John August

Film Industry

The pressure of PG-13

Film Industry, Genres

Rich Juzwiak looks at how PG-13 has become the [rating you want](http://gawker.com/5896566/the-reign-of-the-pg+13-rating-sanitized-safe-and-worth-shitloads-of-money):

> It’s simple math, really: Movies rated PG-13 make more money on average ($42 million per picture versus G’s $38.5 million, PG’s $37 million and R’s $15 million). Getting blessed with PG-13 ensures that the odds are ever in your favor. In this economy, who wants to gamble?

To some degree it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: as studios make most of their blockbusters PG-13, most blockbusters will be PG-13.

While there are always notable exceptions (Safe House is a recent one), in most cases it doesn’t seem worth arguing anymore: if you’re making an expensive movie that could conceivably be less than an R, it probably *should* be PG-13 — and that comes at the scripting stage.

From personal experience, one of the worst things that can happen to your movie is to cut it down to a safer rating after you’ve shot it. It’s not just losing the F-words. It’s losing the moments that called for the F-words. If when writing the script you knew you could only say it once and in a non-sexual context, you would write scenes in a way that didn’t demand it.

Similarly, an R-rated action scene cut down to PG-13 feels neutered, while an action scene designed for PG-13 can plan for the absence of gore at the outset. People criticize the shaky-cam in The Hunger Games, but it was clearly a choice made from the beginning in order to show the feeling of violence without the bloodshed.

That worked out well for them.

Copyright Math

Film Industry

Rob Reid’s [“Copyright Math”](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZadCj8O1-0&feature=player_embedded) presentation for TED is a great reminder of how misleading numbers can undermine an argument.

In this case, industry figures intended to show the impact of piracy easily tip from “exaggerated” to “comically absurd.” The viewer is left with a natural conclusion: illegal file-sharing is not that big of a deal.

But really, that conclusion needs some italics: illegal file-sharing is not *that big* of a deal.

Something can still be worth discussing even if it’s not an armageddon-level threat. Rational discussions might include the following topics:

* On an individual level, why does someone torrent a movie rather than pay for it? What would change that decision?
* To what degree do consumers have a right to watch something how and when and where they want to watch it?
* Where should the industry focus its energy: on the individual who downloads a movie, or businesses that make money selling material they don’t own?

You won’t arrive at a rational discussion by pulling numbers out of the air.

In defense of shiny discs

Film Industry

Tasha Robinson isn’t ready to [give up on DVDs and Blu-rays](http://www.avclub.com/articles/in-defense-of-discs-and-the-desire-for-better-thin,70396/):

> [F]or me, hanging onto discs isn’t about sentiment, a Luddite fear of technology, or even protecting a hefty financial investment in an aging medium, as so many people do whenever the market-dominating format in an industry changes. It’s a way of voting with my feet, or with my wallet.

> By saying, “I’ll fully switch over to streaming when it looks and sounds as good, feels as stable, and provides as much library depth as disc options do,” I’m encouraging streaming companies to prioritize improving those things. Because media conglomerates don’t care about sentiment, and won’t hold back on progress to comfort the timid. But they do care about where people are spending money.

I’ve generally come down on the other side of the debate — shiny discs are going to go away at some point, so why not now?

But Robinson makes strong arguments I’ve never seen articulated so clearly, particularly about how the transition to streaming prioritizes consumption over ownership:

> Media companies have every reason to not passively wait to see what consumers want, and to try to drive the market to places that will be more profitable and less expensive for them. And they simultaneously have every reason to drive people to value only the newest releases, and the most readily available content. They want purchasers to care about “new and now” because ideally, they want to sell you something new, right now — every minute of every day.

Robinson doesn’t address piracy, which is like discussing climate change without mentioning fossil fuels. The media companies aren’t moving towards streaming because they want to stop selling DVDs and Blu-rays. They are streaming movies because they need to compete with illegal downloads.

But from the perspective of a consumer who wants quality and selection, Robinson’s points are well-made.

Link via [@LoganHard](http://twitter.com/LoganHard).

Let’s run a studio!

Episode - 27

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Film Industry, Follow Up, QandA, Scriptnotes

Celebrating Leap Day, John and Craig play the game of “What If?” Specifically, what if we each were handed the reins of a major Hollywood studio?

We discuss what we’d movies we’d make, what standard practices we’d change, and how we’d address the shifting realities of movie-going and home video.

Could we really do it better? Doubtful. It’s easy to play make-believe, but much tougher when you’re reporting to a major multinational corporation.

Still, there are things that everyone seems to get wrong, and it’s worth the conversation about what could be done better. And if any tech billionaires feel like investing, you know where to find us.

Before that long conversation, we answer a bunch of follow-up questions:

* When optioning a novel, is there a rule of thumb for what percentage of the total purchase price the option should cover?
* Does the WGA cover a novelist’s based-on credit?
* What does it mean when a novelist has a producer credit?
* What is Daniel Wallace’s role in the Broadway version of Big Fish?
* What’s to stop a screenwriter from writing a novel version of his spec, and then having his script be “based on” it?

All this and more in this episode of Scriptnotes.

LINKS:

* [Asymco crunches the studio numbers](http://www.asymco.com/2012/02/07/hollywood-by-the-numbers/)
* Intro: [The Big Valley](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg3HcxYcbog) opening credits
* Outro: [Hey Ya](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-8nkkOA_AM&feature=player_embedded) cover by Mat Weddle

You can download the episode here: [AAC](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_27.m4a).

**UPDATE** 3-8-12: The transcript of this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/scriptnotes-ep-27-lets-run-a-studio-transcript).