The Network Garden - Mark Sigal's Blog

James Cameron's ‘Avatar’: The Citizen Kane of the 3D Medium?

I love films, the art of filmmaking, am a digital media technology nut and positively devour great 'production' success stories (i.e., getting complex projects from ideation to realization and finally, reward). 

As such, I have always considered Director James Cameron a compelling case study in an industry full of compelling case studies (think: Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, Coen Brothers).

From ‘Terminator’ to ‘Titanic,’ this is an auteur that fully visualizes and renders wholly original conceptions, creating places, spaces and times that are authentic and earnest – if a bit over-the-top at times. 

Always ambitious, and never repeating himself, he has to be considered a great entrepreneur every bit as much as he is a great director, inasmuch as each movie production is a full-blown (ad)venture requiring fund-raising, hiring/recruiting/retaining talent, squeezing every drop of goodness out of that talent, juggling personalities, varying skill sets, getting the product out the door timely, and then, marketing it successfully.

Movie making, Cameron once said, is war; a constant fight against the countless things that can go wrong in a world of big money and big egos. Where, after four years, just birthing the movie is about all a director can think of. 

It is with this backdrop that I watched the above 60 Minutes segment on Cameron and his forthcoming $400M 3D marvel, ‘Avatar,’ which is every bit the technical, storytelling and creative high-wire act that Titanic was. 

Titanic, if you remember, cost over $200M to make, and was projected to be the ‘Heavens Gate’ of Cameron’s career, needing to generate over $500M in revenues just to break even (once all marketing, distribution and promotions costs were factored in). 

In the end, Titanic not only avoided its projected cinematic iceberg, but became a monster financial and critical hit, grossing over $1.8 billion dollars worldwide (it’s the most profitable movie ever made), and winning an Oscar® for Best Picture, and a total of 11 Oscars overall.

In any event, check out the 60 Minutes segment (above), as it is quite enjoyable for the reasons cited. 

What follows are a couple of excerpts:

• Morley Safer: "3D or not 3D, that is the question. Hollywood has been making false starts and false promises about 3D since the 1950s. Now comes director Jim Cameron, who is unveiling a movie in mid-December that could settle the argument about the staying power of 3D once and for all…The movie is "Avatar," and 70 years after Judy Garland left Kansas for Oz, Cameron plans to take audiences down the Yellow Brick Road of the 21st century, pushing the limits of modern technology with some filmmaking magic he has helped invent."
• James Cameron (on the impact of new technology): "Even when we were doing Titanic twelve years ago, you know, the shot at the bow where they kiss, we waited two weeks for the right sunset to get that shot,” says Cameron. “Now we'd just shoot it in front of a green screen and choose the right sunset later, you know, digitally."
• Cameron (on being a filmmaker): "I think the moment you're making a film, no matter how crude, no matter how small or cheap the film is, you're a filmmaker." 
• Cameron (on having exacting standards): "I'm not in this to phone it in or to do mediocre work. I tell everybody when we start a project, 'You know, we're going to the Super Bowl. Just understand that. You got to be ready. Don't, as Martin Sheen said in 'Apocalypse Now,' you know, 'Don't get on the boat if you're not ready to go all the way,'" Cameron said. 

Thought Streams – Rape of Europa, Fundamental Asset Re-Pricing & The Movie Marketer’s Playbook

It is a well-known fact that Hitler was a failed artist before he became a monster.  How that failure fueled what came next is largely an unanswered question, but one thing is certain.  It fueled a rampant desire to possess for himself and The Third Reich all of the world’s great art.

‘Rape of Europa,’ a compelling documentary (now on DVD), tells the lesser-known true story of how Hitler’s war and killing machine facilitated an art thievery machine that is beyond belief.

We see the micro level of Jewish art dealers sent off to death camps, in tandem stripped of their citizenship, leading to the cynical and evil capture of literally thousands of masterpieces that are suddenly ‘owner-less.’ 

We then see the curators and staff of France’s famed Louvre and Russia’s Hermitage scrambling to strip the walls bare of their museums to hide treasures like Mona Lisa before the Nazi onslaught arrives.  Next, we see the Nazi machine in action, systematically pillaging antiquities, furniture, paintings, sculpture, etc.

What follows is the Allies’ wartime dilemma of whether to fight the Axis with a blind eye to protecting classic monuments and artifacts, or instead, to measure blows and bombs, putting human life (soldiers) at greater peril. 

Finally, as the Allied victory takes hold, we see the saintly role America played in doggedly chasing down (over a multi-year period) the Nazi’s ill-gotten gains, and repatriating them to their rightful owners. 

It is a beautiful bookend to Donald Rumsfeld’s lame “stuff happens” mea culpa after the complete looting of the Baghdad Museum (following the invasion of Iraq), and a reminder of why America was so globally revered after World War II, and what we need to return to.

Side note: To fully understand the brutal efficiency of Hitler’s Germany, you really have to see Ken Burn’s brilliant documentary, The War (links to my post); it's lengthy at 15 hours (6 DVDs) but a life changer, to be sure.  Let us never forget.

Without financing, the same identical underlying asset is worth much less!

Leave it to Andy Kessler to find the perfect allegory that captures how when the financing engine seizes, assets are suddenly worth less.  A lot less.

In ‘Chicago Cubs Economy,’ Kessler assesses Mark Cuban’s aborted attempt to buy the Cubs, and what it says about asset values, now and into the future:

Here’s an excerpt:

"So here we sit in early 2009. Banks aren't lending much, so assets are being quickly revalued back to some rational cash-flow multiple. A house is increasingly worth what your income cash flow can afford to carry mortgage payments, not what the next sucker will pay to take it off your hands. Same for stocks. Earnings were and are king. Low-debt or debt-free companies with earnings potential once the economy bottoms out will be the next wave of winners. Debt-ridden companies have a long workout ahead."

"The trick is to get as quickly as possible to rational pricing. What is something worth with normalized profits and cash flow? That's what forms market bottoms and gets bankers lending again."

Like Having Bad Speakers on a Great Stereo

Perhaps it’s a bit unromantic to look at the business of movie making as being as much about the packaging as the product. 

On the other hand, those of us in tech have long appreciated the sad fact that good marketing of mediocre products often trumps poor marketing of great products (see: Microsoft v. Apple: Chapter 1).

In 'Inside a Movie Marketer’s Playbook' (in The New Yorker) we learn about the rules that studio marketers have cobbled together for making their films seem broadly 'relatable'; how audience segmentation shapes what gets 'green lighted' and how much of the science of marketing is determining which OLD movie your NEW movie is most like, so you can turn to that movie’s playbook as a rough guide. 

Sounds like the classic VC query "So who do you look like?"

Here’s an excerpt:

"Most of a movie’s opening gross is about marketing,” Clint Culpepper, the president of Sony Screen Gems, says. "You can have the most terrific movie in the world, and if you can’t convey that fact in fifteen- and thirty-second TV ads it’s like having bad speakers on a great stereo." At Sony, executives ask, "Can we make this seem ‘babysitter-worthy’? Will it get them out of the house?"

"The big studios’ average marketing budget of thirty-six million dollars is one-third the total cost of making a film; Lionsgate’s average marketing budget is twenty-two million dollars, about two-thirds of the film’s total cost. In other words, Lionsgate is making much cheaper films that rely disproportionately on their marketing."

"If we weren’t making decisions based on marketability, John Malkovich would be in every movie,” a top studio marketer says. "Great actor, but not someone you want to see half-naked in the sheets next to Angelina Jolie."

See Waltz with Bashir: It's Escher meets Cinéma vérité

In my home office, I used to have M.C. Escher’s ‘Hand with Reflecting Sphere’ hanging on the wall.  What I liked about it was the way it played with perspective, shining a light on the general elastic nature of reality. 

I thought about this concept a bit after seeing ‘Waltz with Bashir,’ Ari Folman’s disturbing, evocative and brilliant animated documentary on the 1982 Lebanon War.

Capturing the various senses of war in vivid terms, ‘Bashir’ is one part nightmare, another part hallucination. 

Or, as A.O. Scott puts it in his excellent review in The New York Times (‘Inside a Veteran’s Nightmare’), it “…is a memoir, a history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film.”

Part of what makes the film so special is that the director is a central character in his own movie; so the story is intensely personal and real. 

Following a conversation with a friend who is haunted by a recurring nightmare related to his own experiences as a member of the Israeli Defense Forces in 1982, Folman realizes that he cannot recall any of his own experiences (as a 19 year old, Folman was a member of the IDF units that went into Lebanon).

This realization leads Folman on a journey that (re) captures his personal truth in a manner that is unflinching, and beautifully rendered, without editorial or justification.

The fulcrum in the story, and where the nightmares and horrors unfortunately become unmistakably real is the notorious occasion in September, 1982 when Christian Phalangists, ostensibly driven to avenge the death of Bashir Gemayel, Lebanon’s newly elected president (who had been assassinated a few days before), entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut (whose entry points were controlled by the IDF) and massacred as many as 3,000 civilians.

I won't say more than that, as the movie is best experienced with the beginner's mind, the less details, the better. 

If ‘Apocalypse Now’ moved you, as it did me, then 'Waltz with Bashir' is a film that you just have to see, as it is a cinematic kindred spirit, albeit a completely original animal in its own right.

Other movies have captured the horror of war, the sense of abandonment, the automaton-like adherence to duty as a cog in the war machine and the grizzly state where life (seemingly) has no meaning.

But few films truly enrich AND complicate our understanding of real-world events, and do so with the courage to NOT attempt to resolve awful riddles for which there are no easy answers.

Be forewarned, though.  The ending is very powerful, a body blow that brought tears to my eyes.

Related Posts:

1. Slumdog Millionaire: See this Movie

Slumdog Millionaire: See this Movie

As the warm tidings of Thanksgiving break wash away, it is easy to get sucked back into storylines of crappy economies, financial crises, and the personal angst and antipathy that go with such foul narratives. 

But don’t go there.  For this malaise, this ennui, it shall pass.  It may be painful and it is definitely psychically confusing, but from such places come real illumination, and we all know that necessity is one of the eternal mothers of invention.

But there is karma, too; namely that the seeds of ‘life experience’ bear perpetual fruits, a truth that should be held as indelible, even if the time, place and specifics of such fruits’ nascence is wholly unpredictable.

With that backdrop, I strongly encourage you to see ‘Slumdog Millionaire,’ a brilliantly constructed, emotionally real fable about an illiterate young man from the slums of Mumbai who goes on the local TV version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” and finds himself sitting on the razor’s edge between transcendence and destruction.

Directed by Danny Boyle, whose surreal, visually arresting style and well-framed narrative you may have seen in movies as diverse as ‘28 Days Later’ (zombies arise when animal research goes awry), ‘The Beach’ (escapism, hedonism and its costs) and 'Trainspotting' (heroin addiction and its lifestyle), Slumdog Millionaire is uncompromising, engaging and powerfully real.

It presents a picture of India that few of us have seen, of poverty, despair, hate, predators and prey, but also of humanity, love and the will to survive.  All of this is presented around a creative and well-grounded storyline that neatly juxtaposes Old India with New India.

Syrupy, it is not, and my wife and I were driven to tears more than once, but it is not gloom and total darkness, either.  I won’t say more than that, as you should see this film.

Here are a couple of excerpts from excellent reviews by Roger Ebert (of Ebert and Roeper fame) and Rolling Stone magazine:

We learn the history of Jamal and the other principal characters in flashbacks, as Jamal answers questions on the TV show not from book knowledge — he has none — but his own life experiences.  The no-bull honesty of Slumdog Millionaire hits you hard. It's the real deal. No cheating.

"Slumdog Millionaire" bridges these two Indias by cutting between a world of poverty and the Indian version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire." It tells the story of an orphan from the slums of Mumbai who is born into a brutal existence. A petty thief, impostor and survivor, mired in dire poverty, he improvises his way up through the world and remembers everything he has learned. The film uses dazzling cinematography, breathless editing, driving music and headlong momentum to explode with narrative force, stirring in a romance at the same time. For Danny Boyle, it is a personal triumph. He combines the suspense of a game show with the vision and energy of "City of God" and never stops sprinting.

Social Media, Koans and Virtual Theaters

Okay, so I am not necessarily even sure what the hell a Koan is, but let's just say that this one is pretty close.

A few months back, I was intrigued by a movie trailer that presented a story narrative along the lines of "there are all of these horrific serial killers that we know by name but there is one whom you've probably never heard of named Gustave, and he wrote the book on human atrocities..."

Intrigued, I did some googling to find out what I could about Gustave, which led me to write the following blog post.

Flash forward, we recently had the opportunity to work with Disney and their interactive agency on a new project that seeks to re-invent the way DVDs are marketed.  Long tail friendly. 

It is called the virtual theater, and essentially it allows movie producers to hold online showings of their full-length motion picture releases on an on-demand or scheduled basis with secure, single use seating. 

What do you use a virtual theater for?  Well for one thing, to connect with both print and online media when geography or cost economics dictate that it is impractical to have everyone physically in the same space.

Nonetheless, the theater is a place where the creative team and media gain access to one anther via moderated conversations and conversation building tools.   Other functionality is in the works, which I can't talk about.

Back to Koans. So completely randomly, what was the first movie in the virtual theater? Primeval.

Does it work?  You decide. Here is an excerpt from a blog post by one of the attendees, Josh Tyler of Cinema Blend:

I was recently invited to participate in something new: An online chat and watch with the director of Primeval.  Disney figured out a way to stream the movie for us online, while simultaneously chatting with the film’s director Michael Katleman. The streaming movie ended up serving more as background, a way to set the scene while the journalists in attendance pounded him with questions; but on the whole the experience worked out as a quick and easy way to connect filmmakers with journalists all over the world and by extension, their audience.

The funniest joke you've never heard before

I came across this story in the August, '05 issue of Vanity Fair (a great magazine in terms of breadth of topics and depth of coverage on those topics).  Penn Jillette (of Penn &Teller) and comedian Paul Provenza are about to release The Aristocrats, essentially a documentary about one thing: a joke so disgusting and in such poor taste that you don't know whether to laugh or be offended. 

The angle that is unique here is the fact that the telling of the joke is a sort of rite of passage for comedians, and the movie captures the veritable who's who of Robin Williams, Steven Wright and even Bob Saget (plus many other BIG names) telling their version of the joke. 

The movie is one part slice of disgusto life and one part story behind the story of the telling of the joke and its place in comedian hazing and acceptance.  Three links to help frame if it's something of interest to you. 

One is an interview with Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza, makers of the film. 

Two is a Southpark version of the joke (Southpark Aristocrats)

Three is Taylor Negron refusing to share his version of the joke in Defamer.  Supposedly, his version sets the bar, so to speak.