Another egregious thing about the high budgets is that it's often at the expense of screwing over visual effects artists. The actors/writers/directors and probably some of the crew are unionized and at least in theory have some influence over how much they're exploited by the movie studio.
But visual effects artists aren't (or at least weren't as of recently) and are often overworked and given absurd deadlines to meet. And then they're the ones often singled out for criticism for their work being subpar when in reality they did the best they could under ridiculous circumstances.
It feels to me as if the industry has been getting progressively more staid and derivative over the course of the past fifteen years or so? Some of this might just be my own tastes changing in the opposite direction of the version of pop culture Hollywood tends to be centered around. I don't think all of it is explainable by that though. The remakes of remakes, the remakes of sequels, the sequels of remakes, it feels like as long as it's been done before, the impulse is to keep doing it until no one can stand the entire franchise at all. (Whichever one they're doing). There was a period in the 2000's where I really enjoyed a lot of things that came out. Some of them are still favorites. "Eternal Sunshine", "Me, You, and Everyone Else" "Synecdoche, New York" " Being John Malcovich"... what happened?
greater access to streaming has meant that movies have to be more Big Events to get people to go to the theater; that means legacy properties/sequels/films that they're sure have a big built in audience beforehand.
The good news is that streaming also means that a lot of great movies are accessible now that wouldn't have been made before. things like I Saw the TV Glow or Monkey Man; hard to see those getting made even 15 years ago.
mostly agree but in our overworked and burdened society there are people that would never read books or see a play but might watch a show or movie that would open their minds to alternate ways of being. I remember reading ( I think in freakonomics?) that the rise of soap operas in India correlated to a drop in individual birth rates because people saw what lives they could lead if they had fewer children like the glamorous soap stars who had one or two kids. You frequently cant be what you cant see and those whose only exposure to a successful/powerful black, gay or trans person might be through film because they live in rural America might be profoundly changed. I think Will and Grace probably helped shift middle class acceptance of Gay Marriage. Theres a reason right wing reactionaries are always screaming about hollywood, tv and film because they know it can influence people.
::Compare this to science-fiction and fantasy film. Neither Dune 2 nor Alien: Romulus include LGBT characters::
Maybe because when they DO, a certain segment of fandom loses its shit so utterly it terrifies studios? I mainly HATE STAR TREK: DISCOVERY (mostly because I consider its creator Alex Kurtzman a talentless hack!), but one of the things I really like about it is that it has LGBTQIA characters front and center—and not just "hawt lesbians!", either. They have male gay couples like Stamets and Culber, nonbinary couples like Adira and Gray, and I PRESUME Jett Reno is gay because Tig Notaro is, though if you told me she was enginesexual I'd believe you! But a lot of the Cishet Straight White Male Fanbase.... 🤦♂️
Again, this is because you're thinking Big-Budget Hollywood, who wants to appeal to a queer audience, but is TERRIFIED of pissing off the dudebro fans and getting Right Wing hypocrites (as they all are!) up in arms. This sounds like a job for low-budget indies, who even when they're not good (there are a number of LGBTQIA STAR TREK fan videos out there, and most of them are really cheap and badly-acted!) are representing for the queer community. This might be a good place for beginning effects people to build up their portfolios, or filmmakers into effects like Gareth Edwards to make low-budget queer SF—or even queer SF fans who don't need STAR WARS Prequel-level effects to tell a SF story that represents them. (I really liked the first season of Netflix's ALTERED CARBON series for making it clear that race and gender were just "sleeves"—they got right what the movie version of GHOST IN THE MACHINE got so utterly, incredibly wrong! Sorry, ScarJo—nobody believes you're actually Japanese....)
sure, there's pushback...but there's lots of pushback in SF print fandom too! there's always backlash; the question is how the creators/fandom handles it.
::there's lots of pushback in SF print fandom too!::
Oy, don't I know it! My then-wife and I were supposed to go to London for Worldcon 2014, but couldn't afford it for both of us so we didn't go. We were passingly active in the SF community during that time, being on panel at various Cons and the like....
I remember hearing about the HUGE dust-up from Ann Leckie winning the Best Novel Hugo for ANCILLARY JUSTICE from the "Sad/Rabid Puppies" crowd of Cichet Straight White Right-Wing Male SF fans, and how that lot engaged in some serious shenanigans to get Kevin J. Anderson's THE DARK BETWEEN THE STARS nominated for the next Hugo awards. Anderson, despite being the kind of Red Meat White Dude writer the Puppies liked, wasn't thrilled to be lumped in with them, and tried to distance himself from their decidedly toxic views on SF and fandom.
I still think Season 1 of ALTERED CARBON, at least, did a better job at its race and gender issues than you did, certainly—especially given it was a Netflix original, which is not a service I think about when I consider "daring" SF!
::In contrast, to write a novel you need…maybe a $1000 laptop, which you can then also use for other stuff.::
Not even $1,000, Noah! You could get a Dell Inspiron with an 11th Gen Core i5 processor, 16 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD for under $500 on Amazon. And a Mac Mini with a M4 chip, 16 GB RAM and a 256 GB SSD is only $599, which for a Mac is insanely cheap—and driving career Apple-haters like Linus Tech Tips' Linus Sebastian INSANE with trying to justify why it's bad, it sucks, it's Apple, it's awful, I hate it for one-upping my PRECIOUS Gamer Windoze WAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!
::Linus should never EVER review anything from Apple, since he has a psychopathic hatred for the company.::
So you can write a book, or even a screenplay (which I realize you're trying to backpedal from), for half of what you're talking about. You can even use freeware office suites like LibreOffice or Google Workspace so you don't have to pay a subscription fee for MS Office.
A fantastic point, which needs to be amplified. A somewhat related topic is the environmental impact of film-making, which is of course considerable and doesn't seem to get much attention beyond specialized and academic publications.
::smaller budget films like The Substance ($17.5 million) or Monkey Man ($10 million) are built on budget numbers that would set you up for retirement if they appeared in your bank account. Even tiny budget films like The Blair Witch Project ($600,000) are too expensive for most people to put together without substantial fundraising and capital.::
Maybe part of the problem is you're only looking at larger-budgeted, or heavily-marketed movies? Yes, a $200M movie is going to have to scrape to every half-wig in existence just to get made, but SKINAMARINK was made for $15K, the first PARANORMAL ACTIVITY was initially made for even less ($10K), EL MARIACHI was made for even less than that ($7K). While TANGERINE was relatively expensive at $100K, it was shot on consumer cameraphones with consumer external mics, which means making cheap movies is certainly something that can be done....
So if you have a smartphone with a UHD camera, $50 for an external mic to attach to it (or a second cameraphone if you want to work with double-system audio), anywhere from $30 - a few hundred for battery-operated LED lights (or if you're willing to shoot outdoors and in available light, $20 for some tinfoil and large pieces of cardboard for reflectors!), and the time to teach yourself the free version of Davinci Resolve like I've been doing over the last year (no strings, no need to use Mac OS or Windows OS)? You can make a feature if you can write it, find people willing to work for free or very little money, and put in the "sweat equity".
Don't blame the medium for the industry, Noah—they WANT big movies because they want Big BIG paydays. There are a lot of people out there making microbudget features, and some are quite successful—even the "unsuccessful" ones are getting seen, at least, thanks to streaming platforms including YouTube and Dailymotion, and small-scale "boutique" distributors like A24 and Blumhouse. Maybe in a year or two I'll be one of them—how do you feel about a horror film lampoon of Hallmark Christmas movies...? 😁
PS: It also doesn't help when critics have their knives out for filmmakers spending a lot of their own money for a passion project, like nearly every critic did for Coppola's MEGALOPOLIS. If you want less corporate movies, maybe you shouldn't eviscerate big-budget non-corporate movies when they appear?
15,000 is a huge amount compared to how much it costs to make a book.
yes you can make micro-features. they're still a lot more expensive than the similar DIY analogs in music and print. Film is just really expensive, at every price level, in comparison to the alternatives.
(Like Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity is famous for costing almost nothing to make; it's well known as an outlier.)
Yes, but a movie hits in a way a book never can—for one thing, how many of the people you want to reach actually READ?
For another? I'd rather spend $15K to make a microbudget movie than a write a book I'd end up spending almost the same amount to self-publish and promote, and even a failed movie will attract more eyeballs than a middling-successful novel.
Nobody's telling you you can't write a book—unlike you trying to tell me I shouldn't make movies, which is how this column came off, and why I responded. Yes, I'm sure that NOT what you intended, but that's how it came off to me—and made me more determined than ever to make microbudgeted movies just because you say I can't!
yep; TV budgets are lower, and in large part because of that, television tends to be more open to women creators especially, but also to other marginalized groups.
Another egregious thing about the high budgets is that it's often at the expense of screwing over visual effects artists. The actors/writers/directors and probably some of the crew are unionized and at least in theory have some influence over how much they're exploited by the movie studio.
But visual effects artists aren't (or at least weren't as of recently) and are often overworked and given absurd deadlines to meet. And then they're the ones often singled out for criticism for their work being subpar when in reality they did the best they could under ridiculous circumstances.
It feels to me as if the industry has been getting progressively more staid and derivative over the course of the past fifteen years or so? Some of this might just be my own tastes changing in the opposite direction of the version of pop culture Hollywood tends to be centered around. I don't think all of it is explainable by that though. The remakes of remakes, the remakes of sequels, the sequels of remakes, it feels like as long as it's been done before, the impulse is to keep doing it until no one can stand the entire franchise at all. (Whichever one they're doing). There was a period in the 2000's where I really enjoyed a lot of things that came out. Some of them are still favorites. "Eternal Sunshine", "Me, You, and Everyone Else" "Synecdoche, New York" " Being John Malcovich"... what happened?
greater access to streaming has meant that movies have to be more Big Events to get people to go to the theater; that means legacy properties/sequels/films that they're sure have a big built in audience beforehand.
The good news is that streaming also means that a lot of great movies are accessible now that wouldn't have been made before. things like I Saw the TV Glow or Monkey Man; hard to see those getting made even 15 years ago.
The trailer for “Monkey Man” looks pretty cool, plus my 13 expressed interest as well. She's very fond of revenge fantasies ❤️
It's super entertaining.
I just have to put down the trashy book I'm reading and watch them.
mostly agree but in our overworked and burdened society there are people that would never read books or see a play but might watch a show or movie that would open their minds to alternate ways of being. I remember reading ( I think in freakonomics?) that the rise of soap operas in India correlated to a drop in individual birth rates because people saw what lives they could lead if they had fewer children like the glamorous soap stars who had one or two kids. You frequently cant be what you cant see and those whose only exposure to a successful/powerful black, gay or trans person might be through film because they live in rural America might be profoundly changed. I think Will and Grace probably helped shift middle class acceptance of Gay Marriage. Theres a reason right wing reactionaries are always screaming about hollywood, tv and film because they know it can influence people.
oh sure. and as I mention in the piece, television is actually a good bit better than film in terms of being open to diverse creators and stories.
and of course music is generally cheaper and more accessible than film!
::Compare this to science-fiction and fantasy film. Neither Dune 2 nor Alien: Romulus include LGBT characters::
Maybe because when they DO, a certain segment of fandom loses its shit so utterly it terrifies studios? I mainly HATE STAR TREK: DISCOVERY (mostly because I consider its creator Alex Kurtzman a talentless hack!), but one of the things I really like about it is that it has LGBTQIA characters front and center—and not just "hawt lesbians!", either. They have male gay couples like Stamets and Culber, nonbinary couples like Adira and Gray, and I PRESUME Jett Reno is gay because Tig Notaro is, though if you told me she was enginesexual I'd believe you! But a lot of the Cishet Straight White Male Fanbase.... 🤦♂️
Again, this is because you're thinking Big-Budget Hollywood, who wants to appeal to a queer audience, but is TERRIFIED of pissing off the dudebro fans and getting Right Wing hypocrites (as they all are!) up in arms. This sounds like a job for low-budget indies, who even when they're not good (there are a number of LGBTQIA STAR TREK fan videos out there, and most of them are really cheap and badly-acted!) are representing for the queer community. This might be a good place for beginning effects people to build up their portfolios, or filmmakers into effects like Gareth Edwards to make low-budget queer SF—or even queer SF fans who don't need STAR WARS Prequel-level effects to tell a SF story that represents them. (I really liked the first season of Netflix's ALTERED CARBON series for making it clear that race and gender were just "sleeves"—they got right what the movie version of GHOST IN THE MACHINE got so utterly, incredibly wrong! Sorry, ScarJo—nobody believes you're actually Japanese....)
sure, there's pushback...but there's lots of pushback in SF print fandom too! there's always backlash; the question is how the creators/fandom handles it.
I'm not really a fan of altered carbon; I think it's a good example of hte problems with mainstream SF I'm talking about. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/netflix-s-altered-carbon-season-2-yet-another-missed-opportunity-ncna1144136
::there's lots of pushback in SF print fandom too!::
Oy, don't I know it! My then-wife and I were supposed to go to London for Worldcon 2014, but couldn't afford it for both of us so we didn't go. We were passingly active in the SF community during that time, being on panel at various Cons and the like....
I remember hearing about the HUGE dust-up from Ann Leckie winning the Best Novel Hugo for ANCILLARY JUSTICE from the "Sad/Rabid Puppies" crowd of Cichet Straight White Right-Wing Male SF fans, and how that lot engaged in some serious shenanigans to get Kevin J. Anderson's THE DARK BETWEEN THE STARS nominated for the next Hugo awards. Anderson, despite being the kind of Red Meat White Dude writer the Puppies liked, wasn't thrilled to be lumped in with them, and tried to distance himself from their decidedly toxic views on SF and fandom.
I still think Season 1 of ALTERED CARBON, at least, did a better job at its race and gender issues than you did, certainly—especially given it was a Netflix original, which is not a service I think about when I consider "daring" SF!
::In contrast, to write a novel you need…maybe a $1000 laptop, which you can then also use for other stuff.::
Not even $1,000, Noah! You could get a Dell Inspiron with an 11th Gen Core i5 processor, 16 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD for under $500 on Amazon. And a Mac Mini with a M4 chip, 16 GB RAM and a 256 GB SSD is only $599, which for a Mac is insanely cheap—and driving career Apple-haters like Linus Tech Tips' Linus Sebastian INSANE with trying to justify why it's bad, it sucks, it's Apple, it's awful, I hate it for one-upping my PRECIOUS Gamer Windoze WAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!
::Linus should never EVER review anything from Apple, since he has a psychopathic hatred for the company.::
So you can write a book, or even a screenplay (which I realize you're trying to backpedal from), for half of what you're talking about. You can even use freeware office suites like LibreOffice or Google Workspace so you don't have to pay a subscription fee for MS Office.
A fantastic point, which needs to be amplified. A somewhat related topic is the environmental impact of film-making, which is of course considerable and doesn't seem to get much attention beyond specialized and academic publications.
::smaller budget films like The Substance ($17.5 million) or Monkey Man ($10 million) are built on budget numbers that would set you up for retirement if they appeared in your bank account. Even tiny budget films like The Blair Witch Project ($600,000) are too expensive for most people to put together without substantial fundraising and capital.::
Maybe part of the problem is you're only looking at larger-budgeted, or heavily-marketed movies? Yes, a $200M movie is going to have to scrape to every half-wig in existence just to get made, but SKINAMARINK was made for $15K, the first PARANORMAL ACTIVITY was initially made for even less ($10K), EL MARIACHI was made for even less than that ($7K). While TANGERINE was relatively expensive at $100K, it was shot on consumer cameraphones with consumer external mics, which means making cheap movies is certainly something that can be done....
So if you have a smartphone with a UHD camera, $50 for an external mic to attach to it (or a second cameraphone if you want to work with double-system audio), anywhere from $30 - a few hundred for battery-operated LED lights (or if you're willing to shoot outdoors and in available light, $20 for some tinfoil and large pieces of cardboard for reflectors!), and the time to teach yourself the free version of Davinci Resolve like I've been doing over the last year (no strings, no need to use Mac OS or Windows OS)? You can make a feature if you can write it, find people willing to work for free or very little money, and put in the "sweat equity".
Don't blame the medium for the industry, Noah—they WANT big movies because they want Big BIG paydays. There are a lot of people out there making microbudget features, and some are quite successful—even the "unsuccessful" ones are getting seen, at least, thanks to streaming platforms including YouTube and Dailymotion, and small-scale "boutique" distributors like A24 and Blumhouse. Maybe in a year or two I'll be one of them—how do you feel about a horror film lampoon of Hallmark Christmas movies...? 😁
PS: It also doesn't help when critics have their knives out for filmmakers spending a lot of their own money for a passion project, like nearly every critic did for Coppola's MEGALOPOLIS. If you want less corporate movies, maybe you shouldn't eviscerate big-budget non-corporate movies when they appear?
15,000 is a huge amount compared to how much it costs to make a book.
yes you can make micro-features. they're still a lot more expensive than the similar DIY analogs in music and print. Film is just really expensive, at every price level, in comparison to the alternatives.
(Like Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity is famous for costing almost nothing to make; it's well known as an outlier.)
Yes, but a movie hits in a way a book never can—for one thing, how many of the people you want to reach actually READ?
For another? I'd rather spend $15K to make a microbudget movie than a write a book I'd end up spending almost the same amount to self-publish and promote, and even a failed movie will attract more eyeballs than a middling-successful novel.
Nobody's telling you you can't write a book—unlike you trying to tell me I shouldn't make movies, which is how this column came off, and why I responded. Yes, I'm sure that NOT what you intended, but that's how it came off to me—and made me more determined than ever to make microbudgeted movies just because you say I can't!
I would watch the horror film you’re proposing. I watch a lot of streamed horror movies. Some are actually really good!
yep; TV budgets are lower, and in large part because of that, television tends to be more open to women creators especially, but also to other marginalized groups.