In This Dimension

Ode to Keith Olbermann on SNL - Hilarious!

If you missed this, go watch now. It is hilarious - and dead-on.

Detritus of the ’60’s — Baby Boomers

You can safely assume I am not an avid reader of (gazer at?) Playboy magazine.

With that as a given, a recent interview (July 2008) was brought to my attention by a friend. The interviewee is Dr. Drew Pinsky. What he has to say is important.

Pinksy concentrates on the pathologies of the 1960s brought to us by the Baby Boomers, the worst generation, and on what they have wrought. He doesn’t go forward to the kinds of politics these ridiculously narcissistic, nihilistic, un-educated and moronic people have cultivated in our once-civil society.

You can watch Congress on C-SPAN for that, Congress now being dominated by[…]

Listen to ‘Talent’?

Out here in the industry (Hollywood), we call those who make their living with their perceived talent (writers, directors, actors, etc.), “Talent,” regardless of how little they may display at any particular time.  (They are extraordinary babies for the most part – trust me.)

You may have noticed a dearth of Hollywood talent onstage thus far in the 2008 campaign season. With the exception of Oprah heralding the Second Coming to her True Believers, talent is ensuring none of the Right can tell them they were, um, wrong about their standard bearer.

Talent, of course, is never wrong - by definition, just ask[…]

Can we talk about movie piracy?

So help me out with this one.

In the 1960s, when the current crop of “leaders” of Tinsel Town were in their politically formative years, they stole stuff all the time.

I have ex-good-friends who thought nothing in the 1980s of owning two VCRs so they could copy a rented VHS tape while watching it, returning said tape to the rental store the next day.

Abbie Hoffman even wrote a book, Steal This Book. A friend of mine did.

No law disliked by Baby Boomers ever has gone unchallenged or unbroken.

So now they run Hollywood. And now were supposed to worry about people stealing[…]

Copy Protection

A friend of mine, a major studio Sr. VP, and I are in complete agreement on the copy protection (CP) issue: If studios did a global, all-media, all-format day/date release, professional piracy would go away.

You like it at the theater? Impulse buy the DVD on the way out, adding to the revenues of the studios and theater owners. Want to buy the movie but not go to the theater? download it in whatever format you want for $20 (or whatever, but low enough not to encourage a black market).

Think about copy protection. Can you print and market a book in[…]

Memo to Hollywood: Piracy isn’t the Problem

For a decade Hollywood has been at the mercy of digital pirates as sales of music and movie seats have fallen. Legal digital downloads have not replaced lost CD sales. The studio outlook seems worse than ever. Digital piracy is destroying valuable industries and thousand of industry jobs. Right?

Wrong.

Consumer piracy isn’t the problem, and anti-piracy measures aren’t the solution. What we are seeing are far stronger societal changes, and the inability of studio executives to make the business model changes necessary to keep-up with their customers.

Anti-piracy technology, on which Hollywood has wasted tens of millions of dollars and over a[…]