Weekend Reads (Nov 11): Disney Innovations, Hollywood Strikes, Boomboxes, Neil Gaiman
Recommended weekend reading for November 11, 2023.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Walt Disney Studios recently celebrated its 100th anniversary, so now’s a perfect time to reflect on some of the ways it revolutionized animation, from the incorporation of sound to its inventive approach to capturing and conveying visual depth.
Even with sound effects, entertaining characters and color breathing life into animations like never before, the scenes still lacked the third dimension of the real world. Disney was not the only studio to identify this missing piece, but it was the first to find a scalable solution.
In 1937 Disney implemented the multiplane camera which captured scenes that appeared more similar to live-action film, with the scene’s background moving at a different pace from the foreground. The multiplane filmed not one cell but multiple cells stacked on top of one another. Together, the stacked cells formed one illustration in which the background, foreground and every layer in between could move independently of one another.
Via 1440. This delightful video from 1957 features Walt Disney himself explaining how the multiplane camera works.
I wrote about this in a previous newsletter, but now it’s official: Spotify is changing their policy so that tracks need to be streamed 1,000 times before they can start earning money.
MBW has subsequently confirmed with sources close to conversations between Spotify and music rightsholders that 1,000 streams will indeed be the minimum yearly play-count volume that each track on the service has to hit in order to start generating royalties from Q1 2024.
We’ve also re-confirmed Spotify’s behind-the-scenes line on this to record labels and distributors right now: That the move is “designed to [demonetize] a population of tracks that today, on average, earn less than five cents per month.”
And note that it’s 1,000 times each year.
I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: If you really want to support your favorite artists, buy their music. (And some merch while you’re at it.) Don’t believe for a second that streaming music actually supports artists. (Or the vast majority of them, anyway.) You’re mainly just supporting Spotify, Apple, etc., and they already have more than enough money.
After four months, the Hollywood strike is finally over.
The two sides spent the last several days putting the finishing touches on the deal, which will see the first-ever protections for actors against artificial intelligence and a historic pay increase. The deal will see most minimums increase by 7% — two percent above the increases received by the Writers Guild of America and the Directors Guild of America.
The deal also includes a “streaming participation bonus,” according to an email sent to SAG-AFTRA members, as well as increases in pension and health contributions. The union said the contract is worth more than $1 billion in total.
“We have arrived at a contract that will enable SAG-AFTRA members from every category to build sustainable careers,” the union said in the email. “Many thousands of performers now and into the future will benefit from this work.”
Union members still need to vote to ratify the new agreement, which will take about a week. In the meantime, however, they can return to work.
I’ve been keeping tabs on the ongoing SAG strikes partly for selfish reasons: the sooner the strike is over, the sooner I can see Dune: Part Two. That said, the strike and its related negotiations have been a fascinating real world example of how AI is shaping our culture — as well as a stark example of studio and corporate greed. As Cynthia Littleton puts it:
Another important result of the labor contract cycle has been to ignite the conversation about the legal, moral and ethical lines to draw around generative artificial intelligence technologies. Instead of talking about tech in amorphous terms, the anger and discourse unleashed by the strikes forced Hollywood to discuss in fine detail how AI may affect the employment picture for creatives who work in copyright-based industries. The details of the SAG-AFTRA terms on AI will be studied no doubt as guideposts in the sea of litigation and public policy making that is now under way in the U.S. and around the world.
Speaking of studio greed, “Hollywood accounting” is the term commonly used to describe the measures that studios take to show that even the biggest blockbusters are commercial failures… on paper, anyway.
One oft-cited example is the 1997 hit Men In Black, starring Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith. The movie grossed nearly $600 million on a budget of just $90 million. It was such a box-office winner, the movie spawned three sequels.
And yet Sony Pictures, the studio behind it, claims the film has never broken even.
The movie’s screenwriter, Ed Solomon, has spoken out about the accounting shenanigans that make that possible.
“The studios ARE losing money, just as they say,” he said recently in a deeply sarcastic tweet. “My recent Men in Black profit statement proves that the film, though having generated over $595 million in revenue, has actually *cost* Sony over $598 million. SO close, too: off by just .02%/yr.”
Related: Another shady studio move is shelving movies that are completed (rather than releasing them) in order to write them off come tax season. Warner Brothers’ Coyote vs. Acme is the latest movie to receive this treatment.
Earlier this week, one of the iconic Tustin blimp hangars in Orange County, California burned to the ground. Originally built during World War II, the hangar appeared in numerous movies and TV shows that required a big, impressive space for a scene.
“We in the film industry are always very excited about cavernous, large, historic spaces like this,” said production manager Scott Trimble, referring to both hangars. Trimble, a board member of the Locations Managers Guild International, also was a location manager on Star Trek and recently worked on The Book of Boba Fett and Snowfall. “Because they look so incredible for filming,” he continued. “So any time we lose any kind of place like this, it’s tragic and it makes it harder to find a filming place for the next time.”
[…]
Real-life structures like the north and south hangars stand out in an era in which many large-scale structures are often computer-generated. Productions often elect to shoot scenes in warehouses full of green screens.
“There’s definitely some realism in filming in an actual environment,” Trimble said, adding that it improves the actors’ performances when they can “feel all the space around them,” instead of just “a green wall.”
Much like the IMDb, Discogs has become an invaluable resource for music obsessives. But recent decisions, including a fee increase for the site’s marketplace, has soured some Discogs users.
In the last two decades, Discogs has become a central hub to vinyl collectors, thanks to its inventory of more than 62 million items and a vast, user-generated database of information on vinyl records. In 2021 alone, the company claims it sold 17.8 million pieces of music. “I would tell friends of mine who were looking for rare records, go there first,” says Damien Facobbre, a Chicago-based collector. “If it exists, it’s gonna be there.”
Yet Terzulli’s frustrations reflect a growing discontent among many small-time Discogs sellers, who say that the fee hike, along with the new shipping fee, has jeopardized their ability to turn a profit without gouging their customers.
“I would wager I actually lose money on most shipments when my costs for mailers and tape are factored into the total I charge for shipping records,” says Steve Visteen, another Chicago-area collector who’s been trying to sell records to which he no longer feels emotionally attached. When Visteen, who ships two or three records a month, received an email from Discogs in May encouraging sellers to entice customers by offering free shipping, he found it insulting. “I cannot absorb shipping fees based on Discogs’ belief that free shipping is a sales booster. If I were to follow Discogs’ advice, I would be obligated to eat shipping costs that have been increasing with every passing month.”
Much of the discontent stems from the fact that Discogs is largely user-driven. The site’s users, myself included, have spent countless hours adding information on millions of artists, releases, and record labels, which creates a sense of ownership. Thus, when the site’s owners make decisions that seem driven less by a desire to improve the site, and more by a desire to increase their bank accounts, that’s bound to rub people the wrong way.
In addition to being a vast music database, Discogs occasionally posts some interesting music-related features, like this breakdown of the most iconic old-school boomboxes of all time.
There are few things more iconic than the old-school boombox. The boombox bridged the gap between the home stereo and the walkman and it did it with style. You could bring one with you everywhere you went and blast your music through a set of powerful speakers instead of being limited to a pair of headphones.
By the late 1970s, boomboxes offered deeper bass, input and output jacks, and more audio control options than most people knew what to do with. Throughout the ’80s, the boombox became a cultural phenomenon as groups like The Clash and Beastie Boys were often spotted with one when they were out on the town or touring.
Lacy Baugher Milas delves into what makes Neil Gaiman’s stories so unique, singular, and enjoyable.
Gaiman also remembers what so many modern fantasy writers seem to have forgotten: That there is no point in darkness without light to go alongside it. Our current pop culture landscape — with its embrace of dystopian fiction, difficult antiheroes, and gleefully dark themes — seems to find it difficult to tell stories about goodness or belief with anything approaching sincerity. But Gaiman, whose works frequently touch on so many uncomfortable, difficult, or even downright frightening topics, never forgets that a big piece of fantasy is about hope, and our collective longing to believe in something better — or possibly just something that’s different — than the place in which we find ourselves.
I’m not quite the Gaiman fanboy that I used to be, but I still look forward to reading his latest stuff. (His sequel to 1996’s Neverwhere is supposedly due out some time next year.) And 1999’s Stardust still ranks as one of my favorite novels of all time.
Max Read reviews David Fincher’s The Killer, a movie about an anti-social hitman that might also serve as a critique of “sigma male” culture.
The killer likes to think of himself as a kind of warrior-monk, a violent philosopher set apart from the herd. But what he sounds like is a macho hustle-guru YouTuber doing a video called “8 Secrets Of Sigma Success (RARE)”: “If I’m effective, it’s because of one simple thing: I don’t give a fuck… Weakness is vulnerability. Each and every step of the way, ask yourself: What’s in it for me? This is what it takes. What you must commit yourself to. If you want to succeed.”
The punchline is that this is what he’s saying as he pulls the trigger, misses his target, and botches his job. Whatever complicated and ambivalent feelings The Killer has toward its main character, “admiration” is not among them. The killer thinks of himself as having an unmatched clarity about his life and the world, but the movie mostly regards him as self-deluded. He botches his hits, he forms attachments, he misunderstands his own importance. Rather than being freed by his careful planning and elaborately articulated life philosophy, he’s trapped by his own paranoias and resentments.
From the Blog
If you have a website, then you probably like to know how it’s doing, i.e., how many visitors it’s had, what it’s most popular pages are, and so on. Google Analytics is one of the most popular tools for tracking site analytics, but it’s overly complicated and has privacy issues. Which is why I’ve started using Vincent Ritter’s Tinylytics.
Opus currently uses both Google Analytics and Tinylytics. (Their numbers are pretty similar, if you’re wondering.) But I plan to remove Google Analytics and use Tinylytics exclusively starting in 2024. Over the years, some have advocated for removing website analytics altogether and there are valid concerns with any analytics (e.g., privacy issues, the extent to which bots can skew the numbers). While I’m sympathetic to those things, I still like having some idea of how Opus is doing. Tinylytics gives me that in a simple, well-supported package. I’m happy to give it my money, and I look forward to seeing what else Ritter has in store for the platform.
This post is available to everyone (so feel free to share it). However, paying subscribers also get access to exclusives including playlists, podcasts, and sneak previews. If you’d like to receive those exclusives — and support my writing on Opus — then become a paid subscriber today for just $5/month or $50/year.