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Oct 14, 2022·edited Oct 14, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

I think you're pretty much exactly right. We could take all the adjectives and the verbs out of this piece and use them to write the very same article about elections where everything also is a goddamn analytics riden horse race. I've decided to watch mostly French films from the 50's and Hollywood "B" westerns from the same period from here on out. I wish I could figure out a similar approach to elections.

7 year old me had one of my life's premier experiences watching "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines" at one of those really nice theatres that had a screen the size of a Billboard. I sat right down in front.

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Oct 14, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

The fixation on box office is merely consistent with a culture whose crowning value is money: the worth of an education is measured by how much a graduate can earn, people buy what is accepted as fine art these days as investments; and the esteem in which an individual is held — his social capital — depends upon his income.

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Oct 14, 2022·edited Oct 14, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

This has bugged me for around 30 years. I think I remember first noticing it when the rise of shows like "Entertainment Tonight" became popular on network TV. I remember being puzzled back then when I was a teenager... some movie that I liked "bombed" at the box office, or was somehow doing worse than some other movie that I hadn't seen. Why should I care, I haven't even seen the other film?

There were other competing shows like Entertainment Tonight. 30 minutes of Hollywood and Teevee news five nights a week. That's a lot of time to fill. They figured out a way to make advertising 'the show,' and then sell 30 second ads to sell the advertising-show itself. SO entertainment became less about the product and more and more about "inside baseball" because that's a great way to generate 20 minutes of content for Entertainment Tonight five times a week. Television and movies and music as competitive sports.

I follow various topics on Reddit, one of them is fantasy fiction. There's a weekly thread that gets posted there now that's the epitome of this nonsense. I'm paraphrasing here, but the topics are titled "HBO's 'House of the Dragon' up 3% viewership this week, Amazon's 'Rings of Power' down 2%." People are online talking about percentage changes in streaming numbers over two different fantasy TV shows week to week! It's completely bizarre to me that anyone would care. I understand being generally interested in seeing if your favorite show is a flop or success: it might get cancelled or it might get another season. But closely discussing some kind of horse race between television shows is absurd unless you work for one of the shows yourself.

I'm rambling, but this topic has mildly irritated me for decades. Guess what? I ain't never been a sports fan. I don't work for the entertainment biz, nor does anyone I know. The article you link seems to sum things up nicely.

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the last movie I've seen in an actual theatre is Black Panther, so I'm hardly qualified to speak on this subject, but it seems that money has taken precedence over reputation in this arena as in so many others. huge revelation, that, eh? I guess by reputation I mean making something for its intrinsic value rather than how it will be reflected in the box office. making any sort of statement based on one's own critical thinking (the horror!) has been supplanted by how the great unwashed will receive it. and increasingly, it seems that the lowest common denominator is the end goal.

so sayeth another internet crank

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Thanks for this -- it seems like the sickness of a hyper-reality world to worry more about what people are saying & how they are feeling about a media object, than what that object actually is, does, or means.

But I don't blame us that much -- this world is literally hell & rotting to pieces. I'd retreat to some fourth meta-dimension too. Look at me here -- responding to this. :)

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Oct 14, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

Eh, points, no discussion:

Regressive, reactionary, exploitative times and economy aren't fertile ground for an avant garde. The amount of regurgitation in the entertainment biz is, for an old who's been paying some attention over the years, amazing.

Speaking of which: When it can cost approximately nothing to make a movie, it's not happening. (I suppose some energy is instead going into TikTok and YouTube videos and podcasts.)

Back when we were young -- Scorsese, Roy and me -- it was as Roy noted: A movie did well or it didn't. A movie was the cool thing or not. If the former, we all went to see it. But of no concern was the box office. But starting with St. Ronnie and the nation's 180, more and more the only thing of importance as the MSM tells us is 💵💰💸.

Listen, it's been a couple of decades of societal collapse to the point that far too many can't be bothered to do anything to mitigate a pandemic and think not voting or electing the puppets of those making things worse is somehow the correct thing to do. So, you know, we get the art the times, well, dictate.

As for Scorsese, he's not talking but he might have a clue:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5537002/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_5

Or not. The underlying real life events as they say in Hollywood could of course be the basis for a great critique of capitalism and racism and how they combine into murder for money.

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Oct 14, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

Wait wut.

Are you suggesting that art has been…*commodified*?!?!

YOU COMMIE BASTARD!

Oh, wait, sry.

You’re suggesting that 21st-century culture is driven by an algorithmic quest for the perfect commodity, one that will suck every last dollar out of every last pocket of every last member of the consumer caste.

YOU LUDDITE COMMIE BASTARD!!!

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Oct 14, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

I think one of the factors at play here is the human need to feel validated and superior. People are into the idea that if something is wildly popular, it must be good. And if that thing is good, then the people who like are also good. So my liking [latest hyped blockbuster] validates my taste in movies if [latest hyped blockbuster] is topping the box office numbers this week, and that, in turn, proves that I am superior by virtue of my superior tastes.

In other avenues of life, this tendency takes the form of snobbery. Back when I was big in fly-fishing circles, I would look on in amazement as guys who were insurance salesmen or trash contract administrators spewed at length about how fly fishing was superior to any other form of fishing. These guys were actually ashamed that they started fishing with a spinning rod like everyone else. (And within fly fishing, there was a "moral" hierarchy--at the bottom were those who fly fished and used whatever fly the fish were eating and caught whatever fish were biting; at the top of this pyramid looking down on all the other benighted souls were the few dipshits who only fished dry flies to rising fish using 100-year-old classic hand-crafted bamboo fly rods. These latter types were utterly insufferable, but God gave them their punishment in this life by rendering them incapable of catching fish under even the most favorable of circumstances.) And all of this was in service of trying to feel that their hobby was validated and that it made them superior to other mortals.

So sad!

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The tail wags the dog to some extent here as I see it. Jaws was considered the watershed 'blockbuster' in 1977 for box office sales as well as reviews, only to be outdone by Star Wars a short time later. This, I feel, set the trend (akin to greedy landlords, and what I call 'The Nirvana Effect' on the music biz) towards aiming at Beacoup Bucks over art for art's sake, when such insane profits were on the line and marketing / distribution became more important to investors rubbing their hands together than it ever had before.

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Oct 14, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

Wait, people are going to movie theaters? Are there no HDTVs, are there no streaming apps? Why subject yourself to the talking, candy wrapper crinkling, guys going to pee mid movie, sticky floors…? Are Sno-Caps worth enduring all that? I spent whole days going from theater to theater in NYC in the 60’s, cramming in as many movies as possible in a weekend, but now I can do the same on a Smart TV any time I want. So, I’m not doing much for box office numbers and they’re not doing much for me. Thanks, COVID!

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... and none of this changes the fact that 95-99% of anything/everything is shit; yeah, ok, MOST of anything/everything is shit. So much of it is shit, that I'm starting not to mind when things are just a little shitty (of course, very shitty things often have their own entertainment value--among those who know which very shitty things are actually entertaining...)

A business model for art comes a close third to a business model for health and a business model for education when it comes to stupid ideas (which are many and varied)

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I think the studios have always thought this way, right? Producers have always played a kind of Moneyball game, pushing the "creatives" to follow formulas for competitiveness while creators wanted people to love their movies (the schlock as well as the art). But writers and critics used to identify with the creators (or even like Pauline Kael with the audience), and make fun of producers and their fixations, and that's what's turned around. I wonder if there's a real readership for it though. If the exciting developments are mostly on streaming video nowadays, as my kids think, there's a lot more talk about whether people like a particular show or not. I wonder if the handicapping preoccupation with movies is some kind of awful signal that people don't care so much about movies now.

Worriedman below is right to equate this with the journalistic coverage of politics as sport, too, and I wonder if the same kind of worry applies. Political journalism seems mostly directed to gamblers rather than voters--what's that a sign of?

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Oct 14, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

‘Amsterdam’ is on pace to lose $100 million

There's yer problem and yer answer right there

Marty, DiBergi...2 marks!

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Oct 14, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

I think I speak from experience when I say most people hate math, but boy do they LOVE numbers. In particular, what people love is one big, dumb number that quantifies how good something is. I think I first noticed this as a '70's-era college student shopping for stereo equipment when "Watts per channel" was the big, dumb number, and more was better and that's all you needed to know. Today, I notice it in how electric cars are marketed, and range is the big, dumb number and you've GOT to have 300 miles and won't be caught dead in some piece of shit with anything less (the majority of trips by car are 6 miles or less.)

And I get it, the world is complicated and it's not getting any simpler, so people seek comfort and reassurance in over-simplification. Nothing more complicated and anxiety-producing than the economy, wouldn't it be nice if someone could come up with a single number that says "good" or "bad" and then report on it EVERY DAMN DAY on the news, always with a handy explanation for why it went up 0.2% or down 1%? Why, of course that would be great, and that's why you know the ONE news story that they always find space for no matter what and even in the event of a nuclear war is the fucking Dow Jones Average.

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Oct 14, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

I'm a big fan of science fiction, so I love reading about production of science fiction movies. Movie critics are rarely science fiction fans, so there's an inherent handicap there.

But what I find most mystifying is sequels. There seems to be this tendency for studios, when they have a so-called "blockbuster" on their hands, decide they can produce a sequel they expect to be just as big of a "blockbuster", but on a fraction of the first movie's budget. And, with each sequel, the budget gets smaller and smaller.

Is it any wonder why sequels are rarely successful?

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Oct 14, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

I have barely started to read, just what's above Marty's quote. But it's important. Before it gets away.

You wrote another column on a similar subject. There's a quadrilateral that embraces both this rectangle and that square. Maybe they are all parallelograms. Creating something for money. Creating something for attention. Creating something because it makes us happy, because we believe it has value in and of itself. Why do we create things? Entertainment, edification, because we can, I just have to go, you know? Try this mustard!

Is it other directed or is it for ourselves alone? Are we communicating or just getting rid of something? Is it for today, for now, simply a lark, a laugh, a quickie, or a marriage, beyond, for all time? This one today seems to focus on the commerce, that is, will it play in Peoria and will the piper get paid, versus, will a public I don't know and never the twain shall meet think I'm swell well after my corpse is swollen and will I get a tomb after all even if it is only a slim tome.

So, if you are following me in my mad method here, and I know it's a bit jazzy for this time of the morning (good morning, by the way), the central question comes back to: Who are we trying to be (identity); does this trope make my brain look phat and what will it inspire others to feel/believe/do (rhetoric): brother, can you spare a dime and/or give me your wallet, bitch (I own you, you owe me)... What else?

Now, I'll go back and read you whole thing here, before I have to go to work and the day dulls my pencil to the point I pour myself another martini and don't care whether anyone thinks anything about the fact Angela Lansbury is dead and wasn't she a looker when she was younger and maybe even now, still wondering if Ursula Le Guin is still with us and should I just walk away from Omelas altogether.

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