The rise of the digital economy threatens the very bedrock of both the publishing and the movie industries – the blockbuster.

Forty years after Jaws set box-office records, high-grossing, event-style blockbusters have cemented their place as the essential success strategy for movie studios. In today’s crowded entertainment market, film producers must rise above the noise to win. Pursuing safer movie bets is a recipe for lifting sagging profits.

These are the conclusions of Harvard academic Anita Elberse’s book, Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment. The dynamics of blockbusters hold true not just for movies, she writes, but for publishing, recording labels, sports franchises and television networks.

Yet the ever-growing sea of entertainment choices – much of it distributed online, much of it cheaper, if not free – raises the question of ”whether digital technology will spell the end of blockbusters” and with it the dominance of the strategy. So far, the biggest victims of the new technology have been the middle rungs of the entertainment business, leaving a ”winner-take-all” market littered with thousands of ”also-rans” in film, acting, books and music.

Tom Cruise reportedly earned $US70 ($77.5 million) from the first Mission: Impossible, while two-thirds of American actors make less than $US1000 a year. Of the 8 million unique tracks sold on Apple’s iTunes in 2011, 102 tracks sold more than 1 million units each, but 94 per cent sold fewer than 100 units. Nearly one-third sold only one unit each.

Now, tech-fuelled change threatens the industry’s very structure. Promotions for Lady Gaga’s 2011 Born This Way album, for example, employed a complex web of deals among companies as diverse as Amazon, Belvedere Vodka and Starbucks. The demise of retail music-store chains has made reaching a wide audience of potential fans more difficult.

Online retailers such as Amazon and Book Depository offer a millions-strong catalogue of books at prices few corner bookshops can compete with. As those outlets collapse, many of the practices of promotion and marketing in the book business have struggled too. ”The blockbuster strategy is becoming more necessary than ever, but also harder to pull off,” Elberse writes.

Films require bigger launches to break ”through the clutter” of entertainment and attract people to theatres, as attendance continues to fall.

While studios and publishers struggle, the big names can also enjoy new powers: British band Radiohead offered its album In Rainbows directly to fans at whatever price they thought fair, without a record company’s help. Comedian Louis C. K. has done a similar direct-to-fan sale of a performance.

Less well-known bands routinely give away music online to build audiences who will pay for concerts – the opposite of the old model, when bands toured to sell more albums. That would seem to be a significant change in the business, and it matches the broader shift from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy in places such as the US and Australia. It is a shame Elberse does not note credible studies showing revenue from concerts rising, even as recording sales sink.

Elberse does acknowledge the cultural downside of the blockbuster strategy. ”Nine of the top-selling movies in 2011 were sequels to major franchises, and the 10th, Thor, was based on a comic-book character.”

In publishing, the focus on bestsellers has spelt the ”death of the mid-list”, the market for books selling moderately well, which once provided a living for many authors, she says.

Elberse quotes a music label manager saying: ”The great artists and the bad artists are easy – it is the good artists that can kill you,” because with good artists, it is not clear when to stop backing them.

Before the emergence of the blockbuster strategy in the 1970s, audiences had grown bored with movie offerings and distracted by TV. Hollywood was looking for a new success model and the video cassette recorder further dampened movie attendance.

Blockbusters such as Jaws and Star Wars gave the movie industry a new life, as studios sold stories as a special event to draw audiences back to the cinema.

Today, technology is changing viewers’ tastes and, once again, reshaping the expectations of the public. This book offers a snapshot of a four-decade-old strategy that may be in its twilight. What emerges next, no one can say.

Chris Zappone – SMH – March 22, 2014

Launched less than a year ago, Jake Film Finance has put money into two Australian features and has signed letters of intent with a number of producers. The Perth-based film is cash flowing the producer offset and pre-sales, drawing on funds from high-net worth individuals.

Its first investment was in Kriv Stenders’ crime thriller Kill Me Three Times. The second is Sucker, writer-director Ben Chessell’s saga of a 17-year-old Chinese-Australian boy who embarks on a road trip with the Professor, a colourful, aging conman, and his daughter.

Jake Film Finance founders and directors are Jarod Stone and Michael O’Donnell.

They hired entertainment lawyer Joan Peters as executive producer. “I am the interface between producers and the money, ” said Peters, who is also a member of Screen Australia’s board. “The fund is gearing up and we’re open to new projects. We would like to grow to the point where can provide funds of up to $60 million.”

She said Jake Film Finance‘s primary business is to cash flow the offset but it is willing to provide a small amount of gap financing, as it did with Kill Me Three Times, secured against a sale to France. Due to start shooting next week, Sucker is backed by Screen Australia and produced by Robyn Kershaw and Jason Byrne.

Chessell co-wrote the script with Lawrence Leung, based on the latter’s play. According to its website, the fund aims to provide wholesale investors with a strong yield from an alternative fixed interest product. The fund will consider taking positions in film, television and documentary productions but the initial focus is on feature films where substantial Government equity is already committed. All monies returned by the producer offset are assigned to the fund and are secured by a suite of production funding and security documents.

More Here: http://if.com.au

Don Groves. 20/3/14

The silent spaces and spooky folk crafts of backwoods Louisiana get as much screen time as Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey in director Cary Fukunaga’s murder mystery.

If you were looking to name the most talked-about programme on TV right now, you wouldn’t have to be an obsessive policeman with a deductive intuition to alight on True Detective. Praise has been lavished on Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey in their roles as Louisiana state detectives Marty Hart and Rust Cohle.

The mystery, in which the pair investigate a ritual murder in the bleak wilds of the bayou, has prompted much speculation and theorising. Some of us have even admired the folk crafts (wherever the detectives go they stumble over piles of spooky wooden icons). What binds the serial together, though, and elevates True Detective into truly compelling television is its eerie tone and complex structure. And that achievement is the work of 36-year-old director Cary Fukunaga.

“One of the images I first saw in my head when I read the screenplay was a plain landscape towards dusk,” says Fukunaga over the phone from his home in New York.

“There was a still, Magritte-like light hanging in the sky and these two cold, hard characters at the front, staring at a burned-out church. I loved the starkness of that, the openness of everything being exposed to the air. There’s a lot of two-hander dialogue in True Detective, and I needed to place those guys in locations where there were other levels of visual storytelling. It didn’t necessarily have to move the plot forward, but it had to add tone or add to the overall feeling.”

Woody Harrelson (left) and Matthew McConaughey on set That feeling is where much of the tension of the drama is derived; the broad, silent spaces of rural Louisiana are both beautiful and somehow menacing, as if the land itself is holding secrets. Fukunaga’s keen attention to his craft is reflective of a career that has begun at lightning pace. As with the stars of his drama, Fukunaga comes from a feature-film background. Born in Oakland, California, to Swedish and Japanese parents, he studied film at New York University. His debut, migrant drama Sin Nombre, won both best cinematography and direction at theSundance festival in 2009. To research that project, Fukunaga joined real migrants as they travelled across Mexico on the roofs of trains, exposed both to the elements and criminal activity (“We were attacked by gangsters within three hours on my first night,” he has said). Two years later, Fukunaga delivered something very different: an adaptation of Jane Eyre with A-list Hollywood leads in Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender.

While big-name actors appearing on the small screen have become a familiar sight in recent years, it’s less common for a director to make the switch. The demands of the role are very different.

“If you’re directing,” says Fukunaga, “it doesn’t really matter any more if it’s going straight to TV – what matters is whether you have the resources to make a story that moves you. The latter comes first. Increasingly, there’s much better material on television, but there’s not always the time and money to make it, so you’ve got to make sure you make it in the right place. It also depends on time commitment; a lot of directors will make a pilot but a series is just a whole other level of involvement.

“I remember one of my tutors at NYU telling me that making a feature film is not like making six short films but a whole different endeavour. The same applies to making eight hours of TV. It wasn’t going to be like making four features, it was going to be a whole different way of looking at narrative art.”

This applied not only to the structure of the drama – which jumps between the years 1995 and 2012 – but in its actual filming. The final four episodes had to be planned at the same time as the first four were shot. The crew ended up working “six or seven days a week for six months”.

Into this mix came the star duo of Harrelson and McConaughey, the latter fresh from his soon-to-be Oscar-winning performance in Dallas Buyers Club. “The first conversation I had with Matthew on the phone, I could tell he was a smart guy. The first time we met he brought some music that he thought would work for the show.

Initially we had differences in how we envisioned Cohle, but in terms of where he came from, we 100% agreed on that. It was up to Matthew to put the flesh on that, be it in his voice or the way he moves. I wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do but I was very pleased with the results.

“I remember on the first day of shooting being struck by the way he smoked a cigarette,” Fukunaga continues. “We weren’t sure how much he was going to smoke yet, but I had made some comment early on – because he doesn’t smoke and is very healthy – where I said, ‘Just make sure you don’t smoke it like a high-school girl.’ He must have taken that as a challenge because by the first day of filming he was smoking a cigarette like it was a joint.”

After saying this, Fukunaga takes a moment to correct himself; he didn’t mean “high-school girl”, more like “don’t look like you’re faking it”. This revision seems a little self-conscious and perhaps belies an awareness of the other discussion that has centred around True Detective: its shortage of well-drawn female characters. New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum wrote of the show, “It was about the evil of men who treat women as lurid props, but the show treated women as lurid props.”

“Look, the story is what the story is,” says Fukunaga when I ask him about the criticism. “It’s about two men who work in a very macho industry, in terms of the area they’re working in and the crimes they’re dealing with. But it’s about two men’s dysfunction as much as anything. The show is not going to pass the Bechdel test. I considerably doubt that. So is it sexist? I don’t know. I always focus more on the main characters and what they’re doing, and I didn’t write it, so… My job is to make the best version of that story possible.”

Next up for Fukunaga is a return to the big screen, a “small, simple” film about a child soldier in west Africa, with Idris Elba playing the leader of a rebel battalion. Are his friends at all envious of his prodigious career? “My friends just make fun of me in some shape or form. I got lucky.”

Paul MacInnes – The Guardian, Saturday 22 March 2014