Klint Finley conducted an interview with me last month about digital piracy, the death of the Hollywood business model and right-wing fucktards:

So your position is that piracy is going to completely undermine these businesses models?

Well, it’s not just piracy. It’s also changing consumer habits and what consumers will put up with. Price points that make sense and are viable in the consumer’s mind are not going to be the same sorts of numbers that sustain big Hollywood blockbusters. Shrek 4 was just released this weekend and in New York City the ticket prices edged north of $20. And it didn’t do that well. Because I think what they found is that there’s a pain threshold above which the consumer is saying “Fuck it!” Who the fuck is going to pay that much to see a Shrek movie instead of something else? It’s utterly ridiculous.

And then the other news, which shows that the Hollywood studios are ready to throw the theatrical distribution industry under a bus, is that they’re going to shorten the distribution window between theatrical release and DVDs in stores. Day-and-date releasing is something that Steven Soderbergh and Mark Cuban have done with their movies, but they got a lot of push-back. Hollywood studios are embracing this now. What does this do effectively? It’s like burning down the only grocery store in town. It doesn’t make any sense to do this from a selfish point of view –or an accounting, cash flow viewpoint–given current business realities. Yet they can’t not do it either!

There was one really compelling thing we found that stood out amongst all the facts about where the entertainment business is inevitably headed. Domestic box office basically pays for 15% towards what is goes to make tentpole motion pictures profitable these days. 85% is home viewing, including 59% for DVD sales. Hollywood is doomed, or at least the current way of business is doomed. That much is certain.

Read the entire interview at Media Punk

 
Mike Nichols’s film adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened 44 years ago today during a summer of tumult. Not only were massive protests against the Vietnam War hitting Washington DC, but the last trouble-free marriage sitcom, The Dick van Dyke Show, had just aired its last episode. It was on.

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor took on the roles of inadequate associate history prof George and his drunk university-president’s-daughter wife Martha two years into their actual marriage, which itself was one of the most scrutinized in pop culture history. The then-thrice-divorced Taylor won the Best Actress Oscar, and Haskell Wexler’s stark cinematography scored him a statuette as well. Controversy over how much of the play’s profanity to include in the film would compel the MPAA’s Jack Valenti to convert the industry’s old Production Code into the rating system we know today.

Screenwriter Ernest Lehman ingeniously situates George and Martha’s relentless turning-point fight in a well-lit parking lot, giving Taylor the pacing space to sprawl out the argument across the psyche of tortured married couples across America. The pair’s agreement on “total war” seems almost chilling in its self-indulgence in the context of President Johnson’s escalating the horrific bombing of North Vietnam at the time.
 

 
“Perversion for Profit links pornography to the Communist conspiracy and the decline of Western civilization.” The producer, Citizens for Decent Literature, Inc. was the organization of crooked banker Charles “Mr. Clean” Keating, one of the central figures in the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s. Clearly Keating and his cohorts seemed to know an awful lot about the pornography available at the time.

 
Watch out Robert-De-Niro-as-Angel-Heart’s-Louis-Cyphre, there’s a new contender in town for most Dramatic Eating of a Hard Boiled Egg!  Ah, Faye Dunaway, keep your Eggs of Laura Mars carnality away from Edith Massey!

 
Thanks, Everlasting Blort!

 
Difficult to tell from the box cover, but like the real thing, it certainly hints at it! Gaga goo goo!
 
Via Oh No They Didn’t! where you can also see the back cover.

 
Today marks the half-century anniversary of the premiere of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which—along with Fellini’s La Dolce Vita opening earlier the same year—used the artform of cinema to hold up the cracked mirror of compulsive desire to Western civilization.

Movies, of course, would never be the same. Who better to drive the point home than our friendly neighborhood Lacanian critical theorist from Slovenia, Slavoj Žižek, from his excellent 2006 documentary, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema?

 
Get: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema Pt. 1-3 [DVD]

Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World is Mark Frauenfelder, editor of Make and co-founder of Boing Boing’s ode to the DIY lifestyle and slowing life down enough to allow for purposeful—and life enhancing—activities. Mark discusses bee keeping, raising chickens and the four and a half months he and his family spent living on a tiny island in the South Pacific. He also talks about his recent appearance on The Colbert Report and about the burgeoning DIY Maker scene across America.

Although Charles Manson had been interviewed on television from prison previously, the 1981 chat he had with Tom Snyder that was aired on the Tomorrow show 29 years ago tonight was the first he did outside of his cell. On review, it’s instructive in two ways.

First, it shows that inside the clichéd image to which so many fashionably “extreme” types cling (via t-shirts and the rest) lives a rather regular guy—albeit one who inhabits an extraordinary sense of self-justification. Secondly, it demonstrates the hugely talented Snyder’s haranguing pomposity, which was also famously on display the previous year in his interview with John Lydon and Keith Levene of PiL. Geraldo Rivera would tweak that same pomposity with a bit of sleazily ingratiating buddy-buddy attitude during his 1988 go-round with the bearded enigma. For an actual listening exchange with the man, check out the Charlie Rose CBS News Nightwatch session from 1989.

2010 marks the 46th year since a young dandy named Davy Jones made the media scene. On June 6th 1964, at the age of 17, he’d released a typical mod-blues single with the King Bees called “Liza Jane.” Later that same year, he’d appeared on Cliff Michelmore’s BBC Tonight show as head of The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-haired Men.

Two years before this, he’d gotten into a scrap with his friend George Underwood, who punched Jones in the eye with a ring on his hand. Although imperceptible in the BBC Tonight clip, it would leave the young Jones with a permanently dilated pupil a different color in that injured eye, one of the many features of the future superstar that would later fascinate millions.

Abstract non-narrative filmmakers deserve all the attention they can get, if only because so many of their techniques are absorbed into more conventional films. Moviemaker Jeff Keen only started making his own 8mm films in his late 30s, as his native Britain entered the adventurous ‘60s. His work was soon discovered by art journalists and ended up in the National Film Theatre, garnering funding support for his activities into the ‘80s.

Now in his late 80s, Keen lives in Brighton and is actively creating, although he’s reportedly sick with cancer. Thankfully, the British Film Institute released the Blu-Ray collection GAZWRX: the Films of Jeff Keen last year as a lasting document of his work. Below is his 1967 short film Marvo Movie, in which Keen backs his rapid-fire, Kenneth Anger-cum-Stan Brakhage romp through the areas of nature, decay, consumption and pop culture with a soundtrack that resembles the early chant-work of British occultist group Current 93.

Gazwrx: Films of Jeff Keen (3pc) [Blu-ray]