Get rich quick

by Jason Preston on December 30, 2005

Despite the fact that every get rich quick scheme ever only makes one person rich, and it usually isn’t you, I’m always looking for the opportunity to get in on one. Because you never know, it just might work this time.

I know it isn’t respectable money, and I’ll be roundy criticized by the upper class for having poor taste in art, but who doesn’t have that dream of whimsically stumbling upon millions of dollars. Accidentally find oil in your back yard? Instantly you can have a palace with palm trees and little men whose skin shines with oil as they fan you with branches plucked from your garden and feed you almonds all day.

I’m also extremely jealous of everone whose succeeding at “getting rich quick” (&easy). Peter Jackson counts in this cateory for me. He coasted to billionair movie mogul status by convincing The Suits to give him money to make movies of other people’s famous stories. Despite the fact that the Lord of the Rings took a lot of work, per se, virtually none of that work was his. He just sat around and played with cameras and CG. Also, he hired his own digital effects company for exhorbatent sums, so he was rich even if the movie flopped.

Finally, I’m extremely jealous of this kid. Simply by selling pixels on his web page, he has made more money in four months than Uganda did last year. He calls it the “million dollar homepage,” and he sells each one of a million pixels for a dollar. He has sold 911,000 pixels because he gets so much traffic that it’s worth advertising on. This is pure spectacle!

I hate him. I hope he chokes on the almonds.

  • http://www.kylecoberly.com Kyle

    WOAHWOAHWOAH, have you ever seen seen the appendix discs to LOTR? I think Peter Jackson earned his keep just fine.

    -Kyle

  • Jason

    I have seen the appendix discs. I have also seen movies made. Peter Jackson himself did surprisingly little that couldn’t be done by anyone else.

    I give him credit for the script (which he wrote with Fran Walsh and Phillippa Boyens, so who knows how much he actually did). But his job during all of that production was most likely to tell his ADs to shoot scenes, wach monitors, and gladhand the actors.

    I’m sure he’s a cool guy. I’m just mad because he’s made gazillions from other peoples (read: Tolkien’s) phenominal creation by essentially repackaging it.

  • http://www.kylecoberly.com Kyle

    Well, he was also the producer. As the director, he was responsible for that incredible acting; as a producer, he was the logistics man for the hands-down most ambitious cinematic undertaking of all time. I think you’re selling him short hardcore.

  • Jason

    Most of this is probably my snooty little “LA school film student been to Hollywood” attitude, but I think people give directors and producers far too much credit. They’re convenient because they’re analogous to book authors, a format we’ve been familiar with since time immemorial, but that’s about convenience, not accuracy.

    I can’t claim to have been part of anything major; I was an extra on the OC for two days, and I was in an independent movie that never made it to post-production, but I’ve also made several student films and spent a lot of time learning about the process of filmmaking in general, and Hollywood productions in particular.

    As I see it, no film can be made without a very cooperative effort. There’s a reason the end-movie credits rarely take less than five minutes, and that reason is the incredible amount of people it takes to put a movie together. Producers come in many different shapes and sizes, but even when they’re on set, the producer’s job is essentially to keep tabs on the money.

    The director, in contrast, is more of an “orchestrator” than anything particularly hands-on. They’re reponsible, together with the producers, for the final cut of what will make it to the theaters, and for the general look and feel of the movie, (and now increasingly with cgi shots) but specific camera angles, scene construction, composition, mise en scene, and lighting setup are largely tangential to their job.

    Directors do often work with actors to get the kind of performances they want, and while I often give credit where credit is due, it’s hard for me to believe that outside of a few, new actors (Orlando Bloom, some of the hobbits) Peter Jackson had a lot to contribute to their performances. Actors like Christopher Lee, Ian Holm, Sean Astin, and Viggo Mortensen don’t need to be coaxed into good performances so much as they need to understand the nature of the film.

    Essentially, I’m saying that directors in general get too much credit, and Peter Jackson in particular has no particular claim to pretentious academic terms like “auteur” from any particular strength in style. His “directing style” is “extremely bland and textbook.”

    While every shot works for that very reason, it also very specifically means that he himself gave far less “character” to the movies than many directors do.

    I do credit Jackson with being intelligent. He’s smart enough to know this, and smart enough to relegate things that should be relegated. He’s a likeable guy, too. I think the new Star Wars films are a great example of how if you try to make a movie too much of a one-man-project, it falls apart. Star Wars was entirely Lucas. It was his script, his CGI, the actors read the lines the way he told them to and in short, it robbed the film of its character.

    It can go both ways.

    I give Peter Jackson a lot of credit for being able to pull off both The Lord of the Rings and King Kong. I give him “savvyness” credit. But I have yet to be impressed with his directing or his artistic talent. What makes me mad is that he can do all this with far less talent than I think a lot of other people have.

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  • http://www.kylecoberly.com Kyle

    I still think you’re short-changing what producers do. I were one (albeit a quite shittily paid one) for a few years, and while it isn’t exactly the same in the film world the similarities outnumber the differences. It would be a truly frightening world where musicians have more than the most ceremonial of involvement with the albums they’re credited with; people have no idea how fucking awful the most celebrated musicians are capable of sounding or how much producers are 90% of any album (most of the othe other 10% going to the engineer). Similarly, sort of decent actors are a dime a dozen (and save Count Dooku that’s really all LOTR had), and anymore they’re just kind of a necessary evil for films. Same with the ubiquity of great animators, writers, DPs, etc. There is a true paucity of people who can coordinate all those talents. If this wasn’t true, there would be more good movies. Pete Jackson earns his keep by sifting through the hours of Frodo half-assing through the same scene with Andy Serkis in a goofy white suit, and picking the one shot out of fifty that’s a step above, thereby getting started 5 seconds of a 9 hour movie. It’s more than just coordinating money- it’s picking the CGI crews, the casting director, the model makers, having the balls to scrap the entire Gollum model and make them start over when you’re already overbudget, having the balls to insist on doing the movie in this ginormous format in the first place. I went to school with a dozen incredible animators; picking which one would be right for a given project is an artform alone.

    Finally, the producer is the guy who’s head can’t leave the game for a minute. This is tough on a TV show that takes a week to make, month-long music projects I’ve done have sent me into breakdowns, 9 month movie productions are almost inconceivable… a 5 *year* long production? Even if you were just watching the money, that alone could send you into a coma, much less being as many-hatted as PJ was.

    He had good source material, but frankly with the aforementioned ubiquity of good writers, there’s no excuse for doing a project that doesn’t anymore. Also, shitty direction or production can sink the most beautiful of stories- I call into evidence the Lynch version of Dune.

  • Jens

    What exactly are we calling “good,” here? It doesn’t really make sense to claim that good writers are “ubiquitous”; there are, for example, extremely bad books and plays, and of course a number of hilariously terrible screenplays sitting around that have yet to materialize as films. You can’t claim that those are bad because the director was; there was no director. And speaking of plays, it’s also a bit of a stretch to claim that good actors are “ubiquitous,” especially when there’re so many wonderful examples of bad ones in auditions, one-man performances, life… or good composers, or editors, or DPs… these are artists, not engineers. Good ones are neither “a dime a dozen” nor “ubiquitous.”

  • Jason

    Actually, I think we was saying there’s a shitload of bad-to-mediocre actors out there, and that good director’s tend to draw out their performances.

    Personally, I think he’s halfway right. I think there are a lot of bad actors out there, but I don’t think that so many good performances should be credited to the director/producer.

  • http://www.kylecoberly.com Kyle

    Well, think about it. There was probably one, maybe two bitchin’ actors in your high school, and maybe a very small handful at your college. Same thing with people who can draw really well, or write really engaging stories. Now multiply that by all the schools in America, and put all those people in the exact same city, and I think you have an approximation of the talent pool they have to draw from.

    Talent, however, is just having the ability to get the thing right at some point. The best singers still do in the neighborhood of 50 vocal takes per song, the best actors still do 50 takes per scene. And have you seen a graphic artist’s sketchpad? They do the same drawing about 50 times before they get it right. It’s just the nature of the shit. Finding one actor out of a pool of 100,000 who can nail the part 1 out of 50 times isn’t a miracle. There are thousands of great stories written everyday- just ask someone who reads a lot. There are tons of visually literate people. Being one of those people makes you different from most people, but hardly unique. Being a person who can pick the right story with the right people with the right visuals, and do it inside of the right budget DOES make you unique. There are so few amazing movies not because there aren’t enough good actors or storytellers, but because there aren’t enough good coordinators. Peter Jackson is a LEGENDARY coordinator, and that’s why the LOTR movies will go down as some of the greatest of all time, and why he deserves the lion’s share of the credit for it.

  • Jens

    You COULD “multiply that by all the schools in America,” instead of considering that your experience may be slightly different from others since you went to Bellevue High School, not No-Money-and-No-Drama-Program Municipal Primary School; you COULD assume that every good actor ended up in LA doing acting, instead of somewhere else doing something else because an acting career barely pays for food; and you COULD assume that every good high-school actor will look good on screen, take effective voice training, and get enough experience to turn their high-school-level acting into a professional talent; but even if you did, your point isn’t very well made, since casting is the job of the casting director, not the director. For example, Peter Jackson made both Lord of the Rings and King Kong, but only one of them starred Jack Black.

    However, in reality, those assumptions are all pretty retarded in the first place, especially if you try to apply them to things like writers or photographers, whose absence is even more noticeable when substituted with clothing models. And the fact is, even if you have the means to present yourself effectively at casting calls (transportation, clothes, connections, a resume), being cast through audition has a lot less to do with acting ability than it does with getting one’s self noticed; audition is not a particularly effective judge of acting ability. Additionally, I don’t think I need to remind you that lead actors almost never get cast through open audition unless the budget is under $50,000.

    It’s not that directing doesn’t require talent, it’s just that when making a movie with a cast and crew as mind-shittingly huge as the one Lord of the Rings had, the director’s talent as a coordinator becomes key and his or her CREATIVE talent becomes less important. That doesn’t mean that the director is less necessary, but creativity is what makes film into experience instead of spectacle, and makes television into culture instead of furniture.

  • http://www.kylecoberly.com Kyle

    …but the casting director is picked by the producer, which is kind of my whole point. The brilliance isn’t in doing everything yourself, it’s in knowing the right person to do the job, and that kind of brilliance is far more rare than acting talent.

    And if we’re going to play that “but BHS was really rich and nothing is like that anywhere” game, we can also throw in all the people who never did drama at all and just have a natural aptitude for it, or all the people who went to acting magnet schools. My point is that decent actors, like decent guitar players outnumber decent producers 100 to 1.

    And are you saying that LOTR was a spectacle, and not an experience? Did you *see* the movies? Waterworld was a spectacle, and that’s why no one remembers it. The LOTR movies have hewn themselves into the top-ten-movies-of-all time-lists of countless people who make lists like that for good reason. How can you make a 9 hour movie *work* without being creative? How could an uncreative person realize a story that big with the only real criticism from the fans being that he left out some obnoxious forest scene in the beginning in which a gay lumberjack gives Frodo a bath?

    And I disagree with your assertion that on a bigger scale, a producer or director can’t be as creative due to effort spent coordinating. I call into evidence every Dogme95 movie I’ve ever seen, or Dancer In The Dark. On a small scale, there’s just not very much to be creative WITH. On an LOTR scale, you can say things like “That looks too fake, scrap it and let’s try making the model 15 feet high.” Obviously it’s a double-edged sword that someone in that position could (and frequently does, see the aforementioned Waterworld) impale themselves on, but PJ *didn’t*, so I don’t see why there’s so much hatin’.

  • Jens

    I have nothing against Peter Jackson. Well, actually, I really hated King Kong, so I guess I have that against Peter Jackson, but aside from that, I have nothing against Peter Jackson. Nor did I call the Lord of the Rings movies a spectacle, though I do believe that, on some level, they were. But that’s just personal opinion; far be it for me to disagree with the people who make lists for reasons.

    Actually, the fact of the matter is, I don’t care what you think of Peter Jackson, and you shouldn’t care what I think of Peter Jackson. Lord of the Rings is a movie, not a constitutional amendment; there’s no reason we can’t have differing opinions. The only reason I commented in the first place was to correct your misconception about the prevalence of effective actors, writers, DPs, and other vital crew members in the film world, and the only reason I did that was because that misconception debases the roles of said crew members. It’s based off of conjecture and assumptions, and like all statements that are based thus, I find it offensive, especially since I aspire to work in that field. And I find your belittling of effective writers particularly offensive, though that’s probably because I recently saw “Fantastic 4.”

    Your opinion about movies is your opinion, and mine is mine. I do actually believe that directors have a great deal of influence on movies; I wouldn’t care much about the name “Coen” if I didn’t. But claiming that directors deserve almost exclusive credit for the films they direct is absurd. Good directors aren’t brilliant, God-like geniuses that forge movies out of their sheer will; good directors are people who can direct other people’s creative talents effectively. That doesn’t mean directing is easy, but dammit, neither is acting.

  • http://www.kylecoberly.com Kyle

    Good acting just isn’t necessary in movies anymore, the same way good singing or drumming isn’t necessary to do albums anymore. You still need good actors to do live shows and the fast pace of TV shoots, you still (mostly) need good musicians to do live music shows, but producers, directors, and editors *make* actors look good in movies. There’s an argument (and a good one) for that being the death of an artform and completely souless, etc., but that’s kind of beside the point; it’s how it gets done regardless.

    Here’s a great example from the music production world:

    Antares even came out with a throat modeler this year. A fucking throat modeler!! And that’s in the wake of intelligent pitch correction, intelligent harmonizers, learn-from-MIDI, automatic tempo-matching, and seemless sound-replacement. I just did an album where I basically had a trumpet player play 12 notes and then mapped them to MIDI and programmed the parts myself, and it would take a phenomenally sharp ear to ever hear the artifacats.

    According to my associates who were were brave enough to suffer working in Hollywood how this plays out in the film world is digitally editing making it a piece of cake to swap 50 takes in and out, cutaways and effects making it unnecessary to ever nail a monologue, entire movies done piece by piece in ADR, CGI-marrying, and now with Episode III, the mysterious disappearance of sets. Granted it looked stupid, but give it a couple years and Studio City will just be one big green screen.

    I don’t mean to diminish the art of acting, good actors will (probably) always rule the stage and the small screen, but anymore acting is obselete in movies and producers are the new stars.

  • Jens

    Hey, if you LIKED “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,” that’s your own business. Just keep in mind that some of us can still tell the difference between MIDI and music.

  • http://www.kylecoberly.com Kyle

    Honestly? Unless you’ve spent some serious time working in studios I’ll bet you can’t. MIDI and sound triggers aren’t that fakey Yanni shit anymore, most of it is completely transparent. For example, every drumset you hear on the radio (with the exception of about half the jazz music, and yes, even the real jazz) is more machine than natural sound. This is everything from Korn to John Mayer to Dave Matthews to NOFX- anything recorded that’s deemed to be of high quality. If you put an NI Battery kit up against a real kit, most people, even most musicians, would probably identify the NI kit as “the kit that was recorded better,” rather than a fake kit. There’s still technically somebody playing the drums, but all you’re hearing on the recording is the quality of the room (ironically, the realm of the engineer) and maybe some shell resonance, almost everything else is a sample.

    Again, this doesn’t happen quite as much live, but some of the big-&-shitty bands even do it live (especially Nu metal bands). The aforementioned Korn and the overcelebrated Perfect Circle, for example, are both totally synched and triggered live, and the only reason I even know is because I was the one who set their triggers up.

    Vocal treatment is slightly more obvious and most musicians can pick out when it’s being done, but I think even they get snowed a lot of the time. For example, Sean Nelson (singer from Harvey Danger) is probably one of the most accurate singers in rock music today. I mean, he floored the production crew when got in front of the mic because there he’s one of the only singers who doesn’t really need pitch correction (he still got it, of course). By the time the albums come out though, no one can tell the difference betweeen Sean Nelson and that dumb cow from Pretty Girls Make Graves, who spent most of her time in front of the mic making shit up, forgetting the songs, and not even making it within the 50 cent window for pitch correcting without an artifact. In fact, she got even praised for her “impressive range.” There was an engineer taking a bow for that one. Ditto whenever someone praises any other total non-singer, like Anthony Keidis or absolutely ANY emo singer (although they do tend to be a little more studio-savvy and are way more likely to self-produce without abysmal results).

    Albums are productions more than performances, and if they weren’t people would say they sounded like shit. This doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of being art, it’s just that the ownership of that art belongs to the producer (this is becoming increasingly true in the legal sense, even). I shudder to think of the world where artists are responsible for their albums, and I don’t even mean that sardonically. Even the greatest musician rarely has any idea how to turn a song (which is an intellectual expression) into a sonic experience (which is what most people are looking for when they listen to an album).

  • Jens

    Coincidentally, the only band you just mentioned that I actually listen to at all is Harvey Danger. Well, that and some jazz. I really don’t listen to many modern bands with large budgets. Emo is gross, and NOFX recorded that song advocating a “final solution” (hopefully) without even knowing what they were fucking saying, so I’m not particularly fond of them. Or maybe that was Suicide Machines. Honestly, they all sound the same.

    I’m not even gonna mention Korn.

    However, you’re entirely right that a significant amount (and often almost all) of the creative and artistic contribution in the music business belongs to the producers. I certainly don’t dispute that; I listen to Fiona Apple almost exclusively because she’s produced by John Brion, and music like The Bran Flakes (OK, a little obscure, but they’re awesome and they’re the best example I can think of), or the entire genre of techno, is pretty much entirely free of artists outside the area of production, or at least what could be considered production.

    The question I think you may want to ask yourself is: are you projecting your perspective of the music business (which, obviously, you have some knowledge about) onto the film business? Because, unless you’re in animation, there’s still a lot that computers can’t fix in post, no matter how many takes you do, and acting, photography, and especially writing definitely fit in that category.

  • palm tree lover

    Pardon my ignorance! Maybe this is the result of being on the north pole for too long but I didn’t know the Palm trees are usually associate with being Rich and Famous. Anyway,money, it all boils down with money and the great thing here folks, you can’t take it with you when you Die. So here’s to Peter Jackson and to a make believe celluloid world!

  • http://www.kylecoberly.com Kyle

    I’ll be the first to admit that I’m projecting a bit onto the little of the visual media world I’ve spent time in (which isn’t exactly nothing, I did go to production art-fag school after all), but I’m also going on the word of my school chums who “sold out” and decided to work in film post-production and my homies in animation. They’re not exactly the same and of course you can’t just grab anyone off the street and expect DeNiro, but I think they face similar growing pains as it becomes increasingly apparently what the public cares about, and it’s not acting just like it’s not musicianship.

    The greatest evidence for this is the reality-TV typhoon. It didn’t exactly come out of nowhere; around 2000 or so, SAG made a tragic miscalculation and thought their services were being undervalued, leading to a strike. The studios pulled the proverbial rug out from under them and just started putting everyday people on TV, to unprecedented results. The shows didn’t have to look good, so production costs were low and hardly any crew was needed, the people weren’t actors so they didn’t have to pay them, and the audience was entertained so they could give a shit if it was technically “bad” TV. Needless to say, SAG had to suck it.

    The lesson here is that something is never more valuable than its audience says it is. Film-tards LOVE scenes that have those 10 minute shots with multiple monologues, lots of camera movement, and no cuts; Pop-culture doesn’t give a living shit, so if it’s in a pop-culture kind of movie it’s probably not worth the effort. My film and video theory teacher once did a movie where all the cuts were done “in 3/4 meter”- my mom will never understand that, so if they’re angling for her buck, they should try something else.

    Part of the brilliance of LOTR is that it got my mom’s dollar AND a bunch of film dork dollars. The acting was good enough that most people paying attention were impressed AND they didn’t have to use anybody very expensive. They were verbose enough that the fans felt the story was given adequate time to tell itself AND it was made snappy enough to get Joe Schmoe to sit still for 3 hours for it. The effects were amazing AND they weren’t distracting or just a showcase for new technology. The immaculate balancing of those kinds of elements is why the film is so universally loved and is such a production coup.

    As far as the music goes, this stuff isn’t all that expensive anymore (which is why all these emo bands can afford to self-produce). If you actually pay for the software you’ll get a dent in your pocket, but it’s a couple thousand not a couple hundred thousand. If you steal it for free off the internet like everyone else, all you need to do is pay someone competent to operate it. These things have gotten so simple and intuitive that THAT isn’t even necessary anymore, making engineers obselete fast (see the aforementioned comment about not being more valuable than your audience deems you). Korn et al weren’t intended as examples of kickass bands, they were intended as examples of kickass production quality and you don’t need major label budget for it anymore (well, you never did, but that’s another story). If 5 people can scrap together $2000 to pay a production school grad to mash their crap together in Pro Tools, they’ll have a totally professionally passable album on their hands. The HD album that would become “Little by Little” (which was by no means a low-budget project) is just as processed and fake as any other album out today, it’s just that Albini did it and he’s really good. To their credit, they did use an actual honest-to-god mellotron and a real cello player (they were supposed to use the horn section from my band… grr..).

    The throat modeler is yesterday’s news, apparently. It’s been completely overshadowed by the new hip toy, the MeloDyne. It’s a tool that lets you correct pronunciation and emphasis and stuff- so there’s one more thing that an actor doesn’t have to get right anymore.

  • Jens

    I don’t know if it’s fair to blame reality TV on the SAG; I prefer to blame it on the people who watch it. Not that I’m a particularly big fan of the SAG, or their admission requirements, for that matter, but honestly, reality TV exists because people are willing to watch shit, not because of internal Hollywood politics.

    As for “something is never more valuable than its audience says it is,” that’s a little too cultural relativist for my tastes. There’re a number of great movies that absolutely bombed, and a LARGE number of horrible movies that made enough money to warrant sequels (which were even worse). I don’t generally understand the “film dorks” either, but that doesn’t mean I think that all that is popular is good. And if all you care about is the money, that’s fine, but I’m gonna go ahead and keep my copy of Donnie Darko anyway.

    As for the actors in Lord of the Rings, if you think actors of that caliber are common, you have another think coming. I don’t know how much their salaries were, but just because they’re not ridiculously famous or expensive doesn’t mean they’re not great actors.

  • Jason

    I dunno, I think Kyle’s mostly spot on in those cases. I think he’s wrong about actors — I’ve seen a shitload, and I mean a shitload, of bad actors. I really don’t think finding good ones is as easy as he says it is.

    I hate SAG. It’s like a club where the rule to join is that you have to already be a member. They’re assholes, and from a business perspective, Kyle’s story makes sense. Of course, it’s important that the American public likes to watch shit television, too.

    In the world of TV and from a producer’s perspective, things are often only as valuably as their audience thinks they are. But again that’s talking business. As one of those “film dorks,” i’m going to insist all the way down the line that some movies can be objectively good, in that they make good use of both cinematic and narrative techniques and effectively convey themes, meanings, and symbolism, all the while being entertaining, if not popularly so. For example, Amadeus. Good movie. Not a popular audience movie.

  • http://www.kylecoberly.com Kyle

    I think Jason got where I was coming from. Amadeus did just fine with the PBS crowd, which was its audience in the first place. Donnie Darko wasn’t intended for mass consumption, and that it’s shown off in film classes across the nation and beloved by all manner of film dorks speaks to it nailing its audience, not to its violation of the laws of capitalism.

    Which is the other thing- value isn’t a meaningless, nebulous term. Never forget that any art released in a theater or shown on television or sold at Sam Goody or sold at Teen Center show or bought and sold in any way is a commercial product, EVER. If you want to make art for art’s sake, knock yourself out. If you want to get the capital to make a feature length film, either think of your art as a product or pull a Mel Gibson. Audience matters too; If CBS tried to angle Surivor 14 to Jens and Jason, it would tank and be forgotten and be a failure. The exact same thing angled to Joe and Betty gets watched every Thursday and is a success and gets renewed indefinitely. In both cases, the product isn’t more valuable than the audience says it is.

    I didn’t just make up or infer that SAG/Reality TV thing, btw. I learned it on the “History of TV” thing I got from the bargain bin at Barnes and Noble. It had an interview with Mark Burnett and all these execs who were shitting themselves over the SAG strike, and they talked about how they basically used it as a strikebreaker. It was some seriously fascinating stuff.

    And of course SAG sucks. Thank the good lord the musician’s union is mostly powerless or CDs would cost $45 each. I was even thinking of joining the stagehands union (IATSE) until they got me fired from a gig in Berkeley, killed someone from our crew for being non-union and threatened to rape the PA’s daughter. I’m just lucky I did most of my work in the surprisingly (and thankfully) union-weak Seattle. They’ll kill you for suggesting that you take breaks less than once an hour in NYC. I think I almost made my girlfriend’s dad cry when I swore to him that they’d have to crucify me before I’d join the teacher’s union, but after the shit they pulled in California over the paycheck protection act, the NEA can kind of suck my nuts for eternity. If there do exist unions “that aren’t really like that,” SAG sure as hell isn’t one of them. Those crybabies are seriously on the brink of driving Hollywood to Vancouver. Good job, way to look out for struggling actors dipshits.

    As far the good actors thing goes, I don’t doubt that there are thousands upon thousands of terrible actors. There are also a myriad of unbearably terrible guitar players. However, if you had the pick a good leading actor for you cast or a good lead guitar player for your band, you’d have to be fucking retarded not to be able to find one given the pool you have to draw from. It’s like saying it’s impossible to find a pretty girl; you don’t need a million great actors, you only need a few. If you can’t do that in a city designed to make it easy, then the casting profession is not for you.

    By contrast, even passable producers are few and far between. Everything you see in a movie has to go through the producer, so even if a casting director picked JTT for the lead, the producer was the one who signed off on it and it’s ultimately his ass for why the movie sucked. It’s why good movies are made by like, the same 5 producers. Fuck, I went to producer school and I doubt I can remember the names of 2 dozen music producers, including people I went to school with!! So even if we grant it the same 1 decent to 20 suck ratio, there are still a few million people trying to be performers of some kind and about 90 people even intereted in being producers, let alone actually doing it professionally.

    I’m a perfect example of this in a microcosmy sort of way; I stopped being able to pay my rent and had to move out of Seattle because ONE other guy started producing within my market and was, admittedly, way the fuck better at it than I was. We were competing over the same 25 bands that I previously had a monopoly over, and he worked like 20 hour days to accomodate every single one of them. Then he got a lawyer and started getting them to sign exclusive contracts for all their future albums. I’m still friends with the charismatic bastard, but it was kind of weird to have lunch with a guy who was singlehandedly *brilliantly* ruining your life. Oh well, I sate myself with the knowledge that he has a quarter million dollar bank loan to pay off now to pay for his new studio and I get to make music for fun again, often while picking my nose at $14 an hour for Expedia.

  • Jason

    Which reminds me, when can I buy/steal your latest project?

    I think “end of my days” has like 30 or 40 spins on my iTunes.

  • http://www.kylecoberly.com Kyle

    It’s in mastering at Bob Lang’s right now (as soon as the Mos Def album is done). I finished mixing it about 3 weeks ago, and I’m purposefully not listening to it until the CD gets printed. In theory, it’ll be available this month, you’ll be among the first to know, I assure you.

    I couldn’t give you a preview if I wanted, I archived my entire audio drive to DVD and wiped it and then all the DVDs ended up being coasters. Aside from the “Dedicated to the Early Adopters” album, I don’t have a single article of Push media in my possession anymore.