Anyway, the reason I’m so tired is that I stayed up until 5.30 in the morning last night watching these here videos
It’s about this Aus movie – which is a Crow-esque would-be-blockbuster about Archangels and Demons etc, shot on an incredibly small budget… which is to say, hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I liked it actually – I didn’t know it was a) Australian and b) Low budget… but it had a certain indefinably something – that something, being incredibly committed actors. I thought Michael Piccirilli was excellent
and apparently played it with a broken leg or something. He’s so good in fact that I’d almost be inclined to write a movie just so he can be in it. The caravan guy was good as well – apparently lived like a tramp in a caravan for a week prior to the shoot. I love that sort of thing. Proper.
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Still, the movie seemed to be stuck in this nightmare (purgatory) world between guerrilla and corporate – the second vid starts by saying that the movie nearly didn’t happen because the insurers pulled out. Insurers? Fuck fucking insurers for fuck’s sake.
Maybe if you start getting proper paid actors and whatnot in, you need to be inviting that level of bureaucracy in to add retardation to the brew… in this film I’m about to start now, it has crossed my mind that Shavaughn Ruakere would be perfect for one of the roles…
but… although I haven’t talked to her… she’s…. you know… a proper person.
This means agents. This means flights and accommodation. This means catering, makeup, insurance… time constraints. Time constraints create dependency on weather, proper-scripting, proper planning and story-boarding etc etc etc etc.
She’ll probably say to me afterwards “Nick you blithering ares-biscuit, I would have done if for free because you’re such a fabulous bloke, no really, you are etc. You’re great, I mean it, no really, I do”, but… You get the picture. The addition of a single professional has created a big-bang of fractaline hassle.
Hence the title of this post… read this thing by Clay Shirky (who is a god) “The Collapse of Complex Business Models”
“Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:
“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”
This whole article is entirely relevant to the movie biz. Which is insane. It is so overblown it’s beyond satirical, and it is (I think) doomed. It can’t not collapse… not under it’s own weight, but it’s own farcical complexity. I mean I don’t have anything in particular against there being a diminishing-returns spend-fest arms-race with about 6 major (corporate) participants – maybe it will produce something interesting or entertaining – but don’t pretend for a second that this is “the culture” and that we should wreck the Internet (and turn ISPs into de-facto wire-tappers) to preserve it.
It’s fucking lunacy. Any corporation caught lobbying govt should be broken up. 3 strikes and they’re fucking out.
Cunts.
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