THB #93: The Batman (no spoilers)
| March 6, 2022
“What is the point of having a multicultural public broadcaster if you’re not going to give the people that it pretends to support a chance to lead it and shape its content?”
“A colleague and I were at our desks in the TV and online department [at Australia network SBS], talking about an interview I had done with Gurinder Chadha, the director of Bend It Like Beckham. Two other colleagues joined. I pointed out that she and I shared some heritage – we were both Punjabi (our families came from that Indian state; I’m also half Puerto Rican). “No, you’re not, you’re American,” said one colleague, kindly erasing and explaining my cultural heritage to me. He then told a story about encountering the director in some unfavourable capacity. “She had that Indian thing where she was very rude,” he said. I didn’t quite believe what I was hearing so I offered him the chance to walk it back, suggesting that if she was rude, maybe it wasn’t necessarily because she was Indian. Did he actually mean to say that, like all people, some Indians were rude? Nope. He’d spent time in India and he was sure – Indian people were rude. I gave him another out: Chadha was raised in Britain, so was there something innate about rudeness in Indians that had been passed down to her? Yes, he said, tripling down and adding that if he ever saw her again he’d kick her in the teeth. Then the two colleagues walked off. I was shocked at how comfortable this person seemed while saying those things – and that the other colleague with that person thought it was funny.”
-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
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DP/30 Audio: Bombshell, Jay Roach
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DP/30 Audio: The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Jonathan Majors
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DP/30 Audio: The Mustang, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre
| December 4, 2019
No Responses to “SBS Racist”