Follow Up

Jeremy Dylan doesn’t share my zeal for [renting movies](http://mrjeremydylan.blogspot.com/2012/01/collapse-of-ownership-society.html):

> In a recent episode, August and Mazin presaged a dystopian future in which entertainment exists only in an ethereal online space and nobody owns anything. Apparently, we are marching inexorably towards this brave new world and any attempts to halt the approach would be futile.

> I like owning things. I own The Philadelphia Story. I own all seven seasons of The West Wing. I own The Last Waltz. I paid a one-off charge at a store at some point, and in exchange, I own these things. I can watch them as often as I feel like, whenever I feel like, in perpetuity, and it costs me nothing further. I don’t need to be connected to the internet to do so. And no one can take away my ability to watch it. If I come across someone who’s never seen The West Wing (seriously?), then I can lend them my copy. While they have it, I can’t watch it, which is only fair. If they get bitten by the Sorkin bug, they can trot off and buy their own copies, and enjoy the associated privileges I listed above.

Valid points, every one of them.

I think one reason DVDs (and Blu-rays) have been so successful is that they hit a sweet spot of being cheap enough and small enough that you can afford to keep an extensive collection in a normal-sized apartment. If, at two in the morning, you suddenly have a jones for the second season of 24, you can pull out the discs and start watching.

That is, as long as you’re *at your apartment.* If you’re in a hotel room in New York with your iPad, the ability to get that through streaming is much more appealing.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been travelling so much — or because I’m going through a general [discardia](http://www.discardia.com/) phase — but I’m much happier to not own things. If a book is the same price in hardback or on Kindle, I’ll always take the Kindle edition.

With movies, yes, there’s the risk that I won’t be able to watch what I want when I want it. But that’s my argument for more pervasive licensing and rights-packaging. With HBO Go, I can watch that episode where David gets carjacked and confirm that *oh shit, yeah, that was insane.* It’s like having all the DVDs to all the seasons of all the HBO shows, and I’m happy to pay for access to it.

But that’s me. I rarely re-watch movies. I rarely re-read books. For folks wired the other way — which I suspect is a sizable majority — ownership of atoms makes a lot of sense. I think we’ll continue to have ways to buy physical books and movies. It’s not either/or.

Responding to our podcast [Zen and the Angst of Kaufman](http://johnaugust.com/2012/zen-and-the-angst-of-kaufman), reader Scott argues that Charlie Kaufman is in fact thinking of the audience:

> He’s just like you. He’s trying to write movies that HE would want to sit in a theater and watch. But what he likes to watch is something true, not something he’s seen before in a slightly different form. We may not be entertained by this, either because our culture has trained us that a movie should be a certain way, or because we simply like different things than Charlie Kaufman likes (because everyone’s different).

> He’s putting himself in the theater seats as he writes, as we writers should, but he’s asking us to be a more critical audience of ourselves than real audiences actually are.

We’re conflating two points here. I think both are valid, but they shouldn’t be confused:

1. Screenwriters should write movies they themselves want to see.
2. Screenwriters should consider the point-of-view of the audience.

Violate the first rule, and you have hacky trash.

Violate the second rule, and you have solipsistic indulgence.

Kaufman is clearly writing movies he wants to see. That’s good. But if another screenwriter loves horror movies and wants to see more movies like Halloween, his intentions should be considered just as pure despite being more commercial.

Scott feels Kaufman knows what “real audiences” are like, but holds himself to a higher standard. Okay. But if this higher standard makes the screenwriter’s work inaccessible or uninteresting to an audience — or at least, a large chunk of the audience — I don’t think it’s fair to put all the blame at the feet of “the system.”

In his BAFTA speech, Kaufman isn’t complaining as much as explaining (or exploring) why he feels compelled to write the movies he writes, and the resulting frustration.

Scott continues:

> The Hollywood model panders to the universal truths that we already know are universal, because that will translate to the largest demographic and therefore the largest box office. What’s funny to me is that one fairly common “truth” sold by many of these films is that “money isn’t everything” (or some variation thereof). Yet the person (or committee) who wrote the script, the people who greenlit it, the people they hired to make it, and the people marketing it are solely concerned with it making the most amount of money possible.

Agreed. It’s likely because the credit-slash-blame for movies is shared among so many people that this thematic hypocrisy goes unnoticed.