Kevin Spacey discusses the economics of television pilots:
Last year 113 pilots were made. 35 of those were chosen to go to air. 13 of those were renewed, but most of those are gone now. And this year 146 pilots were shot. 56 have gone to series, but we don’t know the outcome of those yet. But the cost of these pilots was somewhere between 300 and 400 million dollars a year. That makes our House of Cards deal for two seasons look really cost effective.
What did Dorothy learn from the aftermath of The Wizard of Oz?
Although I enjoyed the early real-time strategy games, I haven’t had much interest in the massively multiplayer World of Warcraft roleplaying game. I must admit though that Blizzard has put together some gorgeous animated videos to promote their latest creation:
It combines the work of concept artist Laurel Austin and voice-actor Jim Cummings.
Bruce Charlton strongly recommends this Tolkien documentary:
His anti-modernism seems rather Butlerian Jihad avant la lettre.
We’re living in a Golden Age of Television, Megan McArdle notes, but why is it so dark?, she wonders:
We watch so many crime dramas because there are no big stakes in middle-class American life. The criminal underworld is one place where decisions actually matter — and can be shown to matter, dramatically.
You look at novels of the 19th century and they are filled with terrible, dramatic dilemmas that actually did face ordinary people. People lost everything, and risked starvation; they performed terrible, cruel, dangerous work for years on end in order to make a little money; they died from the risks of their job or the ordinary diseases that used to carry off so many people in their prime. Women had to choose between love and the economic security of a well-off suitor. The result of a regrettable night of passion could be expulsion from polite society, or a hasty forced marriage. People in the 19th century, and into the middle of the 20th, faced a lot of dilemmas wherein doing the wrong things could permanently destroy their lives.
America has less drama because compared with the 19th century, our economic and social systems are basically risk free. Don’t get me wrong: Being poor is still really terrible. But almost no one who is poor in modern America (with the exception of a few drug addicts and mentally ill people) is seriously at risk of spending an extended period of time without heat, food, clothing or shelter. The ordinary poor do not starve to death, and they do not freeze to death. Those were real things that could happen to, say, a middle-class family without close relatives whose bread-earner died. They were real things that did happen to a lot of people, not one random case that made the news because it’s so unusual.
Tony Swatton read Robert E. Howard’s swords & sorcery stories as a kid and wanted his own sword, so he learned how to make a knife. Then he went to a Renaissance fair and watched the armorer — so he could go home, replicate the equipment, and forge his own suit of armor. Now he’s Hollywood’s favorite blacksmith:
His business is called The Sword and the Stone, and he has his own Man At Arms YouTube Channel.
Legendary fantasy artist Brom worked for TSR during the company’s heyday — right before it went bankrupt:
Most of TSR’s management in that day were non-creatives — neither artists, nor writers, nor even gamers. Did this stop them from telling the creatives how to do their craft? Nope. Not one bit. A line I will never forget came about as I was starting a new cover. I was informed that this was a very important cover and told to use only my most expensive colors. What? Huh? Did they want me to paint the damn thing in rose madder and cobalt violet? I knew of no way to answer them that wouldn’t have gotten me fired.
Brom’s childhood drawings look like ordinary kids’ drawings:
I remember always being able to draw at a level above my peers, so there was a certain amount of natural talent at play, but by my early teens I became obsessive, drawing every day, it was all I wanted to do. Also, I was never satisfied with my work (even to this day) and I think that drive to find that perfect painting is what pushes some ahead of others and certainly keeps an artist growing.
Kevin Kelly watched The Hobbit in the theater and then went back and watched the high-frame-rate (HFR) version, which seemed shockingly different. No one could explain to him why it seemed so different, until he met John Knoll the co-creator of Photoshop and an Oscar-winning Visual Effects Director — whose explanation he paraphrases:
Imagine you had the lucky privilege to be invited by Peter Jackson onto the set of the Hobbit. You were standing right off to the side while they filmed Bilbo Baggins in his cute hobbit home. Standing there on the set you would notice the incredibly harsh lighting pouring down on Bilbo’s figure. It would be obviously fake. And you would see the makeup on Bilbo’s in the harsh light. The text-book reason filmmakers add makeup to actors and then light them brightly is that film is not as sensitive as the human eye, so these aids compensated for the film’s deficiencies of being insensitive to low light and needing the extra contrast provided by makeup. These fakeries were added to “correct” film so it seemed more like we saw. But now that 48HFR and hi-definition video mimic our eyes better, it’s like we are standing on the set, and we suddenly notice the artifice of the previously needed aids. When we view the video in “standard” format, the lighting correctly compensates, but when we see it in high frame rate, we see the artifice of the lighting as if we were standing there on the set.
Knoll asked me, “You probably only noticed the odd lighting in the interior scenes, not in the outdoors scenes, right?” And once he asked it this way, I realized he was right. The scenes in the HFR version that seemed odd were all inside. The landscape scenes were stunning in a good way. “That’s because they didn’t have to light the outside; the real lighting is all that was needed, so nothing seemed amiss.”
This high-speed video of an AK-47 firing underwater is pretty impressive:
I liked the explanation near the end.
Naturally, when he pointed out that the bullet only went five or six feet — let’s call it one fathom — I thought of the APS Underwater Assault Rifle, designed to solve that problem — and then he closed by mentioning that his next video would feature Russian frog-man guns!
(Hat tip à mon père.)
So, why is Japan obsessed with giant robots?
From War of the Worlds and The Day the Earth Stood Still to Independence Day and Battlestar Galactica, high-tech alien invaders have been a constant theme in American entertainment. But Japan actually grappled with such existential threats firsthand. Putting it another way, you could say Japan has been living in a science-fiction world since the day Perry first appeared.
The humiliation of realizing how far they’d fallen behind fueled a race to modernize. Within less than a century, Japan would manage to defeat a Western power at sea in the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War and be defeated itself in 1945 by an unfathomably powerful new weapon in World War II. Success and failure, life and death, all of it riding on whoever possessed the better scientists and engineers.
Robots came to the literal rescue when Japan began rebuilding its shattered infrastructure in the late 1940s and early ’50s. Retooling what had been weapons factories into toy factories turned out to be a quick way to jump-start the economy. Tin robot toys, the earliest made out of cans discarded by the Occupation forces, represented some of Japan’s first exports abroad after the end of the war.
In fact, the toys are the real key to understanding Japan’s robot obsession. The great majority of classic robot characters from the 1970s and ’80s were the brainchildren of toy companies. Toy companies paid anime studios to create television shows, then paid TV stations for the airtime and the right to air advertisements during the shows. The first and most influential, “Mazinger Z,” debuted in 1972 to instant success.
This marketing gambit proved so profitable that dozens of companies leapt into the fray. (It’s actually illegal in the U.S., where the Federal Communications Commission specifically prohibits advertisers from airing ads for a show’s merchandise during the show itself.) By 1977, no fewer than 12 different giant-robot shows aired on Japanese TV every single week, glorious robot-on-robot action matched only by the glorious ads for the toys the shows were created to hawk in the first place. So far, more than 100 series featuring giant robots have been produced.
I don’t know the original Captain Harlock, but the opening 12 minutes of the new movie seem… cool:
Edit: So, it looks like that video got pulled. This trailer gives some idea of what to expect:
In 1950, a live television interview on the set of Destination Moon was captured on kinescope. The interview features George Pal, Robert A. Heinlein, and Chesley Bonestell:
The film appears to be available on YouTube — with embedding disabled.
(Hat tip to Ron Miller at io9.)
The trailer for Miyazaki’s new film, The Wind Rises, now has English subtitles:
Blowhard, Esq. graduated from a monkey prison — or simian reeducation center:
In 1972, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, the fourth installment in the series, was released. When the film begins, humans have enslaved the apes but during the course of the movie, the apes rise up in revolution against their oppressors. There may be some deeper moral or subtext about racism and bigotry, but I can’t be sure. All I know is, when they needed some buildings to portray a sterile dystopia, they logically chose the recently-completed University of California Irvine campus, which happens to my undergraduate alma mater. I took some screencaps from the movie then went over there today for a short then-and-now comparison.
He compares before and after photos:
Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium isn’t as interesting as his history of fooling the critics:
I’ve read over a hundred reviews of Blomkamp’s two movies, and virtually no critic has noticed that he does not share their worldview.
Not at all.
Blomkamp’s 2009 Best Picture-nominated District 9, in which the black residents of his native Johannesburg demand that their black-run government clear out millions of feckless illegal space aliens, was universally praised by American critics as an apartheid allegory. Yet Blomkamp has relentlessly insisted in interviews that it’s really about “the collapse of Zimbabwe and the flood of illegal immigrants into South Africa, and then how you have impoverished black South Africans in conflict with the immigrants.”
Similarly, Elysium is another Malthusian tale about open borders, set in a dystopian 2154. By then, Los Angeles has been completely overrun by Mexicans, who have turned it into an endless, dusty slum that looks remarkably like urban Mexico today. (Blomkamp filmed for four months in Mexico City.)
[...]
Blomkamp, a gun-loving Afrikaner whose movies are based around his fear that the rapid breeding of Third Worlders threatens to bring down civilization, says Elysium originated in a disastrous visit to Mexico in 2005. While shooting a Nike commercial in lovely San Diego, the Boer crossed the border one evening to see Tijuana, where he was abducted by corrupt Mexican cops who shook him down for $900 in return for not killing him.
Despite the obviousness of Blomkamp’s parable about Mexican immigration’s catastrophic effects, Elysium has been universally interpreted as preaching the need for amnesty, open borders, and Obamacare.
Sailer also mentions John Milius and Christopher Nolan.