Laughing Owl Productions

Following on from my last post Are Stars in Movies Really Worth It, the Independent has an interesting autopsy on the split between Paramount and Tom Cruise. In short: you have to read the numbers, and the numbers show that Cruise was an expensive overhead, despite the billions of dollars his films have brought the company over the years. From the point of view of what he cost and what his potential was, he’d jumped the shark.

Tom Cruise is 44 years old…. In the history of Hollywood box office very few people - men or women - have had their best days still to come at the age of 44.

And

This is not to knock Tom Cruise. The wonder is that his miracle has lasted so long. And he has been very good for the movie business: his pictures have grossed somewhere in the region of $20billion. Paramount and Viacom have taken a good deal of that income, and been happy to do so. But they are behaving like businessmen in saying this could be the moment to cut and run.

A very interesting look at the money and numbers behind one of the biggest stars ever.

Via Screen Hub.

The NYT has an article on the economics of stars. A Big Star May Not a Profitable Movie Make argues that having stars in a film doesn’t really make that big of a difference in the end, and certainly not enough to justify the huge fees.

If you ask economists and other academics that study the movie industry, [Viacom’s] decision was, in financial terms, spot on. The best reason to get rid of Mr. Cruise or, for that matter, Mel Gibson, or Lindsay Lohan, is not their occasional aberrant behavior. They, like most marquee names in Hollywood, are simply not worth the expense.

And

“There is no statistical correlation between stars and success,” said S. Abraham Ravid, a professor of economics and finance at Rutgers University, who, in a 1999 study of almost 200 films released between 1991 and 1993, found that once one considered other factors influencing the success of a film, a star had no impact on its rate of return. Employing a star had virtually no discernible impact on the box office itself.

And

“Movies with stars are successful not because of the star, but because the star chooses projects that people tend to like,” said Arthur S. De Vany, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of California, Irvine, who has written extensively about the economics of moviemaking. “It’s a movie that makes a star.”

In other words, while a person will go to a Bruce Springsteen concert because the artist is, indeed, Bruce Springsteen, the success of “The Matrix” had to do with many things other than its star, Keanu Reeves.

This is particularly interesting to those of us trying to get films off the ground, especially without stars. We’re forever being told, mainly by people with money, that our movies need the big names. Despite the fact that many, many successful films have unknowns (”Whale Rider”, “Ten Canoes”, and “What the Bleep” spring to mind), investors seem to like the security blanket of a star. Maybe they need to rethink that one.
Via Boing Boing.

Robert Young writes on GigaOm about an idea for pumping new life into the cinema experience. It was a response to Mark Cuban’s call for ideas on how to get people out to the movies. Here’s Young’s idea:

Whenever anyone goes to a movie theatre, they end up with a ticket stub. I would propose that you create a program/system to make those ticket stubs into currency… essentially a coupon that can be passed around, traded, bought/sold, etc.

Allow me to illustrate with a hypothetical. Let’s assume I went to see The Pirates of the Caribbean on opening day and I paid $8.00 for my ticket. I leave with a ticket stub that has been date/time-stamped. Then sometime during the following week, I run into my friend Sarah at Starbucks.

During the course of our conversation, I tell her that I had seen Pirates and recommend that she should see also it. As a friendly gesture, I pull out my wallet and give her my ticket stub. Sarah decides to go see the movie the following weekend, and since exactly one week has passed since my ticket stub was stamped, she is entitled to receive a $1.00 discount. Now, had she waited two weeks to see the movie, she would have received a $2.00 discount.

He explains:

What I am proposing is akin to institutionalizing word-of-mouth into a capital market, where the ticket stub becomes the currency. Not only is this concept likely to increase the volume of movie-goers (as any consumer goods promotional expert will attest), it is also likely to impact the distribution curve of box-office receipts… when the vast majority of movies are released into the theatrical exhibition window, they normally go through a fairly consistent demand/revenue curve at the box office… essentially, box office receipts are cut in half with every subsequent week.

I think this is a very clever idea. People love a discount and tend to feel pained by the cost of going to the theatre. This would help keep the window for theatrical release from collapsing more, and would give those films that are going to thrive on word of mouth more of a chance.

Last night, SBS showed a lovely film, Janis et John (2003, French). It has been a long tme since we enjoyed a film as much as this one.

Pablo Sterni (Sergi López) is a desperate insurance broker. He hatches a scheme to dupe his brain-adled cousin , Léon (Christopher Lambert), out of half a million francs to pay a claim on an insurance policy that he took the money for, but didn’t process. Pablo’s idea? Get his house-mouse wife and an actor to appear to Léon as his long-lost idols, John Lennon and Janis Joplin, and have them hit Léon up for the money.

The film features a stand-out performance by Marie Trintignant as a Brigitte Sterni, a down-trodden housewife who blossoms when she begins impersonating Janis Joplin. Sadly, Trintignant died just a few months after the movie came out.

A great premise, fun acting, and an absence of nudity (What? On SBS?) and violence made this a fun film. There was some really striking photography, including an image of Brigitte driving where a single drop of rain on the windscreen represents her crying - fabulous.

And ultimately, a good message about finding the creative person inside you who needs to come out, and giving them the air to do so.

We’re thrilled that a three-minute short of our documentary Seven Days with Seven Dogs has been chosen to screen at the popcorn taxi Flagfall Film Festival. The short was one of sixteen chosen from entries nationwide, and it’s great to be part of it.

All of the films will screen at ACMI in Melbourne tomorrow night at 7:30. After that, it will be part of screenings in the back of selected Melbourne taxis from March 1 to April 5, a period which covers the Commonwealth Games. Plus there will be screenings on the big public screens at Federation Square during the rest of the year.

You can download the “Seven Days” short (and all the Flagfall films) at the Flagfall site.