John August

QandA

His, hers and ours

Words on the page

Danielle Sucher put together a browser extension called [Jailbreak the Patriarchy](http://www.daniellesucher.com/2011/11/jailbreak-the-patriarchy-my-first-chrome-extension/) that switches gendered words (such as pronouns) on web sites you visit.

It’s more thought experiment than anything, but I became fascinated with one esoteric issue:

> There is a known bug with the English language itself that I’m dealing with imperfectly at the moment. See, sometimes “her” should translate to “him”, and sometimes it should translate to “his”.

“Her” functions as both an objective pronoun (give the book *to her*) and a possessive pronoun (*her cat* is orange).

Sucher attempts to account for this by looking at the words surrounding “her.” A nearby preposition is a good indication that we’re using the objective form. Here’s her list of matching words:

> aboard, about, above, across, after, against, along, amid, among, around, as, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, besides, between, beyond, but, by, concerning, considering, despite, down, during, except, excepting, excluding, following, for, from, in, inside, into, like, minus, of, off, often, on, onto, opposite, outside, over, past, per, plus, regarding, since, than, through, to, toward, towards, under, underneath, unlike, until, up, upon, versus, via, with, within, without, not, and, feel

Numbers, both digits and written out, also signal an objective pronoun.

It’s the kind of thing a native speaker never notices, but ultimately becomes important when teaching the language — particularly when the learner is an algorithm, like Sucher’s extension or Apple’s Siri.

(link via [Faruk Ateş](https://twitter.com/#!/kurafire/status/138711379782803456))

More on movie money

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Film Industry, Follow Up, Scriptnotes

One of the many reasons I’m lucky to be married to my husband Mike is that he used to manage a bunch of movie theaters in LA, so he knows a lot about exhibition.

After listening to the Scriptnotes podcast on [movie money](http://johnaugust.com/2011/how-movie-money-works), he had some additional figures to share.

first personFilm rentals depend on various factors including length of run (the storied 90/10 split in opening week, but perhaps 30/70 in week 15) and location (“showcase” locations like Hollywood may have average film rentals around 35-40% due to studios’ eagerness to have the film at the most-visited or most-visible locations).

When I left exhibition in 2001, our average ticket price was about $6. Our film rental cost percentage was usually in the mid-50s. Assuming 55%, we paid the distributor $3.30 out of that $6 average ticket and kept $2.70.

Meanwhile, our average concession revenues were about $5 per transaction. However, only about 40% of customers bought something at concession, so the concession “per head” (analog to the average ticket price) was $2. So, revenue-wise, ticket sales were 75% of total revenues while our concession revenues were 25%.

However, concession cost of goods was about 15%, so out of the $2 concession sale per head, we paid 30¢ in expenses and kept $1.70. Given that, concession profits were 39% of the combined ticket and concession net.

Expenses are enormous, so even with super-high concession profits, exhibition was (and still is) always strapped for cash. You have a lot to pay out:

* Facility costs. This includes rent for the building, plus maintaining and upgrading furniture, fixtures, equipment.

* Staff and management payroll. Around 80% of employees were making within $1.50 of minimum wage, but you also have salaried management at both the theater and national level.

* Utilities and supplies, all the way down to soap and toilet paper.

One expense mentioned in the podcast was co-op ads. Co-ops were always a line item on our theatre P&L, and I was told that the studios placed the ad, but then charged every theatre whose name was listed in the theatre-list box below its proportional amount for the cost of that ad.

In LA, there are “showcase” theatres in the most important parts of the market (Santa Monica, Century City, Hollywood, Westwood) whose names appear larger in the co-ops, and for which actual show times are listed. Accordingly, the co-op cost to those locations is higher than for others.

How movie money works

Film Industry, Scriptnotes, Transcribed

When you read articles claiming every Hollywood movie loses money, an obvious question arises: “Why do they keep making them, then?” In this installment, John and Craig explain how the film industry spends and makes money.

It’s a big and complicated topic. You could easily spend a semester studying it — John did — but this overview should give you a sense of how it all works.

The most important thing to understand is that each film is accounted for separately. Studios charge distribution fees that earn money for the company without paying down the investment in each movie. That’s how Theoretical Pictures can turn a profit even when each of the last 20 films it has released shows a loss.

Because we’re throwing a lot of terms around this episode, here’s a handy cheat sheet:

John couldn’t remember the name of it (The Paramount Decree) but it’s worth reading up on the 1948 court decision [barring studios from owning movie theaters](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc.). Not only is it a fascinating anti-trust case, but it greatly influenced how the modern film industry works.

LINKS:

* Intro: [Mister T cartoon intro](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4WAG0z-hDo)
* Outro: [Fatback Band – (Are You Ready) Do The Bus Stop](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeeOPR8bxac)

You can download the episode here: [AAC](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_11.m4a).

UPDATE 11-17-11: The transcript of this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/scriptnotes-ep-11-how-movie-money-works-transcript).

Why France exhausts me

Books, Psych 101, Travel

I’ve only just started reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, but it’s already verified something I’d observed several times: France exhausts me.

I speak enough French that I can follow a conversation. My husband and his French friends are allowed to speak at full speed as long as they don’t expect me to say anything substantive — or if they speak some English, I’ll contribute my portion in that.

At the end of any day in which I’ve had to keep up in French, I’m zombie-tired. I’ve always explained it thusly: “I can speak French as long as I donate every available brain cell to it.”

Kahneman has my back. Basically, you have two mental systems:

> *System 1* operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.

> *System 2* allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it.

For languages you speak fluently, you’re working in System 1. It didn’t take any work for you to read this sentence. In fact, you couldn’t *not* understand the words in the sentence. It happens at a level below awareness or control.

But I don’t speak French fluently. I know just enough that I can process French in System 2, where I’m spending an enormous amount of mental energy trying to keep up with the conversation.

Kahneman would argue that “energy” is the way to think of it:

> System 2 and the electrical circuits in your home both have limited capacity, but they respond differently to threatened overload. A breaker trips when the demand for current is excessive, causing all devices on that circuit to lose power at once. In contrast, the response to mental overload is selective and precise: System 2 protects the most important activity, so it receives the attention it needs; “spare capacity” is allocated second by second to other tasks.

Either I can figure out how to get to the Louvre, or I can listen to Claire talk about her teaching job. I can’t do both.

It’s not me. It’s my brain.