movie was marketed as a mainstream broad comedy.

Indie movies have become the proverbial trees falling in the forest: with little marketing push to back them up, they drop to the ground without making a sound.  And then comes December, and we’re awash in films that each hope to repeat the success of last year’s late entries, when The King’s Speech, Black Swan, and The Fighter went and got all popular on us.  This year’s contenders for top honors include A Dangerous Method, My Week with Marilyn, The Artist, The Descendants, The Iron Lady, Shame, and Melancholia.  The scuttlebutt right now is that the Best Picture Oscar will come down to The Descendants and The Artist, but any one of these smart, adult-themed titles is probably worth the price of admission.

6.  Indie films that can’t earn a million dollars in box office are now making money through video-on-demand.

Some titles were released on-demand before a theatrical release, some titles, such as the Polish Brothers’ For Lovers Only, bypassed theaters altogether,

and some titles went the traditional route of appearing on-demand after disappearing (quickly) from theaters.  Unfortunately, there aren’t many available box office numbers for on-demand releases, so it’s left up to the distributor to share those numbers with the public.  If a film does well, as Margin Call with Kevin Spacey did (around $4 million in VOD), then the studio is all too happy to let us know about it.  It’s not hyperbole anymore to claim that future indie releases with rely on VOD box office almost exclusively to earn back their production costs.

7.  There will be streaming. 

Boy will there ever.  People will stream new releases from their cable provider, or from VUDU and Blockbuster.  They’ll stream older titles from Netflix and Amazon, or network programming from Netflix, Amazon, and HuluPlus.  Did I leave anyone out?  Of course I did.  Each week there’s another announcement about streaming from Facebook, YouTube, or, now, Verizon.  The revolution may never get televised, but at the very least it will be streamed.

8.  Original content is king.

If a network owns a hot property, as is the case, for example, with HBO and Boardwalk Empire, you can bet they won’t be sharing it with any other content providers.  Did AMC keep Mad Men off the air in 2011 in order to grow an audience for The Walking Dead and Hell On Wheels?  Showtime has another winner with Homeland, and Netflix made a splash announcing the long anticipated return of Arrested Development.  But if you want to watch these shows as they air, you won’t be able to get them à la carte.  Each month, you’ll need to shell out around $15 bucks for HBO, $15 for Showtime, $16 for Netflix, and who knows what for basic cable.  If you’re still mad at Netflix because they raised their prices, you could go with Amazon or Hulu to save a little money, but you’ll miss out on a whole lot of exclusive programming and upcoming original content.

9.  Digital movie cameras will finally replace traditional film.

We’ve been hearing about this for years, and have been amazed by Arri Alexa footage for some time now, but 2011 saw the release of two new digital cameras from Red, a hot new number from Canon,

Canon EOS C300 = Awesome from Jonathan Yi on Vimeo.

and a decent entry from Sony.  But while these cameras are poised to make celluloid obsolete once and for all, they are damn expensive.  There are cheaper alternatives (get a GH2 — seriously, get one!), but, as usual, the digital cinema community is too excited about the latest and coolest technologies to give much attention to more affordable, flawed solutions that require creative workarounds.  All the back-and-forth about which camera is better this year was incredibly depressing, but I’m afraid it won’t be letting up anytime soon.  And if indie filmmakers manage to scrounge up the money for a shiny new camera, or to secure financing for their films through successful Kickstarter campaigns, they’ll still face another daunting challenge…

10.  It’s really hard to make a dent in the culture.

On that optimistic note, Happy Holidays!

My Completely Unnecessary Rant

Tonight’s the night of the much anticipated American Master’s Woody Allen documentary, and, coming on the heels of the success of Midnight in Paris, Salon film critic Matt Zoller Seitz took the opportunity to write about what he argues are Woody Allen’s ten finest films.  Now, I know there are much more important things for me to get angry about in this world, and I know that film criticism, by its very nature, needs to be subjective, but this top ten list by Mr. Seitz has really got me steamed.

Here, according to Mr. Seitz, are Woody Allen’s ten best films:

1. Annie Hall
2. Hannah and Her Sisters
3. Manhattan
4. The Purple Rose of Cairo
5. Bullets Over Broadway
6. Love and Death
7. Husbands and Wives
8. Deconstructing Harry
9. Zelig
10. New York Stories, Oedipus Wrecks

Now, if I’m going to go through the hassle of actually writing about my reaction to this list, then at least I should explain my reasoning: it’s all about the rankings.  Keep in mind, it’s pretty hard to screw up a Woody Allen top ten list.  Most critics would rank Annie Hall

and Manhattan as his best two films.

Most critics would similarly put The Purple Rose of Cairo somewhere in the top five.  There is consensus about these things.  And that’s precisely why Mr. Seitz’s list is such a joke.  For starters, he ranks Hannah and Her Sisters over Manhattan.  His critics license should be immediately revoked over that offense.  And he ranks Bullets Over Broadway fifth, while leaving Crimes and Misdemeanors off the list entirely!

After so many readers complained about the omission, he added this equally laughable response in the comment section:

ABOUT CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS: I like the movie, and I like his other “God is not watching, now how do you behave?” films — MATCH POINT and YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER — in which major characters commit grave moral offenses, even crimes, because they can get away with it. During various early phases of this list I carved out spots for all three of those films, especially CRIMES…As a portrait of an immoral person opportunistically seizing an opportunity to get what he wants and not caring who he hurts, I slightly prefer MATCH POINT, even though it’s a far less rich film overall, because it’s more focused and unrelenting, even shocking in some ways. I felt as though I was being granted access to the very darkest places in Woody Allen’s mind, and that he was not protecting himself in any way, which I did feel he was doing in CRIMES.

Seriously.  His exact words.  Is he actually saying that You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger made his shortlist?  Who is this guy?

Listen, if you’re a film critic, and you have a bias against a certain film that the overwhelming majority of your colleagues hold in extremely high regard, and you’re putting together a top ten list, you may want to consider including the film in question on your list.  You’re not writing about your favorite Woody movies, per se — you’re trying to make the case that these are his ten “finest” films.  So put an asterisk next to Crimes and say something negative about it, but don’t keep it off your list.  If you keep that movie off a top ten list of Woody’s best films, then everything else you write about in your article will lose credibility.

And how do Oedipus Wrecks and Love and Death even make it onto this top ten list at all?  By trying to satisfy a need to express his own personal opinions while at the same time trying to put together some kind of definitive top ten list, Mr. Seitz, at least in my opinion, essentially discredits himself as a film critic.

If you’re going to look at Woody’s entire body of work, it’s fairly easy to divide his films into three major categories: the Stinkers, the Near-Misses, and the Gems.

Stinkers: Whatever Works, Melinda and Melinda, Anything Else, Hollywood Ending, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Celebrity, Shadows and Fog.

Near-misses: You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Cassandra’s Dream, Scoop, Small Time Crooks, Everyone Says I Love You, Mighty Aphrodite, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Alice, Another Woman, September, Oedipus Wrecks, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, Every Thing You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask, What’s Up, Tiger Lily?

There isn’t a movie on that list that I would say is actually not worth seeing.  But, let’s face it, those are flawed movies.  Good for a few laughs — and some occasional existential introspection — but not his best work.  We watch them because they were directed by Woody Allen.

That leaves 21 Gems (some much better than others), the cream of the Woody crop, beginning with the most recent: Midnight in Paris, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Match Point, Sweet and Lowdown, Deconstructing Harry, Bullets Over Broadway, Husbands and Wives, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Radio Days, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Broadway Danny Rose, Zelig, Stardust Memories, Manhattan, Interiors, Annie Hall, Love and Death, Sleeper, Bananas, and Take the Money and Run.  When people argue about which are the top ten best Woody Allen movies, they are (usually) culling from this very impressive shortlist.

And it gets even easier, actually.  Annie Hall and Manhattan aren’t just great movies — they’re masterpieces.  Most everyone would rank them as Woody Allen’s two best films.  That leaves 19 movies for eight spots.  If you want to get all subjective about it, here’s your chance.

So now I’d like to offer my entirely unsolicited advice to Mr. Seitz: make two lists.  One with what a consensus of film critics likely consider to be Mr. Allen’s ten finest films, and another with your ten personal favorites.

These are what I’m guessing are the top ten most universally admired Woody Allen movies (if I’ve screwed this list up, please let me know):

1. Annie Hall
2. Manhattan
3. Crimes and Misdemeanors
4. The Purple Rose of Cairo
5. Hannah and Her Sisters
6. Zelig
7. Match Point
8. Bullets Over Broadway
9. Husbands and Wives
10. Interiors

Maybe it’s a slightly obvious (and less comedic) list, and, in that sense, less fun to write about, but it wouldn’t preclude Mr. Seitz from then making another top ten list of his personal favorites.

So here, for the sake of full disclosure, are my own personal favorites, based on my specific biases and opinions:

1. Manhattan
2. Annie Hall
3. Crimes and Misdemeanors
4. The Purple Rose of Cairo
5. Husbands and Wives
6. Broadway Danny Rose
7. Hannah and Her Sisters
8. Midnight in Paris
9. Sweet and Lowdown
10. Sleeper

In other words, I can recognize that a lot of people enjoyed Bullets Over Broadway more than I did, so while I kept it off my favorites list, it’s included on the more consensus-inspired top ten list.  I swapped the order of Annie Hall and Manhattan.  I’m a huge fan of Broadway Danny Rose, but acknowledge that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.  I’ll take Sweet and Lowdown over Interiors, a film many critics admire.  And I actually prefer Husbands and Wives to Hannah and Her Sisters, while fully recognizing that most Woody fans would disagree with me.

Then again, I’m not writing in Salon.com about: “Woody Allen’s greatest films…these 10 movies are the director’s finest.”

I know, I know, I need to take a chill pill.  But Hannah and Her Sisters over Manhattan?  Give me a break.