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The Ankler is my new email addiction. It’s a daily newsletter that Richard Rushfield puts together and it is full of piss and vinegar, plus fun perspectives on all the movie industry news of the day.

I’ve enjoyed Rushfield’s work for quite some time and while I think The Ankler does have the shortcomings of any publication produced from only a single person’s perspective, it is still an absolute delight. I’d highly recommend it for anyone keen to stay abreast of all the rumors and gossip in Hollywood.

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The state of the film industry is bleak

David Lieberman over at Deadline has a fascinating interview with Doug Creutz about the state of the movie industry. Overall, things are not looking good:

CREUTZ: It’s a classic tragedy of the commons scenario. Everybody’s optimal strategy is to go aggressively after blockbusters. But when everybody’s doing that, it’s bad for their collective outcome. In industries where you have overcapacity or shrinking market, typically companies get merged or they go out of business. That’s competition. That’s capitalism.

DEADLINE: Why isn’t that happening?

CREUTZ: All of the studios are owned by larger companies. So there isn’t this overriding financial pressure: “Oh my God, were going to go bankrupt. We better do something.” Paramount could lose money for 50 years and Viacom would not go out of business. It’s small compared to the overall company. There was an option on the table for them to sell Paramount to a Chinese bidder. There were lots of rumors about that. They opted not to. Why? Well, some of this has to do with it being a family business. The movie business is a sexy business to be in. Very prestigious. People have a hard time letting go of those assets. You wouldn’t see a merger unless two of the larger companies merged.

Disney is the only studio that’s really raking it in. But even for them, the growth trajectory seems uncertain:

CREUTZ: Disney’s doing great but investors expect them to continue doing as well as they are doing —  potentially, if not forever, then for the next several years. And they probably will. But in the event that they stumble, it’s going to be bad news for Disney stock. When you’re at 60% of industry profits, it’s hard to see how you go up much from there.

I was having a discussion with somebody this morning: “Now they’re doing all these live-action remakes of their animated films. Isn’t that better for Disney?” I said, “Look, how much better are things going to get?” They had the top five grossing films in the world last year and six of the top 10. I guess they could have 10 of the top 10. It’s possible. But at a certain point it’s like, “Okay, you are the industry, practically.”

If current trends continue, medium-budgeted films will keep getting squeezed out in favor of ultra-low-budget or massive-tentpole releases. By and large, the movie industry isn’t really a growth industry anymore — it has become a zero sum game, with studios all trying to out-blockbuster each other.

While it’s a great time to be a filmmaker, it’s insanely difficult to get noticed or to get any critical mass of attention these days. That will only get worse as time goes on.

An appreciation of ‘The Fugitive’ 

Matt Zoller Seitz, writing for Rogerebert.com, on Andrew Davis’ The Fugitive (1994):

The train crash itself is one of the great action sequences of the nineties, but for my money there are four others that are nearly as good: Kimble eluding Sam Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones) in the sewer tunnels a la Jean Valjean in Les Miserables (the inspiration for Roy Huggins’ original TV series); the raid on the house the results in the death of Richard’s fellow escaped prisoner (Eddie Bo Smith, Jr.); Richard’s escape from the Marshals on St. Patrick’s Day; and Richard’s fight on the train with Sykes, a great reminder in this age of wildly overscaled action that all you need to get the audience’s pulses pounding is a good guy and a bad guy whose motives are clear.

It’s worth noting that this film was shot and edited a few months after Oliver Stone’s innovative paranoid thriller “JFK” won an Academy Award for best editing. You can detect the Stone film’s visual signatures in Davis’ flash-cuts, as well as in the brisk yet legible way “The Fugitive” fills in the past and present at the same time. In that opening section, we’re continuously finding out exactly what’s meant by the ominous questions of the Chicago detectives, but in a way that spares “The Fugitive” of the indignity of having to stop the action while somebody delivers a recap.

It’s appropriate that Seitz is running Ebert’s namesake website. Like Ebert, Seitz’s reviews make me desperately want to re-visit the films he writes about.

Turns out, the internet can be used for good too

The other day, I re-blogged an article in The New Yorker about “how clickbait is killing criticism.” I was pretty skeptical of that piece, pointing out that in place of the old definition of “criticism” there’s now a whole new world of content out there that things like “clickbait” have enabled.

In a recent piece for The New York Times, Farhad Manjoo makes a similar point:

In the last few years, and with greater intensity in the last 12 months, people started paying for online content. They are doing so at an accelerating pace, and on a dependable, recurring schedule, often through subscriptions. And they’re paying for everything.

You’ve already heard about the rise of subscription-based media platforms — things like Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Spotify and Apple Music. But people are also paying for smaller-audience and less-mainstream-friendly content. They are subscribing to podcasters, comedians, zany YouTube stars, novelists and comic book artists. They are even paying for news.

It’s difficult to overstate how big a deal this is. More than 20 years after it first caught mainstream attention and began to destroy everything about how we finance culture, the digital economy is finally beginning to coalesce around a sustainable way of supporting content. If subscriptions keep taking off, it won’t just mean that some of your favorite creators will survive the internet. It could also make for a profound shift in the way we find and support new cultural talent. It could lead to a wider variety of artists and art, and forge closer connections between the people who make art and those who enjoy it.

Some interesting stats on Patreon are also disclosed: $100 million has been paid towards artists thus far, and in 2016, there were 35 artists making more than $150K each.

David Chen is going on vacation

It’s been a challenge for me to take vacations in the past. Even if there’s a lull at work, I still do podcasts every week, which I think of as a little digital garden that I have to keep watering, no matter what my life circumstances.

But as time has gone on I’ve started to let go of this mindset. I’m fortunate to have very capable co-hosts who are willing to step up and fill in for me while I’m gone. I also have a limited window of time to get away for a relaxing, refreshing break from this dark, rainy Seattle winter.

For the next two weeks, blog updates will be scarce. I plan to return in the last week of March. Thanks for reading, and if you’re looking for updates from me in the meantime, follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

davechen.net, two months later

It’s been two months since I re-launched my blog back in January and since I’m about to take a brief vacation, I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at some of my stats during that time period. Note that these months do not provide a true apples-to-apples comparison, since I technically re-launched my blog mid-way through January, and March is not over yet.


Overall, I’m averaging about 20K page views per month and about 14K-15K visitors per month. I’m thrilled by this performance, and this level of readership has made the entire enterprise of re-designing the blog feel worthwhile.

By far my largest source of traffic is my Twitter page. This is not super surprising, as Twitter is able to surface my links quickly and reliably to anyone who’s following me. Plus, retweeting someone is not as huge of a commitment as sharing someone’s post on Facebook — I’ve seen some of my posts get good traffic that way. Traffic to archival material from search engines is also performing relatively well, and this blog’s Facebook page is slowly growing as a traffic driver.

Based on my observations, here are the posts that are likely to get the most traffic on this specific blog:

Any time I am one of the first to post about a video or a piece of content — I’ve been lucky to help surface some interesting videos on this blog, and any time I’m one of the first, I’ll usually be shared pretty frequently. Examples of this include these La La Land BTS videos, and this Breaking Bad movie (now taken down). But even if I’m not the first, sometimes people just want to check out specific pieces of content, as with this re-blog of SNL’s La La Land sketch.

Anything topical that people are interested in right now — posts on topics like the Oscars attracted significant attention right after the event. Any time you can tap into something people want to read about, think about, and discuss immediately, it’ll likely garner more traffic.

Any post that answers a specific question that people might be asking — After people watched Get Out, many of them wanted to know about the meaning of the Asian character that shows up seemingly randomly halfway through the film. My post addressing that question is on the first page of Google results for related queries.

***

I have a lot of ideas for how to grow the blog further, but I think that’ll have to be another post. There are several things I could be doing that I think would really help things (e.g., integrating AMP and Facebook Instant articles for starters).

In the meantime, I’m very grateful to my brother for helping with my blog re-launch, and also for anyone who has taken a look at the blog in the past few months. Thanks for reading, and if you want to follow along for regular updates, I’d recommend you follow me on Twitter or follow follow blog’s Facebook page. Or just check back here every day or two — I’ll usually have something new up (when I’m not on vacation).

The upsetting implications of the “Missing Richard Simmons” podcast

Amanda Hess, writing for The New York Times, has written a thorough takedown of the new (and apparently very popular) “Missing Richard Simmons” podcast:

The relationship between journalists and subjects shouldn’t be confused with friendship. Journalists have power over their subjects and a responsibility to try to minimize harm. But Mr. Taberski leverages his claim to friendship to reverse the equation, arguing instead that it’s Mr. Simmons who has the responsibility to speak to him, and to explain himself to his former acquaintances and fans. He compares Mr. Simmons’s relationship to them to the responsibilities of a licensed therapist. Mr. Taberski says he took care to ask Mr. Simmons’s manager “if there was something serious going on, like illness, so I could just let it be.” But is depression not an illness? Is a person’s gender identity not sufficiently serious to leave alone? Having decided that Mr. Simmons’s reasons for withdrawal are not “serious,” Mr. Taberski feels freer to pursue the guy.

“Missing Richard Simmons” speaks to both the possibilities and the limits of the emerging prestige podcast form. Many of the podcast’s tropes — the mystery framing, the crowdsourcing of clues from the audience and a format that focuses on the narrator as much as his subject — are borrowed directly from “Serial.” By turning a journalist into a friend and casting a man’s personal life as a mystery, “Missing Richard Simmons” has retooled the stale Hollywood documentary as an addictive media sensation. But it’s also turned it into a morally suspect exercise: An invasion of privacy masquerading as a love letter. Mr. Simmons is a public figure, and that gives journalists a lot of latitude to pry. But a friend who claims to want to help Mr. Simmons should probably just leave him alone.

Many recent true crime and mystery podcasts/shows have exhumed details from the lives of private citizens for public entertainment. While shows like Serial and Making a Murderer are ostensibly about correcting some systemic or institutional injustice, they still wreak havoc on the lives of those who are its subjects.

If we take “Missing Richard Simmons” at face value, then it appears to have all the devastating impact of other similar shows, only without the journalistic value — just the veneer of it. Truly upsetting.

How clickbait is killing criticism

Alex Ross, writing for The New Yorker, on how criticism, as an industry, is dying:

The trouble is, once you accept the proposition that popularity corresponds to value, the game is over for the performing arts. There is no longer any justification for giving space to classical music, jazz, dance, or any other artistic activity that fails to ignite mass enthusiasm. In a cultural-Darwinist world where only the buzziest survive, the arts section would consist solely of superhero-movie reviews, TV-show recaps, and instant-reaction think pieces about pop superstars. Never mind that such entities hardly need the publicity, having achieved market saturation through social media. It’s the intellectual equivalent of a tax cut for the super-rich.

The drive to revamp cultural coverage has overtaken major newspapers, including the New York Times, just as the wider public has been rediscovering the virtue of traditional reporting. In the wake of the 2016 Presidential campaign, with its catastrophic feedback loop of fake news and clickbait, people have subscribed in surging numbers to so-called legacy publications. Do these chastened content-consumers really want culture pages dominated by trending topics? Or do they expect papers to decide for themselves what merits attention? One lesson to be learned from the rise of Donald Trump is that the media should not bind themselves blindly to whatever moves the needle.

For a brief time in human history, when information was scarce and difficult to obtain, personal ads in newspapers were able to subsidize a whole host of other kinds of reporting. Now that that period is over, consumers need to make new and different decisions about which kinds of criticism are worth paying for.

Ross’s piece is yet another lamentation of a bygone era. But he gives short shrift to the fact that new kinds of criticism and discussion have sprung up in its place — not to mention new ways of funding them, like YouTube ad dollars or direct subsidies from the audience. The more things change, the more they stay the same.