Stephen Colbert was always interested in looking at both sides of an issue. Discussing our last president, he always presented the issue fairly: “George Bush: Great president… or greatest president?”

You get the feeling that, around the editorial offices of Rolling Stone, discussions of artistic quality are similar.

David Fricke’s profile of Springsteen in the new issue (RS doesn’t post all of its stuff online) tells us, again, that Bruce is rockin’ at his best once more:

Springsteen … is at a new peak in his career. Working on a Dream is Springsteen’s third great album with the E Street Band in a decade.

Well, fine—nothing wrong with giving a rock warhorse a little slack in a cover story. Turn to the review section, though and you find that reviewer Brian Hiatt, apparently having been swappin’ thoughts with Fricke by the Coke machine, is happy to restate his colleague’s thesis:

Working on a Dream is the richest of the three great rock albums Springsteen has made this decade with the E Street Band — and moment for moment, song for song, there are more musical surprises than on any Bruce album you could name,

It’s unanimous!

If you actually listen to the album, you will instead hear what you’ve been hearing for too many years from Springsteen. That his once-magisterial songwriting skills have deserted him—that his lyrics are labored and melodies are strained. He and his latter-day producer (Brendan O’Brien) try to cover that up by weighing the songs down with various studio experimentations, which just make for jarring tonal  inconsistencies across the tracks.

Working on a Dream is no different. “The Wrestler,” the Springsteen song that plays over the credits of the Mickey Rourke movie of the same name, is Springsteen’s least-bad songwriting effort in 15 years or more.* That is billed here as a bonus track for some reason. Leaving that aside, the rest of the album is just like his previous two, only less interesting, more strained, and equally forgettable.

The reviews don’t say, for example, that the leadoff track, the ponderous, interminable “Outlaw Pete,” is a meandering mess. Why, for example, does Pete keep wailing, for a eight full minutes, “I’m Outlaw Pete”? Isn’t that kind of a stupid name? He also keeps intoning, for no reason I can discern, “Can you hear me?” It’s not an exact repetition, but it’s more than vaguely reminiscent of the recurring line in the opening track of Springsteen’s last album, “Radio Nowhere”: “Is there anybody alive out there?” Both are trafficking in some crude existential angst, but in neither song does the singer make it sound anything but received.

There’s a song here that’s supposed to be a tribute to the late Danny Federici; that’s heavy-handed and forgettable as well. The worst thing about the album is the odd processed croon that O’Brien has been crafting for Springsteen. On songs here like “Surprise Surprise” or “Kingdom of Days” it sounds thin and inappropriate. The Rolling Stone reviewer compares them to Roy Orbison, but bel canto isn’t exactly the phrase that springs to mind as you hear Springsteen, rather than just attacking out-of-range melodies and deriving a little drama from the process, attempt to actually sing them. He doesn’t have power as a traditional singer (Orbison’s unstoppable voice, of course, came at your body full force, from head to toe), and—how to put this nicely—it doesn’t really sound like Springsteen is pitching correctly.

So, okay, it’s Orbison-like—minus the multi-octave range, the preternatural impact of it, and the actual singing proficiency.

Those are a few of the reasons his E Street band records have become unlistenable. (Don’t get me started on The Seeger Sessions.) At Rolling Stone, it’s a five star review. (His record last year, Magic, got a five-star review as well.) (So did The Rising**.)

* Says Fricke: “[Springsteen] has already started the new year with a Golden Globe for his theme song to The Wrestler and is assured an Academy Award nomination as well.” Not so much.

** If you want to look up the review of The Rising on Rolling Stone’s alphabetical list of reviews, remember that in Wenner World, it’s filed under “T.”

Dear Tom:

You’re the man. One of our sharpest pop-culture observers. So how did you fall under the odd gossamer aura that somehow seems to envelop Katie Couric every time a member of the media gets near?

Here are a few of the things I thought were weird in your story today, Tom:

1) The lede. “How about a big hand for the little lady?” you begin. Couric is not a serious newsperson, but even she doesn’t deserve such a condescending opening.

2) You refer to the “merciless pummeling” Couric has allegedly been getting in the media. Got any examples? I’ve been noticing a lot of puff pieces. From the Post, the NYT, the LAT. Not so much with the pummeling.

3) Tom, there’s too much selective citing of things that make Couric look good, but not enough skepticism. Example: You mention right up front that the CBS Evening News was “a newscast that had a lock on third place long before Couric took it over.” But you don’t note that Couric has taken it down even from that point! (Not to mention the many millions of new folks she brought to the broadcast to check her out originally—who then went somewhere else.)

4) Now, consider this construction:

If Couric stands a chance of elevating the newscast to second or first place in the nightly ratings, one reason may be that she’s finally the right anchor for the times.

First, let’s be honest: She has no chance of doing that; even with her recent advances, she’s several full rating points behind her competition. I’ll talk more about the numbers in a minute, but right now she’d have to increase her viewership by forty percent just to tie NBC.

Now, as for being the right anchor for the times, as I noted yesterday, her little ratings boost is of very recent vintage. Let’s think: What happened in the last month or two that might have affected her ratings? Oh, yeah—the election! After the election, after the stock market crash, after we got a new guy in to deal with the problem. Now people are going back to Couric. (And again, let’s remember we’re talking about a trifling number, but whatever.) Maybe it’s ’cause they didn’t really need Katie Couric for, you know, actual news.

5) Now, about that primetime special last night:

Couric reported Part 1 of an “exclusive” shocker series about domestic violence committed against spouses and girlfriends by troops returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan. She gave this troubling story not “a woman’s touch” but the attention of a good reporter.

As is all too frequently the case with TV news, what she really gave attention to was the New York Times, which has doggedly been following this story for years, most recently and wrenchingly in a front page piece three weeks ago.  (“A focus on violence by returning G.I.s,” by Lizette Alvarez and Dan Frosch.) Do you think maybe Katie “I don’t even write my own blog” Couric got the idea there?

And, Tom, did you really make this observation? “The segment was labeled ‘Katie Couric Investigates’ to help raise her profile even higher.” Shouldn’t it have been called “Katie Couric reads the New York Times”?

6) OK, let’s talk ratings. You, like the LAT the other day, zero in on Couric’s recent uptick. But I noticed you didn’t crunch the numbers yourself, instead attributing them to the network:

NBC’s Brian Williams and his nightly newscast continue to score an emphatic first place in the Nielsens, with about 10.1 million viewers, followed by Charles Gibson and ABC with 9.1 million and Couric and CBS at 7.2 million. But Couric’s numbers are up about 5 percent over the same period as last year, CBS says.

But here, for example, is an NYT piece on evening news ratings from exactly one year ago:

In the extremely tight ratings race between the two leading evening news broadcasts, ABC’s “World News With Charles Gibson” last week edged past its rival, NBC’s “Nightly News With Brian Williams,” for the first time in eight weeks. Nielsen estimated that the ABC newscast drew 9.8 million viewers, its highest average in nearly a year and slightly more than the 9.6 million who tuned in to NBC. […]  Last week CBS’s “Evening News With Katie Couric” remained a distant third (7.13 million).

In other words, NBC is up five percent, ABC is down five percent, and Couric has an increase that is a rounding error.

7) Not having bothered to cite examples of the “merciless pummeling,” you get around to acknowledging the recent puff pieces:

“I am cognizant of it,” she says of the recent rash of pro-Couric reports, as opposed to dump-Couric stories. “I think if it’s true, the reason is partially that people are getting used to me in this role. And I’ve become increasingly comfortable in it.”

Tom, isn’t the “recent rash of pro-Couric reports” because of a concentrated PR campaign?

8 ) Then we get this:

Why did it take two years (after an initial, short-lived leap out of the starting gate) for Couric even to begin to catch on?

Here again, Tom, she’s not “catching on.” Even after her celebrated Sarah Palin interviews, her ratings didn’t improve. She was getting ratings in the high sixes when she and CBS began discussing her departure last year. (You refer to those as “rumors”—kinda of a cheesy way to refer to the WSJ’s big scoop, which was confirmed both by the Post at the time and as recently as this week by the LAT.)

All in all, Tom, a very disappointing piece. Here’s how your story should have begun:

Six months ago, the Wall Street Journal was reporting that Katie Couric and the CBS Evening News might well part ways after the inauguration of the new president.

That time has now come.

Couric and her camp have accordingly embarked on a very big PR campaign to help her keep her job. But a close reading of her ratings show that, after a year that saw her draw the lowest numbers in the storied news organization’s history, she has made only modest inroads in her bottom-basement standings. Worse, the increase she has seen dates from just the last few weeks, underlining the fact that Couric could not draw viewers to her show during one of the most consequential, news-filled years of our lifetime.

———–

Previously in Hitsville:

Katie Couric—Where America Turns When the News Is Over™
Katie Couric, the News Anchor That Nobody Watches™
Couric and CBS, lying
Should CBS jettison its news division?
Katie Couric’s ratings hit a new low
Howie hearts Katie
Kurtz the lame
Couric, the debate, and the vaporization of CBS News
Katie Couric, a year later 

BOSTON (AP) — The speaker of the Massachusetts House said Sunday that he would resign during an investigation of accusations that a close friend used their relationship to push ticket-scalping legislation and paid off legal bills for the speaker’s in-laws.

The speaker’s name is Salvatore DiMasi; a buddy of his is being investigated for what the state attorney general says was being an unregistered lobbyist.

Mr. Vitale has pleaded not guilty to concealing his work as a lobbyist and having contact with the speaker while promoting changes to the scalping laws on behalf of ticket brokers.

Ticket reselling is a louche business. Vitale and DiMasi are poster kids of the old way of doing things, which besides the potential corruption at its best involved systematic suborning of the ticket-selling process and at its worst involved big guys with a lot of cash and presumably guns haranguing passers-by.

Today, we have eBay (StubHub) and even Ticketmaster (TicketsNow) getting into the market. The latter situation is a gem. Ticketmaster can sell tickets to, say, music fans on a relatively fair basis, leaving aside its utterly reprehensible fee system. Or it can sell the best seats in the house to itself … and resell them later at a scalper’s premium.

Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported what was obvious: That Katie Couric, whose ratings were abysmal, was in trouble and that, sooner or later, CBS would have to do something about it. The date mentioned in the article was “soon after the presidential inauguration”—or right about now! The next few weeks may tell a lot about Couric’s future.

The Couric camp has gone on a massive PR campaign, which this space has tried to keep track of. (See, among others, “Katie Couric, the News Anchor That Nobody Watches™.”) The stories uniformly are upbeat on the (generally unspecified) triumphs Couric’s been cooking up, and don’t get too granular about those pesky ratings. These are puff pieces, and everyone involved knows what the rules are.

For the first, on the day before the United States watched Barack Obama take the oath of office, the Los Angeles Times, which apparently had some reporters around with nothing to do, took the time to give Couric a little tongue bath, just as the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz took the time to do the same for Couric over the Democratic convention. (Both stories answered the journalistic question: What is the anchor of the nation’s fourth most-watched news channel doing these days?)

“There’s no question that Couric emerged from the campaign with more buzz than either of her more-watched rivals,” the LAT assured us.

Buzz is nice! Ratings, however, are slightly different. CBS’s evening newscast remains not just in third place but a distant third place. Indeed, the actual ratings from inauguration day show ABC and NBC with audiences a full fifty percent higher than Couric’s. She barely beat CNN (!) and in fact CNN beat CBS in the 25 to 54 demo blah blah blah. (And that’s just home viewers; CNN has a massive additional viewership in commercial venues and offices, particularly on a Tuesday morning.)

To be fair, Couric’s ratings have been creeping back up, from the mid fives last April to just over 7 now. But note how the LAT had to choose its time-frames carefully to make the case:

Since September, the newscast has averaged 6.5 million viewers, on par with its average last season for those same months. But during the last five weeks, the program has attracted an average of 7.22 million viewers, a 7% hike over the same period last year.

Hmmm… the last five weeks. That would mean people started drifting back to CBS only after the election cycle ended.

New slogan, which CBS can have for free: “Where America Turns When the News is Over.”

The LAT story also has this tidbit, emphasis added:

That’s a marked change from this time last year, when Couric, frustrated with the program’s performance, met with McManus and CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves and discussed possibly leaving her post early, perhaps after the inauguration. The conversation was tabled until after the fall election, but media reports speculated that the anchor was on her way out.

Now, as Barack Obama prepares to take office, few expect Couric to be beating a hasty exit. CBS officials said they haven’t raised the topic again with the anchor.

At the time, both Couric and CBS denied they’d had that discussion; now the officials are plainly saying they did. The story should have noted that they (and Couric) lied at the time, and that the original WSJ story was correct.

Meanwhile, over in Portfolio, Couric plays the sexism card, heavily. She says:

Why do you think so many people had a negative reaction to Hillary Clinton? She’s ambitious. And I think there are still qualities that when women exhibit them are less acceptable than when men naturally exhibit them—like ambition.

Have you suffered from similar problems with your press coverage?

I think there might be some of that. It might be because of my background—that I did a morning show and that people didn’t necessarily think I was a serious person.

Of course, Couric isn’t a serious person (she’s by far the least qualified news anchor we’ve ever seen, barring perhaps Connie Chung), and she’s getting terrible ratings, and yet her press coverage has been disconcertingly positive. Journalists have an affirmative obligation to be intellectually honest; isn’t it a little cheap for her to invent this negative coverage and then attribute it to sexism?

Portfolio doesn’t dwell on that. Check out how the issue of ratings are brought up in this exchange:

Network-news shows are seeing their ratings wither away. Are you disappointed about the ­format’s decreasing influence?

Clearly I knew this was a declining genre when I came here, because I’m not an idiot, you know? I knew that network news was declining, and evening newscasts in particular.

The point is of course true in the larger sense, but the fact remains as well that NBC, for example, is building on its previous top standing … and that Couric, even with her recent bump, has frittered away some forty percent of the audience she had starting out, and has ratings that remain lower than her predecessor’s in the slot. (She covers up the unfortunate post-election ratings increase this way: “But I think during the election cycle we really broke out in an important way.”)

And just to underline the fact that she’s not journalistically fit to hold her chair, she lies to the Porfolio guy as well:

There was talk a while back that suggested you were going to leave the CBS Evening News before your contract was up.

All those stories were really blown out of proportion.

Meaning they were not accurate?

No, they weren’t.

Now the big news is that CBS is going to give Couric some prime-time real estate Wednesday evening to ply her wares, and hopefully try to bring some of the network’s later-evening audience back to her earlier show. This will not of course work, but at some point the network’s over-reliance on forensic cop shows is going to backfire, and not even a returning Billy Petersen will be able to solve the case. You heard it here first: Couric will go up against Jay Leno, nightly at ten.

———–

Previously in Hitsville:

Katie Couric, the News Anchor That Nobody Watches™
Couric and CBS, lying
Should CBS jettison its news division?
Katie Couric’s ratings hit a new low
Howie hearts Katie
Kurtz the lame
Couric, the debate, and the vaporization of CBS News
Katie Couric, a year later 

… is detailed after the jump in today’s quite good NYT story on his importance to Apple:

But there are other aspects of his role that do not get as much attention and may be more difficult to replace. […]

Mr. Jobs, former Apple employees say, has the authority and long-term vision to yoke Apple managers and employees together under a single cause. At many technology companies, various divisions often work at cross purposes, competing with one other to develop related products. This can lead to devices and software that are sometimes incompatible, frustrating customers.
[…]
Mr. Jobs has also been Apple’s chief deal maker. After introducing the iTunes store in 2003, he persuaded entertainment companies to sell digital versions of their products when they were largely bivouacked, hiding in fear of piracy. In large part because of Mr. Jobs’s efforts, those barriers have fallen, though other challenges remain like getting the Hollywood studios to relax their restrictions on renting or downloading movies over the Internet.

Emphasis added. For the first point, consider the WSJ’s very harsh front-page assessment today of Microsoft’s many missed opportunities to get in the ring with Google:

[B]ehind [Steve Ballmer’s] push to capture a bigger piece of Google’s lucrative business lies an untold story: Nearly a decade ago, early in Mr. Ballmer’s tenure as CEO, Microsoft had its own inner Google and killed it.

In 2000, before Google married Web search with advertising, Microsoft had a rudimentary system that did the same, called Keywords, running on the Web. Advertisers began signing up. But Microsoft executives, in part fearing the company would cannibalize other revenue streams, shut it down after two months.

And for the second, Jobs’s potent intelligence and persuasive abilities may be his most under-appreciated features. As I wrestle with the two most backward technological presences in my life, the car stereo and the cable box, I find myself idly wishing Apple would get into those products. Jobs could knock heads and design and manufacture new editions that would bring them into the 21st century—a Tivo cum iPod for car radios and a combo cable box/computer/Tivo/Apple TV for the TV.

Both products a) make sense and b) would spur growth in all sorts of ways for all the industries involved, but neither will ever get done because those industries work at cross purposes, and none of the borgs involved—car companies, radio broadcasters, cable companies, and the movie studios, for starters—are known for their big-picture vision.

It doesn’t have to be those products in particular; but if Steve Jobs ever comes back to Apple, won’t the loss of that vision and the grit to realize it be the two big things the company loses?

One of the icky things about too much TV entertainment coverage is that the content of the interviews are decided beforehand backstage. It’s not all pernicious—I suppose there’s nothing wrong with celeb appearances on Letterman and Leno being mapped out beforehand—but since, inevitably, the agreement, tacit or spoken, is to steer away from uncomfortable subjects, it’s discordant when circumstances dictate the opposite.

Case in point is Jeremy Piven’s jarring recent appearance on Good Morning America, which I noticed on Hollywood Elsewhere. Piven left Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow on Broadway after suffering what he said was mercury poisoning from having eaten too much sushi, but the outlandishness of the reason has produced speculation that he was perhaps trying to get out of the show.

Anyway, the GMA appearance was obviously arranged as a clear-the-air spot by Piven’s PR folks. Given the green light, you can see Diane Sawyer turn into a hard-hitting interviewer, pressing on, pressing on, even regularly cutting of the end of Piven’s sentences to get to her next penetrating question.

It’s fun to watch Piven squirm, too. But the triviality of the subject also points out the shows’ double standards.

From an article on Cnet UK:

Be warned: your account information is stored in every file
Although iTunes Plus files feature no copy protection, files downloaded still contain the email address you have registered with iTunes. So although files can physically be shared with, and played by, friends and family, any of your purchases that end up on file-sharing networks, for example, can be traced back to you.

If you’re interested in an easy way to check your own files, find an iTunes Plus file on your computer. Then choose to open it with a text editor (Windows Notepad works fine). It’ll take a while to open and will appear to be full of nonsense text, but if you choose the ‘Find’ option and type in the email address you have registered with the iTunes Store, you’ll find that your DRM-free music is not personal information-free.

I realize it’s a small concession to make to the music industry’s piracy concerns. But we wouldn’t be as comfortable with an identifying code being embedded in a book or magazine. And remember, they are asking customers to pay more for a product that remains inferior to the free version.

The NYT editorialized on Apple’s deal with the music industry to offer downloads free of DRM the other day:

It […] is recognizing something fundamental about music lovers that restriction-free online vendors know. Most of us will buy, not steal, digital music, even if it lacks copyright protection. Shared music is the best advertisement for the music we will eventually purchase.

For the record, that second sentence isn’t true in any sense. I don’t care how many billions of songs Apple sells at the iTunes Store, many, many more are exchanged on the file sharing networks and many, many more than that—orders of magnitude more—are spread around on the bit torrent networks.

Consider this: Just one of these sites, Mininova, boasts that about 150,000 downloads have been made of a single Radiohead discography torrent of 60 or 70 tracks over the past year—and that 700 people are seeding the torrent right now.

Many other similar collections are available there and on the myriad other major torrent sites—and note that this doesn’t even count the torrents available for individual Radiohead albums.

So let’s do some crude math. I found nine other sites with the same torrent. To be conservative and to get a round number let’s include just north of six of these. Multiply the 150,000 downloads times roughly six to get an even million, and then multiply that by the 60 tracks in the collection.

That indicates that just that one torrent of a single artist spread at least 60 million tracks of that artist around the Internet over the last year.

That’s equal to one percent of Apple’s claim of six billion iTunes Store tracks sold total in the last five years or so.

And remember: That doesn’t count the other Radiohead discography torrents available now and in previous years; the torrents of individual albums; the songs exchanged on the regular file-sharing networks; and the songs ripped from friends’ CDs.

A guess? Radiohead alone, in one year, might account for unauthorized sharing equaling between five and ten percent of the iTunes Stores’ total cumulative sales.

And remember—Radiohead was never that big of a band, saleswise.

Just for fun, I took a look at the available Beatles discographies. Sixteen torrents were available. Just one of these was offered on twelve sites. The Mininova site (which I’m using again because it tracks the number of downloads), has had it up for only five days, and shows almost 20,000 downloads.

This particular discography contains more than 300 tracks. In other words, in five days one torrent on one site was responsible for the dissemination of six million Beatles tracks.

In five days! And that site was one of twelve. And that particular torrent was one of sixteen.

Not every torrent site may be that big, and not every torrent is completed. Let’s cut those numbers in half to be conservative and let’s do the math again.

Take six million times six (half of twelve) times eight (half of sixteen)—and it’s likely that at least 300 million Beatles tracks were disseminated in the form of “discography” torrents alone in the past year.

And again, that doesn’t count the individual torrented albums, or files exchanged on non-torrent networks like Lime Wire. All told, the Beatles probably had a half-billion files exchanged illegally in 2008.

Finally, let’s take this one more step.

The industry is now selling 450 million CD equivalents a year. The Beatles sell two million CDs a year, roughly, or, crudely, a half of one percent of the sales.

For the sake of the argument, let’s say the group’s online music profile parallels its terrestrial percentage. Multiply 500 million tracks times 200 and you get …

… 100 billion tracks distributed online in one year, or 100 times as many as iTunes claims as sales.

Nikki Finke among others is advocating for a petition, allegedly inspired by Quincy Jones, to ask Obama to create a cabinet-level arts post. A bad idea!

1) The plan would get a cagey welcome from the GOP. The right dined out on what was by their lights NEA scandals for more than a decade, effectively neutralizing the agency. Creating a high-profile target for a series of new and unwinnable battles about the funding of what would inevitably be outré art would be a classic left move of walking into a propeller.

2) What the new administration should do is talk loudly about how a secretary of the arts just isn’t something the country should be spending money on right now—and quietly continue re-funding the NEA. The agency should go back to funding artists, with an aggressive PR plan in place to respond the next time an NEA Four scandal comes along.

3) I don’t follow the agency that closely anymore, but the last time I did its strategy, as I understood it, was dialing down its profile by focusing a PR campaign on its funding of … Shakespeare. It didn’t seem that contemporary life was lacking in the production of his plays. (Or movies based on his plays.) And then I realized that Shakespeare isn’t even American! If you care about serious funding for the arts in America the idea was either cynically clever (since the word Shakespeare makes the rubes’ eyes glaze over, it’s an easy way to get them to turn their attentions elsewhere) or an even cynicaler devilish reverse whammy (in the end, the government was still wasting its money on productions of Hamlet instead of supporting actual contemporary working artists).

4) The last six or seven years has seen what I hope the Obama administration will recognize as a real arts crisis, namely the damage done to arts programs of every sort in the schools in the wake of No Child Left Behind-driven defunding of arts education.

5) If Quincy Jones is for it, I’m against it.

Patrick Goldstein* takes it as a given The Dark Knight will get an Oscar nomination for best picture. He may be right, but there are two reasons to argue that it won’t. One, at its worst the Academy likes not big big box office but middlebrow portentousness, and in any case rarely rewards fantasy movies. (Lord of the Rings is the major exception, and it took three tries.)

And two, recent best picture nominations, ironically enough, argue against it from the other side: In the last three years, only one of what I would classify broadly as a traditionally hacky Hollywood movie (Munich) has been nominated. Most of the rest have been self-consciously small films from the artsy side of town.

This tendency has been causing the annual drop in Oscar ratings. You’d think that that might motivate the academy to pay respects to what might be a ratings-tweaker like TDK. The problem is that the academy is, well, an academy. The vote is exclusively in the hand of the members; the group runs a tight ship when it comes to the integrity of the balloting, and those members have been trending toward the artsy. And while there might be some viral recognition that the shows’ ratings have been down, there’s little out there to catalyze the feeling beyond carping from the likes of Nikki Finke, and organizational decorum means that its leaders can’t even start cheerleading for more commercial product.

(This is to the group’s credit, incidentally. As I’ve noted before, the Grammys have taken a different take. NARAS formed a secret committee that is empowered to overrule the famously hacky membership’s nominations, and that’s why people like Eminem suddenly started appearing on the big categories—and showing up on broadcasts.)

The Academy passed on a chance to grab for Titanic-style ratings earlier this decade, with the first Spider-Man, which got good reviews, had a similarly ambitious director and made roughly the same amount of money as The Dark Knight. (While partisans keep talking about how TDK’s official total, some $530M domestic gross, is creeping up on Titanic’s $600M, in real dollars the film’s take remains that of a hit like Grease, and far below that of megahits-of-their-day like Jurassic Park and the first Raiders.)

* Goldstein wrote an interesting piece recently on how movie budgets are reported in the press. It’s well reported and has lots of examples. The bottom line is studios lie—or at best can’t get their stories straight:

I wrote in a recent post that Sam Mendes’ “Revolutionary Road,” a Paramount film produced by DreamWorks, cost $45 million. I didn’t make up the number — it’s what a top executive at Paramount (which then owned DreamWorks) told me the film cost. As soon as the story ran, Stacey Snider, who runs DreamWorks, e-mailed me to say the film only cost $35 million. It seems unlikely that Paramount would inflate the cost of a film it financed and distributed, since if “Revolutionary Road” fails to find an audience, it will look like an ever bigger flop if it cost $45 million instead of $35 million. But I also trust Snider, who has a better track record than most studio chiefs in offering honest numbers. So what does the movie cost? Let’s just say — that’s a work in progress.

As noted below, Apple has finally cut a deal with the remaining major record labels to remove DRM from songs sold in the iTunes Store. The major concession? Steve Jobs had to cave on his long-standing insistence that all songs cost 99 cents.

Now, Cnet is answering the question of what people can do about the DRM-encased music they already own.

Users of iTunes can now upgrade their music libraries with a click of a button. For an additional 30 cents per song, a user can receive a DRM-free version of their existing tracks at a 256-kbps bit rate.

The NYT story on Roman Polanski’s absurd ongoing legal attempt to get his child-sex conviction overturned continues many papers’ Polanski-centric view of the case.

The story is interesting for two reasons. One, while superficially making clear that Polanski is a fugitive and had been convicted, it’s told throughout as if something strange is afoot.

Example:

Although this is happening long after Mr. Polanski admitted guilt in the original incident, the effort has raised uncomfortable questions about how justice operates in a legal system that has never quite come to terms with Hollywood, despite this city’s long, and growing, list of famous malefactors.

Emphasis added. As we have seen myriad times, the chief “uncomfortable question” raised by such cases is how rich and famous people manage to get off most of the time. Here, Polanski didn’t, so he skipped town, and hasn’t exactly been living off the land since. The legal issues Polanski has been trying to raise are largely invented, and even if they weren’t Polanski had the money to pursue an appeal. But he didn’t appeal; he left town.

Yet Mr. Polanski’s case has only become more troubling over the years. That happened as tawdry details of his behavior — some of them described in grand jury testimony that was made public only in 2002 — were matched by accounts of official wrongdoing that occasionally seemed to mirror the tone, if not quite the magnitude, of dealings portrayed in Mr. Polanski’s Los Angeles noir classic, “Chinatown.”

Note how this “uncomfortable” case has become “troubling.” We’ll get back to the tawdry details in a minute, but let’s take a look at the Chinatown-like wrongdoing. Since Chinatown involved murder, massive fraud, suborning of governmental processes, and one rococo scene of nostril-splitting, even something not quite of that magnitude seems promising. “Among other things,” the Times tells us,

… Mr. Wells [a prosecutor], in an interview in the film, said he prodded Judge Rittenband with a photograph of Mr. Polanski in the company of two girls, taken in Germany before the sentencing. “‘Judge,’ I said, ‘Look here. He’s flipping you off,’ ” Mr. Wells recalled.

Mr. Wells has also recalled that the remark was routine and that he said it in open court, but the Times story doesn’t say that. Not very Chinatown-esque. The risibly one-sided HBO film, incidentally, spends a lot of time trying to explain away the photo of what seemed to be Polanksi having a very gay time in a German beer hall. The film fell off my tivo so I don’t have it available right now, but I’m not sure that the Times’ use of the word “girls” in that passage is correct, unless the paper is using it in a Polanskian, continental sort of way.

(Incidentally, while the HBO film tried to portray the judge as something of a buffoon, it didn’t tell viewers that he was smart enough to have entered Harvard Law at 15 years of age.)

The other matters in the case seem small as well, as Polanski’s lawyers have seized upon this or that word in email messages from the court in an effort to divert attention to the main issue in the case, which are that he’s a fugitive and that fugitives don’t get to dictate terms when they finally get hauled back before a judge.

Finally, those “tawdry details”: The story ends with these grafs, the first time I think that a major U.S. paper details exactly what Polanski was accused of, emphasis added.

If anything, the case may have become more difficult to resolve over time. The sexual abuse of minors has become a more potent concern, and the recently released details of Mr. Polanski’s relationship with Ms. Geimer cast a particularly sordid light on the incident. By her account before grand jurors at the time, Ms. Geimer was plied with alcohol and Quaaludes, and objected repeatedly as she was subjected to vaginal and anal sex.

The details were not “recently released,” incidentally, and the story doesn’t mention that the documentary didn’t detail these charges either.  And note how the writer lets Polanski’s attorney get the last word:

For the elder Mr. Dalton, who urged Mr. Polanski to pursue redress after reviewing the documentary, however, the issue turned from the original crime to questions about the way authorities here handled it.

“This case before the court is not about him,” Mr. Dalton said. “It is about the criminal justice system in Los Angeles County.”

Dalton was given a lot of time in the documentary to spin wildly for Polanski, so it’s not surprising that he managed to convince himself that he was correct after seeing it.

And again, the issue is framed in a way that’s kind to the director. A more detached account might go, “Polanski’s attorneys, in the HBO documentary and in the time since, have been trying to keep the focus off the crimes the director was accused of and on whatever challenges they were making at the time to the proceedings.”

—————
Previously in Hitsville:

Roman Polanski: The Ick Factor
The Polanski whitewash continues
P.S. on ‘The Polanski whitewash’
Whitewashing Polanski, continued

Greg Sandoval at Cnet was first to report that Apple has finally cut a deal with Warner, Sony and Universal to sell DRM-free tracks on iTunes.

The catch—Steve Jobs is apparently retreating from his long-time insistence on a 99-cent consistent price:

Apple has cut deals that will finally enable iTunes to offer songs free of copy protection software from the three largest music labels, according to two sources close to the negotiations. In exchange, Apple has agreed to become more flexible on pricing, the sources said.

Note how even Cnet is using the phrase “become more flexible on pricing” in its record-industry preferred way, as a euphemism for “raise prices.” (See my previous discussions of this tendency here.) The piece is a little too-industry friendly overall:

The good news is that the price of catalog music is falling to 79 cents per song. The labels will get an opportunity to price some hit songs for more than 99 cents but eventually those songs will drop to 79 cents, according to one source.

Before iTunes users get too worked up, they should remember that song prices at iTunes haven’t increased in five years. According to the Consumer Price Index, a 99-cent song in 2002 would be worth $1.17 today.

Since the bad news was “flexibility,” the good news makes things seem all better. The real bad news, which the piece doesn’t say flatly, is that the hit songs of the day Apple is going to allow the companies to charge more for will of course make up a huge percentage of a day’s typical sales.

As for the CPI, the peer-to-peer networks offered music for the competitive price of zero in 2000. Today, adjusting for inflation, the price there is still … free.

Last graf of the Cnet piece:

Not only will new music downloads be free of copy-protection software, but Apple and the labels will begin removing DRM from music already available in the iTunes Store, the source said. However, it’s unclear what will happen to songs that have already been purchased.

Removing the DRM from already purchased music would be an important and somewhat ameliorative gesture by the labels how wrong their insistence on DRM was.

—–

The question of selling non-handcuffed music raises the question of how much the companies are going to be sacrificing in sales. Without the copy protection, purchasers will be able to do what comes naturally: Email a friend a song, right after purchasing it at the iTunes store.

It’s possible to pass along legitimately purchased music to friends right now in any number of ways, ranging from simply letting them rip a store-bought CD to the more laborious one of burning a physical CD from one you bought on iTunes (i.e., thereby removing the DRM) and letting them import that.

The new way, obviously, is going to be easier, and ironically enough it’s going to hit the hits, most minor and major, most heavily, because someone who eagerly buys a new Beyoncé track will presumably have a friend or ten who are interested in it as well and can now immediately and easily pass it on. If you’re digging up an old song from Nirvana’s first album, by contrast, it’s unlikely you have ten friends who are going to want it that same minute.

You’d think, in fact, that the industry would charge less for hits (to encourage people to buy it online rather than get it from a friend) and price catalog higher—if you want that old Nirvana song, you’ll pay the extra quarter, and the chances are lower a friend of yours would have it.

I think Jobs, for all his severity, was appealing to the better nature of people with consistent pricing. In a world where you don’t have to buy, the image of an industry playing fair, for once, on pricing couldn’t have hurt.

From the WSJ:

Increases in digitally downloaded albums and songs were not enough to offset a nearly 20% plunge in CD sales in the U.S., according to year-end figures published Wednesday by the Nielsen Co.’s SoundScan service.

Emphasis added. I think this is the steepest percentage drop yet since the business went south in 2001, though with sales dropping in the double digits each year I guess it makes sense that the percentage figure would grow.

If you’re selling ten million CDs a year, a million-copy drop is ten percent; but if you’re selling only five million, that same drop would represent twenty percent.

Indeed, according to those SoundScan figures, total CD-equivalent music sales sometime in the middle of next year will reach an annual rate of half what they were at the industry’s sales height, in 2000.

Why is this good news? Because the record industry is built on three pillars of corruption, on which it built an edifice (the manufacture and promotion of physical CDs) that is no longer needed. One of the unappreciated side effects of the digital revolution in the media space is its contribution to a drop in white-collar crime.

In the radio world, the record industry used payola for decades to get radio airplay; with radio’s influence waning and industry earnings dropping, those days seem to be over. In retail, price-fixing was the norm; now the prices are being fixed (lower than what they might otherwise be) for a format (the single) the industry stopped selling to force people to buy full-length CDs, all by a guy (Steve Jobs) who doesn’t even work in the biz!

The indignity of it all. The third pillar is relations with artists, whom the labels have screwed on royalty payments, virtually with impunity, since the dawn of the modern industry. I assume this activity continues.

In the NY Times, a few people try to put a positive spin on things:

Rio Caraeff, the executive vice president of Universal Music Group’s digital division, eLabs, said other income, like the fees collected when users stream a video online, had become an essential part of the pie. Twenty percent of Rihanna’s revenue, he said, has come from the sale of ring tones.

“We don’t focus anymore on total album sales or the sale of any one particular product as the metric of revenue or success,” Mr. Caraeff said. “We look at the total consolidated revenue from dozens of revenue lines behind a given artist or project, which include digital sales, the physical business, mobile sales and licensing income.”

Yeah, for right now the labels are still getting their cut of silly money from things like ringtones. But the next Rihana isn’t going to be turning over 50 percent of her ringtone sales to a label.

That’s another repercussion of the slowdown that hasn’t been noticed.  One thing the industry did do is subsidize the losses it took on most artists with the profits it made on a handful of golden geese. Some of these geese, true, took a few years to mature. Others were sitting, um, ducks who were going to be stars no matter what happened.

Those natural superstars will still come along, of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them now come to stardom not through a label. We haven’t really seen one yet, but the time will come when there are a more than a few artists out there selling out arenas who didn’t come up through the traditional label system.

Each one of those figures would have made a disproportionate contribution to a particular label’s bottom line. That’s a loss that will have ever-deeper impacts as the years go on.

For the rest of us, it will just be fun to watch.

In a blah year for animation, Wall-E won’t have much competition in the Oscars’ best animated feature category. But can it sneak into the best picture nominations?

The main competition seems to be Revolutionary Road, Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button*, and Gran Torino, with Frost/Nixon, Happy-Go-Lucky, Milk and I suppose The Dark Knight** in contention as well.

In this mix, Wall-E stands out for its formalist storytelling, elegant Tati-ian first half-hour, and innovative love story. As I wrote last year, however, the implications of its message have not yet been fully explored. As I see it, the film is a direct assault on America in general and American movie-goers in particular, portraying them as recumbent blobs, confined to video-screen-equipped Rascals either because they can’t ambulate anymore or because it’s just that much easier to move when you have to carry a Big Gulp around all the time.

But whether you agree with or approve of it, more interesting is how that message wasn’t part of the discussion of the film when it came out. By the simple expedient of not drawing attention to the film’s obvious jeremiad, Pixar used the analytical lassitude of the nation’s film critics to avoid talking about it.

(One or two mentioned it, but most didn’t. A few right-wing critics got het up about some of the film’s other themes. One of these was the despoiling of the earth, but that’s a fairly uncontroversial contention. Another was the focus on a Wal-Mart-like conglomerate as the source of the world’s ecological problems. But those are much different issues than the broadside.)

The other bullet Pixar dodged is discussion of Wall-E’s box office. Box office reporting is a fungible world with no clear rules. I’ve never really understood how Hollywood reporters decide that the budget or box office of one film is important and another not; I don’t have the sense that anyone is systematically looking at box office patterns to catch wrinkles.

Maybe I’ve missed it, but I haven’t seen any discussion of how Pixar’s formidable box office muscles have been weakening. I’m not buying into the money-equals-quality equation, here; the excellence of the films is a different matter. While no one was looking Pixar became a massively successful company seemingly run entirely by artists. And the company’s probably never going to lose money on a movie.

Still: Wall-E is the fourth film in a row that has brought Pixar’s per-film average down.

For Finding Nemo, Toy Story 2 and Monsters Inc., Pixar averaged a $350 million North American gross, adjusted for inflation. The company’ last four films have averaged $250 million; its last three films $235 million, and last two films $217 million.

Pixar makes a lot of money overseas and from toys; and there hasn’t been a Shrek-sized animated hit in a while from any studio.

But Wall-E’s tepid box office ($223 million, just above Ratatouille’s $212 million) is pretty portentous as it moves forward under the Disney aegis.

Why? Because the film lacks the problems of the studio’s other recent releases. The appeal of Cars was overestimated from the get-go: hard to romanticize the things that every schoolkid learns are polluting the earth.

And a rat as a cook?

Wall-E doesn’t have a conceptual roadblock like that, and got reviews as good as any Pixar film, which is saying something. Yet still it hasn’t done that well. Oscars or no, is the Pixar brand fading?

* Benjamin Button has originality of conception and Fincherian technique going for it. But it’s also one of those movies about a central character who is just … the central character. Brad Pitt does a decent job with what he’s given, but in the end Button is just … the guy they made a movie about. He has no personality, no world view, no character arc and very little to do except … be the focus of the movie.

** The Dark Knight remains a chaotic mess whose plot is senseless and whose alleged themes, nattered on about endlessly by fan boys and the critics, are superficial or incoherent. Here’s an example: At one point, the Joker, confronting Harvey Dent, has a dramatic, key speech, something to the effect that, “Society just doesn’t care if a truckload of soldiers die, or if a kid in the ghetto gets killed. It’s all part of The Plan. But you say you’re going to shoot one little mayor, people go crazy. They are afraid of chaos!”

Well, duh.

And the much bruited-about discussion of the importance of Harvey’s Dent’s remaining a symbol of the rule of law is pretty silly in the context of a movie about a vigilante.

I’m not a Watchmen head, but one of its virtues is that it doesn’t, tritely, try to undermine the conventions of the genre it deigns to work in. It makes it deeper and more realistic, follows the implications of the superhero character out a few logical steps, and builds consistent layers of nuance and depth throughout, all the while keeping focus on the ever-more-exciting plotline.

The Dark Knight, by contrast, is built upon so many awkward narrative twists it makes your head hurt. If the Joker wants to cause chaos and fight Batman, why doesn’t he just do that?  Why go to all the trouble of stealing from the mob, and then going to them asking them to pay him to fight Batman? He was already stealing their money, and he was already harassing Batman. And did he really stage the Imax underground semi-truck action sequence so that Batman would lasso his truck so he could pretend to be captured and arrested and taken to the jail so he could sneak in a bomb that would go off so he could get to the banker guy? Why didn’t he just, you know, sneak in a bomb to the jail and blow it up with the banker guy in it?

—————

Previously in Hitsville:

Beating up on “Wall-E”

The “Wall-E” debate continues: The far right attacks!

The critical conundrum of “Wall-E” 

What if Pixar released a ferocious broadside attacking the American way of life and the movie reviewers didn’t notice? 

Every review I’ve read of Jonathan Demme’s new film, Rachel Getting Married, namechecks Robert Altman’s A Wedding. After, in Nashville, following a kaleidoscope of characters and finding the scary soul of America, in his followup Altman took, paradoxically, an even bigger cast and used it, in an almost pointillistic fashion, to craft a intimate portrait of the way two families come together.

Or rather, don’t.

Rachel Getting Married, despite the title, isn’t really about a wedding. It’s about a genteel family working out its emotional issues in the wake of a death brought on by the substance abuse of one of its members. In that sense, nakedly acted by a strong cast and filmed with a hand-held intimacy, there’s a decent art film here, a slightly hipper take on Woody Allen’s urbane Hannah and Her Sisters milieu.

What I couldn’t find a single reviewer talk about, however, is how condescendingly Demme views the groom and his family. The setting is a rainy weekend at what seems to be a New England house set amongst the woods. The titular Rachel is marrying a black guy, who is some sort of hepster musician; there’s a suggestion that he’s at least modestly successful. But that’s all we know about him. Where Altman unforgettably limned the souls of dozens in A Wedding and broke down the class issues splendidly, here the groom himself lacks the opportunity to display his character. He’s just “the black guy Rachel is marrying.”

Without giving anything away, let me say that the events of the film would surely have provoked him or one of his friends to say, “Uh, is it smart to get involved with this patently damaged family?”

Instead, in the context of the movie, he’s just a cultural accoutrement. In real life he’s Tunde Adebimpe, the singer in TV on the Radio—a hip bit of casting and one example of a tendency that, we shall see, will become monstrous. But in the film his main function narratively speaking is to have his friends provide the background music.

And what a group it is. The rehearsal dinner alone is a bit much; the long sequence reeks of a sort of self-satisfied hipness, once removed: Since we never learn what Rachel or her family’s connection to these smoky jazzhouse sounds are, they have the feeling of Demme’s having dressed up his art film with exotica.

And then he marches over a self-indulgent cliff. Demme adds a scene with a young, mop-haired electric guitarist, who plays the wedding march, Hendrix style. Turns out its Demme’s own kid.

Then we get a corps of African drummers. Then Sister Carol (who sang “Wild Thing” at the end of Demme’s Something Wild) appears to offer some Jamaican song stylings.

You’re thinking at this point you’ve taken an abrupt turn out of Interiors and entered a Putumayo house party when…

… Robyn Hitchcock materializes, singing in a broad British voice. (Demme, you will remember, did a boutique film about Hitchcock ten years ago.) And then a samba band waltzes in, though I guess they weren’t technically waltzing.

The groovy scene-settings don’t work narratively within the film because they have no context in the plot and have no real connection to the main characters. In A Wedding, you’ll remember, the clash between the nouveau rich family of the bride and the decrepitly patrician groom’s drove the action. Here we’re just supposed to be impressed with the filmmaker’s pals.

In recent years Demme’s been drifting, hanging out with rock stars and remaking movies nobody wanted remade (like The Manchurian Candidate.) He hasn’t made a consistently fulfilling film since Philadelphia, fifteen years ago.

Jon Swift’s disquisition on derrièrism is funny enough* that you almost forget to chase the links to investigate the news that prompted it, namely that Andrew Beitbart is starting a web site to collect writing about culture that isn’t um, written by people who write about culture.

Now the politically conservative Breitbart, 39, will debut his own collection of original material in his Big Hollywood group blog, a new home for right-of-center voices that want to sound off on the interplay of popular culture and politics.

Breitbart has already signed several big names, including House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), incoming Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Reps. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.), Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) and Connie Mack (R-Fla.), to post entries on the site. He has also landed former senator and GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson, MSNBC correspondent Tucker Carlson and a slew of other conservative thinkers from the National Review, The Weekly Standard and Commentary magazine to contribute.

It gets better:

And to jolt liberal Hollywood, Breitbart says he has wooed conservative screenwriters, comedy writers, classical musicians and alternative singer-songwriters to contribute to the blog. Celebrities who risk being blacklisted if they come out as conservative can write under pseudonyms, Breitbart says.

“I want it to be such a mixed group of people that people’s minds will be blown,” he says. “They’ll go, ‘This is not your mother’s conservative moment.’ ”

Emphasis added. With Breitbart buddy Matt Drudge routing traffic his way (which may be Breitbart.com’s chief means of support), the site might not be as evanescent as one might oppose, and for a time will undoubtedly provide some amusement for those who enjoy red state film criticism, or maintain a morbid interest in the parabola of Tucker Carlson’s career.

The site has as yet nothing up but a message promising a January 6 debut date.

* Since it is funny I feel churlish pointing out that Swift misread the comments on Wall-E I made that earned Hitsville inclusion amongst the derrièrists. I was writing about the film not to discuss its ideas nor to agree or disagree with them. My point was that, at a time when everyone reflexively says pop culture is degraded, here was a film with a fairly developed and, not incidentally, blisteringly ironic message whose ideas were largely unengaged with by terrestrial critics. Once acknowledged, people are welcome to get all derrièrist on the ass of those ideas, as far as I’m concerned, but they needed to be recognized and processed first. I may be the first post-derrièrist.