I’ve been working on a horror movie. As I’ve said before, Tarantino starts with music and I find that really helps.

The other little trick I’ve learned is to start by writing from the point of view of the antagonist. They’re the hero of their own story — we all are — so their scheme has to make some kind of dramatic sense. I find it’s easiest to put together a plot by writing what the bad guy wants to have happen and then confounding him at key moments with the actions of the hero.

Like in Star Wars: Palpatine successfully executes his decades-long ultimate-power plan, then Luke et. al. come and smash everything. Simple, right?

So, how do I get in that horror movie frame of mind? I’ve been listening to The Grateful Dead, partly because they’re awesome, partly because the protags are all hippies, and partly for the name-archetype which I think will be useful. Yesterday I decided to try some horrorcore, that rap-metal-horror flick hybrid.

Psychopathic Records is the Disney, or Coca-Cola, of the horrorcore market. Don’t get me wrong: It’s an indie label, but their fanbase is big enough to do things like send their new acts to #1 on Billboard Heatseekers.

Psychopathic’s flagship act is ICP, of whom I used to be a giant fan. Boondox is their first non-urban, Dirty South act. His thing is a kind of Chainsaw-Massacre-Deliverance-Meets-Black-Magic. Here’s Dox’s track Inbred Evil:

This video is deceptively good. Family is a key element of horror (eg/ Mrs. Vorhees). In the video Dox kills because of his childhood — the argument in the car triggers him. Plus, little kids and sped-up footage just look creepy.

Horrorcore albums are supposed to be concept-centric and cinematic, like a horror movie. Listening while I write is reminding me of some key elements of the genre: Evil should be “ancient” (in Scream the evil is a year old, which is good enough). The family element also helps because, and this is my own untested theory, family is the closest most people get to insanity so it’s a good way in.

Here’s Dox’s party track Sippin’:

You need horrorcore party tracks just like you need comic relief in horror films: The lows are lower if the highs are higher.

Here’s Rollin’ Hard, the crazy-drug-murder track. I recommend you don’t listen, it’s certainly NSFW:

You do need gore. The Blair Witch Project, psychological horror film extraordinaire, had that little pouch with a bloody tooth in it. A little goes a long way. (A quick note on that user video: Images that directly represent your soundtrack look terrible. Go for implication.)

Despite hitting the top of Billboard Heatseekers, The Harvest isn’t a genre-beater. It’s no The Great Milenko or The Amazing Jeckel Brothers — fantastic albums in their own rights, let alone in horrorcore.

I caught a couple of commercials for Canada’s EAP recently*.

I don’t like the government spending money on commercials, there’s something dirty about it. There’s an argument that they need to educate citizens about tax changes, but these ads aren’t educational. They repeat a phrase that bothers me. It’s something to the effect:

“The Home Renovation Tax Credit. Put your tax dollars back into your home.”

That’s the Conservatives trying to buy our votes with public funds while stimulating the [home renovation part of the] economy. A tax credit is a partial offset, and it requires initial outlay. You are not spending tax dollars.

The HRTC’s not a deduction, which offset your taxes at, usually, 100%. If you deduct $1,000 at a 15% tax rate, you offset your taxes payable by $1,000. If you get a tax credit for $1,000 at a 15% tax rate, your taxes are offset by $150.

The quip should be: “The Home Renovation Tax Credit. If you spend money renovating your home we’ll give you a fraction of it back at the end of the year.”

That’s less catchy though. The government’s phraseology is newspeaky frame control that implies that you’re getting some kind of fantastic deal.

Don’t believe the hype.

* Aside: The Truman Show is an amazing, amazing movie. Forced perspective FTW in the final sequence!

There’s a post on the CBC’s jobs site for Associate Producer of Interactive Kids Programming. I applied last night, and then Tanya the Electrowitch gave me a Rider-Waite tarot deck.

I ran the cards this morning and the outlook isn’t good: covered by Ace of Wands, reversed, crossed by Knight of Cups, reversed.

The Big Dick: A card specifically about what one does for a living. Success in all aspects, reversed.

The Grail Knight: A bringer of ideas, opportunities and offers, reversed. Probably indicates my application info was too thin.

Quite inauspicious!

I’ve realized the key to Tarot reading: It’s exactly the same as screenwriting. You have a collection of archetypes that you apply creatively to situations to tell a story. I think there might be more meaningful spread-patterns than the traditional ones as well — why not use Monomythic structures to lay out the cards? That seems to make a whole lot more sense than cover/cross plus annotations or any of the other spreads I’ve read about. Something like this, for example.

Tarot is a neat fusion of poker and writing — no wonder it’s so diggable. I’m considering doing big spreads for all my characters to add random detail to their personalities, but until I get the backbone of the tale down that might be fapping about.

Balsillie’s “Make it Seven” movement — the populist front for his Coyotes relocation bid — has been very active in the last few weeks.

Today they’re asking people who want an NHL team in Hamilton to spam Bettman with a prepared message.

Click through for some good rhetoric. From line one the letter forces Bettman onto his back foot.

Self-serving populism: Delicious.

When I heard that J. J. Abrams directed the new Star Trek movie I was worried. Between Lost, Cloverfield, and Fringe J. J. doesn’t seem to know how to end stories. He relies too heavily on cliff-hangers.

But J. J. does know how to do sound. Star Trek successfully mixes the suffocating silence of the vacuum transparently with the pew-pew of futuristic space weapons, and the scene with young Kirk blasting the 200-year old Sabotage by the Beasties reminded me of Alex’s Beethoven obsession in A Clockwork Orange. “Wow, this classical music is the perfect soundtrack for my crime spree.”

The CG is great. There are some nice space battles, as expected. The hulking sci-fi structures in the haze of Iowa’s horizon give a nice sense of a real place in another time. I just wish the camera stayed still long enough for us to enjoy the effects. The movie uses a lot of fast cuts, more Star Wars than Space Odyssey, more popcorn action flick than sci-fi film.

Actually, this Star Trek owes quite a bit to Star Wars: the farm boy gets into a bar fight at his backwater spaceport; warp drives boom suddenly as ships blast off; cute, Ewok-style aliens annoy the characters. The villain, Nero, even travels around in what is essentially a Death Star.

Nero stops the film from being truly great. Bad guys can’t be pure evil, they end up looking like cardboard cutouts. Even Darth Vader said he was sorry in the end. Nero’s redeeming qualities are glossed over too quickly for me to empathize with the guy. Fans of the prequel comic, Star Trek: Countdown, got his tragic backstory fully: Blue-collar guy loses family, wants revenge. In the film, apart from a brief mention of his wife, Nero is a caricature of evil.

Good heroes need great villains. Nero’s weaknesses as a character reflect poorly on Kirk.

That aside, I thought the story was decent, and J. J. didn’t disappoint me: the plot comes to a satisfying conclusion — no cliff-hangers! If you’re looking for a Transformers-style sci-fi romp, you won’t be disappointed. 8 of 10.

Written for Edge News Vancouver. Cross-posted to MPF.

This is part five of a five-part series. Part one is here.

Actually, I’m not going to talk about Regulatory Suggestions. Partly because those are boring, and partly because I’d just be recapping info from the previous posts in this series. I want to talk about what a successful Canadian drama looks like, show the economic theory in practice a little, and then talk about why Rupert Murdoch declaring war on the Internet is not completely insane.

So what does a successful Canadian drama look like?

Woo! That show is hot!

There’s only a hint of it in the trailer, but the first 10 minutes of the pilot are spent in an underground sex-and-murder club (fight clubs are so nineties). Having sold you on the merits of their show right up front, the writers spend the rest of the two hours discussing the nature of good and evil and what makes us human. The way I described it to Chris was that the story wasn’t complicated, just very well executed.

I’ve never been able to get past the Battlestar Galactica pilot, but I am assured that Caprica is full of fan service.

Debauched writing aside, notice that the show doesn’t look Canadian (or maybe just a little). It lacks the cinematic dullness typical of Corner Gas, Little Mosque, and literally every other show filmed for a Canadian audience. I use comedies because Canadians seem to instantly understand the quality I’m talking about in those shows. The same dullness exists in what little Canadian drama there is, possibly with the exception of Degrassi.

In short, this is because of funding. As I mentioned before, American drama productions cost about twice as much as Canadian ones. Part of the difference comes from the fact that Americans use better equipment and more talented creatives who rightly charge more for their time. If Degrassi lacks “The Canadian Quality” I assert it’s because it’s popular in America, and therefore well-funded (again, 150 three minute episodes for $25,000 each — about $8,000 per minute which is approaching Hollywood feature territory, about $10kpm).

Yesterday I had a pre-meeting with my Toronto point woman before her pitch to a Canadian TV producer. We’re developing a show for the American market. After first contact the producer wanted to re-work our reality show into a drama. To disabuse him of that notion I told her to plant the idea that it’ll cost twice as much if we go that route, and we’re not really looking for production partners whose first idea increases our cost basis by over 100%.

This, by the way, is one of the several reasons I don’t go to sales meetings: My rhetoric is harsh, better to have it softened and delivered by beautiful women. Know your limits.

During last year’s writers’ strike the American networks tried to import Canadian television to fill their programming schedule. The result: People jumped up from their couches and burned their televisions en masse, crying, “Better no television than Canadian television!”

Well, not really, but our current shows don’t work down there and the data support me on that. The best we could do, and I’m not kidding, is syndicate Little Mosque to Al Jazeera.

Using the ideas from this series of posts I then broke down the media market for her. Based on her conversations with other television types it seems that this is all industry-standard common knowledge, which lowers my opinion of the producer she was meeting with still further. He’d have to have a stellar production record for me to be comfortable with him running our show against Lost. Better to take on Celebrity Rehab, at least to start, especially given that we’d need more than twice the budget to do otherwise.

Last, let’s talk about Fox! Here’s Rupert’s inflammatory quote from that one article:

The current days of the Internet will soon be over.

He’s talking about free access to, and linkability to, news sites online. He wants you to pay, “handsomely”, for access to content. I was waiting for a story to come along that would let me talk about old and new media as a kind of a summary, so here we go.

Sites like MentalPolyphonics are killing newspapers. Our cost basis is about about $300 per decade, which I’m happy to eat to entertain you. Newspapers can’t compete.

“But where will all the news stories you link to come from?” you might ask. Well, I don’t know. I’m not going to bother googling the link, but there’s a saying: Demanding to know what will replace newspapers is demanding to be told that change isn’t painful.

Change, dear readers, is painful.

That said, there are a couple of glimmers: The Mumbai terror attacks were reported on Twitter before any news site. The newspapers are firing journalists like crazy — all it takes is one of them to start a successful newsblog using primary sources submitted by readers, like CNN is trying to do (think: /. with more rigor).

But again, I don’t claim to know what will replace newspapers. I don’t care that much. I stopped reading newspapers when they discontinued The Far Side.

The vast majority of newspaper readers are boomers or oldsters, which is why new products are usually advertised televisually and online. The newspaper market tends to have established brand preferences. Fun fact: Men settle on a brand of razor by their mid twenties and then almost never change. Statistically, I will continue to use the Mach 3 until I die, or until Gillette discontinues the brand (which will be a good time to switch to a straight razor, instead of whatever 10-bladed holographic electrified insanity they’ll try to upsell me to).

Pertend you’re running a newspaper with an audience worthless to large advertisers, who might be savvy enough to get your content online for free, and which has lost enough subscription revenue to make production of the physical good — ink-on-pulp — unsustainable. What do you do? Let’s stick a pin in that for a second and talk more about the advertising market.

As we’ve previously reported, ad-supported iPhone games are economically inefficient. An ad-supported free iPhone game will almost always make less money than the same app does when sold for $0.99. The value of the users that you lose by charging is more than made up for by the smaller number of users who pay. I expect this effect to be magnified with iPhone OS 3.0, which introduces in-app stores (what’s known in the industry as DLC). Users that have shown a willingness to buy your app almost implicitly have a willingness to buy DLC, and free applications are not allowed to have online stores.

This is why I was surprised to hear that EA released an ad-supported game! Now, this lemonade stand idea turned out to be quite popular, but they couldn’t have known that in the planning stages. I’m left to wonder: Did EA do any market analysis before releasing that product? There’s a saying in poker that you should assume about a 10% chance that you’re completely wrong. I’ll also give EA 10% on the “we know something you don’t know” front. So I figure there’s an 80% chance that no one at EA thought critically about the market and a 20% chance that there’s something else going on.

But I digress. We were talking about advertising and newspapers.

Essentially, the ad-supported iPhone game argument is why I think Rupert Murdoch isn’t totally nuts. Newspapers have a mature market, and moving them online-only will cut a lot of plant, property, and equipment expenses, a lot of ink and paper expenses, and a lot of union jobs. You will lose readers, yes, but they’re mostly the readers that advertisers don’t care about, and their $1 per paper (or whatever those things cost now) will be made up in cost savings.

Erecting a subscription wall around your content and charging people will cut readership even more, but again you’re losing readers that advertisers don’t really care about — those who don’t pay for things. This is a trick that Wired Magazine used in the 90s to secure a high-value readership, and it’s also why Rupert’s test case, The Wall Street Journal, succeeded so nicely. One of the tricks in this strategy is finding a price point that balances reader loss with subscription revenues.

But!

But there are some major problems with this strategy. First, not all of Rupert’s papers are of the caliber of The Wall Street Journal. For example, The New York Post once called Christiane Amanpour “CNN’s war-slut”. I doubt people will pay premium prices for tabloid “news”, not when you can get The Superficial for free.

Second, Rupert’s bounce rate (the rate of people who look at the registration page and then immediately navigate away) is going to skyrocket. I can’t find the actual number, but when Wired tried to force people to register online — for free — in the 90s their bounce rate was ridiculous prima facia. People don’t like filling out forms, even when that form isn’t asking for a credit card number.

Given all that, the 3% reader retention figure cited in the CNN article seems reasonable. Rupert better be sure that the 3% of readers he retains are all millionaire shopaholics.

Third, when you build a wall on the internet it walls people out, it doesn’t wall people in. Without link traffic you don’t have PageRank, and without PageRank you are nothing. The counter to this is to have very high-quality reportage, which ties back in to my first qualm: The strategy that worked for The Wall Street Journal probably won’t for The New York Post.

But!

I think what Rupert is doing is setting up a cash cow. He’s got a bunch of mature media properties and he’s trying to figure out a way of cutting costs to squeeze every last drop of milk from them before they’re put out to pasture. He’s probably not going to grow readership or attract much of a younger audience, but that’s not something he necessarily cares about. After all, he owns MySpace.

Economists were created to make weather forecasters look good. — Rupert Murdoch

This ends my five-post series on the economics of drama. Whew! Okay, time to make sure the link-footer works on all the other posts. Thanks for reading.

There were roughly five parts to Peter Grant‘s talk: “Why Local Drama?”, the Economics of TV, the Economics of Film, the Economics of New Media, and Regulatory Suggestions.

If you’re reading this, chances are you think I would make a good professional writer. I’m attracted to the concept, but when I look at the future that strikes me as a career of suicide. I believe that the amount of money people spend on the written word will decrease every year and writers will have to be constantly moving to find revenue.

Right now, novels appear to be the safest market – the market isn’t large, but most consumers pay for them. Non-fiction books have to compete with Wikipedia and the rest of the web, while people have less and less time to get deep into a topic. Besides, many non-fiction books seem to either be collections of magazine articles (eg: Malcolm Gladwell), or single magazine articles stretched to book-length with the addition of anecdotes (eg: Urban Tribes).

Jakob Nielsen believes that eBook readers will invert that as the Kindle is very usable for linear, engrossing content but unusable for most non-fiction. He also believes that non-fiction still has a market: The ability to inspire deep thinking is why non-fiction books still have value compared with websites, which are better for quick hits and controversial writing.

But Clay Shirky (an Internet fanboy whose ideas must be taken with a grain of salt) argues convincingly that all the writers are going to go broke before we invent a new way to pay them:

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it.

Let’s look at the English-language markets for television drama. In order, the largest such markets are: the United States, the United Kingdom, English Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand. The United States viewer base is 300 million people. The UK’s is 60 million.

America is far and away the largest market, and it turns out is the only market large enough for ad-supported shows to compete commercially. Everywhere else the advertising revenue pie is too small to support high production value shows and some sort of subscription or subsidy model is used (they’re basically equivalent). We’ll get into the economics in detail later, but the same is true for film.

An hour of American TV costs about USD 2.62 million to produce or about USD 1.8 million to license. Average in Canada is USD 1.25 million to produce, despite our market being ten times smaller. Worse, licensing a successful American show for the Canadian market is only a few hundred thousand dollars per episode and benefits from cross-promotional marketing done in the US. It’s cheaper to rent proven US media than it is shoot our own speculatively.

What ends up happening in the smaller English-language markets is they’re flooded with game shows, reality TV, sports programming, news, and low-cost soap operas (examples: Britain, Australia). Low-cost productions tend to fill low-advertising-value airwaves.

So why put high-value productions on low-value airwaves?

Well, because people like it. High production value television drama retains viewers more than lower-cost shows (twice as many, on average).

When asked, people also tend to say they want public support to go into local productions (for example, France’s “James Bond Precedent” which says Hollywood-financed films otherwise shot entirely in France, by and for the French are American films and so receive no government funding). Locally-produced drama should also be more relevant to, and communicate more easily with people. When exported, local media spreads “the Canadian point of view“.

Entertainment is an evergreen industry — there has always and will always be demand. Entertainment products are also some of the easiest to export. While the local market isn’t big enough to support failures of local media, successes can be transplanted to other English-language markets at huge gains (for example, a 50% interest in the future revenues of CSI recently sold for CAD 900 million, Britain records the worldwide gross sales of Harry Potter, including films, as export income). Local productions also create a lot of employment both directly and in allied industries (equipment rental, catering, electrical, etc). Supporting the national entertainment industry grows the economy.

Last, TV production is seen as essential for the development of a creative cluster. I think there’s a chicken-and-egg problem here, but the argument is that where you find creative clusters in Canada, you find television studios: Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver. Being professionally creative, a professional actor, makeup artist, director, or writer, is possible in these markets because of media productions. Professional creative people are a necessary prerequisite for a creative cluster. Alternatively you could argue that enough creative people lumped together will eventually point cameras at each other. Either way where you find TV and film, you find the Creative Class.

Though successful productions are valuable, particularly as exports, they are also a cultural good — not solely economic, and nothing like commodities. Film, for example, is still one of the most difficult-to-finance, difficult-to-execute artistic processes, but when it goes right the result is something culturally significant, a recognizable work of art. Independent Canadian Media should be seen as a cultural institution that produces these cultural artifacts, like the community is seen in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany.

That should answer the “why” of locally produced high-production-value media. The next post in the series, dropping tomorrow at noon, will talk about how to pay for it.

This was first of my five-part summary of my notes on the Stories Under Stress seminar.

There were roughly five parts to Peter Grant‘s talk: “Why Local Drama?”, the Economics of TV, the Economics of Film, the Economics of New Media, and Regulatory Suggestions.

One of my (several) side projects is Todesco, a story about a zombie cowboy vengeance trip.

Tarantino starts with music, and so do I. Here’s the track, the title track I think, playing as Jack Todesco wakes up dead in the mountain meadows. I’m imagining a montage, cuts from images to title cards (maybe in spasming blood like Dawn of the Dead), and big reveals on the guitar bits, like dead people’s eyes opening. Here’s Ghosts I, track five [mp3]:

Of course, horror is nothing without humor. We need a bouncy, happy song to do terrible things to. Imagine a dark figure on a white horse looking down from a ridge on a peaceful western village, at dusk. One of our victims plays with his family after dinner below, he committed terrible crimes in the past but now he’s settled down, a good Mormon man.

The horse starts down the mountain. His name that sits on him is Jack, and Hell follows with him. The idyllic scene turns in a fountain of blood, fire, and revenge, set to Johnny Cash’s Flesh and Blood [mp3]:

“Flesh and blood needs flesh and blood, and you’re the one I need.” <- Jack stalks victim.
"So when the day was ended, I was still not satisfied." <- Jack catches up, gets violent.
"For I knew everything I touched would wither and would die." <- Close on victim as his eyes die.
"And love is all that will remain and grow from all these seeds." <- Kids huddled in the corner.
"Mother Nature's quite a lady, but you're the one I need." <- Jack kills wife.

Nice and menacing! I guess any love song can also be a murder song if you just swap out the subtext. The song's tree imagery plays well with the magical nature of the story too.

Actually, Flesh and Blood also plays as the waking-up-in-the-meadow song, maybe better. The song might be long enough to take us from waking up through to the first murder, then to NIN for the title cards. Or maybe a gunfight… That Ghosts track sounds pretty high-noon.

Two bloody massacres in the first five minutes: Hollywood, here I come.

Via BB, a fellow game designer wrote a deep semiotic analysis of The Shining. Either the author is insane or Kubrick was, maybe both.

Essentially the thesis is that the movie is two movies, one presented to each hemisphere of the brain using subtle violations of the fourth wall and little bits of neurolinquistic programming. Illuminating stuff, especially his comments on the Starchild looking through the screen in 2001 and Jack talking to the audience during his job interview.