by notesfromachair

Rules of the Game

About three and a half years ago I came up with a silly exercise for my students, who each semester must attend a series of panels on different aspects of the entertainment industry. Rather than me explain it to you, I scoured my old gmail account to find this task, which will undoubtedly affirm the belief of some that majoring in communications at a private college is a total waste of time. The fact that those people are absolutely wrong and that this exercise is absolute proof that I am indeed preparing them for the world they are about to enter into, will be discussed in a moment. For right now here is the task at hand that you are free to make fun of in your minds five ways to Sunday:

ANGRY BIRDS: THE MOVIE

March 28, 2011

As you all know, Pendleton Productions has purchased the rights to “Angry Birds” and has set up “Angry Birds: The Movie” as our first animated/live action tent pole film with Pixar Studios. It will, of course, be directed by Brad Bird (“The Incredibles”).

We have cast Angelina Jolie, Paul Rudd, Andrew Garfield, Willow Smith and Kim Kardashian as our birds. Our pigs will be played by Zack Galifinakis, Hugh Jackman and Jack Black.

In the time remaining, we’d like you to develop a detailed marketing plan to launch our film. Actually, it’s more than a film. It’s an event. Or will be if we decide to hire you because that will be your responsibility.

The marketing plan should reach across all media and be as creative and out-of-the-box as possible while still staying within the realm of reality. Whose reality? That’s up to you. But it should include publicity and promotion plans for the launch, advertising ideas, tie-ins, merchandising, product placement and any other means of creating public attention (but not backlash). It should also take into account platforms in film, television, music, new media and all social media. Because we want to reach, well – EVERYONE!!

You’ve got about 20 minutes to meet and then no more than 5-10 minutes to impress us with a presentation. So, no pressure.

Oh — our blue ribbon panel will vote and award prizes for the winning team.

Good luck and… don’t get shot down.

Okay, perhaps not my finest work. But it was prescient. A year after this assignment it was announced that there would indeed be a movie version of that best selling app/videogame/four quadrant mega-tent pole thingie. And given that at last count the thingie was at 2 billion downloads across all platforms (and still counting) it was unsurprising that just several days ago Sony Pictures announced it was indeed moving forward with a planned Summer 2016 release of AB on the big screen with a cast that includes SNL veterans Jason Sudekis, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph and Kate McKinnon, not to mention Frozen’s Josh Gad, Key and Peele and Peter Dinklage.

Sounds a little bit different than this “birds” movie

Logic and everyday belly-aching about the lack of imagination among film industry bigwigs tells us that no matter how bad any of us might think this film will turn out, it is also likely to turn out somewhere between a tidy and massive profit. Certainly, it is unlikely to lose money given the longevity this kind of asset assures its makers. Or is it and does it?

The fact is Rovio Entertainment – the Finnish animation company that first created the AB global franchise back in 2003 with a mere app – became rich beyond its wildest dreams from the app and is partners with Sony on the big screen version. But Rovio also had an additional announcement to make almost simultaneously with all this film casting hoopla last week. And that was that there would be a 16% cutback of its workforce, which in laymen’s terms means up to 130 Rovio employees – many of whom were there since the company’s inception – are getting the ax.

huh?

But how can this be after 2 billion plus downloads, 10 million Hasbro toys sold, an on-demand television show, and theme park attractions across the world, including even one at….NASA? (Look it up, naysayer)

Well, apparently Rovio’s 2013 net profits dropped 50% and this summer it was thus forced to replace its co-founder and chief executive of 10 years. In this way, it is actually telling us it will likely fit very well into the model of any other company in the entertainment industry. For the streets of Hollywood – both live and virtual – are littered with top of the heap successes that either no longer exist or are sputtering along in severely downsized versions.

I am old enough to remember that once upon a time there was a decade called the eighties and an independent film company named Vestron that won the lottery many times over with a worldwide film sensation asset that kept on giving: Dirty Dancing. But after a few years of spending with the big boys (literally) and never again achieving that kind of success, Vestron eventually folded. Remember New Line Cinema – the only studio in town that would roll the dice with the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, not to mention the makers of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise? Well, eventually even those assets would still not allow them to compete with the changing landscape of media platforms and they were absorbed by Time Warner and downsized into a sleeker form until eventually winding up as a pint-sized entity of the corporate conglomerate where it is now barely an afterthought.

Flying too close to the sun?

Which brings us back to my students.

Many of them are aspiring writers, directors and producers. There are others who hope to work in more specifically technical fields such as editing, cinematography and sound. In addition, I have a healthy number who are majoring in various forms of journalism, marketing, advertising and public relations. All of them are social media savvy and many are game savvy, or at least game literate. They may not be Angry Birds players – clearly not enough of us are for Rovio – but they have played or will (eventually) be playing some newer, hipper version of it on their phone, tablet or screen of choice not yet invented.

This being the case, there is another game I would like them to be skilled enough to play well in: the game of reality. It didn’t take any genius on my part to predict the Angry Birds reality but it did take a bit of chutzpah to force them to think long and hard, regardless of their career aspirations, of how the commercial world of entertainment functions and what they are up against. No longer can a writer just be a storyteller or a cinematographer spend his/her time ignoring everything else but how precisely light flows into the frame of a scene. In order to navigate the waters and be in a position to exercise your craft within the “system” most seem determined to enter, one needs to understand a world where we are all so ridiculously connected to both the ridiculousness of minutiae and the seriousness of global destruction, human rights violations and refighting the social revolution of the 1960s. Meaning that it should be a mystery to no one how a game application where nasty little furry birds slingshot themselves into innocent farm animals in the hopes that they will obliterate them into nothingness could net its creator many multi-millions/perhaps billions of dollars. Nothing about it should.

Since this is the world we have allowed them to inherit – this Angry Birds world – my thought three and a half years ago was to prepare them in a game of my own rather than to sit around and watch as the slingshot passed them by. Don’t get me wrong – I have higher aspirations for them than the virtual destruction of pigs via feathers. But wouldn’t it be great if they could accept the ridiculous Angry Bird reality of where we seemed headed, use their creativity to smartly work within that world and then leverage it into other employment with something newer, better and certainly more creative of their own once they amassed the access to do so?

After all, the next generation is being born this way

Well, I thought so. But as it turned out, they were not the clueless, intellectual snobs I assumed many of them would be and that I certainly was at their age. They jumped into the assignment at the time, coming up with some of the best, most creative and certainly wisest marketing strategies I had ever heard. This includes any and all ideas I witnessed during the tortured eight or so years I spent working at three different studios in film marketing before become a more tortured – though in a good way – screenwriter, teacher and blogger.

… and before I became the great Chair-dini

This is a generation that, if nothing else, appreciates irony. I loved the AB live celebrity dunk in Times Square. The simultaneous worldwide Angry Bird game, the virtual billboards in cities across the world that would keep score via international teams, the personal appearances of movie stars in bird costumes that would litter the airwaves and magazine pages, and even the animal rights charities that – through some twisted reasoning I can’t remember but recalled liking at the time – would become involved in some huge charity event benefit culminating at the film premiere.

Taking a cue from China’s Angry Bird’s theme park

Sure, some of them balked at having to spend half an hour of their day thinking about film marketing – especially since on the whole this is a generation who doesn’t care much to sell something they don’t believe in. But they all immediately understood the value of doing so. The truth is they’re a lot smarter and two steps ahead of the game that most of the rest of us are because they know games, have fun with games and will, no doubt, be changing the game while the rest of us are still complaining about the very existence of the game that we somehow, through ignorance, omission or sheer laziness, helped make a reality.

Here’s hoping that once they get the power they don’t turn their backs so some other younger, more vibrant member of some future animal species can knock them off their perch. Though surely by that time there will be an app for that which works better than any new, lame exercise I could have come up with.

Until it doesn’t.

09.28.14

by notesfromachair

The Little Gays

One night several weeks ago in a nice area of downtown Philadelphia – and on the 13^th anniversary of 9/11 – a group of about fifteen well-dressed white men and women in their twenties, who during the previous hour were seen enjoying drinks and dinner at a popular restaurant nearby, confronted a gay male couple their age on the street and beat them severely. One of the leaders of the group allegedly shouted to one of the two men: “Is he your fucking boyfriend?” whereupon he and many of his group began to relentlessly pummel them. The couple was then rushed to the hospital where one had to have his jaw wired shut and the other was photographed with a deeply lacerated black eye, among other injuries.

Exhibit A

There are numerous videos and photos of the group accused of doing the damage and they seem like any other normal crowd of young people out for the evening. The guys are alternately wearing button downs, khakis, jeans, shorts and pressed sport shirts and the girls are in dark dresses or nice pants and are wearing makeup and jewelry. As for the gay men – there are no photos of them other than a close-up of a distorted, sliced eye of one. Though there is a descriptive comment from a police officer who spoke anonymously about the case to Philadelphia Magazine referring to the gay men as “two little guys.”

To be fair, let me give you the exact quote:

P Mag: What of the early report indicating that they (the accused) were trying to claim self-defense?

Officer: You have two little guys who are gonna pick a fight with a mob, a bunch of meatheads? I haven’t seen that happen.

This last exchange really pisses me off. Not as much as the three people (one woman and two men) in the group who have thus far been taken to court where they were promptly released on bail within a day. And certainly not as much as the homophobic Twitter rants of the aforementioned young woman, the daughter of a local Police Chief (!), who has typed into the world such missives as: The ppl we were just dancing with just turned and made out with each other #gay #ew and Why do Asians always put their kids on a leash? Or as completely as their attorneys, who variously claim that their clients never touched the two gay men or see the disagreement as either unprovoked or mutual. One can just hear their reasoning now:

The fact that no one in the larger group had more than a scratch on them and that the gay guys were bloody and disfigured is just confirmation of what we all know deep down inside – gay guys, especially little ones, really can’t fight so they should think extra hard before they invite one.

Okay, certainly they would be clever enough not to say this out loud but that would be their clear implication. Just as clearly as the arguments on recent past legal cases which implicitly argued that young black boys who wear hoodies are ominous interlopers or a group of rude mixed race kids in cars who answer back a middle-aged white man with an obnoxious retort can justifiably be shot. Since you never know just what else any of them have up their sleeves that can endanger the well being of the average citizen – who is certainly not Black, mixed race and definitely not gay.

But back to the little guys.

I suppose that as a smaller than average gay guy myself, I should cut Officer Anonymous a little slack since he seems to be on the height challenged side of us “little guys” – which is not to be confused with the commonly used phrase of the little guy we use when speaking of a working class Joe or Jane who can barely make ends meet. No – these are the kind of little guys who are literally, well – diminutive, small in stature – and power. Or, as the dictionary says: small in size, amount or degree. In some cases all three.

It’s my belief that Officer Anonymous needs a little training himself. Referring to a gay couple who were just savagely beaten as two little guys or their attackers as a mob of meatheads is the kind of thinking that is a small but significant building block to this kind of crime in the first place. It’s a way of reducing people to a stereotype of their specific group and, in turn reducing the validity of them and their lives and any crime they find themselves a willing or unwilling participant in – as victim or perpetrator.

As a homosexual male who is just below the average height of the American male in 2014, I haven’t been a little guy since about, oh, 1962. And even then I didn’t think of myself as little even though you might have. Nor, I’ll bet its safe to say, do the two gay guys who were outnumbered by that gaggle of fifteen meatheads. On the same token, I wouldn’t presume to generalize about the motives or IQ brain functions of 15 people I didn’t know who either watched or engaged in a fight that landed two young men in the emergency room – especially if I was an officer tasked with upholding the law. That would reduce a very serious crime that will undoubtedly happen again in some other form, and admittedly could have been and inevitably somewhere again will be worse, to a frat level scuffle on the scale of, let’s say, jock vs. nerd. This is the kind of reasoning that leads us to wonder whether extreme domestic violence in an elevator between a husband and wife is really the typical private business of a married couple or if the sexual assault of a teenage woman wearing a sexy dress on a date with a hormone fueled, red-blooded all-American boy should merely be seen as an unfortunate example of benign signals at cross purposes.

Apples and Oranges are closer than you think

Perhaps I’m being too picky but you have to start somewhere. Until we see the connections we won’t begin to solve the issue. The hoodie, the elevator assault or the terrorists who hate our way of life who it turns out aren’t terrorists at all but the children of immigrants who were born here. Several of the latter, in fact, might have even gone to medical school and become doctors at work in several of the nation’s five-star hospitals, one of which was able to restore my second Mom’s breathing this week through brilliantly new surgical techniques. But I digress.

I’ve never been beaten up physically for being gay. Only been called names, laughed at, mocked and imitated in school by teachers and classmates alike, as well as by coworkers, neighbors and random passersby on the street. I’ve also been told numerous times over the decades by people older than myself to keep my private life private, to rethink my sexuality, that I need to give the opposite sex more of a chance, that I am living a sinful life and that any expectation that the world should at all change to accommodate my choice is misguided and threatens the very existence and continuation of the world as we know it.

Luckily, through a lot of therapy, reading, experience and love I knew enough not to let these misguided judgments about who I am prevent me from having what I now consider to be an extremely happy life. But these experiences and accusations – every single one of them – hurt deeply and cut me to the quick at the time. That I can remember each and every one of them decades later and not all of the many wonderful supportive words sent my way speaks to the power of just how much psychological damage negative words and hate-filled verbal exchanges with others can do. I can’t even imagine what the effects of a physical encounter would be – especially one as vicious or even more vicious that those described on the streets of Philadelphia and elsewhere around the world – now or in the future.

It’s something to think about as we sound off anonymously, reaching people and places we have never seen – or to be mindful of when we’re face-to face with friends and neighbors in locations closer to home. I laughed as I heard Sen. Cruz categorize Iran as swilling chardonnay in NYC with the US this week during nuclear talks, knowing full well the representatives of a strict Muslim government would, if nothing else, clearly avoid the public consumption of alcohol. But it’s just another generalization of yet another entire group of people we might not like but most certainly have not taken the time to fully understand. And it’s not particularly funny, especially when it comes from a bigot. It’s dangerous.