Does Hollywood Have No Geeks?

Repo Men opened to $6.15M this week.  In the future you buy your organ replacements on credit then repo men come and cut them out of you when you miss your payments.  I know it's supposed to be allegorical, maybe they thought they were making some deep comment on our overuse of credit cards and health care issues.  But how could anyone take the story even remotely serious?

It's the latest in a list of movies released over the last 6 months that just feel to me like what somebody who has never read a comic book or played a video game imagines geeks want to watch.  If they had played it satirical like RoboCop that would've worked, but trying to play it serious?  WTF?

Daybreakers -- the entire world population is vampires but not scary vampires, instead vampires who work at Wal*Mart and are accountants and such.  Then some vampires are working on a cure.

My writing partner and I actually had an idea along these lines -- world taken over by vampires and we follow the efforts of a group of rebels trying to overthrow the vampire empire, sort of RED DAWN, but with vampires instead of Soviets.

I think Daybreakers might be the result of someone thinking that a modern vampire movie MUST have vampires as the protagonists.

Gamer -- seriously, video games where you mind-control prisoners through battles by doing Wii-style cavorting in front of a plasma screen? This is what inspired my theory that the people making the decisions have never played a video game.

on the other hand, there have been a couple solid concepts that haven't done great either --

Surrogates -- didn't do that well either (though significantly better than the others on this list), but it at least had a good premise.  In the future people stay at home and mindlink into robot bodies that go out in the world and do things. Then the hero cop has a malfunction and has to go out in person to do things, which is a lot more dangerous, of course.  A) that's plausible in that if the tech existed I can see people using the hell out of it, and B) good angle for the hero since he's especially vulnerable.

Legion -- not a unique idea in geek circles. There's been I figure at least 4 roleplaying games based on the idea of angels kicking demon ass on modern earth. But it's a good genre that hasn't really been done as a feature.  Might've been better though to make Jensen Ackles the angel and try to work a Supernatural tie-in.


I saw a recent option sale on a short story the premise of which was that in the future overpopulation has gotten so bad that the government has hit teams wander around icing couples who have a second child.  As a short story it was sharp and had some nice twists.  But as a movie it sounds like another Repo Men.

Paperback book prices

As a follow-up to the last post -- a paperback from 1970 like Cat's Cradle above went for 95 cents.  Inflation calculator puts that at $5.19 in 2009 money.

Comic Book Price Increases

 

I noticed an old comic book cover on the web today and was reminded of what the prices used to be.  As in the above cover from 1970 -- 15 cents.  When I first really started reading them in 1976 they were typically 25 cents.

Which, according to the inflation calculator, would be 82 cents today for the 1970 book, or 93 cents for the 1976 book.

But actual comic prices now are much higher -- $2.99 or $3.99. 

No wonder I'm so wary of buying them now! I had considered buying some recently but since I could buy one typical novel for the price of two comics, and the comics get read in about half an hour, I just couldn't justify paying for comics.

Admittedly the paper and color quality is a lot higher now.  But I'm not paying 3 to 4 times as much just so that my fingers can indulge in the silky touch of glossy paper.

My Top 13 Movies plus extras

Going into Oscar weekend and I'm able to get a list of films off IMDb so here's my top 13 that I've seen:

(500) Days of Summer
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Inglourious Basterds
District 9
Up
Moon
Star Trek
Watchmen
Push
The Hurt Locker
The Hangover
Coraline
Drag Me to Hell

Only the top two are in order of preference.  Also, might be missing some since Hurt Locker didn't show up in my search and I assume that means other good films didn't show up either.

A big part of my voting criteria were I voting for the Oscars would be "how memorable is this film?"  So even though Watchmen has issues, it's really striking.  And it'd be a tough call between (500) Days and Mr. Fox.  500 works really well but Mr Fox is really fun and fresh.

A couple honorable mentions:

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
He's Just Not That Into You

Then movies I haven't seen that I think might make the list:

Thirst
Crazy Heart
The Men Who Stare at Goats
Up in the Air
A Serious Man

Smoking hiatus reaches five year mark

At seven dollars a pack, this gets easier and easier, but my smoking hiatus -- to be resumed once technology or imminent death changes my reward/penalty structure -- is now at five years.

It hasn't been particularly difficult, but it would be awfully nice for nano-technology to finally pay off in the form of carcinogen and heart disease scrubbing lung-based nano-bots.

Insurance Rate Hikes

WellPoint CEO defends rate hikes as pressure grows

Just chose a recent headline for the above -- but when I saw this sort of stuff occurring just around the time Obama is making his second push for health reform I started wondering.

This is exactly what health reformers should be blazing all over their ads -- along with anecdotal stories about the middle class getting squeezed out of health care.  Don't insurers know that?

And of course they do.  Now, there's no shortage of stupidity running the world, so that's the mostly likely answer.

But a sharp, long-sighted insurance Overlord might realize that health care reform either occurs now -- or it occurs later after the problems have become catastrophic -- since premium increases drive more people out of the insurance pool, pushing them to rely more on the ER, making hospitals shift more of the overage burden to paying customers, driving premiums up further, and thus pushing yet more people out of the insurance pool.

Along the line suddenly some European system polls extremely high and poof -- health insurance industry vanishes.

Obama's system retains the private insurance industry and dumps a lot more payers into it.  How it was in the 90s might be the best alternative -- but that's not possible.  So "helping" the Obama reforms go through rather than watch their business disappear in ten years might be an incentive to do media-attention-grabbing things now.

The iPhone Touch Screen

The presence of a touch screen on a device had previously sounded good in theory but always rather sucked in practice. 

It typically involved stabbing repeatedly at touch screens on bank atms and grocery store card readers until they finally registered the contact and then occasionally decided to register it multiple times.

And the Sony Reader with touch reinforced all that.  Touch, then screen flickers dark.  Then one second later it scrolls -- hopefully not too far.

But the iPhone touch screen rocked.  Did the touch two fingers to the Google map and squeeze or spread to zoom in and out.  Scrolled instantly.  Totally responsive.

Now just put that on a device big enough that I'll find several uses for it and I'll be pleased.

eReader Testing

My big concern with the iPad is if I can read off it for hours at a chunk.  So to test what I did was load up a pdf of Closing Arguments on my laptop, rotate the text so it'd read up and down the long side of the screen, then hold the laptop like an open book.

The image is representative, but it's from my wife's little netbook instead of my laptop.

Reading off the screen was good -- and had the added advantage that I didn't need a booklight.  Not sure if it's as easy on the eyes over the long term as an electronic ink display.  But read through the full 114 page novella in maybe 3 hours, which I think is faster than normal for me.

The netbook is actually more representative of what the iPad would be like since it's screen is almost the same size.  As you can see in the photo, digest-sized or prestige paperback sized books fit the screen almost perfectly.

I also tried Kindle for the PC, but couldn't rotate the text so didn't try reading it on screen.  At any rate, if PDF is available and reasonably close to the right scale, I prefer it to these e-Reader formats.  Changing font size can be handy, but I like reading the book in its designed layout.  For instance, in the Kindle version of Closing Arguments the little post-it section breaks aren't centered.  Layout's not a huge deal for a novel, but I see more books using the occasional layout gimmick inside the text to get across some narrative point.

I also went into a couple stores to check out eInk readers. 

First tried a couple versions of the Sony Reader. The screens seemed to refresh slow (slower that the Nook I tried later).  And this was a real issue on the Reader with a touch screen since some screens have scroll bars and they're pretty worthless if it take 1 to 2 seconds to refresh the screen.

I tried the Nook next and that was actually fairly nice for just reading.  The little LCD bar across the bottom works reasonably well (though I'm not convinced how useful it would really be).  Standard eInk refresh, but the pages flipped pretty clean and it looked good.

The Nook isn't in contention though since I want the larger screen.  And it's odd that Amazon can't get the Kindle DX into any retail outlet so that potential customers could get hands-on experience.  How many people do they expect to drop $500 on a new technology without testing it? 


Also, both the iPad and the Kindle DX are almost exactly the size of a graphic novel trade paperback -- so they'll be easy to carry.


At any rate, so far the iPad looks like the way I'll go.  I haven't read many comic books in a while, but reading them on the iPad should be perfect.  I also had a chance to fiddle around with an iPhone for a bit and that was pretty awesome.  Since I don't need a fancy phone and am looking for an eReader anyway, a large-size version of the iPhone would actually be perfect for me.

The Weight of Ideas

When we moved from NJ to Florida we boxed up all our books, weighed them, and mailed them so we could just throw the rest of our stuff in the car and drive.  I learned that a box of books averages 25 to 40 pounds.

That was the first of 6 moves over the following seven years.

Subsequent moves averaged 10 boxes of books for me and approximately 30 boxes for Jaru.  That's over half a ton of books.  And that's not including the bookcases.  Each move involves schlepping that half-ton of books twice -- once into the truck, and once up to the apartment.

And it's not just during moves.  You end up with a wall piled with boxes of books that every two months or so need to be re-arranged when you have to get to an outlet or adjust some furniture.

Then just last week I had to drag a 50 pound boxed bookcase up to our apartment and spend four hours punching little plastic bits through holes in cheap press-board to assemble it.

I am fucking ready to see the book as technology vanish into my personal rear-view mirror.

I'll miss the cotton gin more than I'll miss books.  At least the cotton gin hasn't personally tried to kill me.

Kindle DX or iPad

Getting some assignment windfalls so I'm going to celebrate by buying either a Kindle DX or an iPad (just wireless, no 3G).

I'm not sure how much I buy the idea that reading from an LCD screen is that much harder than reading E-Ink given that I spend most of the day looking at an LCD screen, and I certainly like a color display given that I have a lot of RPG pdfs in color.

On the other hand, reading a 300 page book isn't the same as glancing through web pages and writing.  And I suspect the iPad's 10 hour battery life will turn into 5 hours in practice given my experience with laptop computers. Which is an issue given that one purpose of having the reader is to use it on flights from Newark to Los Angeles, and the added hours waiting for the flight.

And, then again, the other uses of the iPad could also be handy down the line.

The World thanks the supreme court

Finally, Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, Toyota, Daimler-Chrysler, and maybe even a few Chinese-funded corporations will be able to directly help decide who wins American elections!

I remember reading a while back where people around the world wished that they could vote in American elections.  Well, now they can if they have enough money!

My first "Somebody in Hollywood is Mad at Me"

And my first gossipy post all in one!

Last summer I sent out a screenplay and it wound up getting a strong response.  Got a number of requests and then two offers came in fairly quickly.

The first offer was from a management company.  They were going to develop it with me then take it to various places where they had connections.  We talked on the phone and then scheduled to talk again down the line about the notes they had and so on.

A few days later a small producer also contacted me wanting to option it.  They had some connections with strong track records and laid out a pretty clear plan.

One of the unfortunate facts of life is that, at least for me, instead of having places come in wanting different scripts, I typically have 2-3 places come in all wanting the same script.  Concept is king.

I've grown nervous over the years about telling companies that other companies are interested in the same screenplay they are.  Some people are mellow about it and professional.  But some places act like this is some kind of personal insult to them.  I suspect they think I'm lying.  No places have ever gotten into a bidding war, so there's really no upside.

But I have to make a decision sooner or later and that means I need to tell everyone involved that I've got another offer and I'm trying to figure out which place I want go with.  The smaller producer just laid out their pitch.

Then I emailed the management company and waited.  A creative executive there got back to me right away, said congrats on the added interest, and said that the bosses would get back to me shortly.  Very professional on their part so I'm figuring this is fine. 

It's still a tense for me because I'm going to have to make a choice and that choice could very well make an over $100,000 difference in my and Jaru's life, not to mention future career prospects.

A couple days pass and management company boss still doesn't get back to me.  I send another email saying that I'll need to make a decision before too long and CE again re-assures me.

I am in fact wrong at this point in time.  I shouldn't tell anyone that I'm out of the market until my attorney has negotiated a contract we're happy with.  So, if I were wiser, I'd have realized I had more time to wait for a response.

But I'm not wise.  And apparently neither is management company boss because a couple more days pass and they still haven't even bothered to send off a couple line email suggesting their strategy.

So I end up going with the smaller producer and email the management co that I'm doing so.  Nobody at management company ever gets back to me.

Well, it's clear they're upset.  And I do feel a little bad because I think I could have given them more time.  But I also think that any professional could've zipped off a quick email in the course of five days.  This is business after all.

Fast forward to November and I've finished a new script that fits management company's profile so I figure I'll take a shot at querying them.  Boss gets back to me and tells me how angry they are that they devoted a bunch of time to thinking about the script then I yanked it out from under them.


At this point in the email I feel a little bad.  The boss screwed up but I think I screwed up a little too.

And if his email had stopped there, I would have walked away feeling a little guilty.  But he couldn't shut up.  He kept typing.  And he said that not only had I yanked this script out from under him, but that I had also cost him his favorite assistant -- the creative executive who had emailed me a couple times and who seemed to be pretty talented.

How the hell would some unknown screenwriter from New Jersey cost him his favorite assistant? 

This dude was so un-self-reflective that he didn't realize that in the second half of his email he just told me that he mishandled that scenario so bad that he made his favorite assistant mad enough to quit working for them, a pretty decently sized management company.

If he had just shut up, I never would have known.

Given all that, I'm not terribly upset that I didn't get to work with them.  But I do feel bad for the CE and hope he ended up in a better job.