THB #93: The Batman (no spoilers)
| March 6, 2022
“Heather Havrilesky loves her husband, you numbskulls. The humor writer and longtime advice columnist published an essay, “Marriage Requires Amnesia”—an excerpt from her forthcoming book, “Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage”—in the New York Times. This led to an inexplicably angry Twitter fight among readers about whether she should leave her marriage. (Or whether her husband, wronged by this shocking display of dirty laundry, should leave her.) The argument for dissolving Havrilesky’s marriage is that she said, in so many words, she hates her husband. In The New York Times! Can you imagine? Surely, there could be no clearer signal that a relationship is over. The argument against: Oh my god. Irony exists. Hyperbole exists. Please get better at reading. Havrilesky loves her husband, Joe Biden won the election, COVID-19 is not just a cold, the Omicron variant is bananas contagious, vaccines are safe and effective, climate change is real, the fascist threat we face is not coming from the left, Aristotle was not Belgian, the central message of Buddhism is not “Every man for himself,” etc. Not everything the internet treats as ambiguous actually is. Texts generally do contain evidence that certain interpretations are more valid than others.”
-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
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