Following up on Wednesday’s post in defense of books and reading, my friend, the novelist Max Gladstone, weighs in:

 An author can write one good book of moderate length in a year. Costs for publishing, distribution, and marketing can rack up pretty quickly, but one estimate I’ve heard puts the cost to publisher for an average mass market paperback at $150,000.

Avatar cost between $300 and $500 million depending on who you read; Firefly cost around $2 or $3 million per episode, and a $10 million investment for the pilot (for sets, costumes, developing initial special effects, etc.), and I’ve heard a price tag of $17 million attached to the Battlestar Galactica miniseries.

People invest money looking to make it back, and the more money they invest, if they’re reasonable people, the more they want that investment secured. If I’m sinking $300 million into a really fun movie about pseudo-Native American space smurfs, I want to be positive it will do well, so I become worried when the movie takes risks and breaks ground in its story.I become worried if the story is slow, or doesn’t have an up ending, or pisses off the pro-military crowd without appealing enough to the anti-military crowd. I become worried if the audience isn’t able to cheer with unalloyed joy for someone at the end of the film.

Please don’t think of this as an attack on Avatar; I watched that film and liked it a great deal. But a publisher can afford to put out individual books that take more risks and push more boundaries because there’s less money tied up with each story. In extremity, if you’re DH Lawrence and nobody wants to publish your Lady Chatterly’s Lover, you can self-publish out of pocket these days using sites like lulu.com or createspace.com; by comparison, even a very inexpensive feature film like Rian Johnson’s amazing Brick costs $450,000 and requires the dedication of maybe a hundred people to make it happen. Possible, but well outside many artists’ budget, especially if you’re writing something you feel certain will piss some people off.

io9′s been on a role, so I thought I’d do a quick hit on two posts of theirs from the past couple of days that really struck me:

-Charlie Jane Anders asks why English is the language most science-fiction seems to be written in these days is English.  Obviously, as she notes, part of it is a desire for a larger audience.  But given that in a great deal of science-fiction, there is a universally accessible or spoken language like Basic in Ender’s Game, or common useage of English in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars books, I wonder if writing in English might be a way of not simply thinking futuristically, but acting that way, too.

-What happens when studios geek out over 3D–and directors don’t?  In RoboCop‘s case, Darren Aronofsky holds the remake hostage.  I do wonder if this will be a problem, studios insisting on 3D, particularly as more theaters can handle the technology and they can make a larger profit margins on individual tickets, even for projects that might not be well-suited to the technology.  I’m not sure the grubby realism of District 9 would have been particularly enhanced if it popped off the screen, and it might even have been too uncomfortable for viewers in the film’s more visceral moments.  I do wonder if that will close off opportunities for directors who already have visions they’re quite wedded to, if only because it forces one more compromise?  Or if we’re at a point where 3D is about to become so standard that everyone will have to work in it.

I was reading through io9′s list of the science fiction movies they’re most looking forward to this year, when I noticed Charlie Jane Anders’ remark that “Paul Bettany [is] our new go-to guy for supernatural action.”  It makes sense, but I’ll admit that the movies I most associate Bettany with are Wimbledon, the romantic comedy folly he made with Kirsten Dunst and that is on the romantic-comedy VHS shelf in my parents’ house, and A Beautiful Mind, in which he plays Russell Crowe’s enigmatic roommate in a small, beautiful role.  I don’t think of Bettany as an action guy or a supernatural guy, even though he’s taking an increasing number of those roles.  And the truth is, he’s not necessarily defined by those roles.  Bettany keeps up a good mix: he’s got period dramas like The Young Victoria and Creation on his upcoming roster, along with Legion and Priest, the movies that made the io9 list, and a voice role in Iron Man 2.


But the truth is, Bettany seems to have largely backed away from romantic leading man roles since Wimbledon, and he didn’t have many of them beforehand.  In movies like A Knight’s Tale, where he played Geoffrey Chaucer, and Inkheart, where he plays a wandering conjurer named Dustfinger, he plays a kind of holy fool, an outsider.  He does the whole scary monk thing in The DaVinci Code.  It’s not that Bettany isn’t a good-looking guy, he is.  But his looks lend themselves to shading over into the uncomfortable; those eyes can be a little bit too intense.  I wonder if by forsaking romantic leads, Bettany’s actually opened more possibilities for himself.  He doesn’t just have to be the hot guy.  He can be many other things as well.

I don’t know if it started with District 9, which sparked a mini-controversy over its portrayal of Nigerian gangsters, but blogfriend Bunmi Oloruntoba’s been tracking the portrayals of Nigerians as supervillians in news and popular culture, and his most recent find is the best yet: a blogger who tricks Nigerian 419 scammers into dressing up like superheroes, and has turned the experience into a comic book.

I don’t that Nigerian 419 scammers are really worthy of being our age’s super-villains.  They’re harmful, for sure, even devastating to the people they trick.  It’s undeniably corrosive to have an economy where so many people are involved in scams–or illegal activity period, and Nigeria’s not the only country you can say that about.  But they’re not internationally nefarious–they’re not The Greek in The Wire, they’re not the specter of the Chinese in the Red Dawn remake.  No one can be that individually powerful, and while it’s certainly possible we could have another Germany under Hitler, I think it’s unlikely.  No, Nigerian 419 scammers are only powerful enough to be a meme, to be subject counterscams like this, and fodder for jokes on shows like 30 Rock.  I don’t know that there’s enough genuine fear there to motivate more portrayals of them as a menace.