From Charlie Kaufman’s highly recommended 2011 BAFTA lecture: ‘People all over the world spend countless hours of their lives every week being fed entertainment in the form of movies, TV shows, newspapers, YouTube videos and the internet. And it’s ludicrous to believe that this stuff doesn’t alter our brains. It’s also equally ludicrous to believe that – at the very least – this mass distraction and manipulation is not convenient for the people who are in charge. People are starving. They may not know it because they’re being fed mass produced garbage. The packaging is colorful and loud, but it’s produced in the same factories that make Pop Tarts and iPads, by people sitting around thinking, ‘What can we do to get people to buy more of these?’
Tag: staged financing
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Ah… I have given my thanks so now it’s that time of the year when I get to complain about what’s wrong — and what hasn’t yet been fixed. I have done this before (several times), but this is that post on where we are right now. Like always, I suggest you don’t forget that lists like these only make the foolish despair. After all, we can build it better together. Let’s take this post as an action list. All are opportunities to truly ToDo. It does not need to be this way.
- The film business lives in Bizarro World, thinking we do something for the love of it, but in fact creating something far far far away from what we actually love — and thus making it so much harder to do what we love in the process. We have turned our strengths into our weaknesses. The worst of course is we now take it for granted that this is how it is and this is what the film biz needs be (if you are not fully following me here, I suggest you click on the link above). It’s not and it doesn’t but I don’t hear a whole lot of folks saying we need a complete systems reboot of the whole film ecosystem (see #2).
- It’s not enough to just think outside the box. The box is a trap and a false representation of a reality. We have to break the box, probably smash it to bits and then
This is my recent FERA Keynote speech (London, UK BFI South Bank,September 27, 2013 145PM):
Children love playing “The Opposite Game” where “yes” means “no”, and “no” means “yes”. Politicians seem to love to play that game too…
This backwards world has infected many of our cultural fields,taking hold as an everyday concept reflected in our every action. In comics, it is known as the “Bizarro” World, a common plot scenario where our strength becomes our weakness. That is of course a fictional conceit, but in the world of cinema, we all now too truly inhabit a similar land of opposites, where what we say we love to do is not what we do at all.
Each day I become more and more convinced that staged financing could be a cure to much of the Film Biz’s ills. Staged financing? What? Is the phrase not exactly center of your conversations right now? Why not?!! Whatsamattawidyou? Don’t you know a good solution when you see one?
