Corporate studios close their "indie" divisions

The crisis in human-scale cinema is worsening with Screen Daily reporting a "seismic shift in specialty landscape".

"Some independent players see it as a 'healthy correction', others as a 'turning point'," writes John Hazelton. "One company chief recently suggested, in a Los Angeles Film Festival speech whose words have ricocheted around the indie community, 'the sky really is falling'.

"However you describe it, what has happened to the US independent industry in the last few months has raised big questions about its future, and the future of the specialised distribution sector that over the past decade has pushed the profile - and sometimes the performance - of independent films to new levels.

"First there was the decision by Warner Bros, which had just announced its plan to turn New Line into an in-house genre label, to close down both of its specialty divisions - Picturehouse and Warner Independent Pictures (WIP).

"Then Paramount said it was merging the marketing, distribution and physical production departments of its Paramount Vantage specialty arm into those of the main studio.

"A few weeks later, the studio named former New Line executive Guy Stodel as Vantage's new executive vice-president of production and acquisitions, suggesting a move by the specialty arm away from prestige films and towards genre fare.

"Put the studio's moves alongside the downsizing of independent specialty operation Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, the financial problems being encountered by ThinkFilm and the acquisition of the Sundance Channel cable network by the owner of rival IFC, and you have a worrying confluence of events.

"It's probably true to say it's healthy, and it's absolutely true to say it's a correction," concedes Mark Gill, The Film Department CEO and former Miramax and WIP president who sounded the alarm at the Los Angeles festival. "But it's a correction in the way that a massive earthquake is a correction..."

One might argue about the appropriateness of describing outfits owned by major studios as independent, even if they have been independently run, but the point remains valid nonetheless: the business of smaller scale film-making is not looking healthy.

The story continues here (though I'm pretty sure you'll need a subscription to Screen Daily to access it).

Blogosphere discovers Blob (a sphere)

To those - and I would have to count myself - who have been happy to live in blissful ignorance of the gaming world, now may be the time to wake up. Especially with those derangedly talented film and commercial makers from Adelaide, The People's Republic of Animation, getting involved in the design of a new Nintendo Wii game parading under the magnificent name of de Blob.



See what I mean?

(With thanks to Inside Film magazine.)

Producer Nick Hagger gives an overview here:


How see here for the PRA's fabulous Mitsubishi Lancer ad...

Mitsubishi Lancer, "Safer in a Wild World" from PRA on Vimeo.

and here for their truly magnificent, deservedly multi-award-winning 2006 short film, Carnivore Reflux :


Carnivore was an animation finalist in the 2006 Dendy Short Film Awards, over which your humble servant, in the guise of the Sydney Film Festival's Grand Poo-Bah, presided in a titular capacity.

It maddened me no end (the SFF director does not have a say in the decisions taken by the various Dendy Awards juries) to see the makers of a film of such distinction walking away empty handed. Not because the films named Best Animation and Best Film overall (ie. the winner of the Rouben Mamoulian Award) were not worthy. The standard that year was extremely high and they were both very fine films indeed.

It's just that talent as genuinely brilliant and distinctive as that of the People's Republic is a rare and precious thing and needs to be recognised, nurtured and celebrated wherever it is encountered.

Which is why it was so good to see justice served the following year when the best animated film winner turned out to be the first ever official animated co-production between Australia and China; a film called Sweet & Sour produced by none other than....the People's Republic of Animation. An extract folows:

Another orang utan wins role in Neighbours

Thanks to The Official Blog for Jeff Goldsmith.

Go to Goldsmith's other website, Creative Screenwriting Magazine, to download a podcast of an extended interview with Jonathan Nolan, co-writer of The Dark Knight and brother of the film's director and co-writer Christopher Nolan.

Riddle me this

Now riddle me this, readers.

As can be clearly wtnessed in the trailer, near the start of The Dark Knight Heath Ledger's Joker tells a bunch of criminals to "kill the Batman". Yet towards the end, as The Jokester is being dangled over a building by said Batperson, he explains he wants the dark vigilante to live because (and I paraphrase from memory) the pair of them have too much fun together.

So which is it? He wants him to live or he wants him to die?

If Monsieur Le Jesteur changes his mind at some intermediate point, at what point exactly and why? And if so, does it have anything to do with anything the Batperson has said? I ask since I could only make out one in every 10 words breathed so heavily by Christian Bale from inside that rather uncomfortable looking rubber bondage suit.

Or was The Jestman lying when he told The Batpersonage he wanted him alive because he never liked to admit defeat?

Not that I'm suggesting the film is totally muddled in its conception or anything.

While we're on apparently illogical movies that have taken vast amounts at the box office, can anyone explain in what year Mamma Mia! is meant to be taking place - solely using the evidence provided by the film and not anything said by the filmmakers in interviews and official PR material?

I ask because the plot hinges around the conception of Donna's (Meryl Streep) daughter around the time of three brief sexual dalliances 20 years previously.

A brief flashback to the three potential fathers (Stellen Starsgard, Colin Firth and Pierce Brosnan) shows they were all fully paid up hippies at the time, which makes the likely date of conception around 1968.

Yet Firth later recounts having sold his Johnny Rotten tee-shirt to buy a guitar for Streep. That would mean their brief affair occurred sometime in (or after) 1978. While it's hard to tell from the Greek peasant costumes worn by the colourful peasants on the film's Greek island location, the clothes of the main characters suggests the film is set in the present day, which would mean the sperm wiggled its way up Donna's channel in 1988.

For the final word let us turn to the film's official media kit. There we discover the film is meant to be set in 1999.

This means the conception occured in 1978 - which certainly explains Firth's Johnny Rotten tee-shirt, but not his hippy haircut nor why a former fan of The Sex Pistols would be a huge fan of daggy old ABBA right down to knowing all the words.

Meanwhile has anyone else noticed that Streep seems to have mysteriously lost her once ubiquitous obsession with wrapping her gums around pronounced foreign accents whenever given the chance? This odd cove at The West Australian has, for at start (see here)...

The Dark Fight

Here's an update on the Christian Bale story. (For those who haven't heard, Bale was arrested after his mother and daughter complained to police of being assaulted on the eve of the UK premiere of The Dark Knight. (Yes I know the UK's Daily Mail is a usually heinous newspaper but this report seems reasonably well-balanced.)

How newspapers are dying - part 7

From today's Crikey:

"New York Times Co., the third-largest US newspaper publisher, said second-quarter profit declined 5.5 percent as job cuts and price increases failed to make up for plunging print advertising sales. Chief Executive Officer Janet Robinson said today that the company is accelerating cost-cutting efforts in the face of a slumping US economy and will exceed a target for $230 million in annual savings by the end of 2009. Robinson also said the New York Times newspaper will raise its weekday newsstand price by 25 cents to $1.50 starting Aug. 18.

"June ad sales tumbled 16 percent, the most in at least two years, mirroring the slide reported last week by Gannett Co, the largest US newspaper company. The publishers were hit by a steeper drop in national ads, coupled with a continued decline in classifieds as marketers moved to the Internet.

"'I doubt whether you'll see any improvement at all this year,' said John Morton, a newspaper industry analyst in Silver Spring, Maryland. The drop in June is 'about in line with what other companies are reporting'."

Independent cinema crisis now hitting the UK

Great to see the fine Canadian documentary Up The Yangtze in local cinemas thanks to the efforts of the selective independent distributor Gil Scrine. Make sure you see it soon on the big screen, if you haven't done so already, before it's too late.

I've been logging the commercial/ audience crisis in independent cinema almost since starting this blog last October and I see Screen Daily is weighing in on the issue, highlighted in the UK by the recent collapse of the much respected Tartan Films.

As I've commented before, the Australian scene is over-saturated with distributors trying to grab a small slice of an ever-decreasing pie. Britain is clearly similar. The result is likely to be a few more failing companies before a serious change in the way cinemas and distributors release films.

"Despite the risks," runs the Screen Daily article, "there are a growing number of indie distributors in the UK, with new competition from Delanic, Halcyon, Eureka, Diffusion, Network, Axiom, Odeon Sky Filmworks and Liberation.

"The market is over-saturated, supply is greater than demand from the exhibitors and I doubt if Tartan will be the only one to go," notes Edward Fletcher, managing director of Soda Pictures, which recently released Irina Palm in the UK and is handling Duane Hopkins's Better Things.

"The UK market has changed considerably in the last few years, polarising in a way that there is still a good business at the higher end of the indie market with more foreign-language films taking over a million (pounds) than the previous year and also at the micro end if your overheads are low enough. It's in the middle where you can crash and burn with no decent DVD ship or TV deal to fall back on."

How to write a brilliant script

Here’s something for New South Wales readers interested in the scriptwriting issues raised on my January 2nd feature for The Australian and explored further on this blog (see here)

The International Film School Sydney (IFSS) in Rosebery is holding a series of short courses for screenwriters and development executives featuring two of my three expert witnesses as speakers. See here

for details.

Billy Marshall Stoneking kicks things off this Saturday with a day-long session called The Drama of Story. (See here for Stoneking's excellent blog, Where's the Drama).

Speakers in coming months include:

* John Truby (Anatomy of Screenwriting, August 30, which sees three act structure as training wheels for screenwriters and looks at how to go beyond).

* David Freeman (Beyond Structure One, October 4, 5 which goes beyond structure and articulates 200 powerful tools for the writer and development executive, with Beyond Structure Two on October 6).

* IFSS head Duncan Thompson (Advanced Screenwriting, November 1,2,8,9).

* Stephen Cleary (Genre Bootcamp, November 21, 22, 23, 24)

Hunger for information

Last night I went to a long-lead media preview of Hunger, the UK film about 1980s IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands that won this year's Cannes Camera d'Or for best feature by a first-time director and the Sydney Film Festival's inaugural best feature prize.

So what's it like, you ask? I'm afraid I'm not allowed to tell you. Because everyone attending was required by distributor Icon Films to sign a form agreeing to hold our reviews until nearer the Australian release date (which has just been moved back from September to October). Otherwise - as the form made explicitly clear - we would be excluded from the screening.

I signed, so no commentary from me. Yet. I will however add a personal reminiscence (below) and this interesting comment from the film's director, Steve McQueen (previously best known as a UK visual artist and winner of the art world's Turner Prize) from an interview on the Channel 4 website. It's worth bearing in mind when you see the film. Which - assuming I am allowed to say this without being sent to film reviewer jail - I recommend you do.

"Ch.4: Did you change your opinion about Bobby Sands the more you learnt about him?
"SM: My opinion was: I don't know. That's why I made this film. It's not a situation that's right or wrong. It's not a situation with an easy answer. It's very painful. With me, I identified very much with the prison officers, just as much as with the hunger strikers."

Seeing the film reminded me of visiting Belfast during the early 1980s in the aftermath of Sands's death. Taking a cab up the Falls Road, the city's main Catholic enclave, was a memorable experience. Every available wall was filled with murals of Republican propaganda, including a very prominent memorial devoted to Sands.

At the top of the long road the cab chucked a left, travelled a mere 50 to 100 yards or so, then turned left to travel down the Shankill Road, a Protestant area running exactly parallel to the Falls. This road was almost identical - rows of bleak terraced houses with every available of wall space inch devoted to murals remarkably similar in style to those plastered over the Falls. Except in place of the images of hunger strikers and the Irish flag were those of the Orange order, the Union Jack and admonitions to God to "Save Our Queen".

Separating the back gardens of these mutually hating neighbours was a wall - smaller than the barrier that divided Berlin or now divides Israeli from Palestinian. But no less ghastly in its implications for that.

More silly Hitlers

Hitler Rap (YouTube)


The Great Dictator (Chaplin)


The Producers (Brooks)


Der Fuehrer's Face (Kinney)


To Be or Not To Be (Brooks)


To Be or Not To Be (Lubitsch)


Monty Python - Mr Hilter sketch

Every day a different sky, a different cloud - Rollins

"Now is the time to blossom and be the music that transcends everything and includes everything," tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins told me earlier this year ahead of his debut Australian live appearance at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall.

"Jazz is like nature," he continued. "Every day a different sky, a different cloud, a different rainbow: this is something that jazz represents. I'm trying to exemplify everything in jazz. It's something that takes in the bigger picture."

I was recently approached by a new Australian arts magazine called extempore, to be launched in November, for permission to use part of the above quote. I can see why: it's a wonderfully lyrical description of Rollins's inclusive musical philosophy. People who don't much care for jazz are, I suspect, often intimidated by it, viewing it as elitist. Rollins, one of the key jazz saxophonists of the post WW2 era, offers a strikingly different viewpoint.

My feature on Rollins, based around a phone interview with the great man, was published in The Australian on May 13. I never got around to posting a link as that was the day my wife Kaye was knocked down by a cyclist and sustained serious head injuries. For the full article see here.

The team behind extempore describe it as a bi-annual (published every May and November) Australian journal of arts and writing that is about, inspired by and responding to jazz and improvised music. It will feature fresh new writing, with well-known and new voices contributing short stories, poetry, features, interviews, reviews, art and photography. A bonus CD of Australian jazz and improvised music will accompany each issue.

Incidentally Kaye continues to make a strong recovery. Her arm is still in a sling from a collarbone operation and she has permanently lost her hearing in her right ear and her sense of taste and smell - not something you'd wish on anyone.

Yet her mental functioning and reasoning is top notch and she remains in amazingly good spirits. Given that paralysis, permanent brain damage and even loss of life were impossible to rule out in the early days after the accident, she is, as doctors and nurses have repeatedly informed her, very lucky in the grand scheme of things.

Who do you think you are kIdding, Mr Hitler?

Woody Allen is usually credited as the first person to take an existing film and lay spoof dialogue over the top in What's Up Tiger Lily? In Australia the Double Take team led by Des Mangan did much the same with live dubbing of old Steve Reeves sword and sandals epics.

Now comes this very amusing scene from Downfall with Hitler's bunker in the final days of the Third Reich recast as a digital post-editing suite. The new, subtitled dialogue transcends its origins as an in-gag for digital/ advertising industry workers to become a sublimely absurd send-up of that Nazi boss for whom all of us have toiled at some time or other.

Thanks to Anna Broinowski for sending me the clip.

More on Stanley Kubrick's Boxes

More on Jon Ronson's superb Kubrick documentary can be found here. The film debuted on Tuesday on Channel Four's digital channel More4 in the UK.

It can be seen in its entirety - hopefully at least for a while - on Google Video (see previous post for the link).

Meanwhile the UK's Daily Telegraph has a lengthy interview with Kubrick's widow Christiane in which she talks about her late husband and his working methods, repeating some of the information and views she gave to Ronson and adding a few more.

The Telegraph has also published some of Kubrick's correspondence, including the fascinating exchange below with Laurence Olivier, whom he had initially hoped would star in Lolita.

June 5, 1959
To Laurence Olivier

"Dear Larry, I am sorry the rushes were late yesterday and I was unable to come by for that drink. I hope that when you see the finished film you will be less disturbed about certain things than are now. In any case, I should like to thank you for the decent way you have behaved about the things with which you were in such disagreement. Good luck and Best Regards, Stanley."

(Olivier, who had originally agreed to star as Professor Humbert Humbert if he could co-write the script, pulls out of the entire project.)

December 15, 1959
To Stanley Kubrick from Laurence Olivier

"Having scrutinised the book curiously and intensely during the last week I do not feel my mind grasping a film conception of the subject and I therefore don’t feel that I can very well bear the onus of the responsibility of partnership in the script of a subject concerning which strong doubts are so uppermost in my mind.

"These doubts come from a conviction that the chief merit in the book lies in the author’s brilliant original and witty descriptive powers and I can’t see how this particular virtue is photographable. I fear that told in terms of dialogue the subject would be reduced to the level of pornography to which I’m afraid quite a few people already consign it.

"I could not guarantee to myself that I would be much use in getting it right and therefore cannot feel that I should guarantee to you that I would play the part whatever happened. Full of admiration as I am for the book my faith in it as a film subject is shaky."

Eyes Wired Open meets director of Eyes Wide Shut - posthumously, of course

Just watched this brilliant 40 minute documentary, Stanley Kubrick's Boxes, made and presented by Jon Ronson for Britain's Channel Four and put up in unbroken form on Google Video (thanks to Jeffrey Wells's Hollywood Elsewhere for drawing this to attention). I'd advise you click on the "full screen" icon, pull up a comfy chair, set aside the best part of an hour and enjoy.

Ronson was invited by the Kubrick estate to visit the late filmmaker's home near St Albans in South East England and trawl through the nearly 900 cardboard boxes of files that he'd built up over the years.

Among the more mind-boggling finds are copies of every single fan letter Kubrick ever received, divided into positive ("FP"), negative ("FN" and crank ("FC"), then divided again according to geographical area or city ("FN Albuquerque").

Ronson is also given the chance to look at 18 hours of raw footage of the production of Full Metal Jacket shot by Kubrick's daughter Vivian (whose documentary on The Shining offers a fascinating addition to the DVD of that film ). For some reason she never turned the Jacket footage into a film.

Interview footage includes Kubrick's long-time personal assistant, who offers a myriad of insights into the man, and his widow, Christiane. Also interviewed are a photographer who was hired to spend an entire year photographing London in immense detail as background research for Eyes Wide Open, and one of the "crank" letter writers, a British TV scriptwriter who in the 1970s wrote to Kubrick in suicidal despair after one of his prized TV projects - a Downfall-like drama about the last days of Hitler - had been butchered by executives.

I think it's Christiane who bridles at the suggestion that Kubrick might have been clinically insane. But what emerges with utter clarity from the documentary is the sense that the line between genius and madness, far from being thin, was non-existent in Kubrick's case.

The nutty obsessiveness, the out-of-control urge to collect and to classify, was a necessary part of the way he saw and understood the world; an inescapable part of his artistic process.

The sad irony is that the urge to research and file in ever-increasing detail eventually spun so far out of control that it stopped him making films on which he had worked so diligently, including his 1990s Holocaust project, eventually abandoned because his friend and fellow Jewish filmmaker, Steven Spielberg, had beaten him to the punch with Schindler's List. Kubrick started first but Spielberg took his own project from development to completion while Kubrick was still bogged down in research. There again, as Ronson suggests, without the mania for detail you wouldn't have the genius of the films he did make.

The line "what's he building in there?" crops up in the Ronson doco, which may or may not be a conscious reference to the priceless Tom Waits piece of the same title. Was Waits writing about Kubrick? Almost certainly not, but watch this video and you might be able to persuade yourself that he was.

Rant of the week - Die you fiends, die!

Terrifically fiery rant on the old vs new media debate from stilgherrian, also in yesterday's Crikey, with the delightful headline, Note to “old media” journalists: adapt, or stfu!.

"What is the future of journalism? To judge by the discussion at this week’s Future of Media Summit held simultaneously in Sydney and Silicon Valley (and every other “new media” conference I’ve been to lately) it’s endless bloody whinging. Whinging about how journalism has standards and bloggers are all “just” writing whatever they think.

"The panels in both cities covered the same, tired old ground. The new 'participatory media' and 'citizen journalism' would never be Real Journalism, because Real Journalism is an Art/Craft/Profession. Real Journalism involves research and fact-checking and sub-editing. There’s a Code of Ethics. But 'these people', as bloggers get labelled, these people just sit around in their pyjamas and write whatever comes into their heads.

"Bollocks.

"What’s tiring about this false dichotomy is that it compares the highest ideal of journalism with the lowest grade of personal blogging about what the cat did yesterday and — lo and behold! — they’re not the same. Gosh.

"How much everyday journalism actually conforms to the high ideal? Not much. For every Walkley-nominated episode of Four Corners there’s a hundred tawdry yarns about miracle fat cures or shonky builders with a camera shoved in their face. For every investigative scoop there’s a thousand mundane little 5-paragraph yarns that merely quote what someone said at a press conference, and then quote their opponent. Or recycle a media release, putting the journo’s byline where the PR firm’s logo used to be. Or misappropriate statistics to beat up some shock-horror non-existent 'crime wave'. Or either fawn or tut-tut over some 'celebrity' and their antics — more often than not because that same celebrity is appearing in a TV show or movie that’s completely coincidentally owned by the journalist’s employer.

"And you know, some 'bloggers' actually know what they’re talking about, interview people, and link to their references to boot.

"Dear Journalists, how can you spout all that stuff about 'standards' and then go back to your mucky business?

"Oh, that’s right. You’re a proper journalist. It’s all the others…

"Actually, I know why you’re so bitter about 'those bloggers'. You worked hard on that student newspaper or street rag while living in uni-student poverty, put up with the abuse of grumpy old chain-smoking subs who bawled you out over trivial spelling mistakes, put up with the unpredictable patronage of editors who promoted everyone else to A Grade but you — you endured all of that hoping that one day you’d get the plum posting. But no! The newsrooms are now being decimated, and the masthead’s adorned with photos of celebrity chefs. And bloggers — bloggers! People with no professional training are leaping into the limelight. Some of them are even being paid! How dare they!

"Dear Journalists, in case you hadn’t noticed, the internet and pervasive mobile digital communications change everything.

"The shape of your craft and the form of your stories was determined by the technology used to deliver those stories. Newspapers, for instance, worked to their daily cycles, and stories had the length and structure they did, because of the physical and operational constraints of putting ink onto paper. Some bloke called McLuhan said something about this, ages back — but I wouldn’t know for sure, because I’m not a proper journalist. Still, it strikes me that the very industrial scale of printing a metropolitan daily or producing a 6pm TV bulletin also shapes the way you go about making your stories: all that mechanism between you the journalist and your audience.

"Well, that’s all changed.

"We all have keyboards now. We all have mobile phones with cameras, or soon will. We all have publishing and distribution tools like WordPress and YouTube and Ustream.tv and Qik, or soon will.

"We don’t need a third party in The Mainstream Media to bring us mass-produced stories for mass-produced audiences when we can tell each other our own stories. Stories that are directly meaningful to us — like how niece Sarah did so well at the school concert (and here’s a video), or how the factory’s closing down (and here’s the lousy memo the bastards sent us). We’re only just learning how to connect myriad storytellers to myriad audiences, but we’re learning fast.

"There’s still a role for Real Journalism, of course, with your research and storytelling skills and, yes, with your Code of Ethics too. No-one’s saying there won’t be. And you know what? You too can use all these wonderful new tools to create wonderful new forms of Journalism — if only you’d stop whinging about how your world’s falling apart and actually learn to use them. A hint: You don’t have to wait for your grumpy old chain-smoking editor to show you, either, because he’s a dinosaur and will soon be dead.

"But nearly every time I hear journalists talking about, say, real-time messaging services like Twitter, it’s about how they can mine it for data, not how they might adapt their craft to this new participatory delivery mechanism. Or they’re waiting for someone else to show them how to do it.

"The people already exploring these new media forms will be the leaders. They may not call themselves “journalists” — and they probably don’t want to, since you’re held in such poor esteem these days — but they’ll be fluent in the new media. And you… well, you’ll be stuffed."

Republicans stomp on cute robot, upset children

OK, so I was being spectacularly dunderheaded, but I admit to being confounded by the apparently dull title Pixar gave to WALL.E (released in Australia in September) until seeing the film last week.

"WALL.E? What kind of name is that", I groaned, forgetting the drawled US pronunciation of "wall" is closer to "warrrrl". Which means WALL.E is just a cute spelling for Wally - a perkly little garbage compactor on tank treads that features as the film's eponymous protagonist.

Good to report the film lives up to the advance word - though it seems bizarre that it should have sparked the ire of Fox News-types in the US. For daring to portray a an unhabitable future Earth the film has attracted foaming-at-the-mouth comments like, "from the first moment of the film, my kids were bombarded with leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind" (I'm not making this up - see here.)
Jeez, these Republicans need a film education: it's kind of scary to think their heads are pushed so far up George Bush's sphincter they've failed to realise that a wasted earth is a standard science fiction trope. (That they should have failed to recognise that global warming is a threat to civilisation goes without saying - they're Republicans; no point in asking them to start saving the whales.)

Talking of WALL.E, Business Week has an interesting piece on why Pixar keep
coming back with success after success. Its corporate structure encourages maximum involvement from its creative talent across different projects and involves a unit called Pixar University in which staff get paid for receiving up to four hours education in different creative fields per week - even the accountants and chefs. In other words the company doesn't take creativity for granted. It actively works to develop it in every single one of its employees.

"The latest No. 1 movie for the animation giant, whose success owes more to its corporate culture than its movies' content," writes Bill Taylor.

"The arrival of summer means trips to the beach, fireworks and parades—and another boffo performance by the creative geniuses at Pixar. The studio's just-released summer movie, WALL.E, has generated rapturous reviews, record-setting ticket sales, and loads of cultural commentary.

"More than anything, though, WALL.E has generated amazement from Hollywood observers at Pixar's capacity to generate hit after hit in the fickle world of big-budget filmmaking. WALL.E is the studio's ninth consecutive number-one movie since the release of Toy Story in 1995, an unparalleled record of creative and commercial success.

"There are all kinds of theories about the secrets of Pixar's success. But I'm convinced that Pixar's films work so well with audiences because Pixar works so distinctively as a company. My colleague Polly LaBarre and I wrote about Pixar in our book, Mavericks at Work, and its latest box-office hit gives me a chance to reprise one of our "greatest-hit" messages from the book: You can't win big unless you change the game in your field.

"Pixar doesn't just make films that perform better than standard fare. It also makes its films differently — and, in the process, defies many familiar, and dysfunctional, industry conventions. Pixar has become the envy of Hollywood because it never went Hollywood.

"More than a few business pundits have drawn parallels between the flat, decentralized 'corporation of the future' and the ad-hoc collection of actors, producers and technicians that come together around a film and disband once it is finished. In the Hollywood model, highly talented people agree to terms, do their jobs, and move on to the next project. The model allows for maximum flexibility, to be sure, but it inspires minimum loyalty and endless jockeying for advantage.

"Turn that model on its head and you get the Pixar version: a tightknit company of long-term collaborators who stick together, learn from one another, and strive to improve with every production."

The full article is here.

When Sun Ra visited Earth

Talking of great eccentrics, as I did last month, is the late Sun Ra to music what Werner Herzog is to film?

Around 25 years ago I interviewed Herman "Sonny" Blount aka Sun Ra aka "They Call me Mr Ra, you can call me Mr Ree" at a hotel in London's Victoria district. Three bizarre memories:

(a) his telling me we had to look after our politicians otherwise they'd leave the planet;

(b) how strange it was meeting a man who claimed to be from Saturn when he was wearing a chunky knit sweater and clutching a copy of one of Britain's lurid tabloid rags;

(c) the strange experience of being tailed, almost footstep for footstep, by the band leader's sinister minder when we went outside with the photographer looking for a location for a photo shoot.

His stage show at The Venue was pretty amazing though - an artful micture of camp theatrics, avant-garde freakout (see below) and big band propulsiveness peppered with catchy, gospel-inflected tunes like The Satellites are Spinning.

David Byrne on the post-oil economy

Since discovering it a couple of years ago I've made a habit of every so often checking into David Byrne Journal, the blog written by David Byrne, the former Talking Head turned solo musician and conceptual artist.

His June 10 post, which chimes with my recent post on rising oil prices and the coming switch to a post-oil economy, offers a strong reason for you to consider doing the same.

"In my opinion, this is just the beginning," wrote Byrne. "When gas tops $10 a gallon THEN perhaps we’ll see the US public demand that our government seek alternative energy sources and demand that everything in our lives be more energy efficient. That day is not so very far away. (And this might actually be a good thing if we consider our carbon footprints). In a recent New York Times review of two books addressing the Middle East, Dexter Filkins points out that in 2003 a barrel of oil was $30 a gallon. It’s now what? $138? At this rate, gas will pass the $10 mark in a couple of years.

"For years the economic experts and financial masters of the universe told us that oil prices wouldn’t significantly mess with the economy. Think again. Those guys were so insulated in their high paying jobs with corner offices, that they had no reason or will to see otherwise. Denial is a wonderful thing.

"Of course, every business that involves transporting people and goods from one place to another will be impacted by the rising price of oil: commuters (naturally), parts for manufacturing, food trucked across the continent, all of those Netflix and Amazon packages (obviously), and even regular mail will be affected.

"Paint, computer and television screens, mobile phones, light bulbs, cushions, paper, mattresses, car seats, carpets, steering wheels and polyesters are all made with materials derived from refined oil and natural gas. They’re all going to cost twice as much. If oil was $30 a few years ago and now it’s more than four times as much, well, there will be a lag and some belt tightening, but eventually the costs will be passed on.

"This sounds depressing and ominous, but I sense that one’s quality of life is not actually tied to these goods, and is certainly not tied to the automobile and all the roads and services it’s demanded for almost a century. US commuters, for example, will probably blame the Arab world, but will also look for alternate solutions, like decent public transportation, and living closer to their place of work, which is also a good thing. In fact, after some very nasty times we could — if we don’t let our anger and pain get the better of us — emerge with a better quality of life than what we have now."

The shower scene from Genesis

Those turned on by this restaging of the Psycho shower scene in the medium of Lego should check out The Brick Testament, in which the Lord's good book is illustrated with the aid of the kids' building bricks.

From bad to even badder

That Werner Herzog should want to remake Abel Ferrara's 1992 film Bad Lieutenant, in which Harvey Keitel managed to get not a lot of police work done due to an excess of snorting, sniffing and shooting up, is not in itself that odd. The great German has afer all remade an earlier work before (his remarkably faithful 1979 version of F.W. Murnau's 1922 vampire classic Nosferatu).

No, the shock is not that he wants to remake the film (though strictly speaking, as he says below, he doesn't consider his project a remake at all). It's that he would lower himself to work on it with that incorrigible over-actor, Nicolas Cage.

The following interview with Herzog was conducted by defamer.com.

DEFAMER.COM: So, yes or no: Is Bad Lieutenant a project you're working on with Nicolas Cage?

WERNER HERZOG: Yes, but its not a remake. It's like, for example, you wouldn't call a new James Bond movie a remake of the previous one — although the name of the bad lieutenant is a different one, and the story is completely different. It's very interesting because Nicolas Cage really wants to work with me, and just anticipating working with an actor of his caliber is just wonderful.

DEFAMER.COM: Why this project, though? You could have worked on anything.

WERNER HERZOG: There's an interesting screenplay; it's a very, very dark story. It's great because it seems to reflect a side of the collective psyche — sometimes there are just good times for film noir. They don't come out of nowhere. There was some sort of a mysterious context with the understanding of people in that particular time.

"And it's going to be in New Orleans, which is a fascinating place. Part of it was the decision of the producers for tax incentives — which is totally legitimate. However, I thought to myself: "We have seen a lot of New York in movies; we have not seen New Orleans in feature films." Or very few feature films. After Katrina it's a particularly interesting set-up. The neglect and politics after the hurricane struck are something quite amazing. It has to do with public morality.

DEFAMER.COM: Speaking of which, the original film's director, Abel Ferrara, has vowed to fight this project, and —

WERNER HERZOG: Wonderful, yes! Let him fight! He thinks I'm doing a remake.

DEFAMER.COM: Have you talked to him?

WERNER HERZOG: No. I have no idea who Abel Ferrara is. But let him fight the windmills, like Don Quixote.

DEFAMER.COM: Have you heard his comments at all? He says he hopes "these people die in Hell."

WERNER HERZOG: That's beautiful!

DEFAMER.COM: Do you relate to that passion?

WERNER HERZOG: No, because it's like theatre thunder. It's like being backstage in the 19th century, with the machines that make thunder. It has nothing do with with his film. But let him rave and rant; it's good music in the background.

DEFAMER.COM: You did a remake before with Nosferatu, but —

WERNER HERZOG: It was not so much a remake as an homage to Murnau. But I don't feel like doing an homage to Abel Ferrara because I don't know what he did — I've never seen a film by him. I have no idea who he is. Is he Italian? Is he French? Who is he?

DEFAMER.COM: Oh, come on.

WERNER HERZOG: Maybe I could invite him to act in a movie! Except I don't know what he looks like.

Thank you for No Smoking

The above clip (filmed in Madrid) gives some idea of the musical and visual mayhem caused by Emir Kusturica and No Smoking Orchestra on Sunday as they turned the usually stuffy Sydney Opera House Concert Hall into something akin to a Serbian beer hall.

I'd expected something along the lines of the mad Balkan brass band knees-ups found on the soundtracks of the great director's films such as Underground and Black Cat White Cat (on which the band played). This maniacal music is to Kusturica what Nina Rota was to Fellini or Michael Nyman to the early features of Peter Greenaway.

In fact the Belgrade-based No Smoking Orchestra, in which the filmmaker plays electric guitar, takes an electrified approach to the region's insanely catchy gypsy music, adding a violin, saxophone, accordion and occasional tuba (but no trumpets) to a standard rock line-up.

"Towards the end of their two hour, 20 minutes performance, the lead guitarist took pleasure in spinning his instrument around his midriff," I wrote in The Australian yesterday. "At another point two audience members were required to hold a yacht's mast horizontally: a giant bow for the violinist, Kusturica using it to pluck power chords.

"With nods to Pink Floyd, Duke Ellington and Deep Purple, No Smoking Orchestra were nothing if not musically broad. Crude, yes, but as entertainers and audience pleasers, virtuosos."