THB #93: The Batman (no spoilers)
| March 6, 2022
“My friend Alan Stern called my psychiatrist. At one in the morning he comes to my house, and we have this long conversation. My gun, a blue steel six-cylinder revolver, is on the table. He’s just about to call Cedars to have me committed. I’m trying to talk my way out of this. Finally, he sort of agrees with me that I’m not a threat to my own life at the moment. But he says, “I have to take the gun.” Well, time goes by—I get married, have children. It’s 30 years later and I’m in Los Angeles. I’m curious, so I go to his office. He’s now in his mid-80s. I say to him, “I don’t know if you remember, but you came to my house in the middle of the night. I had a gun and you took it from me.” He opens a drawer and puts the gun on the table. He says, “I’ve kept this gun ever since, because it reminds me of what I really do for a living.” I say, “I don’t suppose you would give it back?” He says, “Oh no, I wouldn’t.”
An Oral History Of American Gigolo, Which Is 40
-30-
May 1, 2022
"Netflix, the great disrupter whose algorithms and direct-to-consumer platform have forced powerful media incumbents to rethink their economic models, now seems to need a big strategy change itself. It got me thinking about the simple idea that my film and TV production company Blumhouse is built on: If you give artists a lot of creative freedom and a little money upfront but a big stake in the movie’s or TV show’s commercial success, more often than not the result will be both commercial (the filmmakers are incentivized to make films that will resonate with audiences) and artistically interesting (creative freedom!). This approach has yielded movies as varied as Get Out (made for $4.5 million, with worldwide box office receipts of more than $250 million), Whiplash (made for $3.3 million, winner of three Academy Awards), The Invisible Man (made for $7 million, earned more than $140 million) and Paranormal Activity (made for $15,000, grossed more than $190 million).From the beginning, the most important strategy I used to persuade artists to work with me was to make radically transparent deals: We usually paid the artists (“participants” in Hollywood lingo) the absolute minimum allowable by union contracts upfront, with the promise of healthy bonuses based on actual box office results—instead of the opaque 'percentage points' that artists are usually offered. Anyone can see box office results immediately, so creators don’t quarrel with the payouts. In fact, when it comes time for an artist to collect a bonus based on box office receipts, I email a video clip of myself dropping the check off at FedEx to the recipient."
Jason Blum Sees Room For "Scrappier" Netflix
| April 30, 2022
"As a critic Gavin was entertaining, wry, questioning, sensitive, perceptive"
Critic-Filmmaker Gavin Millar Was 84; Films Include Cream In My Coffee, Dreamchild
April 29, 2022
| January 24, 2022
DP/30 Audio: Bombshell, Jay Roach
| December 13, 2019
DP/30 Audio: The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Jonathan Majors
| December 4, 2019
DP/30 Audio: The Mustang, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre
| December 4, 2019
No Responses to “Schrader”