SOPA opera

(or: STFU cuz Star Wars will outlive Google)

Let me start this by just making totally clear that I’m against SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, NAMBLA, and the PTA too. I’m against SOPA for numerous reasons, but mainly: (a) I don’t think piracy is really all that bad for the IP business and (b) when the government is passing invasive new bills it’s better to be safe than sorry… especially when Chris Dodd has anything to do with it.

BUT I’m getting a little tired of the sloganeering. Piracy *may* not be that bad for the IP business, but it’s *definitely* highly profitable for a lot of tech, platform, & gadget businesses… y’know, like most of the ones who are driving the SOPA opposition and generating all those talking points.

You’ve heard the cliche: when they say it’s not about the money, it’s about the money… Or you think Google is really fighting DC for your freedom of speech?

When Halo-8’s website went black for SOPA, we listed out other IP companies who were anti-SOPA… we found 4: Fantagraphics, Oni Press, Riot Games, and Troma. Ok. That’s your first hint that something’s wrong here.

The technosphere wants to vilify every content creator as being Big Hollywood with crazy old ways of thinking and blah blah blah. Ok, sure, plenty of Hollywood execs don’t understand how email works and still have home phones. But not EVERY IP company except for FIVE! And Halo-8 barely counts because our core audience is anarchists, hackers, and criminals… of course WE’RE against SOPA. And umh Troma? I love me some Uncle Lloyd, but there’s clearly a trend here.

I’m not going to argue whether piracy is good, bad or indifferent right now and I’m not going to tackle how much Hollywood lobbies Washington at the moment either (as if Silicon Valley doesn’t lobby Washington—puhleeze)… I’m just going to touch on something I find distressing.

Some in the technosphere are currently pulling a Newt Gingrich-style full-scale attack on IP creators… there’s been heat between LA and Silicon Valley for a long time, but SOPA seems to have turned things a bit nuclear (and things don’t really get just “a bit” nuclear, do they?). Y Combinator’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” bounty on Hollywood was shocking. I don’t think anyone really wants Twitter updates to replace The Godfather. YouTube’s Birth of a Nation is still LOLcats (though slightly less racist, to be fair). I’ve got nothing against LOLcats, but just pay attention to where you’re swinging that hatchet, Y Combinator. I don’t take sides in Hollywood versus Silicon Valley but I think it’s a fair assertion to point out that Star Wars will likely outlive Google.

When Y Combinator starts running around throwing death threats at American industries that employ a lot of union laborers, they run the risk of making Silicon Valley start looking a bit too much like Wall Street. We love the gadgets and the platforms and all the clever ideas, but sometimes it does start to seem like fancy algorithms and exotic, computerized instruments are extracting money from large populations to a select few. As I’ve said before, there’s a fine line between disruptive technology and corruptive technology.

I guess the point is… walk a bit more softly if you’re gonna carry that big stick.

And stop it with all these farcical so-called “empirical studies” of how piracy is actually really good for IP creators. Anyone who thinks the indie music sector is as robust and thriving as it was in the 90s either wasn’t around in the 90s or had bad taste in music. We all know the rise of piracy has been excellent for gadgets and platforms, you don’t have to rub it in.

I’m sympathetic to why you’re lashing out, Silly Valley… I understand the pendulum of public opinion is swinging back toward what you mockingly refer to as “authored content” and suddenly platforms are being perceived of as commodities. I get that it’s making platform people nervous that no one cares about the miraculous technological innovation of Netflix Streaming anymore if it doesn’t have Game of Thrones and Dark Knight on it. But… I mean, it’s a pendulum. It swings back. That’s the point. Relax.

In the meantime, can’t we all get along? At least we can all agree Chris Dodd’s a tool. Isn’t that a start?

Inventing The Future

As many of you know, I spent a few months earlier this year working on a documentary called Ctrl+Alt+Compete that’s debuting at the Napa Valley Film Festival. It’s a cool film and has some really compelling insights into startup culture and entrepreneurism. You should definitely check it out.

But what I want to talk about for a moment is a different documentary called Inventing The Future.

Inventing The Future was the working title of Ctrl+Alt+Compete early in development. We’d been tasked with creating a documentary about tech innovation, entrepreneurship, and the pursuit of changing the world for the better through hard work and vision.

An early idea was to develop a Waiting For Superman about the American entrepreneurial spirit: people who create jobs and industries through idea and force of will, visionaries who invent the futures that the rest of us benefit from.

The difficulty with that direction reared its ugly head pretty early: there’s just not a lot of people who are pursuing those kinds of visions these days. There are hardworking, brilliant, gifted, willful, committed, idealistic entrepreneurs and visionaries out there… we profiled and interviewed many of them. But culturally, the goal posts just aren’t that lofty. The ideology right now is lean startups hacking out code over the weekend… since the growth market has been mobile apps, the visionary’s depth of field is scaled down to the size of a smartphone. Visions are precise rather than grandiose. Financiers want to invest smaller amounts per company in larger numbers of companies, accepting Hollywood’s dogma that nobody knows anything so better to make a lot of little bets than a couple of big ones.

Is this all bad? No, not at all. I don’t even know if it’s a little bit bad. People are making cool products and businesses, and some of them are pocketing ridiculous profits because a little widget can grow exponentially among the ginormous userbase.

But there aren’t a lot of people Inventing The Future right now. They’re tinkering on APIs, building apps on top of systems. It’s all reform, not a lot of revolution. That wouldn’t be a problem except our economy needs a revolution. Our country *needs* grandiose plans that can employ large numbers of people and inspire them to invest their earnings and profits in their own futures. Facebook employs around 2,000 people. GM employs around 200,000. We’re all looking to the luminaries of Silicon Valley to rescue us, but even if all the hardhats across the rust belt were re-educated in C++ there still wouldn’t be jobs for them.  As it is, many of the startups I encountered were financed by unemployment checks rather than venture capital.

It’s not by accident that I’m writing this the day after Steve Jobs died. It’s unsettling to consider how important he’s been to this country in terms of vision and leadership and thinking in grandiose scale but with the precision of placing little interconnected devices in everyone’s hands. It’s unsettling and it’s a little scary. Not to deify him, but he did have a transcendent quality. You just don’t really think of anyone else alive today operating on that level. And, all around the media, pundits have been asking where the next Steve Jobs will come from… well, we can’t wait for another Steve Jobs. We can’t wait for one person to present grandiose visions of our future. We don’t have time. There’s just too much at stake. We have to all do it. We have to all think different now. Because the future is not written, and it’s up to us to invent it.

Everything I Needed To Know About Business I Learned From Dr. Doom (#1)

Lesson #1 – Direct competition is stupid.
(Learned in Secret Wars #1)

I was 8 years old when I first read Secret Wars, and I’ll always remember what a badass Dr. Doom was.

For the uninitiated, Secret Wars was a ridiculous “event” comic where a godlike being from beyond our multiverse, The Beyonder, happened to see the Earth (of the Marvel Universe) and was so enamored by its heroes and villains that he plucked them into outer space and threw them on a planet he cobbled together so they’d fight for his amusement… kind’ve like if God decided to put together his own personal UFC league.

Here’s what he says to the heroes and villains when they wake up on his weirdo planet:

THE BEYONDER: “I am from Beyond. Slay your enemies and all you desire shall be yours. Nothing you dream of me is impossible for me to accomplish.”

Ok so that sales pitch is kind of like Hollywood studios + Silicon Valley venture capitalists + Wall Street tycoons all wrapped into one bag of lottery-ticket-winning awesomeness.

And so all the idiot super heroes and super villains start kicking each other’s asses to try and get a prize. As Molecule Man epic-ly puts it: “I want a nice house and a yard, and lots of friends, and maybe even a girl—! One who LIKES me, and — OWW!”

Why does he interrupt himself with an OWW? Because Doom bitchslaps him, that’s why.

DOOM: “Ignore your petty dreams! To fight is to prove we are but microbes on a slide! We must transcend ourselves!”

And then all those dummies try to knock Doom out so they can go back to fighting each other.

What does Doom do? He’s got the master plan—he ignores the jackasses fighting for the lottery ticket and instead goes after The Beyonder. That’s called being a mothafucka!

What can we learn from this?

At its root, our economic system pits us against our contemporaries by calling them competitors. I don’t consider other filmmakers, other writers, or other labels my competitors. (a) They’re my friends and I don’t need them to fail in order for me to succeed. (b) Just because we’re doing the same thing today, doesn’t mean we’ll be doing the same thing tomorrow… I don’t want to be in the same place tomorrow, I want to be operating on another level tomorrow. Why should we spend our lives fighting each other in this crappy basement when we can both run upstairs and kick somebody else’s ass together?

If you’re constantly fighting with people on your same level, you’ll never transcend to the next level.

Identify where you WANT to be and compete THERE. Find your Beyonder and go kick his ass.

Fuckin Doom, man, that dude knew what’s up.

Three Sentences

Many emails I receive from Silicon Valley end with the signature:

“Q: Why is this email three sentences or less?

A: http://three.sentenc.es”

Many emails I receive from within the creative community end with an invitation to grab a 2-3 hour lunch.

There will never be peace.

If a tech app failed 20 years ago, try it again today

If you missed it, Wired covered my new tech project EtherFilms a few weeks back.

I appreciated the article’s take on the project and it even includes the powerpoint demonstration I gave at Comic Con (the slide deck as well as a video), but what was most satisfying to me was the comments.

Most people would find a comments section satisfying if everyone commented favorably, but mostly I got kicked around on this one. So why did I find it satisfying? Well, I did something I haven’t really done before: I engaged in the conversation.

I’ve tried participating in the comment sections of articles about my projects before, but usually it brings the conversation to a halt… like the principal just walked in on your spitball fight. I think most comment boards operate on the presumption that the subjects of the article aren’t reading the comments, so it can be a real party pooper to pierce that veil.

I sensed this was different though because the discussion was about ideas for a tech application I’m developing (basically an interface that turns movies non-linear with hyperlinks and transmedia), so it’s not really a movie-snark-zone vibe since it’s about ideas and things that are still being sussed out… it’s not film content, which kinda exists to be consumed passively and then dissected among friends.

Anyway, participating in the comments became very satisfying because I was able to have conversations with intelligent, engaged people who had points of view on the topic and they really helped me hone the messaging. This was key because most of the negativity stemmed from people misinterpreting the goal (they all assumed it was Choose Your Own Adventure movies, which it’s not), so I learned that most of the pushback was coming from readers not understanding the core concepts and I also learned how to better articulate those core concepts.

But beyond the misinterpretations, there was one meme that really surprised me: several people commented that this was a worthless endeavor because they’d worked on similar attempts at non-linear film 20 years ago, and those attempts failed.

My response was that most successful new tech of the past few years (MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Hulu, Netflix Streaming, the iPad, smartphones, etc etc etc) are all based on concepts that were tried and failed 10 and 20 years ago. When I was conducting interviews for the upcoming tech documentary Ctrl+Alt+Compete, I came upon a whole meme about how 90s boom startups built heavy backend infrastructure for their companies, but they failed because the broader infrastructure wasn’t strong enough to support them at the time–today the infrastructure is far more sound and so many of the concepts that failed then are being relaunched now and succeeding. Without Pseudo and DEN and Pop.com there might not be the infrastructure for MySpace, Facebook, or YouTube. Without the Newton there might be no iPad. But either way, using those past failures as an excuse to not launch the newer companies would clearly have been unwise.

So actually, it’s quite possible that the *best* way to launch a successful new technology today is to look back at what was tried 10 or 20 years ago and identify a really cool concept that only failed because the infrastructure wasn’t there to support it. If the infrastructure is there now, maybe its time has come.

that gnawing sound you hear is indie film cannibalizing itself

The 90s are back, and what that means in this context is independent films in the times ahead are likely to be more sentimental & intellectual & (for lack of a better term) culturally-coastal than the range of experimental, aggressive, genre, niche content we’ve seen the past few years.

That’s because the next wave of indie films will require wealthy patrons of the arts again… they’ll be less likely to be bootstrapped and cobbled together DiY with the expectation of a quick return on investment via direct-to-consumer sales.

Why? Because DVDs aren’t selling anymore, and DVD was unique in the history of film as one of the quickest ways to create a film and turn a quick enough profit to re-invest your own funds.

VOD is not quick, payments actually trickle in very slowly (unless you’re doing it on your own website, but that’s not where the action is) and there are far greater barriers to entry. Everyone wants to believe the rise of VOD will be democratizing in the way MP3s and iTunes were for music, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. First off, the walled-gardens are not as open to film as they ever were to music… and they’re not likely to become any more inviting. iTunes was only supportive of indie music because it needed hipsters as a base to negotiate with major labels, but nobody cares about an indie film base for their movie platforms (except marginal players with specific niches).

The main problem, though, is that sell-through is down and rentals are up. Rental (esp VOD rental) requires more management for lower margins, so that means volume.

An interesting stat I came across is this breakdown of the most popular way to consume movies in 2010 (source Pricewaterhouse Coopers):
1. Netflix DVD Rental
2. Netflix Streaming
3. A la carte VOD Streaming (rental On Demand)
4. Renting DVD from kiosk
5. Renting DVD from videostore

NONE of these are promising for sustainable independent film production. Netflix DVD and Streaming cannibalizes everything else, it’s fine and it’s a great service but it’s only a small percentage of a sustainable approach to film production. The fact that those are 1 & 2 is quite distressing for independent production (and production in general if you’re not part of a conglomerate that also sells air conditioners and credit cards). VOD rental at #3 is not very promising either. And following up, DVD rental from kiosks at #4 is also a great service for consumers that (sadly) cannibalizes a film producer’s ability to create revenue. After that is selling DVDs to mom & pop rental shops which is a lot like herding cats now that all the chains are dead—it’s completely inefficient.

If you’re confused by why DVD rental is not sustainable, I’ve gone through this at length elsewhere but here’s a quick summation: VHS tapes cost $100 because they were priced for rental, DVDs cost $15-20 because they were priced for sell-through. A producer might get $3-5 per DVD sold at $15-20. That’s potentially sustainable even if you’re making small niche films as long as your averaging $3-5 per viewer. But rental DVDs (due to First Sale Doctrine) are sold at wholesale with no rental revenue trickling back to the filmmakers… so one of those $3-5 sales can actually account for hundreds of viewers or more. Plus, it drives the perceived value of the film to free and/or 99-cents, which is also not helpful.

Note that “Buying DVDs” doesn’t even rank on that chart. If this were Family Feud I’d be weeping on Bob Barker’s shoulder (or whatever that guy’s name was… Pat Sajak, whatever).

The pendulum is swinging back to coastal patrons/curators with independent film as a cultural loss-leader in search of donations and grants. Which is fine, but that doesn’t equal jobs and youthful innovation. The past ten years have had far fewer gatekeepers than the 90s and the brash wave of over-the-top independently produced films is a reflection of that. To be fair though, a lot of the crap that was popular the past ten years was stupid and vapid escapism with excessive everything and too-clever twist endings, so maybe we could do with a few cultural curators. But a creative renaissance doesn’t necessarily mean anybody’s paying their rent…

Why the comics -> movies bubble must burst

The general consensus (I’ve not seen empirical data, although it is anecdotally consistent) is that the *core* comic book readership is dudes in their mid-30s through 40s.

This seems to be in large part due to comic books exploding in the 80s and early 90s and that readership remaining loyal to this day… but that core base of longterm loyalty had the unintended consequence of nurturing dense, complex, multi-decade continuities and efforts to “mature” the medium—both of which limited the accessibility of comics to the next generation of young people.

Are dudes in their mid-30s through 40s really that coveted a demographic to drive production of all these comic book movies we’ve seen the past ten years?

In a word: no.

Dudes in their mid-30s through 40s actually have crap for disposable income, as they are more likely to be raising families than say tween girls or college guys.

Plus, Generation-X is (population-wise) a bust generation. So purely in terms of population you’re better off targeting Millennials or Baby Boomers than Gen-Xers.

So why are comic book movies so successful? Well… they’re not. Comic book movies have to be “good” in order to be successful—and, in Hollywood, that recipe is “bad.”

Comic book movies need name directors like Sam Raimi or Bryan Singer and movie star leads and solid critical support in order to be successful. Basically… they’re just like every other movie regardless of underlying material. There’s no built-in audience that will go to a comic book movie just because it’s based on a comic book (at least, no built-in audience that means anything in the context of a Hollywood event movie’s budget). There’s franchise power, but that has nothing to do with the comic book… that’s just the strength of the preceding films like any movie franchise.

Is Marvel currently trying to re-set this trend with lower profile directors and less starpower? Yes. And they’re doing an admirable job of it, but they’ve also lowered the goal posts. Thor and Captain America are considered hits, but at a fraction of the box office Marvel movies were opening to earlier in the decade.

So comic book movies, like all movies, have box office that is directly related to starpower and subjective-quality (critical response/word of mouth).

Compare this to something like Twilight or Harry Potter—both of which find their core base of support in younger demos. Those movies don’t have to be “good.” They don’t need stars. They make their own stars and the quality of those movies… well, y’know… neither franchise is spawning many Oscar contenders.

So why do so many comic book movies get made?

Simple. The core demographic of dudes in their mid-30s through 40s happens to be the core demographic of Hollywood development executives.

Hollywood is not as data-driven as one might imagine, it really is about passion and seat-of-the-pants intuition in its own weird way. Since the famous aphorism “nobody knows anything” is so fiercely believed in the biz, many execs just assume they’re Don Drapers whose personal tastes will determine a film’s success or failure.

And, of course, the personal taste of a Hollywood executive will not determine a film’s success or failure. If we know *anything* we know that.

Meanwhile, the comics biz has exploited this Hollywood vulnerability in an insane pump & dump that shifted the entire economic structure of the comics business out of sustainability and into a lottery-paradigm of incubating IPs to sell to Hollywood.

And it works because many Comics Publishers and Hollywood Executives are contemporaries that have similar tastes… so the Comics Publishers can develop IPs to their tastes and sell them to Hollywood Executives with similar tastes… who will then need scapegoats when they flip those IPs as films to an unresponsive public with *different* tastes.

It works… just like the housing bubble worked. It works until it doesn’t work anymore. And then everybody’s screwed.

How many more Scott Pilgrims, Kick-Asses, Jonah Hexes, Cowboys & Alienses, Green Lanterns, Fantastic Fours, etc etc etc etc etc (a couple of which I thoroughly enjoyed and felt were really good films) can this bubble survive?

I think not many more. And when the bubble bursts, it’s gonna do a lot of damage… mostly to comics creators who got into a Faustian bargain with Hollywood and will find themselves left without a business model.

a digital note about paper

— Comic book readers are the final bosses you’d face if you played a videogame written by a tree —

Last week I was at Comic Con. That place has many things… awkward sweat, unsettling cosplay flesh, off-balance quasi-celebrities, open bars… but most of all it has paper. Lots and lots of paper. And I don’t mean “paper” in the hip hop sense (seems most of the $$ spent at Comic Con comes from marketing budgets not from piggy banks). When I say paper I mean dead trees. I mean if you dropped the San Diego Convention Center down a recycling bin you’d likely save a fistful of rainforests.

But eco-terrorism aside (geeko-terrorism?), I just find it fascinating how amped Comic Con-goers are on paper. They love it. Comic book readers are the final bosses you’d face if you played a videogame written by a tree.

For example, here are two people I randomly met at Comic Con last week:
- One was a “transmedia executive” I met at a guest-list-only industry-assgrab party with free booze. He had the weirdest spiel I ever heard. He was pitching film producers and game developers on designing a transmedia strategy for them by publishing books to sell at retail. Really? That’s your bold new transmedia strategy? Books? Retail? What fucking year is this? Hey film exec… you’re trapped in the past… you need a traaaansmedia (!) strategy! You need to make cuneiform tablets based on your films and people can come to a temple and read them. That’s multi-platform as fuck.
-  Then I met a guy who was generally pretty likable and smart but… I mean, ok I don’t wanna be a dick so you be the judge. He’s making a documentary about the comic book format and why it’s important to read comic books and you have to read them on paper not on your iPad and, most importantly, comic books are a superior medium to film. Ok, dude, but you’re making a FILM to tell people that COMIC BOOKS are *better* than FILM. “Why don’t you make a comic book that says comic books are better than film?” “Cuz nobody would read it.” Exactly.

Look, I like paper as much as the next guy who pretty much likes paper but doesn’t really give a shit and can do without more clutter. This isn’t personal. Paper is fine. I’ll even go so far as to say it’s great. Paper is fucking awesome.

But riddle me this, Comic Con… why is paper so fucking EXPENSIVE?? It’s expensive to print. It’s expensive to ship. You need ink to print on paper and that’s even more expensive. It’s not efficient AT ALL. And floppy periodical comics are retail dependent (ill-suited for e-commerce for numerous reasons) with only one serious retail segment supporting them, a segment that is… shall we say “troubled.”

Graphic novels are in slightly better shape, but only slightly (ask Borders) and they’re ridiculously expensive. I was quoted $15 to print a 200 page graphic novel. A DVD is 75-cents. If I sell that graphic novel at retail, the store takes 50%. How much am I really gonna be able to charge for that book? If I don’t sell ALL of them QUICKLY I’m fucked, and even if I do it’s a lot of work for a pretty weak payoff.

A floppy comic book sells for what… 3 or 4 bucks? The *only* distributor who carries them takes 60%. The books cost over a buck to print and that’s not including shipping. This is not good math… I thought comics readers were supposed to be geeks. What the fuck? That math was oookay in the 90s when even a weirdo indie book could sell hundreds of thousands, but nowadays a weird indie book is more likely to sell hundreds than hundreds of thousands. A non major superhero book that does a few thousand is ranking in sales charts and the biggest Marvel & DC titles top out at around 100k. When I was a kid working at St. Mark’s Comix, Horny Biker Slut was selling 100k. Granted, who doesn’t like horny biker sluts, but still.

The reason comics was thriving in the 90s was because desktop publishing and print technology suddenly made it a cheap and accessible artform for experimentation. It became vibrant. It wasn’t the variant covers and holograms, that’s what *killed* it. Technology had made comics a very cost-efficient artform for new visual/dramatic creators looking for a laboratory to experiment in.

But it’s not an efficient laboratory anymore. Technology now hates high marginal cost, shipping of heavy product, and specialized distribution of niche authored content (meaning technology hates all us Gen-Xers and our old-ass tastes).

Back in my Gen-X heyday, we manufactured & bought our favorite indie albums on vinyl except for the demos that went out on cassette. But CDs existed and they were cheaper to produce than vinyl or cassette. There was backlash against CDs… they were compressed and digital and a tool of the man, whatever. Eventually, if you wanted a vibrant arts community you had to skew toward the more efficient format of CD (later replaced by the even more compressed yet even more efficient mp3. And don’t give me shit about vinyl’s resurgence—that’s part nostalgic novelty, part justifiable backlash against mp3s sounding like shit, and part a ploy by retail stores and retail distributors… but in any case it’s marginal and not the point).

The comics community is entrenched in paper. They don’t care about efficiency. So what do they get? They get publishers who can only stay in business if they sell their comics IPs to Hollywood… so those IPs are inevitably developed with Hollywood tastes in mind. Your paper comics are a fucking loss-leader for Tinseltown. Loss-leaders are (a) never good for business, and (b) NEVER good for art.

I realize I sound like I’m kicking paper comics in the nuts and pedestalizing digital comics, and I guess I am… but mostly I’m just observing in stupefaction this ridiculous obsession with paper. I don’t necessarily think digital comics are fantastic for comics any more than mp3s are fantastic for the music business… it’ll just be great for iPads like it was for iPods. But regardless, it’s inevitable. And it’s not going to mean that all the current publishers are going to make a simple leap across the chasm. New players will emerge who can experiment with the new model and work it effectively, while the others fall aside or copy the innovators if they have the warchests and/or market share to cover the gap.

And there’s a lot to be excited about with the new prospect of new players experimenting with a new format. You’ve seen a bit of it over the past ten years, but that’s almost like the underground comix folks who were ahead of the curve on indie/self-publishing. The explosion hasn’t hit yet, we’re still in pioneer phase.

In the meantime… the Luddite contingent demands paper comics in the traditional format of static sequential art… but in order to get that, the Faustian bargain requires their books be developed as fodder for motion pictures. It’s almost hilarious. Almost. Ok, no, it’s completely hilarious.

Failing Upwards revisited

It’s been brought to my attention that I may have been too hard on Hollywood and too easy on Silicon Valley in my last post. Certainly no one is psyched when tech entrepreneurs fail and squander millions of dollars… and many of the people who did so amid the 90s dotcom boom-bust make up today’s rogues gallery. Also, many filmmakers do their time in movie jail and follow up a flop with a great success.

But also that’s a bunch of crap, Silicon Valley is just better at dealing with failure than Hollywood is… deal with it. It’s not the end of the world.

HOWEVER, I do have one note about part of the reason *why* Hollywood is so terrible at handling failure and why Silicon Valley is pretty good at it.

I was reminded of this by, of all people, Sarah Palin. Now I’m no hockey mom, but when Sarah Palin says Hollywood is “full of hate” the bitch ain’t lyin’. Hollywood is a simmering cauldron of hate and envy and pettiness… all of which makes it kind of awesome in a Game of Thrones kinda way. Silicon Valley’s not like that. Yeah a little bit? No. No they’re not. Neither is the tech world in NY. It’s just not like that. Pretty much everybody launching a startup in Silicon Valley has some professional skill or another that they can use elsewhere if times are tough. Pretty much everyone in Hollywood has no professional skills and they’ll either go back home when times are tough (and thus they leave) or they can’t go home and instead they go back to being criminals when times are tough. So the stakes in Hollywood are higher.

On top of this, Hollywood has critics. Yes, the tech world has critics… but, no, it doesn’t. Maybe the tech writers don’t like your startup or your new phone. Maybe they kick Microsoft in the nuts and make fun of Playstation getting hacked, whatever. Critics of film, TV, & music can make you remember the worst beating you took in high school as a utopian dream. And I’m not just talking about Oliver Stone getting beat up for another acid trip captured on film… I’m talking about even the first-time indie filmmakers who scraped together credit cards and spent years making a very personal little story at high risk. They get savaged. I see it all the time. A startup tech entrepreneur who crashes and burns millions of dollars cannot comprehend the beating an indie filmmaker will take with a small film that gets mixed reviews. It’s like the difference between getting in trouble at prep school and getting in trouble in prison.

I mean, seriously… even the much deserved asskicking Dropbox is taking over issues of security and integrity are a Sunday stroll through a flower garden compared to some of the curbjaws I’ve seen kids take for making a confusing horror film.

I’m not trying to vilify anybody here and I’m not blaming the critics (honestly… not at all… I promise… I love you all… seriously… PLEASE!). Just making the point that there really is a reason why failure in Hollywood and failure in Silicon Valley are two completely different things… and why it’s actually quite likable that DC stuck up for Johns.

Maybe I’m wrong, though. I’m not as entrenched in the tech criticism world, so let me know if my perception is slanted here. But I’ve just never observed the level of vitriol in tech coverage as what I observe all the time in film, TV, music, etc… the so-called “authored content.” Maybe people just don’t take platforms as personally as they take content.

Failing Upwards: Good in Tech, Bad in Hollywood

There’s an old story told around Hollywood that Peter Guber would draft and file two letters for every project that came his way: one letter saying it was great and financially promising, another saying it was terrible and would bomb. Once the film came out and the results were known, he would drop the incorrect letter in the shredder and add the correct one to his perfect record of predicting films’ successes and failures.

I really hope that story is true, because it’s so awesome.

I was reminded of this while reading Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood coverage of the Green Lantern release. She suggested early on that Geoff Johns is a controversial figure who may be ultimately responsible for the film’s major choices (both creatively and in terms of marketing). Over the course of the weekend, the post was continually updated (as is always the case) but the criticism of Johns was consistently softened and mitigated as other villains and conspirators were targeted for blame.

I have no idea if the Green Lantern launch is any single person’s fault, and I certainly don’t know if it had anything to do with decisions made by Johns, but if you’re looking for a scapegoat: he’s your man. He’s branded himself as the Don Draper of DC Entertainment. Draper can’t blame Peggy when a campaign fails… well he can, but we’re not supposed to buy it—and certainly Nikki Finke isn’t supposed to buy it.

I have to imagine there was pushback against Nikki’s criticism of Johns… which is hilarious because all she said was that he’s “controversial,” and even that seems to have incited enough of a hellstorm for her to dial it back (now he’s “respected but also controversial in some quarters”). Clearly DC Ent is protecting their Don Draper, which is fine and admirable in terms of corporate loyalty (better that than kicking him to the curb on Monday morning)… but it really does demonstrate another key difference between Hollywood & the tech community—a difference that is exacerbating Hollywood’s lack of innovation.

Failure is frowned upon in Hollywood. This is a bit of cognitive dissonance for two reasons:
1. A movie’s failure is nearly impossible to pin (credibly) on any one person. Movies are colossal collaborations of hundreds of people and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, not to mention scores of executives and numerous conglomerate supercorporations. How do you assign blame? The director as auteur is a marketing stunt, the job of the director is to work with the actors on their performances. That’s hardly the single defining characteristic of what makes a film a success or failure.
2. Hollywood’s most successful players usually have a trail of spectacular bombs & failures behind them.

This all fits together, of course. Because failure is inevitable and frowned upon, responsibility for any failures must be assigned to someone. Because there is no single person responsible, a scapegoat must be selected. Thus, career-success is contingent on scapegoating–the most successful players will not be the people who are best at making films… it will be the people who are best at making scapegoats.

And that is Hollywood culture in a nutshell. Because movies are impossible to predict, you can’t avoid failure… so if the culture frowns on failure, that culture is screwed.

If there’s one thing I learned in my dozens of interviews with tech innovators & entrepreneurs, it’s that failure in tech startups is not only tolerated but expected… in fact, if you haven’t failed you’re probably not working & thinking hard & different enough.

This leads to a culture of angel investors, lean startups, ongoing iterations & innovations, and venture capital firms not owned by GE and Gulf+Western. It even provides for collaboration among competitors (at least before they’re entrenched competitors, I’m not suggesting it’s utopia).

There are a few things Hollywood has over the tech world, but its coping skills for dealing with failure are not among them.

A tolerance and support for failure inspires a culture of experimentation. Both the tech community and Hollywood are creative laboratories… but the tech community keeps its innovators in the lab coats whereas Hollywood shoves its innovators into the rat-maze to fend for themselves.