Mel at the Movies: talking dollars and sense

What a nice outcome at the Oscars! A sorta-kinda gay movie right there in the spotlight ... the award for Best Actor bestowed upon a performer in a gay role -- and richly deserved. Is the cinema-going public changing? Is there a shift in the mindset of your average popcorn-muncher in the fourth row?

Could be. Here's an interesting quote:

Jim Carey and Ewan McGregor play love interests in the upcoming movie I Love You Philip Morris which is based upon a real life incident about a man who falls in love with his cell mate while in jail and escapes four times in order to be with his lover. Some critics worry that the film will be a problematic sell given that it is an overtly gay love story. However, they do like the film.

Several straight actors have played gay, lesbian or trans characters over the last few decades without incident, and without any problem in their careers.

For Carey, this movie makes his first foray into doing so, but McGregor is an old hand at playing gay characters. Adding into that list are Tom Hanks, Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman, and a much longer list. The notion that audiences may not like a movie due to a gay, lesbian or trans story line may be old thinking. While Milk has not been a blockbusting success the same way, say, The Dark Knight has been, it certainly has achieved a certain amount of commercial success, and a great deal of critical acclaim.
http://lezgetreal.com/?p=922&cpage=1

From what I've learned about Philip Morris, I have a feeling the movie might be a tad bit too explicit for the average audience -- and this would explain the reticence of distributors to be involved. It costs a ton of money to strike the prints to get a movie out on the road; exhibitors have to believe they can break even or better.

Now, sometimes it's impossible to second-guess movies. Australia was initially supposed to rival Titanic, and then it was supposed to be the world's biggest ever flop, and now -- hey, it's showing critics and audiences alike that it has enough staying power to be out there earning, long after it was supposed to be getting stamped into the surfaces of a few million DVDs. However, it's not going to magically transform itself into a boxoffice success, though it might break even -- in which case, all the DVD dollars are frosting on the cake. And like The Man From Snowy River, his one will probably "go platinum" on disk.

Why? Well, because Australia cost the grand total of $130m to make, which is a fleabite these days, by comparison with the budgets of "big movies" like the Pirates of the Caribbean films. In the days of yore, it used to be that $1 in $3 of the boxoffice made its way home to the studio that put up the financing, so a movie that cost $130m to make would have to earn $390 to break even...

These days it's very, very different. To begin with, it's $1 in $5 of the boxoffice that dribbles back to the investor ... but increasingly, the studio, the distributor and even the exhibitor are all branches of the same company which, in any case, is owned by something like Gulf Western, Coca Cola, whatever.

So while various divisions of the company might be showing a loss, the parent "machine" that drives this multi-national juggernaut is sitting pretty ... and it gets better.

The DVD revenues associated with movies can, and do, outstrip their boxoffice potential. You have global boxoffice to think about; plus the network TV premier; cable TV; pay per view; the DVD release; the BlueRay release; the TV rerun(s); the Netflix subscription service; and whatever merchandizing you've been able to scare up along the way.

Any way you slice it, movies are huge business, even though box office figures the world over are far from attractive. There's a site which makes fascinating browsing: BoxOfficeMojo.com ... enter in, and prepared to be astounded.

Russel Crowe in A Good Year ... directed by Ridley Scott, himself a legend. Total boxoffice gross: just under $7.5m ... you're not reading that wrongly. Nor did I mistype it! $7,459,300.

Kathleen Turner in her absolute hay day in V.I. Warshawski -- if she can't put bums on seats, who can? $11,128,308.

Johnny Deep and Charlieze Thieron (and I wouldn't be in the slightest surprised if I don't know how to spell that!) ... same bums-on-seats remark. The Astronaut's Wife. $10, 672,566.

Let's face it: if only the top 2% of movies ever broke even, Hollywood would have collapsed by now! The truth? Boxoffice is only part of the picture, and not even a large part.

Australia is at just under $50m, and still earning at the boxoffice before they get stuck into all the rest. Hey guys ... it's not that bad, really.

Little is happening in this neck of the woods. The big news (and terms are relative!) is that I did two posts to Legends today, and here they are:

http://mel-keegan-legends.blogspot.com/2009/02/chapter-nine-conclusion.html
and
http://mel-keegan-legends.blogspot.com/2009/02/oracle-knows.html

I haven't been able to look at Digital Kosmos for a week, and in this week I'll have to make a decision: gee, do I get five titles up on Amazon Kindle, or do I post to the photo blog. Duh. I'll get back to DK when time permits. Till them -- bear with me, guys!

Ciao for now,
MK

The Great Halloween Chocolate-athon

It happens twice per year ... there's no way to avoid it ... it's heaven for kids and natural born skinnies; it's hell for diabetics, dieters and health food store proprietors.

It's the Biennial Chocolate Olympics.

Now, in March or April these Olympics seem to be obsessed with rabbits, hatchling chickens and eggs ... which is perfectly understandable, when you remember that the festival of Easter started life as (!) Eostar, one of the high points of the (!!) pagan calendar, and the year's biggest, brightest, bestest (!!!) bonking tournament.

Yes: Eostar was a fertility festival ... hence the chocolate bunnies and eggs and chicks. Comparatively late in the scale of human evolution was Eostar was morphed into Easter by the early Church, which slightly renamed it. (They just weren't trying ... they could have called it Holy Hoppazoozitztide, and sworn to people it was a word that came straight from heaven, via the Ark of the Covenant, which had been stumbled over just the week before by the emperor's special operative in Judeah, Indianus Jonos, who was actually looking for the wreck of this really big, fat boat, and got a bum steer from a secondhand camel dealer who sold him the wrong map.)

In fact, Easter remained a bonking bonanza; only its name changed ... the church even allowed its very date to be set by the phases of the moon ... still true today, which is why Easter floats around like a cork in a bathtub.

And even now, 1683 years (calculators come in handy) after the Council of Nicea, where the new church's sacred days were fixed (hey, you've seen The Da Vinci Code, right?) Western Civilization is still bunny-happy, and egg-centric, and chick-obsessed, when the floating date of Holy Hoppazoozitztide -- whoops, Easter -- comes around again.

Only, we've translated the whole fertility cult into CHOCOLATE. Fertility ... sex ... procreation (if you're not bloody careful; if you're not contentedly gay; if you're not a person happily blessed with the DINK or MINK mindset) ... means the start of new life.

For the record: rabbits + eggs + chicks = sex = procreation = new life = chocolate.

Now, this explains one of the Biennial Chocolate Olympics ... or at least it explains the symbology, though I'm damned if I personally see the connection between a Mars Bar or a packet of Maltesers, and standing in the checkout line at Big W (Walmart in the US), behind an unfortunate young woman paying huge bucks for a 132-pack of Huggies ... though, I admit, the connection has been firmly established during the last several generations. It all looks a little bit weird to me, but then, what the hey, we're all human. Well, most of us are, anyway.

However, our civilization has more of this Big Fun in store. The second of the Biennial Chocolate Olympics takes place almost exactly six months later, at another renamed pagan festival: the whole place goes ballistic at Halloween, and -- whether or not you're diabetic, a dieter, or the proprietor of a health store -- you're wading up to your navel in chocolate. Again.

Halloween was last night (Here's my post: http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/10/halloween-memories.html), and this morning we still have a pile of chocolate left over after the trick-or-treaters finished. Now, the whole Halloween celebration has become a matter of costume parties and scary movies on DVD, while a few of the adults are out "trick of beering."

As I mentioned yesterday, for those folks of the pagan persuasion, it's Samhaine ... a time where no one minds if you have a big party (pagans really know how to party), but the festival is really about communicating with your deceased loved ones -- and dodging those people whom you really got barking-mad in this life, and they're dead now, and probably just as mad with you.

In other words: dead people + Samhaine = death = chocolate.

Right. Start of life = chocolate. End of life = chocolate. A pattern emerges.

Well, so long as the equations balance, I suppose. They're probably reciprocal anyway, so it could also be shown that

L=D/C+x

Where L is the number of years you've Lived to date, D = the number of your relatives who have passed away (Died), C = the average volume of Chocolate consumed by yourself without the assistance of family members or trick-or-treaters, and "x" is the amount, expressed in eith pounds or kilos, of weight you personally gain at each of these Biennial Chocolate Olympics.

There, now the whole thing makes a great deal more sense, doesn't it?

Chocolate is life, so "just do it," and if you do it often enough, the words "Death by Chocolate" will assume a whole new gravity.

Speaking of our Halloween -- we did not watch either Chocolat or Charlie & The Chocolate Factory. We watched Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Sleepy Hollow. Anyone notice how Halloween seems to be a kind of Johnny Depp Fest? Or is it a Tim Burton Fest? Well, either one. Those two seem to go together like caramel and fudge...



These are two good Halloween movies, if you're looking for blood by the bucket-fulls and heads getting whacked off in every direction. If you're looking for the best haunted house story, I recommend THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE; and if you're just looking for something to really creep you out, well, you could do worse than tune into any political broadcast issuing from the general vicinity of the USA. Shivers.

The US "goes to the polls" in about 100 hours, and like many people around this planet, I shall be holding my breath.

To folks on the other side of the dateline: Happy Halloween!

Cheers,
MK

Movie trilogies: part three mayhem

If you look at anything long enough, patterns emerge from the background tapestry of Life. There was a day when Cro Magnons looked into the sky and saw constellations ... when people looked into their spent teacups and discovered they could read the leaves ... and out of this simple and logical progression came the pseudo-science of market analysis. Eight minutes later, your ancestors could have been forgiven for running back and forth "doing a Doctor Smith," bleating, "We're doomed, doomed," until someone whacked them upside the head with a handy two-by-four. (Incidentally, Garry Oldman was great in the part. Seriously, what an actor.)

So, if you look at the whole, wide, thrashing ocean of movies -- as a realm, you understand; not any specific movie -- for long enough, you start to see patterns.

Like... Hollywood loves trilogies. And ... Part One is almost always The Best. And ... all the Part Threes seem to go ballistic.

Don't get me wrong: I love an action movie. The big action sequences are fantastic, especially in this age of CGI, where anything is likely to happen, and probably will if nobody exercises a little artistic or editorial restraint. The days when plot elements had to make sense -- or at least obey the more mundane rules of physics, such as gravity and inertia -- are gone, and unmourned.

However, the average age of the normal, ordinary, run-of-the-mill moviegoer is 14. Therefore, when movies are designed and executed to make a profit over their nine-figure budgets, they're targeted to ... tweaked for ... the fourteen year old, whose adolescent bum is the most usual form of bum found on any seat more or less in front of a big screen.

I've been asking myself if the average age of the audience might be the cause of Hollywood's current trend. I call it the "Top That! Syndrome." Basically, the symptoms are simple. No matter what you did in the previous movie, the next one has to out-do it.

So, Part One could afford to set up the characters, backstory some of them, expand on the screen presence of others -- with comprehensible dialog, and other qualities which are expendable in the future segments. This installment will still need massive effects and whacked-out action, because without these elements the film is going to bomb so badly, there won't even BE a second or third movie.

But Part Two is born under a cloud: it's a TTS baby, contracting Top That! Syndrome in utero. It has to be bigger, faster, wilder, funnier, bloodier ... and the audience will love it.

However, TTS has a phase where the patient will have a close encounter with disaster, a near-death encounter ... a phase that could easily be terminal, unless teams of specialists can drag it back from the brink, and resurrect it. And virtually all Part Threes come into the world teetering on the brink, because of Top That! Syndrome.

Some survive: Return of the King could only follow the book. Everything that could be done to top The Two Towers was done, but the framework for the material had been laid down decades before, so there were several pacing points, parts in the denouement where one could draw breath -- absolutely enforced scenes where the action had to stop!!

Most Part Threes are not allowed the benefit of these pivot points, where the characters stop running, shouting, shooting, fighting, crashing, whatever. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor ... Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End ... and even Revenge of the Sith is dangerously close to falling into the same category.

The entire movie has been converted to action sequence. All of it.

Surprise: I actually enjoyed these movies. You just have to get into the spirit of the mayhem, and there are times when I can. I also know that movies like Tomb of the Dragon Emperor were aimed, fair and square, at Mr. Average Moviegoer, age 14, complete with the popcorn, candy and acne, in the front row. These movies hit the bull's eye, and make a ton of money.

But (and some of you are going to be looking for a blunt instrument to throw at me for this) for myself, I far prefer The Curse of the Black Pearl, The Mummy, and old Fellowship of the Ring, the very first X-Men episode, and ... so on. Those where the action STOPPED occasionally; when people talked to each other, rather than yelling at one another over the roar of the oceans and engines and hurricanes.

By now, the news that Johnny Depp has signed for a Pirates of the Caribbean Part Four is old news. But I'll add my two cents' worth right here. Since they finished the original storyline, maybe they can go back to Square One, start over, and come up with a movie that has something more like the pace of Curse of the Black Pearl. Because ... I hate to think what will happen if the TTS is not arrested, retarded -- perhaps even cured. (Is it curable? One hopes so!)

The other bit of news that's old, now, is that Johnny has also signed to play Tonto in The Lone Ranger, against George Clooney. This will make interesting viewing! I wonder if they're going to do it 1950s twee (like the TV show), or if they'll have the nerve to tell the Old West like it was, historically ... dirt and fleas and racial discrimination and all. The movie could have a sting in its tail, if they do it right ... have George rescue Johnny from a lynch mob intent on murdering him for being born an Injun, for example... Hmmm.

Like the rest of the audience, I love action scenes; I'm just not wildly enthusiastic about having the whole movie converted to action. A nice blend would be preferable. Like ... Vertical Limit, and maybe even The Peacemaker, and Max Max, and Troy.

Lately, when I hear that there's going to be a trilogy spinning off a movie I really liked, I tend to groan quietly, because the probability is, the whole thing is eventually going to go haywire. It doesn't always happen. The Zorro movies haven't gone (yet) to a Part Three -- but Nostrakeeganus, he predicting they will. It'll be (!) Son of Zorro, in another five or ten years, when Antonio's and Catherine's celluloid kid is old enough to put on the mask. X-Men: The Last Stand was frenetic, but only borderline whacked out (it's main problem was, it was under-cooked: it should have been a half hour longer, with a great deal more in it ... but the developmental material was obviously ditched to push the action sequences closer together to get Mr. Average Moviegoer revved up in the front row. Damn).

Two of the current Hollywood franchises worry me -- because I liked them both. Iron Man is one of my favorite films, and to my mind, the best comic book movie yet done. The words "sequel" add "trilogy" have been uttered, and part of me is groaning.

The other franchise that worries me is already 66% of the way trough to the terminal phase of Top That! Syndrome ... Batman. The Dark Knight was furious, frenetic, full of comic violence and cartoon horror. Contrast it with the previous movie, Christian Bale's first outing as the Bat. The fact is, few people liked the first movie, Batman Begins (I was one of the few; I loved it ... it was realistic. Woah. So, naturally, audiences stayed away in droves and movie critics pounded it. Makes sense, right? The action sequences were in proportion, and stopped for long enough for characters to be constructed.)

Now, apply the symptoms of TTS to The Dark Knight ...! To Top That, what comes next? Oh ... dear.

The Mel Keegan Show ... and heeeeeer's Mel!

Someone said to me the other day, "Geez, your blog's gotten serious lately." And he was dead right. The last time we had a little fun on these pages was when I stated (categorically and somewhat emphatically, I Am Not Kevin Keegan, nor Am I Mel Gibson; and before that it was "Happy 100th Post," the infamous press release for Martian Boys are Easy starring Clooney and Pitt (Biff and Billy Bob)...

http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/09/clooney-and-pitt-to-star-in-hot-gay.html
(Golly, I'd love to see "The Cucumber Vanishes"...)

http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/09/will-real-mel-keegan-please-stand-up.html
(Strange, nobody's ever asked if Kevin Costner moonlights as Mel...)

So it's high time this blog lightened up and had a little fun, since I talked about politics an doomsday for several consecutive posts, and then delved into the serious business of publishing for almost a week.

Welcome to the Mel Keegan Show, all-singing, all-dancing.

[catchy theme music; chorus line of high-kicking dancing boys in skimpy costumes; spotlights wander about the stage, looking for tonight's Theme Host ... and there he is! Zoom to full shot.]

HOST: good evening, gents, ladies, and anyone else tuning in. My name is Johnny Depp and I'll be your host tonight, for an evening of mayhem and madness ... Keegan style!

Last week, Mel climbed aboard the political bandwagon for a short trip that went through fun territory like human rights, the end of the world as anyone knows it, World War III, Armageddon, the second coming and loads of good stuff like that. Well, Mel might have nailed a lot of the problems facing us in months and years to come, but here's Julie Brown, who set the whole thing to music ... and it goes like this...

JOHNNY: Thank you, thank you, to the lovely Julie Brown for saying it all for us. And here's a good one that's going around the Internet today: "How do you make Sarah Palin's eyes light up? You shine a flashlight in her ear."

[drums: drrrrrrr baboom!]

But moving right along, now, we want to bring you some good advice on this show. It's not all about doing what you want to do and having success handed to you. You gotta work ... you gotta strive, as MK's been saying for the last week (till most of us were tired of hearing it, right?) ... but in a lot of ways The Keeg makes a point. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. And here's the cat to prove it...

Now, was that cute, or what? Raise your hands, folks in our live studio audience here tonight, who's got a cat? Who's got a cat that sleeps on the bed? Who's got a cat that sleeps on the bed and throws up on the bedside carpet right where you step out in the morning? That's disgusting. You people are disgusting --

So maybe we'd better move right along to our celebrity feature. On tonight's show, we're pleased and proud to bring you the very lovely and talented Mister John Barrowman!



And as the late, great Eric Morcambe used to say ... there's no answer to that.

Now, not all of our rabid JB fans know that John just happens to be a native speaking Scotsman. In fact, some of you might refuse to believe it, so here's proof, and if you still don't believe, write a nice letter, take it up with JB:



There you are, you see? He's the Tartan Terror at home. And unfortunately that's all we have time for on tonight's show, so we'll go cut to the Highballs, who'll dance us out of the end titles ... and don't miss next week's show, when your Theme Host will be Sean Bean, and our celebrity guest is Ja Ja Binks.

From all of us here at The Mel Keegan Show ... have a good one!

Night of the Living Dead

...which is soon to be a major motion picture entitled Kreeping Krudd II: The Hacking. (For those who have tuned in late: Keegan came down with the head cold eveyone else has had, has, or is getting, and it's going the full monty, with the sinus pressure, sore throat, hacking cough, the works. This is day two.)

What I need right now isn't cough syrup. That's just delaying the inevitable (the cough will come right back). What I need is to get rid of it permanently. Something along the lines of a radical amputation at the shoulders. A nose-ectomy won't do the job: the throat has to go too.

Seriously, guys, if anyone knows how to contact the Headless Horseman, just give me his number, and I'll go stand in the yard tonight and watch out for him, make sure he doesn't miss me and ride on, by mistake.

Actually, Sleepy Hollow is one of my favorite movies. For some reason I missed it on the big screen, but it plays well on DVD, and one can only applaud Tim Burton for his fresh take on the old idea. The effects are fine; and the digital grading, which drops out virtually every color save the red of blood, is most effective. Johnny Depp is the acknowledged master of accents, and he does extremely well as Ichabod Crane -- ghost-pale and uptight, the exact reversal of Jack Sparrow. The humorous touch makes Ichabod strangely believable: he's squeamish, phobic about spiders, and terrified of the supernatural ... which also underscores his courage, in forging ahead anyway, and doing what no one else in the Hollow will. Full marks to the supporting cast too; it was cast in London, with veterans lieke Michael Gough, Michael Gambon, Richard Griffith, and that guy who played the Emperor in Star Wars, and whose name escapes me utterly at this moment. You know the one I mean. Ian MacD...something. Him.

You've probably heard that the movie of Sleepy Hollow is absoltely nothing like the original story, and this is quite true. However, it's just as true that Washington Irvine's classic story is marvelous: I don't think I've ever read a more beautifully written story. His prose has almost the sound of poetry, and his turn of phrase is inspiring. I don't think there's an in-print version of the story at this time, but I did manage to track it down.

Let me save you the trouble:

sleepyhollow.txt ... it's just a text file, download size is just over 88kb, and it's been virus-scanned by AVG. It's the Project Guttenberg file, plain text, and public domain. Enjoy. This is a great piece to read on a winter's evening, accompanied by whisky and the crackle of a live fire.

As you can guess, I'm not getting through too much work right now. Survival is close to the top of my priorities list. I'd get on with the fresh edit of AQAMARINE, but I can't concentrate worth a damn. Put it like this: when you're so sick you can lose the plot of SPACEBALLS (!) don't even think about trying to work. Sheesh. (Besides, who needs plot when you've got the young Bill Pullman looking so cute it ought to be illegal?)

And yes, I know: Keegan is making less sense than usual. Bear with me.

To answer a recent question: no, I don't actually take on freelance editing assignments ... for good reasons. If it's going to be done right, the work is amazingly time consuming, and I don't believe writers who are just setting out to work their way into the market should start out under the kosh of huge editing bills. (The other side to that statement is, nobody can afford to work for a few bucks on the hour these days. It's getting too hard to make a living! If you're not going to starve, you have to charge a reasonable fee per hour, and an in-depth edit can take 50-100 hours. The math works out horrifically.)

Also, I try not to edit for friends, because ... it's delicate, and it gets emotional. Even confrontational. Nobody actually likes to be edited; many new writers seem to take it as a personal insult. Yet an otherwise good story can need a VLCC-load of work at the copy editing stage to get it into professional trim. Now, if you pay an editor to do the work for you, you'll certainly get it done in one shot, but (depending on how much work needed to be done, and what the editor's fees are) the bill could be appalling. You could be looking at two, even three grand.

For this much, I'd expect the editing job to be so smooth and slick, the book should stand an excellent chance of winning a contract. However, the downside is, few first-timers are paid very much. It would be very possible to sell the book and have the royalties earned not even cover the editing bill. (Plus, selling a book can be a crapshoot. You could pay for the editing and not still get a professional contract. There are scores of sound reasons for failure to sell, of which the quality of the work is only one!)

The last snippet of logic I'd like to apply to this question looks beyond the first sale (which might have turned into a break-even situation). You're hoping to sell many more books than one. If you LEARNED to edit yourself, you don't have to pay editing fees on each subsequent work. If you outsourced your editing, you might have learned little (or nothing) from the experience. In short -- on your next book, you're looking down the double-barrels of the same shotgun. Until or unless you start to sell well, and earn big, the editors will be profiting from your royalties.

My advice to anyone just starting out? LEARN. Join a writer's workshop, if you like to work in groups. Take a course, if you have have some spare cash to lay down. Or else buy the books, and actually read them. For instance, start with a used copy of something along the lines of THE HARBRACE COLLEGE HANDBOOK, and puzzle through it. Apply what you've learned to your own writing. Hammer your typing, spelling, punctuation and grammar into good order. Get this out of the way, and next you can look at your writing STYLE, which is such a massive (and contentious) subject, people have written tomes about it.

Incidentally, I'll be writing on this subject myself in the near future. I've agreed to contribute to a new Internet-driven project, a kind of 'Want to write my novel' website, where every topic from getting ideas to getting published will be tackled. My brains are about to get picked -- and that's cool.

Right now, the best thing I could think of to give to a new, aspiring writer who needs quick editing results is another link to another little ebook. It's also a freebie, yours for the downloading. ELEMENTS OF STYLE is an old-ish book, but the vast majority of its info is never going to go past some use-by date:

Elements of Style is packed as a zip archive; inside is setup.exe which explodes a printable ebook. (Apologies to Mac users; I don't know of a version for your platform -- there probably is one, but you'd have to hunt it down for yourselves. Not being a Mac user, I guess I'm not so well versed in where to find your kind of executables.)

The zip file has been virus scanned, and it's another freebie (sometimes the best tools for the job are free), and you can LEARN. With this little book, and a good college handbook, you should be able to get your editing along to the point where a light, even superficial 'polish' from a pro freelance editor should do the job. You'll still be looking at $350-$600, something in that ballpark ... but not a ruinous bill.

Best of luck in your endeavors!

Now, I'm going to crawl off and find somewhere warm and soft to expire...