I’m getting increasingly frustrated and confused by what seem like the illogic of movie-making economics (television seems much more clear to me, though I’m not sure why), and so I’m beseeching y’all:

1) What are the best things I should read about the economics of Hollywood generally? About cost controls, auditing, etc. on film projects? Is it just Arthur De Vany’s Hollywood Economics, or should I be looking at other things?

2) What are the best things I should read about the economics of special effects, and the impact of globalization on special effects costs, wages, working conditions?

If enough good suggestions come in and folks are interested, I’d be open to doing a bit of a reading group. In the mean time, though, send me everything: books, magazine articles, scholarly journals, whatever.

Sorry for getting behind on these posts. Glad to be back! Especially now that we get to dig into a juicy electoral fight.

There’s a marvelous contrast between the brutality that Deadwood‘s first elections inspire and the shyness of many of the participants who are standing for election. Seth Bullock may be beating E.B. Farnum to a pulp, but he’s also shyly asking Martha to look over his speech, frustrated that “Words…doing the wrong jobs…Nothing showy, is the main thing.” Charlie Utter may be a tough man when it comes to the deployment of his fists and firearms, but he’s got his transition written on his hand so he remembers to thank Seth when he introduces him. The contest inspires E.B. to new lows, referring to circumcision in his attack on Sol’s qualifications for mayor, but it also brings other people fully into the life of the camp, as Sofia, once an unreachable outsider, tells Martha that her vote is for baking bread in class “And Mr. Bullock for sheriff, and Mr. Star for mayor.”

And the campaign intrudes into the tender relationship between Trixie and Sol, when Al suggests to Trixie that he’s trying to get Sol to buy a house so “you and the Jew can fall on each other free of prying eyes.” Trixie, prickly as always, interprets this suggestion and Sol’s participation in it not as an attempt to legitimize their relationship (Sol’s intention) but to hide it (Al’s). “I’ll pop from the wall like Grandma Groundhog in a storybook and attend to your johnson,” she explodes at Sol. She may be in love with him (though she might not admit it), but her worldview is still all tangled up with how she thinks Al sees her. Similarly, she’s tender with Alma after Doc delivers the awful news that she seems likely to lose her child, advising that “your circumstances make it prudent to intervene.” Trixie stands up for Alma when she’s afraid she’ll relapse into addiction, and reassures her that she’ll survive the procedure. And when Doc starts the operation, Trixie stands up vigorously for her own lack of squeamishness. Can we please have a show where these two, plus a sobered-up Jane open a prairie abortion clinic together? I would vastly rather watch that than Alan Ball’s George Tiller show.

Speaking of Jane, like Trixie, she’s drowning in a sea of misinterpretation. “Off to the Bella Union like a moth to a fucking flame,” she mutters after Joanie, suspicious that her friend is returning to Cy, and to her old ways, before asking Joanie directly if she’s “Returning to the Bella Union?…As residence and workplace, is my meaning.” Joanie, of course, is engaged in a darker struggle than Jane knows, holding a gun to her temple, crying out, “What am I Lord, that I’m so helpless.” When she tells Cy, “I don’t want to run women no more,” Cy tells her, “That’s turning away from your gift and your training.” It may be intended to jolly her back to work, but instead, it shines a harsh light on Joanie’s convictions that she doesn’t have any other options than work she’s come to despise. Similarly, Jane, at first reluctant to take up Martha’s invitation to tell her story to the class, insisting that it would consist of “Custer was a cunt. The end,” sobers up, cleans up, and makes a speech of her own. And in doing so, she finds the courage to ask Joanie if she can stay. Simply being on the frontier, lodging in a nascent society, isn’t actually enough to make people start their lives over. They have to find the will themselves.

Back in August, I asked what would happen if the Supreme Court decided to take a case in which the plaintiffs argued that NBCUniversal stole their idea for Ghost Hunters and turned around and made it themselves. At the time, IP lawyer Michael Salerno wrote that:

It will be interesting to see if the SCOTUS takes the case simply to see whether they consider this a copyright or contract case. If the former, unless NBC took actual characters or specific written lines from the writers, NBC will win as ideas aren’t copyrightable. In fact, the only way these writers win (again, if NBC didn’t take specific characters or actual dialogue) is on a contract claim. The Court can’t allow for ideas to be copyrightable or a number of writers will just submit any number of rather generic scripts and then sue the pants off of networks that develop similar shows. Can you imagine a writer being able to have a copyright in an idea like “six friends live in New York and have their love lives intertwine”? There goes just about every 30-minute sitcom ever. If the writers win on a contract basis (which is MUCH more likely), studios will just create more specific contracts that state any screenplay submitted is either a) a work for hire whose copyright resides in the studio, or b) that the network reserves the right to develop a series based on the idea within the script without remuneration for the writers. Tough terms, to be sure, but that is what will likely happen.

The Supreme Court’s decided to let a lower court’s ruling that NBCU breached a contract when it rejected an idea for a paranormal detective show presented to the company several times over a period of seven years, then didn’t pay them when the company produced a similar show. In Hollywood Reporter, Eriq Gardner reports that some lawyers think the decision might make companies tetchy about taking pitches they haven’t directly solicited for fear that submissions are just lawsuit shopping. It would be unfortunate if an effort to protect folks who don’t have much clout in Hollywood from getting their ideas stolen prevented new faces, or people with daring ideas, from getting in the door to pitch meetings at all.

I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t read Lev Grossman’s The Magicians when it first came out, perhaps because I’m not much of a Narnian, but I picked it up recently, and found it so sad and emotionally precise that I kept having to take breaks from it to avoid becoming overwhelmed. But aside from the novel’s general sense of malaise and melancholy, I thought it did a very effective job of tweaking the ambitions of students at elite colleges, and at satirizing a broken career counseling process.

The description of how students prepare for life after Brakebills is a pretty good summary of the range of desirable post-graduate options for students at liberal arts schools who aren’t in specific professional career tracks — the sciences, graduate school, government, the arts:

Lots of students were already actively networking with established magical organizations. Surendra lectured anybody who would listen about a consortium of wizards—whom he hadn’t actually heard from yet, but he was pretty sure they’d basically guaranteed him an internship—who spent their time t suborbital altitudes keeping a weather eye out for stray asteroids and oversize solar flares and other potential planetary-scale disasters. Plenty of students went in for academic research. Alice was looking at a post-graduate program in Glasgow, though the idea of being separated didn’t particularly appeal to either of them, nor did the idea of Quentin’s aimlessly tagging along with her to Scotland. It was considered chic to go undercover, to infiltrate governments and think tanks and NGOs, even the military, in order to get oneself into a position to influence real-world affairs magically from behind the cenes. People devoted years of their lives to it. And there were even more exotic paths. A few magicians—Illusionists in particular—undertook massive art projects, manipulating ht enorthern lights and things like that, decades-long enchantments that might only ever have an audience of one.

Of course, we’re hearing about all of these things, which sound fascinating to me, from someone who has precisely no interest in doing any of them. Quentin’s bouts of boredom and dissatisfaction are one of the reasons I had trouble relating to him. But they’re also a result of the fact that Brakebills, like a lot of colleges (particularly the elite, East Coast liberal arts ones Brakebills is modeled on), don’t seem to have much in the way of a career counseling program, in part because I think they assume students will find there own way. And there’s no question that a lot of people are self-directed, and manage to find their way to something interesting to do without intervention or advice. But for those who don’t, my experience is that recruitment by consulting firms, investment banks, and Teach for America basically fill the gap for folks who are still casting about for something to do.

The Magicians wields a sharp stick in the direction of that pipeline from colleges to consulting in particular. In the world of the novel, consulting’s where you go when you get burned out. When Janet tells Quentin and Alice the story of Emily Greenstreet, the student who had an affair with a professor, attempted some inadvisable cosmetic magic, and inspired her admirer to burn himself up into a niffin in his attempts to save her, it’s clear that consulting is where you go when you wash out of magic. She tells them “I heard she does something businessy in Manhattan. They set her up with an easy corporate job, I don’t know, management consulting or something. We own part of some big firm. Lots of magic to cover up the fact that she doesn’t do anything. She just sits in an office and surfs the Web all day. I think part of her just didn’t survive what happened, you know?” And after the showdown in Ember’s Tomb, Quentin ends up at exactly the same firm where “he was affable enough, if a little mopey. He seemed smart. Or at least he looked smart.”

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with going into consulting if that’s what you want to do. I have friends who are running around the country preserving mining jobs and bringing down health care costs, and that’s awesome, important work. But it’s worth pointing out that there’s something odd about the fact that we treat college as if once you’re in, you’ve got everything figured out, particularly if you get into some place like the Ivy League. And worth interrogating what the defaults turn out to be for folks who don’t have their whole futures planned.

Joe Frazier died late Monday at age 67 after a short battle with liver cancer, and nary a story will be written about the two-time heavyweight champion of the world that doesn’t include ample space for Muhammad Ali. It was Ali who overshadowed Frazier both in the ring and out. Ali was flashy, changing his name upon joining the Nation of Islam, courting Malcolm X, dodging the Vietnam War draft, and, yes, beating Frazier in two-of-three fights. And at a time of civil unrest, it was Ali who painted Frazier as a friend of the conservative elite, an Uncle Tom, a puppet of the White Man — a distinction that became a part of how Frazier would always be known:

During the interview in which Ali called Frazier an “Uncle Tom,” he told the British reporter, “He’s the other type of Negro, he’s not like me. There are two types of slaves. Frazier’s worse than you to me…. One day he might be like me, but for now he works for the enemy.”

It wasn’t just Ali. After Frazier beat The Champ in the Fight of the Century at Madison Square Garden in 1971, Boxing Illustrated posed a question to readers: “Is Joe Frazier a white champion in black skin?” By that time, Frazier had been alienated by much of America’s black community, seen by many exactly as Ali had painted him.

Joe Frazier, to be sure, wasn’t Muhammad Ali. But does that diminish Frazier’s accomplishments, either as an athlete or as the change agent he (perhaps unintentionally) was? It shouldn’t. Frazier’s career began when he fled the racism of the Jim Crow South, moved to Philadelphia, and learned to fight. Like Jesse Owens, Wilma Rudolph, and, incidentally, Ali before him, Frazier highlighted America’s racial injustice by winning a gold medal in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics while representing a country that didn’t represent him. A few years later, it was Frazier who lent money to Ali, who had been imprisoned and stripped of his title for dodging the Vietnam War draft. Frazier later petitioned President Richard Nixon to get Ali reinstated into boxing.

After his career, he started a charitable foundation and opened a Philadelphia gym to give troubled youth a place to go to ease their frustrations and learn to box, much as others had done for teens like Ali and Frazier years before. Well into his fifties, Frazier still fought charity bouts to raise money for troubled youth in communities across the country.

Plenty of black athletes, Ali included, used their platform to become outspoken activists for American racial injustice and inequality. Plenty of others, like Frazier, highlighted social injustice and inequality simply through their accomplishments, accolades, and acceptance by mainstream America. Perhaps none, however, was demonized by other black athletes quite the way Frazier was by Ali. Ali was flashy, bold and outspoken, and imprisoned for his beliefs, and his activism rightly endeared him to millions of people around the world both during his career and after.

“I don’t want to be no more than what I am,” Frazier once said. But while it may not be his enduring legacy — or, for all I know, the legacy he’d choose for himself — Smokin’ Joe Frazier played a positive role in the change of America’s racial norms during his lifetime. Just because he wasn’t Muhammad Ali shouldn’t diminish that.

The bridge is yours.

-What if the apocalypse happened and we assumed it was a marketing stunt?

-Remembering Joe Frazier.

-Sorry we’re not going to get to see Tea Leoni and Hope Davis square off on HBO.

-Curious to see if Batman can convince people to see a movie with a lot of subtitles.

Brett Ratner, charming as always, apparently said, and then quickly apologized for saying, that rehearsing to play a part, something that one would assume is part of performing your job diligently and well if you’re an actor, “is for fags.” There’s something hilarious, given the quality and subtlety of stories Ratner usually tells (though I stand by Tower Heist) in his apology, in which he says “It was a dumb and outdated way of expressing myself…as a storyteller I should have been much more thoughtful about the power of language and my choice of words.”

This would all be another crude entry in Ratner’s crude legacy, except for the fact that the man is producing the Academy Awards this year. As Mike Fleming wrote in Deadline, “Director and Oscarcast producer Brett Ratner needs to conduct himself with more class in public appearances or risk screwing up his dream…He has fielded questions with a lack of understanding that as Oscarcast producer, he is something of an ambassador for the Academy and a prestigious Oscar tradition.” To a certain extent, this is absolutely true. Comments like this are tacky, jarring on a night when the movie industry likes to present its best self, not just because they’re homophobic, but because they’re stupid. I think there’s an open debate about whether it’s OK to make people uncomfortable at awards shows by calling them on their biases, their wealth, or their politics, and whether the host has an obligation to the audience in the room or at home. But no matter where one comes down on that question, I think we can all agree that tackiness and unfunniness are a no.

On the other hand, the Academy Awards are a night when the movie industry professes in public to care very much about things that it as a whole doesn’t invest very much in on a day to day basis. Whether it’s stories about people of color, sexual minorities, and strong women; the folks who make technical and non-acting artistic contributions to what we see on-screen; movies that don’t make an enormous amount of money, the Academy Awards sometimes feel like an apology to techniques, priorities, and people who are ignored for most of the year in Hollywood. Inviting someone like Brett Ratner to produce the Oscar telecast may be treated as if it’s an opportunity for a mediocre but profitable popular director to class himself up for the occasion. But if you’re getting affirmation for being crude most of the time, it probably takes more than a single job for you to rewrite your brain to not say stupid, homophobic nonsense.

After I posted some thoughts yesterday about Dan Harmon’s reflections on last week’s episode of Community, he was kind enough to get in touch to address some of my concerns. “I didn’t want to be sitcom number 5 to have a token gay that was either ‘progressively’ bland or ‘refreshingly’ flamboyant,” he tweeted at me, adding, “And I’m politically nauseated by the concept of TV as Wizard of Oz, giving one group a heart, another a brain, etc.”

I agree, of course — whatever subset of gay men who live to make over heterosexual women is more than adequately represented in mass media. Tropes are always the thin edge of the wedge when you’re trying to open the door to better representations of minority groups in all of their diversity, and if we get stuck on the tough black copy, the gay hairdresser, the Muslim cabdriver, we’re failing, both at representing our country and in telling stories. Consistent with that belief, I suggested that “there’s space between those two options, isn’t there?” And Harmon responded, “Yes, there is plenty in between. Everything is in between. That’s what Community is usually implying, hence the apology.”

I said, in a series of tweets that followed (helpfully curated here by Eleanor at PopChange), something I perhaps should have made clearer, that Community shouldn’t bear sole responsibility for making our conversations about all kinds of bias:

I love Community for its commitment on race, in particular, to have an ongoing conversation between actual stakeholders in a way that’s beautifully uncliche. I want more shows to proceed from that basis, that we live in an increasingly diverse world and have to resolve and work out our biases directly with the people influenced by them. And I don’t think you should have to do all the work. Hopefully other people will expand on the model you’ve set.

It’s tempting to look to folks like Harmon who are open to good-faith conversations about their work, and whose work can be usefully progressive, and demand that they be perfect about everything. But getting a few people to purity isn’t really the goal here, or at least not the only goal. We’ll fail if we’ve got a few islands of smart television that’s thought about race, gender, and sexual orientation in an ocean of regressive entertainment. It’s easy to talk to Dan Harmon about how he sees diversity. It’s harder, and even more important, to find a way to talk to folks who are aggressively closed to conversation, or aren’t aware that one’s going on at all.

In the course of an interview with Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang, who are writing and drawing DC’s rebooted Wonder Woman, Geoff Boucher raises an interesting question. What does it mean to change Wonder Woman’s origin story, turning her from a statue brought to life by Aphrodite for Queen Hippolyta to Zeus’s daughter:

CC: If you went to the average person on the street and showed them a picture of Wonder Woman they would recognize her immediately. Ask those people her origin story and some of them might know the clay story but many, many others would not know that at all. That’s not a problem you have with Superman or Batman; everyone knows their origin. By making her the daughter of Zeus, we’ve gotten a big driving force behind our story. It gives her a motivation and it’s a key to character that we now feel is very important. She’s a child of the gods who defends us from them, in the same way that Superman is from another planet trying to save humanity and Batman is the orphan who is protecting us from the criminals who killed his parents.

BA: It’s going to be key to a lot of things. We can’t just make this change and leave it hanging. It’s going to inform the first year of stories. She’s got a whole family she’s got to meet. Some are looking forward to meeting her and others aren’t. We’re heading toward the family reunion. Ever been to one of those? At the same time she is protecting this young woman Zola, who happens to be carrying a baby — we don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl yet — who is another one of the children of Zeus. So she’s protecting her half-brother or half-sister who is on the way.

That’s a sort of Buffy-ization of the Wonder Woman mythos that accords with a lot of recent stories that explore scenarios where there are a lot of people with varying degrees of power in the world. The idea that we’ve all got a little Wonder Woman in us has been part of the feminist mythos since the founding of Ms., which put her on the cover of its inaugural issue trying to halt the advance of the Vietnam War, striding past a billboard with the slogan “Peace and Justice in ’72.” A mythology that makes that possibility explicit raises the possibility of a pantheon of new superheroes. But it also risks reducing Wonder Woman to a permanent and perpetual mother-protector role, constantly rushing around defending her divinely-inspired relatives.

Similarly, in their quest for specificity, I wonder if Azzarello and Chiang are reducing Wonder Woman a bit. Her original story may not be plausible, or gritty, but it is about an expression of female will and independence. Not everything needs to be grounded in social realism. Some things can just be mysterious and strange. It’s yet another reason we’re far too consumed with origin stories. Trying to come up with a psychologically plausible explanation for the divine, or near-so, is a bit of a contradiction in terms.