Don’t they hold bake sales any more?

Thursday, April 29th, 2004

Tyler Cowen’s Don’t they hold bake sales any more? points to an article on Norwegian high school girls paying for their graduation highjinks:

It is a Norwegian tradition that high school seniors, so-called russ, throw themselves into a month of partying to celebrate the fact that 13-years of schooling is drawing to an end. Many graduating russ buy old vans or buses which they drive during the month of partying, but everything has its costs and it is far from cheap. It’s common for students to acquire sponsorships from local business by putting their logos on their means of transportation in order to help finance their partying.

The girls have signed a contract with 21-year-old porn star Thomas Rocco Hansen to tape a scene for a porn film in their own bus as they lack other types of sponsorships to finance their party costs. They are also going to be interviewed regarding their sexual habits and sex fantasies. The girls will be paid about NOK 20,000 (USD 2900).

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Choice Trumps Price on the Internet

Friday, April 23rd, 2004

Virginia Postrel’s latest article, Choice Trumps Price on the Internet examines a recent economic study, Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of Increased Product Variety at Online Booksellers and its implications:

In the article, the authors, all economists, estimate just how much better off consumers are because of the variety available online. They look specifically at “obscure titles,” books that rank below the top 100,000 in Amazon.com sales and probably would not be carried in a traditional bookstore. (The typical Barnes & Noble or Borders superstore carries about 100,000 titles, while large independent bookstores stock about 40,000.)

Using Amazon rankings and publisher data on 324 titles, the researchers determined that nearly half the book sales at Amazon, 46 percent in 2000, were of obscure titles.

They then “tried to calculate what people would have been willing to pay for these books versus what they actually did pay,” Professor Brynjolfsson explained. That’s the concept economists call “consumer surplus.” If you buy an ice cream cone for $2 but would have been willing to pay $5, you get $3 of consumer surplus.

By estimating what the demand curve for books looks like, using well-established techniques, the researchers could estimate the consumer surplus for all buyers in this market.

The results are striking. People are really happy to find obscure books, and would be willing to pay far more for them.

“The consumer surplus was about 70 percent of the purchase price for each book sold,” Professor Brynjolfsson said. “If a book was purchased for $20 on average, consumers would have been willing to pay on average up to $34.”

All those benefits add up to big money — around $1 billion in 2000. By comparison, Amazon’s lower prices saved consumers about $100 million that year.

“So they got about 10 times as much value from the selection as they got from the lower prices and competition,” Professor Brynjolfsson said. “An order of magnitude more value was created from the increased choice and selection.”

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Studios Rush to Cash In on DVD Boom

Thursday, April 22nd, 2004

As Studios Rush to Cash In on DVD Boom reports, Americans spend more on DVDs than they spend at the box office:

Between January and mid-March this year, Americans spent $1.78 billion at the box office. But in the same period they spent $4.8 billion — more than $3 billion more — to buy and rent DVD’s and videocassettes.

Thus, studios spend as much marketing DVDs as theatrical releases:

Studios now spend comparable amounts of money on DVD and theatrical marketing campaigns. Disney spent an estimated $50 million marketing the “Finding Nemo” DVD last year, said officials at Pixar, which made the film. It was money well spent. The DVD took in $431 million domestically, about $100 million more than the domestic box office.

Rarely does a movie recoup its costs at the box office — the theatrical run is now an ad for the DVD:

The average movie now costs $64 million to make and another $39 million to market, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.

“In the last five years maybe 6 pictures out of 1,000 recouped their cost in the theatrical marketplace,” said Nick Counter, president of the studio alliance. “Today the hits have to make up for all the losses.”

For bigger-budget movies the DVD revenue has become critical. Nowadays, “basically the movies are commercials for the DVD’s,” observed John Lesher, an agent for the Endeavor talent agency who represents leading directors like Walter Salles, Paul Thomas Anderson and David O. Russell. Movies with budgets over $100 million now commonly just break even at the box office.

The financial rules have changed — and Office Space shows how:

The old Hollywood model of needing to recoup three times the production cost at the box office to make a profit is long gone. But many are asking: What is the new model?

The answer to that may lie with a little-known movie called “Office Space” (1999). The satire by Mike Judge, co-creator of the animated television series “King of the Hill,” cost 20th Century Fox about $10 million to make, and took in just $10 million at the box office. But on DVD the movie has become a hit, with the studio so far selling 2.5 million units, well over $40 million worth.

There are other examples of surprising windfalls. The Lion’s Gate comedy “Van Wilder” was renamed “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder” and has unexpectedly become a hit on DVD, where it sits alphabetically next to other National Lampoon movies.

A moderate hit like the DreamWorks comedy “Old School” starring Will Ferrell took in $73 million at the box office, but made an astounding $143.5 million on DVD.

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)

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Financier Bets Big On Risky Venture: Family Values

Thursday, April 22nd, 2004

“Some people know Philip Anschutz, co-founder of Qwest Communications International Inc., as a hard-charging financier who has amassed a $5 billion fortune in oil, railroads and telecommunications,” but as Financier Bets Big On Risky Venture: Family Values explains, Anschutz has moved into family films:

In the last few years, he has stormed into Hollywood, bankrolling nearly a dozen projects at once. These films are meant to be uplifting and family-friendly, earning G and PG ratings, even as movie theaters are packed with darker, R-rated fare. The 64-year-old Mr. Anschutz has committed more than $300 million to film projects already. It’s unlikely he will break even on many of them. But he shows no signs of stopping.

Disney picked up his latest film after Paramount refused to distribute it:

He has financed a $110 million remake of the 1956 movie “Around the World in 80 Days,” which he enjoyed as a youth growing up in central Kansas. [...] The movie may benefit from a lucky casting decision: Arnold Schwarzenegger has a cameo role as a Turkish prince, filmed shortly before he began his successful campaign to become California governor.

This should surprise no one:

Succeeding in the family-film market is tricky, especially for a newcomer. Just this week, Mr. Anschutz announced he was dismantling one of his two production companies, Crusader Entertainment. He had created the company in 2000 to make films free of violence, sex, drugs, tobacco and profanity, but few of its films made money.

Does he know who Hunter S. Thompson is?

On a wall in his Denver headquarters is a plaque, with a quote from writer Hunter S. Thompson, calling the film business “a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There is also a negative side.”

You’ve heard the pitch: It’s Lord of the Rings meets Passion of the Christ — with talking animals!

He and Disney have paired up to develop C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books into a series of movies, starting with a $150 million version of “The Lion, The Witch & the Wardrobe” for Christmas 2005.

Does he know who Truman Capote was?

For most of its 3? years in business, Crusader struggled to find its way. At one point, the company spent $8 million to film “Children on Their Birthdays,” a Truman Capote short story with so little public appeal that the finished movie rang up only $54,000 in ticket sales before disappearing from first-run distribution.

Does he know who Ayn Rand was?

For a brief time, Messrs. Anschutz and Baldwin were excited about the prospect of filming Ayn Rand’s epic novel “Atlas Shrugged.” They snapped up the movie rights for more than $200,000 in 2003, only to discover that the 1,075-page book’s sprawling nature, long speeches and many subplots made it an extremely problematic film project. Anschutz insiders say it’s an open question whether they will press on.

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Unhappy Birthday

Wednesday, April 21st, 2004

Last month marked the 100th anniversary of Dr. Seuss’s birth. Unhappy Birthday addresses the shift from Seuss the author to Seuss the brand:

A.J. Rowling famously negotiated ironclad agreements with Warner Bros. to make sure that her Harry Potter books made it to the screen in the right way. (What you saw was what you read.) The stewards of Beatrix Potter have kept a watchful eye, too, permitting animated versions of her stories that hew to the letter and spirit of her work.

The legacies of A.A. Milne and Rudyard Kipling have not been so lucky, however. Their literary greatness is unrecognizable in Disney’s adaptations of “Winnie the Pooh” and “The Jungle Book.” More grotesquely, Dr. Seuss, in movie form, has suffered the same fate. Hollywood cashed in as Mr. Carrey and Mr. Myers mugged and romped, earning each film about $250 million. (With its imminent video release, “Cat” is set to earn more.) But such success nearly wrecked the brand.

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2004 Wired Rave Awards

Monday, April 19th, 2004

Peter Jackson, director of the three Lord of the Rings films, is interviewed in the 2004 Wired Rave Awards:

There were two shots of Gollum in Fellowship. We kept him in the shadows — he wasn’t good enough for dialog or a close-up in daylight. We worked on him for another year, and he was in 300 shots in Two Towers. A month before delivery of that film, [visual effects supervisor] Joe Letteri insisted on redoing all of it because we’d finally gotten the code for Gollum right. Even so, after Two Towers, we still weren’t happy with the subtlety of Gollum.

I have to say, Gollum will date those movies in a bad way. If they saved all their motion-capture data, audio, etc. though, they can keep refining those scenes and releasing new editions of the trilogy — year after year after year.

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Call It Puck Rock

Monday, April 19th, 2004

Dropping the Gloves, Picking Up Guitars: Call It Puck Rock reports on a new genre of novelty tunes:

Mr. Spagnolo, 30 years old, is the lead vocalist in Two Man Advantage, a Long Island, N.Y., band in a tiny but feverish musical subgenre known as puck rock. He and his four band mates compose and play songs about hockey, a sport that for decades inspired very little music that couldn’t be played on a Wurlitzer between whistles.

The article jokes about hockey music played on a Wurlitzer, but I noticed years ago that hockey games had much hipper, much edgier music than other sporting events.

Several NHL arenas have played their song “Hockey Junkie” during games. Royalty Records of New York signed the band and released its first CD, “Drafted,” in 1998.

I really should get around to writing a song specifically for sporting events — another “We are the Champions” or something, just to collect royalties.

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Doctor Who and the Fandom of Fear

Monday, April 12th, 2004

Doctor Who and the Fandom of Fear describes Doctor Who fandom, but it could just as easily describe any number of geeky obsessions (D&D, comics, Star Wars, etc.):

And nostalgia, apparently, is a central part of the show’s appeal. “It’s an odd television program in that it’s very rare for someone to become a Doctor Who fan later in their life,” says Alan McKee, a senior lecturer in media studies at the University of Queensland who studies Doctor Who fandom (and is himself a self-described “Doctor Who obsessive”). A fan can be any age, he adds, “but they always start off younger. From the time its first audience started growing up, the history of Doctor Who has been fans condemning the program for not giving them what they want anymore. And of course what they want is the same experience they had as a child.” The flipside would be viewers like me, who gave up on the show because we wished it would grow up a bit — and who briefly came back when the program showed signs of greater depth.

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Tax Dollars Well Spent

Monday, April 12th, 2004

There’s been an e-mail making the rounds (Tax Dollars Well Spent) with a video attached (VehcicleBarrier.wmv [sic]). You’ll be amazed what a concrete barrier can do. I found a copy of the e-mail on a Retired Air Force site:

From time to time someone asks me what the concrete barriers are in front of controlled and secure buildings. When I tell them that the barriers will stop traffic, even trucks, from approaching the secure building I usually get a look of disbelief. I’ve been looking for some footage like this to prove my point. In this test, the following parameters were used. Read them and then watch the film.

Truck = 65,000 lbs.
Speed = 50 mph
Kinetic Energy = 5.5 MILLION ft. lbs.
Stopped in 24 INCHES!

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The Future of the Past

Friday, April 9th, 2004

Friedrich, of 2blowhards.com, spent last weekend in the desert, and “stumbled across a mind-blowing story in the local paper, the Desert Sun“:

Apparently Cheeta, the chimpanzee star of the Johnny Weissmuller-Maureen O’Sullivan “Tarzan” movies is still alive and hanging out in retirement somewhere in the Palm Springs area.
[...]
Certified by Guinness as the oldest chimp in the world, at 72 Cheeta has nearly doubled the typical chimpanzee life-span. Admittedly, he hasn’t yet reached the duration of his co-stars (Weissmuller died in 1984 at the age of 80 and O’Sullivan died in 1998 at the age of 89) but the notion of a chimp being the last surviving actor of the series seems weirdly appropriate and poignant somehow.

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When Art Imitates Videogames, You Have ‘Red vs. Blue’

Friday, April 9th, 2004

I was vaguely aware of a series of video shorts being done using videogame characters, but I had no idea how popular they’d become — and I had no idea that the creators weren’t college kids. From When Art Imitates Videogames, You Have ‘Red vs. Blue’:

Every week, Mr. Burns gathers Geoff Fink, 28, and Jason Salda?a, 25, and some other friends to play a videogame called Halo. They edit the on-screen images into roughly five-minute videos that have plots, recurring characters and original soundtracks. Like puppeteers, each man controls a computer-generated character on the screen. They also provide the voices along with friends in other cities, who send in their audio tracks over the Internet. The group distributes the series online and on DVDs. Now on its 29th episode, the low-budget production has attracted a cult following and shows signs of crossing over to a broader audience.

And it makes money…

The game-playing and video editing for the five-minute episode took more than seven hours, stretching well into the night. Mishaps were frequent, as when a character accidentally fired his turbocharged weapon in the middle of a scene. Mr. Burns’s 2-year-old son, Jack, toddled into the room a few times. The group broke briefly to eat take-out pasta and discuss fan mail from viewers.

The following day, they made the video available to the several thousand people who pay $10 or more annually to get early access. Two days later, anyone could download a version with lower-quality video free of charge.

Mr. Burns won’t say how much money his series has brought in, but he says the venture is profitable despite about $150,000 in annual computer-hosting costs. And he’s spreading the franchise. Microsoft Corp., which owns the company that created the Halo game, commissioned Mr. Burns to produce an episode to run during a big software-developer conference; the clip recounts a fictionalized falling-out between Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and one of the game’s soldiers. Microsoft and Mr. Burns agreed last year that he can distribute his films without running afoul of copyright issues. Spike TV commissioned a short piece from Mr. Burns’s team last year, which it ran on its Web site. The rock group Barenaked Ladies asked for Red vs. Blue videos to show at concerts.

Despite spending 40 hours a week on the series, Mr. Burns still works his day job as chief operating officer of teleNetwork Inc., a 250-person technology-services company. Mr. Fink, a heavily-tattooed army veteran, manages a call-center team at the same company. Mr. Salda?a is an unemployed guitarist. Their composer, a Frenchman named Nico Audy-Rowland, sends soundtracks for each episode over the Internet from his home in Cambridge, Mass.

Mr. Burns has just hired the first official staffer for Red vs. Blue, Matt Hullum, a Hollywood visual-effects supervisor. But he says he’s wary of expanding too much or getting too commercial. “You kind of hate to mess with what’s working,” he says.

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TV Cuts Both Ways For Plastic Surgeons — And for Patients

Wednesday, April 7th, 2004

According to TV Cuts Both Ways For Plastic Surgeons — And for Patients, surgeons are happy with “Extreme Makeover”, even if they’re not happy with MTV’s “I Want a Famous Face” and Fox’s “The Swan” :

‘Extreme Makeover’ was a hit, and it gave a badly needed boost to the plastic-surgery field, then coming off a two-year decline in business. In 2003, U.S. practices rebounded with a 32% increase in the number of cosmetic procedures performed, including breast implants and injections of the popular antiwrinkle-treatment Botox.

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Rock-Star Wannabe Finds Fame Making Music for Kids

Tuesday, April 6th, 2004

I’m not sure what to say. Rock-Star Wannabe Finds Fame Making Music for Kids:

It might have continued this way, another talented musician plugging along while waiting for his break into rock ‘n’ roll stardom. But in 1994, Mr. Andersen played an impromptu gig at a Kiddie Academy day-care center in New Jersey, belting out ‘Yellow Submarine’ as a favor to his wife, who was temping there. The kids went wild. And without realizing it, Mr. Andersen was on a new career path.

Today, the 41-year-old musician is more successful than ever. Known simply as “mr. Ray,” Mr. Andersen has sold about 25,000 compact discs in the past three years featuring music from his children’s album, “Start Dreaming.” His songs, ranging from “Swish!” to “Boo-boos Go Away,” are a hybrid of kid-empowerment messages cloaked in a rock sensibility that parents welcome as a break from Barney. Mr. Andersen’s own dinosaur tune, “I’d Be a Dinosaur,” is played in a minor key with a shuffle inspired by Doors classic “People Are Strange.” Moms say they don’t mind Mr. Andersen’s good looks or sultry style, either.

His pay also has picked up. Mr. Andersen charges $500 to $2,000 for his concerts at museums, schools, birthday parties, parks and theaters, and less for church and charity clients. Families up and down the East Coast have hired him, and he is playing bigger and bigger venues. Actress and mother Julianne Moore bought his DVD after a recent concert honoring Dr. Seuss at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom, he says. Mr. Andersen earned $100,000 last year, nearly three times as much as during his highest-paid year as a rocker.

Oddly, I just heard about The Wiggles recently:

Mr. Andersen says he hopes to become the “Mister Rogers of the rock ‘n’ roll world.” But to get there, he needs to get on television. The Wiggles, for example, is a men’s quartet from Australia that released its first album in 1991 and has parlayed live concert music into a booming business of videos, TV shows and merchandise.

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Set Your VCRs

Monday, April 5th, 2004

According to Set Your VCRs, “tomorrow afternoon at 3, eastern time, Turner Classic Movies will be airing Mission to Moscow.”

No, not the Police Academy sequel: This is a World War 2-era picture aimed at showing Americans just how wonderful the USSR is. Directed by Michael Curtiz and written by Howard Koch — the director and co-writer of Casablanca — it’s one of the few universally despised movies that’s even worse than its reputation. The film doesn’t just laud the Soviet economy and glorify Stalin; it defends the purges, complete with a quarter-hour dedicated to arguing that Leon Trotsky was a Nazi agent.

Consider my morbid curiosity piqued.

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Putting 40,000 Readers, One by One, on a Cover

Monday, April 5th, 2004

I can only imagine the reaction of Reason‘s libertarian readership to Putting 40,000 Readers, One by One, on a Cover:

When the 40,000 subscribers to Reason, the monthly libertarian magazine, receive a copy of the June issue, they will see on the cover a satellite photo of a neighborhood — their own neighborhood. And their house will be graphically circled.

On one level, the project, sort of the ultimate in customized publishing, is unsurprising: of course a magazine knows where its subscribers live. But it is still a remarkable demonstration of the growing number of ways databases can be harnessed.
[...]
“Everybody, including our magazine, has been harping on the erosion of privacy and the fears of a database nation. It is a totally legit fear. But they make our lives unbelievably easier as well, in terms of commercial transactions, credit, you name it.”

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