Comic Con After Hollywood

As many of us observed at the time, that ginormous Scott Pilgrim poster draping the Hilton was Comic Con’s equivalent of George W Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner.

Yesterday The New York Times announced what’s been expected for years and became obvious last year, the Comic Con-Hollywood bubble has burst (or it should anyway, if the NYT prognosis turns out to be premature).

[Before I get into this, let me clarify that when I say Comic Con I’m referring more to the culture around the Con, not specifically SDCC and the staff—who I think are very deft and smart and have managed the Comic Con boom with savvy and integrity… maybe I’ll get into specifics on that in a future post, as I think it’s something others can learn from.]

The NYT article pointed largely to the snarkiness of Comic Con attendees making it a treacherous launchpad, but that’s bullshit—if that were true, Hollywood would bail from the internet. The problem isn’t the movies Comic Con kicks in the nuts, it’s the movies Comic Con champions that then underperform: notably Kick-Ass and Scott Pilgrim. Hollywood will stomach the fear of Comic Con trouncing a “bad” film so long as they respect Comic Con’s ability to launch a “good” film (quotes are to clarify that means good or bad in the eyes of Comic Con attendees).

But if the market ignores when the Comic Con audience champions a film, then there’s no incentive to treat them as power users/evangelists/tastemakers/insert-annoying-marketing-expression here.

Is it fair? No, of course not… but it’s not really fair either when the geeks get rimjobs from Hollywood just because America decided to like Christopher Nolan’s puzzle movie starring Christian Bale in a batsuit without nipples.

Was Kick-Ass a good film that was mismarketed? Yeah, but it was mismarketed because Lionsgate felt America wouldn’t respond if they marketed the elements that made it good… and they’re not necessarily wrong about that (it’s basically a retread of Fox’s failed initial marketing effort for Fight Club, although Fight Club eventually found its audience and Kick-Ass not so much). Was Scott Pilgrim inventive? I guess. I know people liked it, but I personally stand with the rest of America on that one (for once).

But none of that matters. Power is the ability to sell. If Comic Con is going to be respected, the Comic Con halo effect has to turn shit into gold. It has to mean an executive can tell her/his boss that even if the director shits the bed, the geeks will champion it and America will listen. This isn’t about quality, people—if it was about quality then Hollywood wouldn’t have to bother trudging down to the tent village of Comic Con in the first place… they’d just put all that money into making better movies.

Sooner or later, the Comic Con audience is going to wake up at the side of the road with a ripped ass as Hollywood drives back up the 5.

Attn Geeks: Hollywood does not love you. When it says you’re beautiful and geek culture is amazing and we all love the Millennium Falcon, Hollywood is just being Don Draper and getting in your pants.

This happens all the time. Sundance in the late 90s was exactly like Comic Con has been in the late 00s… the spam-marketing ridiculousness with streets full of swag and upscale retreats filled with exclusive coke parties. Just because executives sneak into your garage to have a coke-fueled orgie and don’t let you in doesn’t mean they like you. When they tired of Sundance they moved on and left Robert Redford walking funny in the snow. And after Sundance shook off the hangover, it became a decent festival again… instead of the assgrabbing douchefest it had become.

Hollywood executives are like the Dothraki from Game of Thrones—except not as manly and they don’t wear as much eyeshadow (that’s for the music execs). Like the Dothraki, Hollywood builds its city by plundering other cities and stealing their monuments.

From Game of Thrones:

Beyond the horse gate, plundered gods and stolen heroes loomed to either side of them. The forgotten deities of dead cities brandished their broken thunderbolts at the sky as Dany rode her Silver past their feet. Stone kings looked down on her from their thrones, their faces chipped and stained, even their names lost in the mists of time. Lithe young maidens danced on marble plinths, draped only in flowers, or poured air from shattered jars. Monsters stood in the grass beside the road; black iron dragons with jewels for eyes, roaring griffins, manticores with barbed tails poised to strike, and other beasts she could not name. Some of the statues were so lovely they took her breath away, others so misshapen and terrible Dany could scarcely bear to look at them. Those, Ser Jorah said, had come from the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai.
“So many,” she said as her silver stepped slowly onward, “and from so many lands.”
Viserys was less impressed. “The trash of dead cities,” he sneered.

Yeah… the NY Times article should’ve ended with “and don’t let the door kick you in the ass on your way out, Hollywood.” Ah, Comic Con should only be so lucky.

And let me reiterate I’m not so much referring to the San Diego Comic Con itself and the people who run it, who’ve always struck me as very smart and nimble at retaining the core of SDCC despite the influx of Hollywood… they seem to have thread the needle better than Sundance did, IMHO.

All of these (sub)cultural events are just temporary autonomous zones anyway. If they can manage to retain their dignity while Hollywood fists them, maybe squeeze tight enough to pull off a rolex when Hollywood pulls out, then that’s kind of the best you can hope for. If there is a Comics God, all this means is people will stop making comics as spec movie scripts. And wouldn’t that be a nice change of pace?

Don’t mistake an Executive for a Producer

In Hollywood (and media in general), it’s often difficult to figure out what a ‘producer’ does… well, not really—people mostly understand that a Producer is the person who gets the project made, but when most projects have scores of producers with various prefixes (executive, co-, associate, etc) it’s difficult to figure out who got the project made and what everybody else did.

There’s generally two types of people who get producer credits: Producers and Executives.

If you’re trying to get a project off the ground, you’ll be well served to collaborate with a Producer.

You’ll need Executives, too, but they must be selected carefully and shouldn’t come on too early because they don’t get projects made… and until a project is already surefooted and moving they’ll just slow it down or sink it. That’s not a dig at Executives—many of them are smart and hardworking and can bring a lot of value to a project, they just have a different job than Producers do. Producers *make* things, Executives *work on* things. If a thing isn’t a thing yet, a Producer can get it made but an Executive will just talk about it until it suffocates to death.

So if you want to get something made, you need to know a Producer from an Executive… and their resumes won’t help you glean the difference.

There’s an old joke that is probably the best litmus test: the Producer is the person in the room who doesn’t have a job.

Executives are salaried. If someone tells you he or she is a producer and (s)he’s pulling down a salary somewhere in the entertainment business, (s)he’s not a producer. That’s an executive.

When you’re pulling a salary, your job is to not fuck up. Your job is to do no harm. Avoid risk for the firm.

Producers generally don’t pull salaries, they get paid based on performance. Even if they pull a salary on the production, that salary only exists because the Producer got the project off the ground… and during that performance there was no guaranteed salary.

When you’re paid based on performance, your job is to fuck up spectacularly and constantly. Your job is to fuck up as often as possible… fuck up big and small and sideways and with lots of collateral damage (although hopefully not to other people’s careers… but don’t fret it if you do, that’s the risk they run by being salaried).

And therein lies the risk of collaborating with a Producer… that Producer may very well take you down a deep dark rabbit hole of madness with the prospect of glory & riches and the promise of poverty & insanity. So make sure you’re ready for that ride.

Or if that’s too wild for you, feel free to take lunch meetings with Executives instead. Urth Caffe has great coffee and The Ivy is cool for stargazing… just don’t expect to actually create anything.

Hollywood or Silicon Valley: which one is the creative community?

One of the first things you learn in the film biz is that Hollywood isn’t a production business, it’s a marketing business. If you add up all the people in the greater Hollywood area who make a decent living in the “creative industry,” probably more than 90% of them have no role in the creative process whatsoever. That’s not an indictment… after all, calling it a “creative industry” is just part of the marketing.

Hollywood only makes movies so they have something to market… in fact, the town is happiest when they can just re-market old productions. Why was DVD such a boon to the business over the past 10 years? Not because of new films coming out on DVD. At the end of the day, retail sell-through DVD of New Releases was probably an overall net loss versus VHS rental (that’s anecdotal and a bit oversimplified, maybe I’ll do the math in a future post—but even if it wasn’t a net loss, the gains for New Releases have been dubious at best). The reason DVD was such a boon was because it gave Hollywood the opportunity to sell every film ever made for pretty much the first time. No new production costs, marketing efforts were supplemental, low manufacture costs—it was a slam dunk. How much money do you have to make on a Gone With The Wind DVD to turn a profit? Umh, not much. And it’s not really tough to market.

Most of Hollywood’s revenue the past ten years has had very little to do with actual creative production of anything, and that was perfect for Hollywood because if there’s one thing this town hates it’s production. What a difficult, working-class, unpredictable process. Much better to control pipelines of distribution and simply re-market a library of old movies. Sadly, they’re out of old movies that can be sold for the first time (putting it on iTunes isn’t the same thing… the point is most movies couldn’t be owned at all in a quality/legal format prior to DVD), so now Hollywood has to create new content. Eesh. Skeery.

Silicon Valley on the other hand can’t really repurpose old technology and old platforms, they have to keep coming up with new ideas. Granted, most of them are reiterations of old technology and lots of things these days look like reinventions of 90s-dotcom concepts that were conceived before the tech infrastructure could support them, but it really is an ideas-and-production driven business. There’s no control over distribution (although the rise of the walled gardens is beginning to challenge that), and marketing efforts are far leaner (SVers will argue that they don’t need to spend on marketing in a socially-connected world but that’s hogass, still their most ridonkulous marketing spends don’t come close to Hollywood’s marketing excess).

I’d argue that, in terms of support for innovative, creative thinking, Silicon Valley has long since replaced Hollywood as the Dream Factory.

What does that mean for artists and media-content creators? Not much, not yet anyway. Most of Silicon Valley’s big ideas have been to devalue and commoditize art-media/content to the point where Silicon Valley has probably made it harder for artists and content creators to make a living than ever before. Yeah yeah, I know everyone’s been saying the opposite for the past ten years… well, Silicon Valley markets itself just as well as Hollywood does, if not better.

Things might be changing, though, as these tech platforms start to become commodities themselves. At a certain point, the only difference between Netflix and Crackle and Xbox and iTunes etc etc etc will be what exclusive content they carry, and maybe then content will be king again… but that king will be a tired, eccentric old kook after spending the past ten years in a deep dark dungeon.

Disruptive Technology or Corruptive Technology?

There’s a war a-brewin’ on the west coast between Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

[*For the purposes of simplicity and poetic license, I’m using Hollywood here to represent so-called “authored media content” and Silicon Valley to represent the tech business at large, though obviously neither industry/culture is so geographically landlocked.]

In one corner you have the Hollywood Anachronism: content that is execution-dependent, ridiculously expensive and time-consuming to produce and market, qualitatively unpredictable, and when it is successful that success is impossible to reliably replicate. These elements force Hollywood to maintain firm control of when & how the content is viewed as well as the cost (and thus the perceived value) of viewing the content… resulting in a bizantine bureaucracy of distribution.

In the other corner you have the Silicon Valley Thunderlizards: platforms that are content agnostic, ridiculously inexpensive and time-efficient to launch and test among power-user evangelists, qualitatively unpredictable but that’s offset by quantitavely laying as many eggs as possible to see what hatches, and when it works it’s infinitely scalable and simple to iterate. These elements make Silicon Valley nimble and spontaneous with little regard for imposing roadblocks to access.

The feeling has been that this relationship is symbiotic, because in many cases Silicon Valley is building platforms that monetize Hollywood content. But I don’t think it’s developing that way. Some may call it parasitic and maybe it was initially, but contemporarily the better paradigm is Silicon Valley is just scavenging the rotting corpse of Hollywood.

For example, I don’t believe the music industry was crushed by Napster, it was crushed by iTunes/iPod. Napster was a devastating blow, but it was a hassle… we suddenly had all these mp3s on our computers, many of which were glitchy, and we had to burn CD-Rs to listen to them using junky Roxio apps. Plenty of douchebags like me would be happy to jump through those hoops to save 10 bucks, but not the mass-market. And then Steve Jobs introduced the perfect platform of iTunes and the iPod. It was a disruptive technology because it changed the way we manage and consume music. It was a corruptive technology because the underlying theme was: this is how you manage all that stolen music. The iPod was expensive for a Walkman, but its competitive advantage was that the Walkman doesn’t enable you to manage and listen to every song ever composed with simple, free, instant access. Oh and there’s a store too. (I realize the iTunes store is successful, but it’s a new ecosystem. The old one died. Someday there will be a new ecosystem in Fukushima, too, but not today.)

Netflix is the same way, although I’m not here to bemoan Netflix again because I actually am giving Netflix Watch Instantly a thumbs up. The studios are bummed about it, but that’s just because they’re late to realize how much they got boned by Netflix with DVDs and now they’re fighting last year’s war. The Watch Instantly deal is much better, trust me.

But Netflix DVD rental remains an interesting example of corruptive technology. Personally, all our DVDs have been carried by Netflix and all our DVDs have wound up on piracy sites immediately upon street date. Then we started releasing short-form, episodic DVDs for Godkiller that Netflix didn’t carry and I noticed something funny… they didn’t wind up on the piracy sites in any significant fashion. At first I took that to mean there was no interest, but the episodic DVDs were outselling our other releases as well as our competitors’ & friends’ new releases. Then we started selling digital files of the movies on our website: no encryption, no DRM, optimized for every device. These are basically the perfect files to post on a piracy site without any of the hassle of ripping the DVD. But none of them wound up on any of the piracy sites. Then we released the full-length DVD and the *day* it went out by Netflix rental it wound up on EVERY piracy site.

I don’t blame Netflix directly for this, but it’s the system that develops based on perceived value. If you buy a Godkiller DVD or a Godkiller download, apparently you’re less apt to give it to everybody else for free (either because you care about us or because if you paid for it then you think everybody else should too). But once you’re a Netflix subscriber (as I am), rentals are essentially free… so the movie has no perceived value. Most of the high volume movie pirates simply put every new release in their queue, rip the DVD without even watching it, and post it online. There’s no cost to them and it’s worth the hassle to build the biggest library of movies. Corruptive technology.

Are these tech services providing value to the consumer? Undoubtedly. Are they providing value to the producer? Umh. That’s kind of complicated.

(And just to reiterate, I’ve learned to stop worrying and love the Netflix because I think Watch Instantly is a win-win for consumers and producers alike; so I’m not trying to hate on Netflix here.)

The relationship between Silicon Valley and Hollywood *could* be symbiotic but it’s not, and the reason isn’t Silicon Valley’s fault. When you see a dead body rotting on the floor, it’s perfectly fair game to suck the nutrients out of it before they decompose.

The problem is that Insidious is not necessarily a more enjoyable film than The Omen. Hanna is not necessarily a more enjoyable film than The Professional. And the newest Nine Inch Nails album is not necessarily more enjoyable than Downward Spiral.

Essentially, Silicon Valley does not need Hollywood’s new releases to monetize its platforms. iTunes is fine with having Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band even if Brokencyde won’t allow it to carry their new album.

Hollywood is not used to having to compete with its own back catalog, because it’s always had control over that. Lawrence of Arabia doesn’t play on the IMAX screen next to Thor.

This goes for pretty much all non-tech authored content. On my iPad, it’s as simple for me to read X-Men’s Dark Phoenix Saga as it is to read the new issue of X-Men… is every new comic book ready to compete toe-to-toe with vintage Chris Claremont?

The tech world, however, is used to competing with itself. Novelty and nostalgia aside, New Super Mario Brothers on Wii is likely superior to pulling out the old NES and firing up the original Super Mario Brothers. Call of Duty: Black Ops and Gears of War 3 are developed to compete directly against their predecessors. Is Fast Five? No. It may be fine, but it was greenlit to thrive on its predecessors’ half-lives, not to compete directly with them. Hollywood is hoping 3D is the equivalent of a new console for films, but it’s not.

And the funny thing is the money that these Corruptive Technologies extract from Hollywood will affect the next Fast Five *last* and will affect the next The Professional *first*… because first the overhead gets paid and then the original idea gets nurtured. So it’s a vicious cycle of Hollywood losing money by not out-performing its history and then it can’t pull out of the tailspin because it doesn’t have enough money to augment performance.

So the question is whether or not Silicon Valley is doing itself (and us all) a disservice by allowing Corruptive Technology to take the place of Disruptive Technology. We all know Hollywood needed a shake-up, but on some level content-creation is still an art (even in Hollywood) and art needs to be nurtured in a way that doesn’t necessarily gel with the mindset of MBAs and Three Sentence E-mails.

The tech platforms can survive without new release auteured content, but can they thrive without it?

Transmedia is a useful term even though it has no meaning

I throw the term ‘transmedia’ around a lot at meetings and in elevators. It’s a useful term because it articulates a specific media sensibility and also because it has a RuPaul edge to it. And because it makes ‘authored content’ feel more startup-y… which is helpful when you’re a lowly media creator in a world obsessed with really sexy things like exponentially scalable platforms, datamining, and algorithms.

But does ‘transmedia’ actually mean anything? Well, no. But then again, ‘cool’ doesn’t actually mean anything either.

The term ‘transmedia’ exists because ‘franchise’ sounds like McDonald’s and ‘multimedia’ sounds like the 90s. And because marketing firms need new buzzwords in order to get paid.

And that’s my only real problem with transmedia: it’s primarily being used as a marketing term. Transmedia’s not generally being executed very effectively to create worlds that expand over multiple media platforms. It’s more like: “hey, we’ll give away free Sucker Punch animated shorts before the movie comes out.” Those shorts look *awesome* IMHO, but as long as they’re just marketing freebies no one will write an engaging story for them… just pretty eye candy. (Hmm, I guess in that case it’s a particularly honest advertisement for the film)

Personally, I’m agnostic to media platform and that’s why I find transmedia exciting. My first film Threat mixed live-action 16mm film with animation and we put as much thought into the soundtracks as anything else. We made a comic book following the characters outside the film’s plot. And since the making of the film was as much a part of the story as the script itself, the website formed a unique kind of meta-transmedia component. We called our production company Kings Mob a “multimedia militia.” Ahh the 90s. I guess today we’d call ourselves… “transmedia trannies?”

Here’s my take on why transmedia storytelling is a compelling trend:
- STORIES are universal. Worlds, characters, etc are not specific to demographics (unless they really suck).
- MEDIA PLATFORMS are NOT universal, they *are* demographic specific. Just because someone loves Batman Begins does not mean they want to read comic books. An affection for the Batman story, character, and world doesn’t necessarily mean a non-comics reader will suddenly enjoy comic books… even Batman comic books.

It’s a mistake for creators to think content trumps platform. It doesn’t. And it doesn’t have to.

These days, everyone has their preferred methods of receiving media content. Some people love watching Netflix on their big screen TVs but hate watching it on the computer. Some people love animation but don’t like comic books. Transmedia gives you the opportunity to reach all these different demographics with the same stories and worlds.

But that doesn’t mean you can tell precisely the same story in precisely the same way on two different media platforms. The medium is still the message after all, and each medium has its own storytelling style and its own ideal POV. That’s why transmedia can’t just be about adapting the same story over and over again, whether it’s a new plot altogether or the same plot in a different medium it needs to be written and produced specifically for the target medium.

These two lessons (that media platforms are demo specific and that stories/worlds must be re-engineered for each platform) were really hammered home to me on Godkiller.

A Godkiller DVD consists of four media platforms: an animated film, a comic book, an e-book, and an audiobook. The e-book and audiobook are parts of a serialized novel that tells the story of the pre-nuke world, whereas the animated film and comic book tell the story of the post-nuke world. (Technically, the fact that there are different stories being told in different media is what makes it a ‘transmedia’ series, not just the adaptation of the same story into multimedia—but whatever.)

Now, the animated film was initially written in screenplay format, just because that’s my preferred method of writing a long form dramatic narrative. So to make the comic book, I adapted my film script into a comic book. Does that mean I repurposed my screenplay into a comic book, and thus I’m a comic book carpetbagger? I don’t think so. Again, I’m platform agnostic. It doesn’t matter to me if the story is told in a film or in a comic book. BUT I had to re-engineer the screenplay into a comic book, because they function differently. For example, the pace and the exposition of a comic book are driven by the text. Film is the opposite, with film you try and use as little dialogue as possible and even less voiceover. So there’s a creative process to cross over from one platform to another.

Then I had to reverse the process for the animated film. We developed a style we call “illustrated film” that uses the sequential art from the comic book to build the visuals of a feature length film. Illustrated film is a format all its own that falls somewhere between comics and cinema… so in order to construct the illustrated film, we essentially had to create a new storytelling language. The pace and exposition of an illustrated film are driven largely by the audio, so the dialogue is as important as a comic book, but the dramatic voice performances make some comic dialogue unnecessary or over-the-top… the writing structure is actually more like a play than a comic book. Also, the music and sound design in an illustrated film are as important as the words—obviously those components are non-existent in comics. The visuals, on the other hand, are used very differently than in comics *or* in animation. We have far more control of reveals than in a comic book and it’s more effective for us to pan & dolley through the visual world than to manipulate the characters & objects, so the visuals have camera movement closest to cinema. Strangely, of all the dramaturgical comparisons, an illustrated film is *least* like a cartoon or animated film… even though it’s technically an animated film.

Though I’d previously written plays, films, television, comic books, essays, and long form fiction, it was still a unique education to re-invent the same story across three different media platforms (screenplay, comic book, illustrated film).

The most important lesson I gleaned from the process was that very few people like BOTH the comic book *and* the illustrated film. In fact, people who love the comic book are the biggest haters of the illustrated film. Still, far more people have seen the illustrated film than have seen the comic, and most of them seem to love the illustrated film.

Which leads me to my final point: transmedia is not about selling multiple platforms to the same person, it’s about using multiple platforms to provide the same story to multiple types of story lovers. Yes, some people will love your comic book, your video game, *and* your movie… but that is the lowest percentage of your audience and it’s not the point. Transmedia is about your story’s elasticity… how universal is the story? How many audiences can it reach? How do each of those audiences prefer to consume their media?

As a creator or producer, I suggest you start thinking about your stories’ “Transmedia Elasticity.”

We didn’t make the Godkiller illustrated-film to double dip and sell fans of the comic book a DVD (or vice versa—they were produced simultaneously). We made the comic book to share the story with comic book lovers, and we made the illustrated film to share the story with experimental film lovers.

As creators, producers, & marketers define what Transmedia means, I hope we can navigate it in the direction of sharing stories with a broad range of audiences through whichever media lens they prefer to view our worlds.

Amazon Studios: “Shitty By Committee” to become “Shitty By User Comments?”

The news about Amazon Studios is strange not so much because of the rapacious vertical-integration [or maybe a more contemporary term would be 'sprawl-integration'--a uniquely web-2.0 occurrence we've grown accustomed to where top tech-driven-companies eschew monopolizing a single market sector and instead create a trans-sector fiefdom in a bit of 3-dimensional chess where multiple fiefdoms (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc) can share sectors with varying degrees of dominance], but rather this is strange news because of just how quaintly 20th century it feels… a movie studio? Screenplay submissions? Director reels? To be selected by a pair of USC professors and Mark Gill (killing time til Film Dept’s IPO, I suppose)? And then somehow Amazon director of Product Development Roy Price expects us to believe the next Irving Thalberg will make creative decisions based on the aggregate of user comments. Awesome. Take the creative bureaucracy that turns Hollywood development into “shitty by committee” and expand that exponentially.

What’s so bizarro about this is how it sounds like any of the decades worth of MBA-minded ideas on how to remake Hollywood to be more efficient and idiot-proof… and the tech component of it is so limited that it’s no game-changer and doesn’t make this any more innovative than the business-minded approaches to streamlining Hollywood that have been in effect since the 1940s.

So am I saying this is doomed to failure?

Not necessarily. Like most contemporary MBA-driven corporate cultures, Amazon thrives by turning other people’s dollars into their own nickels… and if you conquer enough market sectors those nickels will add up to a lot for Amazon even while it causes systemic upheaval to the rest of the economy. Amazon became the top retailer not by deposing the previous top retailer but by deposing retail in general. They (like many others, this isn’t an Amazon-specific trend) create savings for consumers by destroying the value of content and crippling suppliers, which is a short term solution… unless your goal is to *become* the supplier.

Keep in mind, it’s not just studios, production companies, and indies who stand to take it in the teeth here… Amazon’s “prizes” for content are below guild minimum. So this is also a ploy to get around the minimum wage. Brilliant.

I also love the fact that it’s legitimized in the press by the first-look deal with Warner Brothers, which doesn’t actually mean anything without further detail.

Amazon’s business model is no different than WalMart entering a new town, lowering prices below cost to put local competitors out of business, and then raising prices.

Amazon has been part of the process to destroy the value of content, and that is only the first step… in a bloodbath, buy everything.

Is Hollywood the next Detroit?

Sorry, Comics, But You’re Screwed

How Privateering, Not Piracy, Destroys Commercial Art & Media

At C2E2 over the weekend, a bunch of people were running around showing off how awesome comics look on the iPad. I have to agree, comics on the iPad appear to be way more enjoyably readable than I had anticipated. No one seems to be quite sure if this is great news or awful news. Well, it’s both. It’s great news for comics junkies who aren’t yet overstimulated by too much digital content and for comics creators who see their stories as loss leaders for movies and action figures… the rest of you are screwed.

Oh I’m no Luddite about this, but I do have more than enough anecdotal reference material to make the call here.

Here’s a list of a few retail shops I worked at during my teens and early 20s:
- Tower Records (Huntington, NY)
- Tower Video (Lafayette & 4th, Greenwich Village NY)
- Kim’s Video (Bleecker Street, West Village NY)
- Two Boots Video (Ave A, East Village NY)
- See Hear Zines (St Mark’s Place, East Village NY)
- St. Mark’s Comics (St Mark’s Place, East Village NY)
- Village Comics (Bleecker Street, New York)
- Mama Mia What A Pizza (Broadway & 8th, NY)

The only one on that list who’s likely to see the next decade is Mama Mia What A Pizza (or whatever it’s called nowadays) because you can’t download a pizza (yet).

Tower Records was put out of business by iTunes.
Tower Video, Kim’s Video, and Two Boots Video were put out of business by Netflix.
See Hear was put out of business by Blogger.

I hate to put a deathwish on great indie businesses, but the iPad has me concerned about the future for St Mark’s Comics and Village Comics.

There’s a reason why I attribute the death of music retail and video retail to iTunes and Netflix rather than Napster and PirateBay. Here’s my unique take on all this: Piracy doesn’t put companies out of business, Privateering does.

For my purposes here, a Privateer is a legal Pirate… let the historians argue the nuances of that. Privateers were essentially pirates with a government issued right to attack, capture, and plunder enemy ships. These days, there are people who receive government protection (in the form of corporate status) to plunder other businesses (in this case, media creators). Businesses like iTunes and Netflix have figured out how to make a dollar by costing other people three dollars. They are not creating value, they are accruing revenue by lowballing the value of other people’s content.

The reason Piracy isn’t the problem is because Piracy is an unreliable, unsustainable pain in the ass way to consume content… and people are lazy consumers of entertainment. Sure, you’ll get a bunch of stuff for free and then you’ll get a virus and then you’ll get free stuff but then you won’t be able to find what you want and then you’ll get free stuff and then the people running the site get jobs and it shuts down. Piracy alone is too difficult to manage.

The problem comes from the union of Piracy and Privateering.

Before iTunes & iPods, we were all downloading thousands of songs that we had to burn to CD-Rs if we wanted to listen to them anyplace other than our computers. It was a huge hassle. Suddenly we all had more music than we could fit in our CD wallets and our mixes were too long for a mix CD. A new demand occurred in the marketplace: “give us a way to organize all our stolen music.” Apple responded with the iTunes/iPod system. The iPod didn’t replace the walkman simply because mp3 players were cool, there were plenty of mp3 players in the marketplace. And it wasn’t the iTunes store either… it was the system of managing a tremendous amount of digital music that most people had accumulated through piracy. Privateering… Apple benefited legally by managing the illegal sharing of content.

Netflix is a bit different and I’ve already beaten that horse to glue, so for right now I’m gonna stick to Apple.

So what does this have to do with comics? Well, the iPad is a very impressive device… and based on the fact that there’s a Kindle app on there I’m assuming Apple’s business model is not to shave revenue off ebook sales. No, the iPad is going to be a fantastic means of managing stolen comic books.

My friend has the first few hundred issues of Spider-Man, X-Men, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, and Captain America on his computer as .cbr files (all obtained legally I’m sure… or maybe they were cracked out of the PDFs on those Marvel CD-Rs from a few years back). I tried reading one on my iPod and it was annoying. It’s also not a great experience to read them on a laptop or desktop since the monitor is landscape not profile. Well… the prospect of reading them on the iPad is downright exciting.

There is already rampant scanning piracy of comics, but until now there was no ideal way to organize and read those pirated comics. Well, it’s here… and as soon as the iPad (or a similar device) takes hold, there will be a blitz of comic book scanning that will begin a cycle of the iPad causing increased comic book scanning which will lead to increased sales of iPads and then more people scanning and so on.

The piracy of comics will be uniquely ubiquitous because so many back issues are simply not available, so fans will consider it a service to share their back issues. The publishers will want to cash in by making digital back issues available, but at $2 a pop how many people are going to actually buy 1,000 or so back-issues of the various Spider-Man series? Instantly, there will be too much content available and that will diminish the value of the individual books… smart publishers will offer blocks of content cheaply (Spider-Man issues 1-100 for $20 or something) and then suddenly new comic books will be competing directly with classic back issues for the time, attention, and dollars of each comic book reader. The digital comics New Release Rack will be as glutted as the rest of the internet.

The drop in perceived value for comics will have massive repercussions for comic shops and especially comic con dealers who specialize in back issues, but also for publishers in general… especially indies.

My advice? Open a pizza shop. Or buy stock in Apple, I guess. The rise of the iPod didn’t exactly make the music business more lucrative but it sure helped Apple’s share price.

But I actually don’t think comics are as screwed as other types of digitized media, because comics have a unique advantage over film and music in that they’re fundamentally periodicals. I know a lot of people will get pissed at me for saying that because there’s been a big push in comics to get away from being periodicals in favor of amassing libraries, but if there’s one thing every industry can learn from MGM and Miramax it’s that the media library business model is a bust… digital media ubiquity demands periodicals. The internet loves nothing more than ongoing, serialized, branded content that keeps issuing forth new releases. So that could wind up making all this hugely favorable to the comics business… but either way it certainly won’t be business as usual.

(get here by accident? welcome to www.hollywood-2point0.com)

10s & 1s: Not Getting Bad Reviews? Try Harder.

If there’s one thing I hate about being on the supply side of this business, it’s reviews. When it comes to reviews about my personal productions, I can’t really complain because I’m such a snarky, sarcastic jerk I deserve anything that can be thrown at me. But some of our filmmakers and performers are really nice people who simply don’t deserve the beatings they take in reviews, user comments, blogs, etc. And they all read every single post because they all have themselves on Google Alerts these days… it used to be weirdly narcissistic to Google yourself, now you need a Google Alert just to keep track of yourself. So even if a blogger has no readership at all and is just venting his spleen for the hell of it, his one reader will be the person he’s tearing to pieces. It’d be awful if it wasn’t so downright hilarious.

I’ll give you an example of how things can go awry very quickly. We put out fitness videos with indie rock music playing in sync with the workouts. It was a clever idea and people really dig them. At first we were super on top of making them cool, then we got preoccupied with other projects and let one of the performers take charge of the production and design. The result was that the aesthetic changed and, for whatever reason, the choices she made turned it… less cool. We were surprised we dodged the hipster-snark bullet for the most part on the first batch, but as soon as we took our eyes off the project it was targeted for internet ridicule. Now, to be fair, it kind of deserved a lot of the ridicule… it was the weakest video in the line and the style was a mess. So I have no problem with the fact that it was criticized. But the snark quickly got out of control. In The Onion, Amelie Gillette and her readers called the girls “beefy-thigh indie whores” and went on to say:
- “at least two of them are on heroin, the rest are on crack,”
- the instructor “should have been sold into white slavery when she was 6,”
- and the cast should be “date-raped, murdered, and thrown in a dumpster.”

I mean, jesus christ, whatever happened to Thumbs Down?

I could spend pages and pages recounting the ridiculous verbal sludge I’ve seen thrown at our filmmakers and performers, but I’m not feeling very Sisyphus right now. Again, there are plenty of perfectly fair critical assessments that I’d consider valid even if I personally don’t agree with them. Then there are the kinds of ad hominem attacks that make you envy Hillary Clinton for the comparatively kid-gloved treatment she received in the primary last year.

But none of that is the point of this blog post. The point of this blog post is sales.

The filmmakers & performers getting kicked in the balls & ovaries by hateful snarks always complain the same complaint “this asshole’s opinion is costing me money, making it harder for me to pay my rent, making it harder for me to feed my family with PERSONAL attacks because I must have somehow pissed him off… did I not sleep with him in high school or something??”

Yes, besides wounded egos, there is also business at hand and even those who can take a few emotional arrows still don’t like losing money and career opportunities based on some random person’s opinion. This is why gangsta rappers are known to stab critics over bad reviews (did you know WordPress dictionary recognizes the word “gangsta” but not the word “WordPress?” how awesome is that?)

So… after all this blathering, I’m finally ready to hit you with the twist ending:

Do bad reviews, snark, and hateful blog posts cost filmmakers & performers money and career opportunities? Well, yes, they probably do.

Ok that wasn’t a very good riddle. BUT!

Do bad reviews, snark, and hateful blog posts cost FILMS money?

NO! THEY MAKE THEM SELL MORE!

Well, wait, let me clarify.

In the lexicon of the internet, let’s use a 1-10 star rating system to break down the analytics of a film’s critical reception.

- Movies that get mostly 3 through 6 star reviews (out of 10) are generally our lowest sellers.
- Movies that get mostly 7 through 10 star reviews are our lower midline sellers.
- Movies that get mostly 1 through 2 star reviews are our upper midline sellers.
- Movies that get mostly 1 star reviews or 10 star reviews are our TOP sellers. By far.

Why is this? Beats me. Would I hazard a guess? Sure!

First of all, nobody likes mediocre. People will watch a mediocre movie that’s on TV, but rarely will they run out to the store and plunk down good cash for a mediocre movie. So getting consistent 3-6 star reviews is death.

Why do 1-2 star reviewed films outsell 8-10 star reviewed films? I have no idea. We have a film that has a 91% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes from over 30 reviews… it’s one of our lowest sellers. We have a splatter film that I’ve never heard a single positive thing said about and it pays the rent each month. My gut is that, for whatever reason, people rent the highly-rated films on Netflix (where we make no money) and buy the guilty pleasures.

Of course, it makes perfect sense that titles which consistently score 10s and 1s would be the top sellers, because they’re divisive. People argue about them, get mad at them, champion them… people CARE about them. This is why Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck and Howard Stern are so ridiculously successful. If you’re not pissing someone off, then nobody cares.

Allow me to demonstrate: Let’s say you love the band W.A.S.P. (haha). Ok, you tell me “holy shit I love W.A.S.P.” and I say “yeah, they’re pretty good.” The conversation is over. You’re not going to champion them to me, nobody fights against lukewarm. But if I say “I fucking hate W.A.S.P., Blackie Lawless is a no-talent prick who should never be allowed in public with buttless leather pants!” Well, now we’re in an argument and we’ll start making some noise. Multiply that conversation a few thousand times across the internet and watch W.A.S.P. albums fly through PirateBay left and right.

Now, here is the flaw in the internet analytics system… if a movie gets 100 6-star reviews and a 100 4-star reviews, a website’s rating system will tell you it’s a 5-star movie. If a movie gets 100 10-star reviews and 100 1-star reviews, the website’s rating system will tell you it too is a 5-star movie. But those two 5-star movies couldn’t be more different.

Good reviews are better than mediocre reviews, but if you’re not getting bad reviews then I have two words of advice for you: try harder.

The Curse of A FILM BY…

There’s been a long-running debate on directors taking (demanding?) the “A Film By” credit on movie key art. I’m kind of indifferent to it. I personally don’t take the credit but that’s just me… hell, I’d prefer all my work be anonymous if I could effectively produce & market that way. So I don’t have a dog in this race, but I do have a unique observation on the whole thing…

At Halo-8, we’ll put the A FILM BY credit [henceforth I'll refer to it as AFB] on the key art if a filmmaker wants it there, so we have a handful of release with the credit. Now, I hate to do this because I don’t want everybody checking key art to figure out other filmmakers’ sales etc, but it’s interesting… our films with the AFB credit are our lowest selling DVDs. Consistently. It’s so fucking weird. They range in content and marketability, but for some reason if that AFB credit is there it dooms the release.

I do NOT want to villify or judge the filmmakers, so I don’t know how much to weigh in on this… but my gut is that a filmmaker who wants that credit has an overall filmmaking ideology that might make the rest of the team less apt to feel ownership of the film and want to help promote it. That may or may not be a big deal on a studio level, but for an indie release that feeling of camaraderie and collaborative-ownership is critical. Or maybe it’s totally coincidental. I sincerely have no clue. I don’t feel comfortable getting super analytical on this one (at least not in public haha), but I thought it was interesting enough to mention.

I’m really curious what everyone else thinks.

[FULL DISCLOSURE: I did once take the AFB credit sort of (and probably cursed myself in the process). I always referred to THREAT as "A Kings Mob Production" and used that term where the AFB credit would otherwise go. When Queque and Killili were making the first THREAT postcard, they asked me about it and I said it should be "A Kings Mob Production." Q&K made the argument that if Kings Mob is a creative collective where everyone eventually helms their own project (the dream that was never realized), then the key art should represent both by saying "A Kings Mob Production" as well as, for example, "A film by Matt Pizzolo." Besides seeing their point as valid in terms of accountability and also allowing the collective to have two levels of ownership to identify the team as well as the project's primary creative force, I also agreed to it because I was incredibly frustrated that press was constantly referring to it as "Matt Pizzolo's THREAT" just because I was the director... but in fairness if it wasn't "Kings Mob's THREAT" and if they insisted on personalizing it then Katie should certainly have the same level of ownership I did, so I suggested "A film by Katie Nisa & Matt Pizzolo" (alphabetical order). I later pulled the credit entirely when the movie finally came out. Now... if that didn't just completely bore the shit out of you, I'd be happy to spend a few pages detailing my neurotic process of dealing with THREAT's opening title cards. Ugh. Credits are stupid.]

If you can’t be the guest of honor, be the one who doesn’t belong there

In my opinion, there are two reasons to be someplace: be the guest of honor or be the one who doesn’t belong there.

Example: I was lucky enough to be included in the Horror Comics Into Film panel Peter Katz organized at Comic Con last month. At risk of hurting my fellow panelists’ feelings, I imagine Marv Wolfman was the guest of honor. Maybe not, surely there were a lot of important, influential, successful panelists up there… and then there was me and Jeff Katz. I mean, who the fuck am I to sit next to Tim Seeley and Whitley Strieber talking about horror? The only horror film I’ve directed was Slumber Party Slaughterhouse and that was a joke (literally: it was supposed to be a Halloween prank but it accidentally became a real DVD… oops). In any case, I’m pretty sure I had no business being on that panel. Which is why it was awesome for me, because I got to reach a new audience.

I like to take Halo-8 and our various titles to all sorts of places where we don’t belong. It didn’t make a lot of sense for us to set up a table at comic book conventions last year, but it seemed like a cool place to spread the word about our films and we were starting to publish comics at the time. Before we headed to the first con, we wondered if we should bother bringing the Fitness For Indie Rockers DVDs with us. We decided to bring them along and the results were this: we didn’t sell any comics, we sold a ton of fitness videos. Why? Because everyone else there was selling comics, and the kind of art school girls who go to comic cons love our fitness videos. Yoga For Indie Rockers had no business being at the comic con, and thus it stood out.

In the past few months, Godkiller has had panels and signings at Wondercon, Comic Con, and Fangoria Weekend of Horrors in LA. Because Godkiller utilizes a brand new filmmaking format that integrates comic books with cinema, you might think it would be a homerun at Comic Con. Nope. The people who dug it at Comic Con were awesome, but the turnout for the signings was light. The Wondercon panel went okay because the art school crowd was into it, but the best response was at Fangoria. Why? Why does Godkiller get chatter in the film trades and horror press but not in the comics blogs? My guess is that when viewed through a horror prism Godkiller is weird enough to be unique, whereas through a comic book prism it just doesn’t stand out as much… either due to comic art overload or because the Luddites think we’re bastardizing their artform (which we are, thank you very much). The best thing we can do with Godkiller is present it in a context where the audience isn’t already desentisized to its unique attributes.

Threat was carried by tons of retailers, but I find two particular retailers define my argument here well: Best Buy and Hot Topic. When Threat was in Best Buy, everyone thought it was awesome for it to be there because that’s where most people buy DVDs (at least, DVDs that aren’t in WalMart). Threat sat on a shelf next to thousands of other DVDs including the biggest hits from the top studios. When Threat was in Hot Topic, a lot of people thought it was weird for it to be there… after all, Hot Topic isn’t really a seller of DVDs. In fact, Threat sat on a tiny little shelf in the back next to a handful of other punk-themed DVDs like Sid & Nancy, Repo Man, etc. Guess where Threat sold better?

Seth Godin makes a point about the importance of being “the best” at a specific niche. He points out that the top performer generally outsells all its competitors combined. If you can be in Best Buy and be the top-selling supplier there, good for you. If not, move to a different context… it’s not hard to be the best-selling line of fitness videos at a comic book convention–and it can be quite profitable.