… is here.

David Carr in the NYT takes a look at that speech by former Miramax prez Mark Gill. The talk, you’ll recall, was a whinefest about how there are too many movies being made—5000 a year, with 600 getting some sort of theatrical release in the U.S. (Gill didn’t cite his sources; Hitsville’s comments on it are here. Gill’s prepared remarks are printed here.)

For reasons that are unclear to me, Gill thinks these figures are bad news, and so does Carr. But the impression of crisis the story leaves—through the use of works like “grim,” “carnage,” etc.—remains, as I wrote, misplaced. The only people for whom these figures are discomfiting are established indie film producers, like Gill, who don’t like all the competition.

The classic American problem in the culture industry is corporate hegemony. Three networks, a few film distribution companies, your local newspaper, Time, Newsweek, Life magazine—these institutions, back in the day, controlled access to virtually all film availability for the vast majority of Americans. The advent of cable, and then the VHS age, and then the DVD one, and now Netflix and the web, have exploded that hegemony, hopefully for all time.

The flaw in Gill’s reasoning—and of those who have been parroting his words—is that no artist has the right to an audience. They have a right to access to an audience. The current state of affairs is an ideal one; the artists are able to create the work they want, and there are distribution channels open to them.

For example, Carr writes:

Last year, I hosted a public interview with Sidney Lumet, the legendary director who made Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. It was an amazing film, with stars like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Marisa Tomei. But someone in the audience got up and said that after he recommended it to all his friends, they couldn’t find it anywhere.

Why? Too many little movies waiting their turn, projects financed by private equity folks looking for their little piece of tinsel and a place to store money.

The film had every advantage it needed—a high profile showing at the New York Film Festival and great reviews. The only reason the movie flopped is … people didn’t want to go see it! In that situation, what’s supposed to happen? Should exhibitors facing empty houses have left the film showing; should Congress have passed a law ordering people to go see it? Sidney Lumet got to make his movie, he got his gala spot at the NYFF, he got reviewed in every major U.S. city. It’s now out on video, and anyone who didn’t get to see it in the theater can watch it at home. What’s the problem here?

(And by the way, it wasn’t an “amazing” movie. We’re not talking about Bergman, here: It was a decent genre exercise, a fairly smart crime thriller, with nudity, stark violence, everything needed for a hit. It didn’t become one because a) it wasn’t that good and b) because a genuinely amazing movie dealing with similar themes, only worked out in a truly transcendent way, was released almost at the same time: No Country for Old Men.)

Anyway, this expansion has made it hard if you are one of the people trying to make money in this brave new world, even if you’re a cool guy who used to work at Miramax. But tough shit. Gill is like the guy in the SUV on a backed-up freeway who wants everyone else to stay home. Couldn’t he really make a statement if he volunteered stop making movies himself?

If Michael Moore, or Oliver Stone, or, God forbid, some effete French director, had crafted a feature film that was a thinly disguised political broadside portraying Americans as recumbent tubbos who moved around on sliding barcaloungers with built-in video screens and soft drinks always at the ready, don’t you think there’d be some sort of notice taken?

But Pixar does it and …

… the reviewers barely mention it. The new Pixar film, Wall-E, does indeed, as you have heard, tell the story of an adorable robot working alone on a depopulated earth. There’s an obvious ecological lesson here, and this has been duly noted, along with mentions of unspecified “themes” and “messages.”

But what was rarely analyzed in the reviews is that the earth is deserted because a Wal-Mart-like company called “Buy n’ Large” has filled it up with trash, and the departed humans, expanded to Big Gulp size, are contentedly gorging themselves amid the comforts of a flying Club Med, where they slide around on those carts, on which they watch TV continuously without even having to sit up completely. While some of the better reviewers mention the beglotted humanoid forms, I found it odd that most mainstream reviewers didn’t bother to point out what the film was saying.

I’m no film theorist, but I think what director Andrew Stanton is trying to tell us is that we humans eat so much and limit our movements to such a degree that we will soon become immobile whales unable to focus past the video screens permanently affixed in front of our field of vision.

(And not subtextually, either; as my friend Michael Sragow says about such obvious material in films, “It’s not subtext. It’s text text.”) What what are those wide-bottomed, view-screen laden SUV’s that cog our highways these days but early versions of the portly trams of Wall-E? I don’t want to be judgmental about people’s lifestyles, but it’s hard to look at the rotund, popcorn-barrel-toting silhouettes in a typical suburban movieplex and not notice that Stanton’s vision of the future isn’t all that exaggerated.*

The Hollywood Reporter doesn’t even mention the human sequences**.

Entertainment Weekly breaks the news gently and doesn’t discuss the implications***:

WALL-E himself is the movie’s mascot and unlikely hero; it’s up to him to save a spacebound colony of humans who’ve ”evolved” into hilariously infantile technology-junkie couch potatoes. Yet even as the movie turns pointedly, and resonantly, satirical, it never loses its heart.

Roger Ebert, too, goes easy on the bad news:

We meet a Hoverchair family, so known because aboard ship they get around in comfy chairs that hover over surfaces and whisk them about effortlessly. They’re all as fat as Susie’s aunt.

This is not entirely their fault, since generations in the low-gravity world aboard the Axiom have evolved humanity into a race whose members resemble those folks you see whizzing around Wal-Mart in their electric shopping carts.

Claudio Puig in USA Today mentions the engorged humans, but doesn’t make the obvous connection.

Joe Morgenstern in the WSJ mentions the trope in passing late in his review:

But I will tell you that humankind’s evolution, as foretold by Mr. Stanton and his colleagues, is a blissfully inspired reductio ad absurdum—or more accurately inflatio ad absurdum—of the ethos of consumption that now sustains the economies of prosperous nations.

Ken Turan tangentially mentions the humanoids. He’s better on the corporate angle:

Not to put too fine a point on it, our planet is a disaster, a bleak and disheartening ruin where every available surface is covered by towering skyscrapers of trash. It got so bad that Buy n’ Large, the conglomerate that has somehow taken charge of the planet, leaned on the entire human population to leave with a “space is the final fun-tier” campaign that featured slogans such as, “Too much garbage in your face? There’s plenty of space out in space.”

The only mainstream review I saw that made the obvious point (emphasis added) was A.O. Scott in the NYT:

Rather than turn a tale of environmental cataclysm into a scolding, self-satisfied lecture, Mr. Stanton shows his awareness of the contradictions inherent in using the medium of popular cinema to advance a critique of corporate consumer culture. The residents of the space station, accustomed to being tended by industrious robots, have grown to resemble giant babies, with soft faces, rounded torsos and stubby, weak limbs. Consumer capitalism, anticipating every possible need and swaddling its subjects in convenience, is an infantilizing force. But as they cruise around on reclining chairs, eyes fixed on video screens, taking in calories from straws sticking out of giant cups, these overgrown space babies also look like moviegoers at a multiplex.

They’re us, in other words. And like us, they’re not all bad. The paradox at the heart of “Wall-E” is that the drive to invent new things and improve the old ones—to buy and sell and make and collect—creates the potential for disaster and also the possible path away from it. Or, put another way, some of the same impulses that fill the world of “Wall-E”—our world—with junk can also fill it with art.

I disagree with his point, but it’s his perogative to make it. But why was he the only reviewer to take the film’s message at face value and address it head on?

————-

* Compare, for example, the trenchant comments of Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells: “I understand the impulse on the part of director Andrew Stanton to call it a robot love story and leave it at that, but it’s a lie, of course—a disinforming of pig-trough moviegoers who might think twice about going to a ‘green’ movie that satirizes their lie-around, fat-ass lifestyle.”

** The standards of the Hollywood Reporter, incidentally, seem to be declining week to week. The review of Wall-E, by Kirk Hunnycut, is a piece of utterly mundane writing and doesn’t appear to have been edited. This is the review’s second graf:

The film is so clever and sophisticated that you worry, slightly, that it might be too clever to connect with mainstream audiences. But like those worries last year that having a rat for a hero in “Ratatouille” might throw off audiences, surely “WALL-E” will make that connection. It’s so sweet and funny that the multitudes undoubtedly will surrender to its many charms.

*** Owen Gleiberman in EW, incidentally, finally goes completely off his rocker into Spielberg lapdogism:

For a while, WALL-E is nearly wordless, and the director, Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo), stages the early scenes with a gentle, unhurried mystery that is unabashedly Spielbergian.

Yeah, the beginning of Wall-E is a lot like the beginning of War of the Worlds: Outside of the fact that the former is deeply moving, cinematically poetic, daringly political, gracefully imagined, and executed with such taste and grace it makes you want to cry, and the latter is a loud, heavy-handed, mind-numbing, senselessly plotted crapload of thuddingly unsubtle filmmaking mechanics, they are very similar.

Essence magazine has a very long conversation with Lisa Van Allen, who you will recall was the woman who testified she had had a number of threesomes with Kelly and the allegedly under-age girl police said was on the sex tape at the center of the case. Lots of very poignant stuff here. Like this:

Essence.com: So how did you go from being an extra [at a video shoot in Atlanta] to meeting him personally?

Van Allen: He sent his cousin over to me. This guy told me his cousin wanted to talk to me. I asked him who his cousin was, and he said, “R. Kelly.” I said, “Okay,” and he arranged for me to be taken back to his trailer. In between the scenes, he came back to the trailer and talked to me. I was very flattered. Out of all the girls at the video shoot, he picked me out of everybody to talk to. We ended up having intercourse.

Essence.com: You had sex with him in the trailer that same day?

Van Allen: Yes. He started with a kiss, and from there we leaned back, and I just didn’t stop him. I was kind of worried that he wouldn’t want to see me again after that, but I wasn’t worried about the actual act at that time because I was just honored that he picked me. Being a young girl, I was like, “Wow.” I wasn’t thinking as a woman would.

And this:

Essence.com: Is it true that you got pregnant by R. Kelly and had an abortion?

Van Allen: Yes. I had the abortion in 2000, right before the “I Wish” video shoot. I was the one braiding his hair in that video. When I told him I was pregnant, he asked me what did I want to do, and I told him I wanted to get an abortion.

(The story includes a denial from one of Kelly’s lawyers. Another of his young girlfriends has said she got an abortion after an alliance with him; this woman was under-age at the time.)

And this:

Essence.com: In retrospect, do you feel that your relationship with him was damaging to you?

Van Allen: Yeah. As you can see, it still bothers me when I think about what went on. It’s emotionally stressful just knowing how I felt, how vulnerable I was. How I wanted him to love me and accept me. I didn’t want to get him mad at me. And I didn’t know what real love was. He was the first man I had ever dealt with—I was 17 when I met him, I hadn’t dealt with men before. I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

Essence.com: If these allegations are true, some people have suggested that you are just as reprehensible as R. Kelly is—that you also were having sex with an underage girl. What is your response to that?

Van Allen: I didn’t know that she was 14. He left me in the dark just like everybody else was in the dark. People hear that I’m 27, and they think that I was an adult when it happened. They don’t realize that I was coming in to being a young woman. I didn’t know her real age. I didn’t know the truth.

Essence.com: Why do you think nobody else in R. Kelly’s circle has come forward about him and teenage girls?

Van Allen: Because they don’t want people to look at them in the wrong light, like how they’ve done me. You see how this case went. It was supposed to be about him, but when I came out, they just switched it all over to me.

Essence.com: The allegations and the video haven’t put a dent in R. Kelly’s career. He still has droves of devoted fans, and his albums still top the charts. Why do you think so few people seem to care about this issue?

Van Allen: It’s like no one wants to step up and take responsibility for what’s happening. I have no idea why more people don’t want to get involved and put themselves out there for our children. I guess if it was closer to home, maybe they would. If it was their child or their sister. But it shouldn’t be that way.

The first page of the interview is here.

The second page, the link to which is a little hard to find, is here.

From Wired News’s Threat Level blog:

A federal judge is awarding Tanya Andersen, who defeated the Recording Industry Association of America’s file sharing lawsuit, $108,000 in legal fees to compensate for defending herself against the RIAA.

The award, made public Wedesday by U.S. District Judge James A. Redden of Oregon, marks the second time that a target of the RIAA who beat a lawsuit was awarded attorney’s fees. In August, a federal judge ordered the RIAA to pay $68,685 in litigation costs to two Oklahoma women whose case was dismissed.

Whether RIAA defendants who successfully defend such suits are automatically entitled to legal fees is on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The dispute is whether judges must award fees to a prevailing party under the Copyright Act.

More stories about how old-fashioned LPs are coming back. A blip last year is said to be continuing in 2008. According to this story in Rolling Stone, as many as 1.6 million albums may be sold in 2008, about double what were sold in 2006. Cnet uses that story as an excuse to visit an LP-pressing plant, saying “the format has made a big comeback, with sales skyrocketing and turntables moving off store shelves like they haven’t in years.”

The trouble is that instead of labeling the phenomenon as a fad, we’re told it’s that full-on comeback. And what the stories don’t supply is a direct comparison to the rest of the industry’s sales. Consider that compared to the 1.6 million LPs that might be sold last year …

… 1.1 million digital albums are sold each week …

… plus 20 million digital tracks, the equivalent of two million more.

In other words, if the trend holds, LPs might edge up to a level that would equal one percent of digital sales.

(Except that digital sales themselves are increasing 50 percent a year.)

And then you can add in the other seven or eight million hard-copy CDs sold—again, each week.

The stories are doubly dopey because they purport to be about a quest for better sound. On a nice stereo system with a good turntable, a decent needle and a new disc, fine, the sound is good. In the other 99.9 percent of the cases, it’s a lot crummier. The digital age (along with cheap equipment, notably speakers) has democratized fine sound, even taking into account the compression (which will be temporary) of mp3s.

——–

Many years ago, during the early CD era, Hitsville traveled to the Sony CD-pressing plant in Terre Haute  to learn about how CDs are made, a process that remains technologically amazing. That story is here.

Previously in Hitsville:

T-Bone Burnett and the drawbacks of digital sound—hooey!

Is the LP coming back? Uh, no.

… as foreshadowed here. And if nothing else, the Sonic Youth promotion was an excellent sign that the company’s music plans had gone straight off the track. The Silicon Valley Insider story is here:

Starbucks, which has been scaling back its once-grand ambitions to turn itself into an entertainment hub, is about to shrink its plans yet again. We hear that by September, the chain will have dumped almost all of its in-store music retail offerings.

That means no more “spinner” racks offering multiple CD choices to latte-buyers. And that also means no more gift cards and promotional giveaways for Apples iTunes (AAPL). Instead, we’re told, the coffee chain will offer just four CD “slots” per store. But it will also continue to offer free Wi-fi access to Apple’s online music store and may continue to try to sell entertainment online.

The Insider repeats two Starbucks music factoids that seem to be contradictory: That the company was selling more than four million CDs a year, but that (per a Jeff Leeds NYT story from March) the average per store was but two discs sold each day. Given that the company has 10,000 stores, roughly, in the U.S. and another five around the world, those two figures don’t gibe. (If the two-discs-per-day figure is true, the company would have sold seven million CDs in the U.S. each year, or more than ten million if they were counting international outlets. The discrepancy seems to come from a distinction the Times was making between company-owned outlets and licensed ones.)

Anyway, the real reason the campaign collapsed is that it was all based on novelty. You might buy a Norah Jones CD in line at Starbucks if you like her, you were going to buy it anyway, and you notice it on the counter. And then, caught up in the excitement of an effective marketing campaign, you might grab the McCartney disc a month later. But at that point reality kicks in: Most folks were quickly reminded why they hadn’t bought the last dozen or so McCartney albums. (His songwriting talents have deserted him.) Other so-called Starbucks artists don’t sell many records in any case. (Like Lucinda, for example.) And the shift to more mainstream acts, like James Blunt, drained away the novelty.

The myth that this was an important story was agrreably parroted by the press, which unaccountably found the idea of Starbucks selling CDs (or helping to publicize a movie, Akeelah and the Bee, for which the producers of the film paid Starbucks) endlessly fascinating and gave the company reams of publicity for what were essentially marketing agreements.How this was any more interesting than Orville Redenbacher, for example, setting up a popcorn kiosk at a Blockbuster, except less intuitive, was never clear.

… in Kansas City, the NYT reports:

In the wave of buyouts and layoffs hitting newspapers this season, The Kansas City Star has decided it can no longer afford a classical music critic. Paul Horsley, who took the critic’s job eight years ago, was quoted on the Web site MusicalAmerica.com as saying, “I think it was a very ‘corporate’ decision.” He added, “I think they eliminated the beat they thought they could most easily farm out.” Kansas City’s orchestra, opera and ballet companies are said to be organizing a formal protest.

Good luck! Last summer, the Times detailed the shrinkage in this field:

 Classical music criticism, a high-minded endeavor that has been around at least as long as newspapers and reached an English-language peak with George Bernard Shaw, has taken a series of hits in recent months.

Critics’ jobs have been eliminated, downgraded or redefined at newspapers in Atlanta, Minneapolis and elsewhere around the country and at New York magazine, where Peter G. Davis, one of the most respected voices of the craft, said he had been forced out after 26 years.

Newspapers have a lot of challenges these days, but cutting coverage in classical music is counterproductive, for two reasons. One, interest in classical music skews older and richer; those are two demographics that subscribe to daily newspapers disproportionately. It’s crazy to give whole classes of readers a reason to cancel their subscriptions.

The second reason is a little more weepy, but hear me out. I don’t think papers have to be high-minded, or suicidal. But it’s true that, with their special legal status, that they owe their communities something. If every daily in the country stopped writing about the local classical music scene, it wouldn’t be a death blow per se. It would merely be a horrendous one, which would hurt all the local music organizations for some period of time before another network of coverage sprang up.

Which brings me to the point I wanted to make. There’s obviously a market for coverage of the fine arts. The papers just have to figure out how to do it more creatively in a changing marketplace. Local papers have a unique knowledge base about the arts in their local communities, and it should be easy—and not very expensive—to leverage that online.

The paper should be enlisting online freelancers who, in return for reviewers credentials and a small fee, go to local classical music concerts and write short reviews for the paper online, immediately after the show. Two of these a day at, say, $50 per, is only $35,000 a year, That would at once a) save the paper money, b) provide increased coverage of a scene desperate for it and c) help establish the paper’s web site as the local source for commentary on the fine music scene. And it’s a model that could easily be adapted to gallery coverage and that of the local jazz and club scene.

I don’t care about Don Imus, but the coverage of his recent racial remarks has been pretty lousy.

NYT update here, for example, but see also the AP here, Dallas Morning News here, etc. etc.

One of Imus’s sidekicks was reading a dumb story about a football player named Adam “Pacman” Jones, who has had several run-ins with the police. Jones was apparently thinking about discarding the “Pacman” nickname, apparently to give himself a fresh PR start.

Anyway, Imus, as is his typical practice, listened to the story and interjected this or that little comment, most of them, as is his typical practice, not very clever.

You can hear the audio at Politico, here. Basically, Warner Wolf, the sidekick, talks about Jones’ plan to drop his nickname. Imus asks, “What color is he?” Wolf responds, “He’s African American,” and Imus says, “Well there you go. Now we know.”

After word spread about the remark, Imus said that he’d been being sarcastic, that he’d been trying to make the point that Jones had been being picked on because he’s black. He was even backed up by some of his employees, several of whom are black.

And here’s what he said on the air this a.m.:

“Warner and I were talking about ‘Pacman’ Jones being arrested six times, and obviously they are picking on him. So I asked Warner what color he was. Obviously, I already knew what color he was… And I said there you go, that’s the point. What people should be outraged about is they arrest blacks for no reason. There was no reason to arrest this kid six times.”

“He’s a lovely kid,” Imus went on to say. The only trouble with that explanation is that it seems there was a reason to arrest Jones six times. Here’s some of Jones’ greatest hits, taken from Wikipedia:

• “On July 13, 2005 Jones was arrested on charges of assault and felony vandalism stemming from a nightclub altercation.”
• Later that year, while apparently on probation from the first incident, he got in trouble at another nightclub in Nashville and ended up having the probation extended ninety days.
• “On August 25, 2006, Jones was arrested in Murfreesboro, Tennessee for disorderly conduct and public intoxication after claiming that a woman stole his wallet. She claimed that she did not steal anything and Jones spat on her. Police officers said they ordered Jones to leave several times, but he refused, continuing to shout profanities at the woman.” He was put on probation again.
• “On October 26, 2006. Jones was cited for misdemeanor assault for allegedly spitting in the face of a female student from Tennessee State University during a private party at Club Mystic, a Nashville nightclub.”
• In February 2006 he was charged with “felony and misdemeanor obstruction of justice charges for an incident outside a home.”
• “On June 18, 2007 Jones was sought by police for questioning after a shooting at an Atlanta strip club allegedly involved members of his entourage. According to police at the scene, Jones was not present during the shooting, and is not being charged.”
• And finally, Jones got into a fight with a dancer at a Las Vegas strip club. He had apparently thrown money on the stage and then got mad when she picked it up. “He allegedly grabbed her by her hair and slammed her head on the stage,” Wikipedia says. “After club patrons exited following the original confrontation, the club owner says a person in Jones’ entourage returned with a gun and fired into a crowd, hitting three people, including the security guard involved in the earlier skirmish. The guard was shot twice, and one of the people hit—former professional wrestler Tommy Urbanski—was paralyzed from the waist down. Jones maintains that he did not know the shooter, although the club’s owner insists that Jones did. On March 26, 2007 the Las Vegas Police recommended to the city’s district attorney that Jones be charged with one count of felony coercion as well as one misdemeanor count of battery and one misdemeanor count of threat to life.” Adams was suspended from play for a year.
• Most recently, earlier this year, “Jones was accused of hitting a woman in a strip club in Atlanta, Georgia. […] The woman, Wanda S. Jackson, was seeking an arrest warrant. However, on January 16, Jackson withdrew the warrant.”

CNN says Jones has been arrested a total of six times, and the AP in the original story about the name change that he’s been in 12 different police incidents since 2005.” That’s about once every three months!  Anyway, if Imus is smart enough to know Jones is black, he’s also smart enough to know that Jones isn’t “a lovely kid” and wasn’t being pushed around by good ol’ boy cops—that he’s really a thug who gets into trouble a lot, often in situations that allegedly involve women being spit on, or hit, generally in strip clubs.

Imus’s rationale, in other words, doesn’t make sense on its own terms. (Not to mention the fact that the explanation is just as offensive against women in the way it diminishes the severity of what Jones has been accused of.) Why isn’t that mentioned in the coverage? Imus’s shtick has always been infantile when it comes to race; he’s one of these guys who compulsively blurts out racial stuff in situations that reveal nothing more than the fact that he’s got race on his mind. The scandal about all the celebrities and political figures who fawn on Imus is less about his being racist as just being a fuckhead.

Speaking of fuckheads, here’s what Jones, who apparently should just be in jail, had to say about the incident: :

“I’m truly upset about the comments. Obviously Mr. Imus has problems with African-Americans. I’m upset, and I hope the station he works for handles it accordingly. I will pray for him.”

The LA Film Fest speech by former Miramax president Mark Gill is getting a lot of notice. The title of it is “Yes, the Sky Really Is Falling.” Here’s some of his evidence:

• 5000 movies were made last year; 600 were released theatrically in the U.S., or just over ten a week.
• The average cost of a studio film is now $70 million, with half that again needed for advertising. So the benchmark for releasing a studio film in the U.S. has finally reached $100 million. He also says that the costs of his main concern, so-called speciality films, have gone up “dramatically,” but didn’t cite figures.
• But by way of example he says Sundance gets 5,000 submissions a year. (Jesus.) Of these, perhaps one hundred get a theatrical release, and of those, five make money.
• Meantime, on the corporate level, independent houses and the studio specialty units (like Universal’s Focus or Fox’s Searchlight) are in a state of extreme upheaval: Besides the closing or de facto closing of Vantage, Picturehouse, New Line and Warner Independent, Gill says he knows of five more “in serious financial peril.”

Which sounds like the sky is falling. But it’s hard to see really what the problem is.

It’s not like Warner Independent or Picturehouse were fabled indie imprints. They were corporate creations. As for New Line, its masters gave up their control (and pocketed their payday) when they sold their company to Ted Turner way back when.

And it’s not clear that the market for indie films is shrinking. To the contrary: Gill says, for example, that specialty films used to make up five to six percent of the tickets sold. And he says that that figure has recently risen to ten percent.

He doesn’t mention it, but it’s also true that they have essentially taken over the Oscars, to the point where there’s been a keening wail of protest from everyone from Nikki Finke to A.O. Scott that the  Oscars are no longer populist.

It seems plain that those films are doing what they should do—working hard to build up an audience and occasionally make a big payoff, the way Juno did last year.

So as I understand it, here’s the situation:

• There are a more and more movies made, which gives more and more people the opportunity to make movies and, as importantly, learn to make movies.
• And, while I certainly don’t want to watch most of these, I do very much care that I have the opportunity to if I want to, which is why the exploding different venues to do so is good for me, for you, and for the filmmakers: There are myriad cable channels looking for products; there’s Netflix, the iTunes Store, and myriad other online outlets; and if the producers of the film really want to get it out there, they can just stream the damn thing free on the internet to get someone to notice it.
• And, just at the point going to the movies—in terms of ambient noise, personal comfort and ability to concentrate on an ostensible work of art—becomes more and more like going to a Nascar event, there are many news ways of experiencing movies, too, and lots of new opportunities for mediators to guide us (good for film guide sites, critics, journalists, even editors!)—and, as I’ve noted before, the plunging availability of big HD televisions means that staying at home to see a movie doesn’t require aesthetic compromises, either.

So the only folks for whom these new realities aren’t ideal are those who are charged with making the really big bucks from them, which is to say, the weasels of the film industry.

So I’m not crying. And if you read Gill closely, his prescriptions for weasel success in the future seem only to make things even better for us, the audience:

Clearly, only the better films will succeed in the theaters of the future. Certainly the number of releases will drop–by half or more. Probably everyone other than the folks who work on tentpoles will be paid less. The words “theatrical necessity” will take on greater and greater meaning. Probably a lot of theaters will close. But I think the best theaters showing the best films will always have an audience. And the rest of the films will have their premiere in Walmart, or on your cell phone.

Interestingly enough, in this Darwinian new future, there will absolutely be a premium for good films on tv, pay per view, on-demand, internet–or whatever that large pipe that goes to all of our houses will be called.

Why do I know this? Because one of the big research companies conducted a study recently which gave viewers on-demand everything. No more schedules. No more appointment television. Just tune in anything—any movie, any TV show—at any time. And guess what: the best stuff won out. Hands down.

Patrick Goldstein, in his new LAT blog, has a slightly different critique:

The real problem with the indie business isn’t quality, but discipline. We have a generation of filmmakers who feel entitled to make personal films at studio prices. (The poster boy for this would be Wes Anderson, a gifted artist who makes increasingly idiosyncratic cinematic sketches on a far-too-costly canvas.) We also have a generation of studio executives who’ve been willing to, essentially, use specialty films as a loss leader to launch their divisions. That’s why “There Will Be Blood” cost $40 million-plus and “No Country For Old Men” and “Babel” cost $30 million-plus to make, which along with the untold tens of millions spent to run Oscar campaigns, made the films a losing proposition.

If people in the indie world want to start making money again, they have to start treating their investment like a truly precious natural resource, not like Monopoly money. Discipline is not antithetical to art. The oldest and most consistently successful specialty division, Sony Pictures Classics, keeps making money because it resolutely, sometimes to a fault, never overspends on a film. When there is a bidding war, you can always find SPC chiefs Tom Bernard and Michael Barker running in the other direction.

Ditto for Fox Searchlight, an equally disciplined, incredibly well-run company that only acquires movies it knows how to sell. When my colleague John Horn recently wrote a story noting that Paramount Vantage had nearly 100 employees and had yet to make a profit, Paramount production chief (and Vantage founder) John Lesher called him and launched into a profanity-filled tirade. Instead of yelling at a reporter, Lesher, not to mention many of his indie film colleagues, should be doing some serious soul searching. The indie film business isn’t going to get any better until filmmakers and studio executives stop their spending sprees and start making indie movies for a true indie price.

From former Miramax prez Mark Gill’s address at the LA Film festival:

When the movie business went from tape to digital [i.e., from VHS to DVD], we dropped the wholesale price per unit from $65 to $10. And everyone said: “Oh my god, they’re killing the business. Our profit margins are ruined.” Well, the margin was smaller, but sales exploded. The studios made tens of billions of dollars on the difference. And consumers mostly like what they’re getting. So much so that movies are the second-highest rated consumer value for the money. Behind only chicken. Not so for albums, which are so far down the list you can’t find them.

Hitsville was so grossed out by the R. Kelly case (not the verdict, but just writing about the particulars of Kelly’s predilictions) that he didn’t have the stomach to immediately start writing about how repulsive the Roman Polanski documentary on HBO was. (It was first shown a couple of weeks ago, and remains in heavy rotation.)

My interest in the Kelly case came about not because he’s a serial sexual predator who should be put behind bars, but because the press had become so complicit in the celebrity hype machine that the crimes he was accused of had become not even worth mentioning to virtually everyone who wrote about his albums or tours.

It had something to do with a lot of journalists being lazy, but it also had something to do with the Ick Factor.

You’re a pop critic at a podunk paper, and R. Kelly’s coming to town. No one at your paper wants to hear about a child-porn sex tape, much less one that involves the words “urinating” and “on a girl police say is 13 or 14.” It is a firmly held belief of newspaper editors that people don’t want to read about gross stuff over their Rice Krispies. So why not just do the usual fun puff piece promoting the Kelly show, and refer obliquely to some unspecified “legal problems”? It’s a win-win situation.

… Unless you’re the parents of  a teenage girl who goes to the Kelly show, catches the eye of one of Kelly’s henchmen, and gets invited backstage.

But whatever. I feel like I should mention the Polanski case, even though it gets into depressingly similar vomitous territory, because no one else did.

We all know that story: The girl with the stardom-obsessed mother who left her daughter alone with the hedonistic European director so he could do a late-night Vogue photo shoot with her in Jack Nicholson’s mansion. What could possibly have gone wrong?

Nature took its course. Polanski was duly arrested and charged, apparently to his great surprise. (Americains puritains!) Negotitations began for a plea bargain but, as the new HBO documentary demonstrates, Polanski ultimately decided he was about to be the victim of railroaded American justice. You can argue that his fears were well-grounded, as the documentary does, but it’s also true that taking a plane out of LAX and living in luxury in France for the next three decades is an option not generally open to criminals who harbor similar suspicions.

The documentary spends a great deal of time obsessing about Polanski’s endangered legal rights and some amusing footnotes to the case, right down to noting that the judge in the case had a girlfriend or two.

The judge was apparently unmarried, so it’s not clear how this was relevant. (It would actually be irrelevant if he had been married, come to think of it.) Anyway, engrossed in such trivia, the filmmakers nelect to explain properly what Polanski was accused of. He did, as the documentary details, photograph the aspiring young Vogue model naked in a hot tub and then, over her repeated objections, whisk her off to a bedroom for sex.

The fact that he had dosed her with a Quaalude made this all easier. “I was having trouble with coordination like walking and stuff,” the girl later said.

But while the movie mentions the (ambiguous) word sodomy in passing (as only some of the recent coverage of the documentary does) it never explains what that charge stemmed from.

I only know about it because the Smoking Gun web site has posted the original grand jury testimony of the girl. It went something like this:

“Then he lifted up my legs and went in through my anus.”

“What do you mean by that?:

“He put his penis in my butt.”

Polanski was 44 at the time. His difficult life as a Jewish survivor of World War II is mentioned many times in the film, but the fact that the drugged little girl was anally raped isn’t mentioned at all.

Polanski is being protected by the filmmakers, who are unaccountably more entranced with his celebrity than they are with sharing with their audience the salient facts of the case, which makes them both incompetent and unethical.

But Polanski, like Kelly, is also protected by something else: The Ick Factor.

Family activists complain, with some justification, that we live in a coarse world. It’s hard to do anything about it, because the coarseness seems to be what an ever-more-empowered audience demands.

In this context, it’s surprising that men like Polanski and Kelly are able to find themselves charged with deeds that test even today’s broad palette of commonly discussed sexuality. (Entertainers aren’t the only ones, incidentally. There is a certain footnote to the Starr Report, containing words uniquely used there in relation to the Presidency of the United States, that as far as I can ascertain were never repeated in the news pages amid the reams of commentary that that scandal generated.)

But it seems plain that if those charges were repeated as often as we are told of, say, their Grammy and Oscar wins, their diverting music videos or their continental flair, our perception of the men, and their cases, would be somewhat different. In this sense, the true beneficiaries of the Ick Factor are plain.

From the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, noise that the company holding one of the smaller financial reins on Michael Jackson is trying to persuade him to create some sort of long-running performance or show, à la the Las Vegas residencies of Celine Dion and others.

As usual with Jackson, the story raises more questions than it answers. From the Journal:

Colony Capital, which owns the Las Vegas Hilton and is a major shareholder in closely held Station Casinos, is in discussions with Mr. Jackson to get him back onstage and in the spotlight via a long-term stand in Las Vegas. It also wants the singer to sell his Neverland Ranch, the home of his private amusement park and menagerie and site of his controversial sleepovers with young children.

Colony and its executives aren’t working with Mr. Jackson as managers or personal advisers. But they may nonetheless have a better chance of succeeding with Mr. Jackson than the many figures who have served in those capacities, thanks to Colony’s major leverage with the pop star. The private-equity group in May bought from hedge fund Fortress Investment Group a $23 million loan backed by Neverland, in Los Olivos, Calif. Mr. Jackson, 49 years old, was in default on the loan and Fortress had initiated foreclosure proceedings. After buying the loan, Colony negotiated some short-term breathing room for Mr. Jackson. Under discussion is a scenario in which he would be allowed to put off making payments for a while, in exchange for more money further down the road.

You’ll recall Jackson was on the verge of having the ranch sold on the courthouse steps in March. This embarrassing scene was staved off, apparently by Colony. Besides the disgrace of his little pleasure palace’s being sold to the highest bidder, Jackson also, by some accounts, would have been facing a steep tax bill, as much as $5 million, had it been sold off at a good price. It was also reported at the time that Havenhurst, the Jackson family manse in Encino, had been mortgaged and that Jackson had regularly been faced with default on that loan, said to be $4 million.

Those numbers, however, may just be a sideshow next to the main Jackson money issue. The big debt is said to amount to several hundred millions dollars and is supposedly backed by his music publishing holdings, specifically his half interest in Sony/ATV. The NYT in 2006 reported that Sony, which owns the other half, had agree to advance him $300 million, guaranteed by half of his interest in Sony/ATV.

Nothing further has been heard about this deal, but if in the end it went through successfully, in crude terms it seems that Jackson, rather than living off the income from the holdings, has in effect paid for his crazily profligate lifestyle by selling off the holding itself. (Note that this is all as an alternative to actually working and earning more money as well.) If it did go through and the numbers in the stories were correct, Jackson now holds the equivalent of 25 percent of a company he used to own all of, and which a few years ago was said to be worth $1 billion.

Even that would keep most folks in the necessities, but Jackson’s idea of them is different from that of most people. At the same time, he may have other, unknown debt obligations—there were mentions of multi-million-dollar tax obligations during his trial, for example—that may deplete even that income.

All of which may or may not explain why a guy who settled hundreds of millions of dollars in debts recently is still having trouble dealing with the demands of a couple of smaller ones amounting to just a few percentage points more.

Back to Colony and Jackson and Las Vegas. The question here is why Jackson needs Colony to set him up with a performance situation. He’s a big star, and has performed live in the past and knows how to set up a tour. The Journal story tiptoes around this:

Since Mr. Jackson’s 2005 acquittal on child-molestation charges, various entertainment-industry executives have pursued some kind of splashy comeback for him. For the most part, the singer hasn’t played along. In February he backed out of a planned performance during the Grammy Awards telecast. Around the same time, he also declined a proposal to perform for 10 nights at a London arena. People who have spoken to Mr. Jackson say he has simply not felt up to the rigors of performing after his lengthy legal ordeal.

That’s bullshit, because Jackson stopped making public appearances, with rare exceptions, long ago. During that time, the money available to him from touring has grown extraordinarily. Jackson knows that artists nowhere near his stature have tours grossing in the nine figures.

I think that if Jackson were capable of touring he would have already. As Hitsville has written before:

The touring issue brings up perhaps the saddest factor of all in the Michael Jackson story. As Springsteen, U2, the Eagles and the Stones know, a big-ticket A-level star tour is a tonic for the troops. Jackson could launch a $100M- —or $200M- —grossing tour whenever he wanted to. He could also take home $10M or $15M with just a two week run at MSG or Meadowlands. He’s also had comparable offers from promoters in Las Vegas and London.

Jackson’s history with tours is checkered, of course, but this seems an obvious way to stave off financial problems. (And he could make even more if he kept his ambitions reined in and did a disciplined greatest-hits show with a minimum of spectacle.) The troubling question about Jackson is this: Is a tour or a series of performances the trump card, deep down inside, he knows he can put on the table when the need arises? Or is his mental or physical condition such at this point that it’s out of the question? If it’s the latter, Michael Jackson’s last years may turn out to be truly unpretty.

p.s. : I was just looking up the derivation of the name “Sony/ATV” on Wikipedia and came upon this little bit of internet ineffability on that page, under the heading “Notes”:

As of June 2008 With Michael holding 50% of the Beatles catalog and Sony/ATV investing in new music publishing’s Michael makes a yearly earnings of $350 million dollars a year. Michael owns 50% of Sony/ATV catalog, the only reason Michael is not paying off the loans is because the Sony/ATV company is reinvesting in new music and buying small publishing companys up. like last year Sony/AVT brought the ‘Famous Music’ publishing company for $370 million. This all add to the value and income of the comany. Remember Sony/ATV was value at over $900 million in 1999 (9 years ago), before they brought a Country catolog for $140 million and before they brought the ‘Famous Music’ publishing company for $370 million and before tens of thousands and news track were added to the comany. now Sony/ATV has an estimated value of between $6 to $7 Billion and Michael still owns 50% and the media keep writing how broke he is. As of 2008 Sony/ATV is valued at 6 billion dollars more then any other music Publishing.

Michael will continue to hold on to his 50% share of the company and the company will continue to reinvested and buy other publishing companys up. Michael will continue to extend his loans and give it less than 5 years, Michael will probley have loans of over $500 million and the media will continue to make out he’s close to bankruptcy, but the company then will be worth between $7 to $9 Billion.

For people living on the coasts, it’s easy to feel the digital world is too much with you. Living here in Phoenix, I get to see how the real world is still operating.

Case in point: The Mayor of Phoenix, Phil Gordon, is engaged in a political range war with Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has built a big public following with his media-savvy law and order shtick. In one sideshow of their disputes, Arpaio has opened an investigation of the mayor and requested 10,000 pages of emails from his office.

I don’t care about the particulars of the fight. As reported by the Arizona Republic, however, here’s how the logistics of the transfer are being carried out:

The blanket request took four city departments hundreds of hours of staff research time, has produced more than 10,000 pages of material and cost about $2,000 to process.

Sheriff’s deputies did save taxpayers some money by using a scanner to copy the e-mails instead of paying 19 cents per page.

In other words, after a request for the emails, the city printed out 10,000 pages’ worth … and then the sherrif’s office sent over someone to scan them.

And the local paper describes the arrangement as “saving the taxpayers money.”

From A.O Scott’s review in the NYT:

To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious. The word “unfunny” surely applies to Mr. Myers’s obnoxious attempts to find mirth in physical and cultural differences but does not quite capture the strenuous unpleasantness of his performance. No, “The Love Guru” is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again.

Roger Ebert:

[Meyers] has a strange manner of delivering punchlines directly into the camera and then laughing at them — usually, I must report, alone.

Myers has made some funny movies, but this film could have been written on toilet walls by callow adolescents. Every reference to a human sex organ or process of defecation is not automatically funny simply because it is naughty, but Myers seems to labor under that delusion. He acts as if he’s getting away with something, but in fact all he’s getting away with is selling tickets to a dreary experience.

Stephanie Zacharek in Salon:

The picture, written by Myers and Graham Gordy and directed by Marco Schnabel (no relation to Julian), is listless and pokey, chiefly because watching Myers in this particular guise is almost completely joyless. He does nothing but beam and mug for the camera; his fellow actors barely exist. […] As an Indian stereotype—or even a faux-Indian stereotype [Meyers is] not nearly as funny as the Bollywood-via-Tennessee pharmacist Padma Perkesh, played by Tracey Ullman on her show, “State of the Union.” Ullman’s Perkesh can turn a laundry list of Viagra side effects into a lavish yet compact two-minute musical extravaganza. Myers wastes a good 90 minutes trying to summon a transcendental boner.

An internal feud over strategy could soon be resolved at Live Nation Inc. The world’s largest concert promoter is negotiating the exit of Chairman Michael Cohl, say people close to the situation.

Mr. Cohl and Chief Executive Michael Rapino have battled for weeks over novel contracts known as “360 deals,” under which the company agrees to give superstar performers rich upfront payments in exchange for financial participation in virtually all their business, from recorded-music sales to image licensing.

The tension at the company, which used to be called Clear Channel, was reported by the Journal last week.

After several weeks sitting around covering a trial that ended with the quick acquittal of a famous pop star who filmed himself having sex with a girl police said was as young as 13, once it’s all over it’s definitely time to kick back and grab a brewski or two.That’s what Terry Sullivan, the PR guy for the judge in the R. Kelly child-porn case, Vincent Gaughan, hosted a party for last night, for the media, the attorneys on the case, and court personnel. Hitsville hears the drinks and food were gratis.

Oddly, the two reporters who broke the R. Kelly story, the Sun-Times’ Jim DeRogatis and Abdon Pallasch, weren’t invited!

Here’s the invite:

To: All Court Staff/Attorneys/Media/Sherriff’s Office personnel on the R. Kelly trial

You are all invited to a reception hosted by Terry Sullivan at Corcoran’s Grill

1615 N Wells St., Chicago, IL 60614
(312) 440-0885 

Wednesday, June 18th, 4:30-7:30

Dress is casual 

Come and celebrate the trial’s conclusion and everyone’s hard work

 If we have failed to include anyone on this invite, please send along the information!

Terry Sullivan
Terry Sullivan
The Sullivan Firm, ltd.
2550 W. Golf Road, #101
Rolling Meadows, IL 60008
(847) 228-1100 phone
(847) 228-5199 fax

With Al Jourgensen you have to get through him saying crazy things to get to his interesting take on reality. In an engrossing Pitchfork interview, for example, you get this:

Pitchfork: When Ministry first went metal, were there any bands that influenced that direction?

AJ: No, I got my influences from 70s bands—Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, blah blah blah. When I was growing up, we had all these crazy bands on the Top 40. Today, if Pink Floyd released “Money”, it wouldn’t even get played.

Blah blah blah. Ministry sold a lot of records in the 1990s; they may be the most uncompromisingly noisy band that ever sold that many albums, in fact. The landscape is even more welcoming and tolerant today. What is he bitching about?

But for the rest of the interview he’s at his best, whether talking about Jello Biafra (”Jello’s kind of like my weird, retarded uncle”) or just sharing his own (perverse, but legitimate) take on the changes in the industry:

Pitchfork: How is 13th Planet [Jourgensen’s personal label] going?

AJ: The label’s going great, because we’re not idiots. We’re not trying to sue everyone that downloads everything. We try to give the fans a bunch of free stuff, and then [have them] buy the record. Without buying the record, it doesn’t support your artist. These idiots like Radiohead and Sharon Osbourne that are like, “Free Ozzfest!”, “Pay what you can for a record!”—Radiohead’s already got their yachts and mansions. Sharon Osbourne already has her empire.

Pitchfork: Same with Trent Reznor.

AJ: Trent Reznor, yeah. It fucks over every other band that’s in the middle of it. Because nobody wants to pay anything. “It’s all free!” “Music’s free!” How does music become “free”? I’m not trying to be like Metallica, like, “What do you mean, we’re losing four cents off our t-shirts, and we’re already rich!” I’m not trying to be greedy. But it fucks over the intermediate artist. Without intermediate artists, [music is] what “American Idol” decides is great or [made by] the very poor, because Sharon Osbourne’s made everything free. No, we have to support our local artists. It’s just that simple. Otherwise, we will have no art.

And, in international news….

Pitchfork: You were born in Havana. Are you paying attention to Cuban politics?

AJ: Of course.

Pitchfork: What’s your take on it?

AJ: My take is that they should give my family their land back, those fuckers. But whatever, they’re not going to do that. So, good for them. Good, get some cell phones. Get some cancer. Join the Western world.

In an interview with the BBC, Kid Rock speaks about digital downloads and payment systems, demonstrating throughout his intuitive grasp of the issues:

The performer - whose real name is Robert Ritchie - said his record company Atlantic had asked him to “stand up for illegal downloading” a few years ago because it told him “people are stealing from us and stealing from you”.

“And I go: ‘Wait a second, you’ve been stealing from the artists for years. Now you want me to stand up for you?’

“I was telling kids—download it illegally, I don’t care. I want you to hear my music so I can play live.”

Asked whether he was worried about illegal downloading, he replied: “I don’t agree with it. I think we should level the playing field. I don’t mind people stealing my music, that’s fine. But I think they should steal everything.

“You know how much money the oil companies have? If you need some gas, just go fill your tank off and drive off, they’re not going to miss it.”

But he said he did not implement that advice himself. “No, I don’t steal things. I’m rich.”

 (Link via Wired News’ Listening Post.)

Todd Martens, on his LA Times Extended Play blog, has one of the smartest articles I’ve seen recently on the music industry: He tracks the decline in the price—or value if you prefer—of the record album or CD.

“Less than 10 years ago,” he notes “it was common for albums to cost $15 and above.” And today, he says, Amazon is now running specials on old Coldplay albums and selling them in download form… for $1.99! (Link via The Daily Swarm.)

(He even notes that the service has already been trying to unload Madonna’s newest at $3.99.)

His mini-history, a must read, calls attention to an often overlooked aspect of the trouble the record biz is in: Not only are consumers buying fewer CDs; they are paying a lot less for the ones they do buy.

Martens reviews the so-called MAP program of the 1990s, which was essentially a price-fixing program the labels enforced on retail stores. Once the FTC started to look into this, the labels backed down. That opened the door for the big box retailers to start using CDs as loss leaders, which was the first, crippling shot at the foundations of the nation’s traditional record store infrastructure, and ultimately saw the closing of everything from hundreds, if not thousands, of neighborhood stores to, in the end, mighty Tower.

But it opened up the era of the $9.99 CD, with $7.99 for new releases not infrequent these days.

(The MAP program, in turn, reminds us again that the record industry’s traditional way of doing business was based on three legs of, basically, criminality: Pay radio stations to play your music, price-fix to keep prices up at retail, and then screw the artists by not paying royalties on the back end.)

You can read all of this and feel a little bit sorry for the labels, I suppose. But you have to think back to those corporations’ salad days—the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, where list prices would go up a dollar every year or two, lead by so-called superstar releases. For those big albums, the labels would jack up the wholesale price 50 cents or a dollar, on the (correct) assumption that fans desperate for the new release by their faves would swallow the increase. The came the CD era, which basically doubled the cost of albums overnight, and the vast majority of the sales coming from the catalog.

It was kinda like free money, but also kinda like crack. So when the digital era, in turn, came around, you cold hardly blame the labels for being unable to visualize a world in which they couldn’t slap an $18.98 sticker on a CD and make their customers like it.