Comment Archives: stories: Blogs: The Measure
Re: “2 Amazing Things, and 5 Troublesome Things About This Kickstarter-funded Veronica Mars Movie”
Really good, smart article from this young man… very thoughtful. Now… what did you guys do with Nate, for Chrissakes?
Re: “2 Amazing Things, and 5 Troublesome Things About This Kickstarter-funded Veronica Mars Movie”
Yeah, it might very well be a one-off, unique situation, but I guess the take away is that the possibility of crowd-sourcing major things is still in its infant stages as an idea, and right now truly funding unknown, worthy projects still seems elusive?
Re: “2 Amazing Things, and 5 Troublesome Things About This Kickstarter-funded Veronica Mars Movie”
I agree that this raises a ton of questions and I understand people feeling like a big-studio project just elbowed into Kickstarter and got a bunch of attention like it's some grassroots start-up, not a major(ish)-network TV show that already logged about 60 episodes and will now get a bunch of fans to spend upwards of forty or fifty bucks just to watch the equivalent of two or three more.
THAT SAID, the release they've described on the Kickstarter page (and I'm sure this could change -- as could the supposed "fans pay the production budget, WB just pays for releasing it" arrangement) sounds like the releases the Kids in the Hall or Mystery Science Theater 3000 movies got back in '96 -- major cities, wider than a lot of arthouse movies, but probably not even 1,000 screens, likely far fewer. This is not being set up as a big hit movie; this is being set up as the kind of mini-movie WB doesn't often bother with. That brings up a whole other issue, which is that a company like WB (which shuttered its arthouse division a bunch of years ago) not being interested in movies that can't play on at least 2,000 screens (even Sony and Universal and Fox have their arthouse divisions) is pretty sad and stupid.
V-Mars also stands out because yes, it's wildly more popular than most things that try to get a Kickstarter campaign going, but it is also a very low-budget exercise. When the show was airing, it was, if I recall correctly, one of the lowest-budget shows in prime-time. I imagine this helped get it to three seasons largely because it did not cost a lot to produce (and as a sidenote to the bottom-dropping game of network ratings: just six years after VM left the air, a show on the CW posting similar ratings would be a near-lock for renewal). So you can make a Veronica Mars feature that looks WAY more expensive than the show for far, far less than the budget of any major WB movie this year. People talked about Pushing Daisies or Firefly in the wake of this project's success, and I'm like, hold up: a decent-looking Firefly movie cannot be made for $3 million or even $10 million. Given that, it does seem kind of weird that WB would deem the P&A costs to be worthwhile "if" other people put up the $3 million (or where-ever this lands at the end of the month) budget, because $3 million is, as you point out, pretty much nothing to a company this huge.
But that also sort of dings the argument that WB is going to make a ton of money off the backs of the fans. Obviously they think they can make money or they wouldn't agree to do it. But most likely, the amount of money this will make would normally fall into the "sorry, not worth it" column for them. I mean, if they thought this movie could make even as much as Whedon's Serenity movie, they might have considered fronting the $2-3 million budget themselves.
And it's also a rights issue: they own the rights to the show, so whether you're raising money to buy those rights back so Rob Thomas can do an indie feature or actually involving WB to basically distribute an indie feature... seems like more or less the same thing.
I also take exception to the idea that it will become easy for fans to become "bilked" into underwriting crap like a Big Bang Theory movie or whatever. As popular as The Big Bang Theory is, I don't imagine a lot of its fans would pony up $25-50 or more for promise of a movie. The demand isn't there because the show has been on for years, will be on for more years, and is a big hit precisely because it appeals casually to a lot of people (rather than fanatically to a few). And if they did, would that be bilking? Or would that just be people throwing away their money on something stupid? I do think there's a difference.
Anyway, I guess my point is that this kind of thing is sort of self-selecting, at least right now.
Re: “SPONSORED VIDEO: Easy In, Easy Out With the Samsung Refrigerator”
So basically, if you don't want monkeys to raid you, don't buy Samsung
Alvano
http://www.bergenrefrigeration.com
Re: “Photos: At The New Museum's Summer White Cocktail Party”
Summer White Party NYC www.randbreloaded.com
Re: “Latest Bowery Muralist Kenny Scharf's Gates Project Earns Graffiti Community's Ire”
just drippy tags by some toy. not like kenny painted over some top-down whole-wall mural or something.
and yeah, most of the gates were blanks.
http://grumpyvisualartist.blogspot.com/2011/12/scrapbook-posing-around-art-world.html#scharf
Re: “Will The Brooklyn Castle Chess Team Lose Its Funding?”
If it would lose its funding that would be a shame! Nothing more! Their reputation explains it all why..
www.krk25ga.com
Re: “Joe Queer Defends Ben Weasel, Reasonable People Everywhere Wonder Why They Ever Listened to This Shit in the First Place”
I just wanted to say Jonny Diamond is fucking stupid. That is all.
Re: “Nobody Got Laid at The Armory Show This Weekend”
By shirt I meant a shirt with sleeves, not a tank top. : )
Re: “Comforting Thoughts: There's an NYC Gang Called "The Master Race" (Featuring Members of the FDNY!)”
The Most Respected... more than two of the tags you listed above from the the TMR crew were were not white...in fact by 1990 the crew had grown so large that the police from the local station(111 pct.) were out numbered like 3 to 1 and more than half the crew was non white... it was a graffiti crew plain and simple!!! all this bullshit about TMR the pot growing crew is just that bullshit!!! what the members of the crew grew up to do or become has nothing to do with what was done as a bunch of roudy teenagers(most of which have gone on to do positive things),it's more about the feds trying to turn old freindships into organized crime rings so that they can justify there own existance...yeah pat was a fireman and yeah he got caught growing pot and yes he was a part of the crew back in the day but if him getting caught growing pot makes every member of the TMR crew a pot grower then everymember of the FDNY must be pot growers also cause that was the crew that pat was a part of when he got caught...sounds pretty stupid huh??? yeah...whats even dumber is that he's gonna spend 7 years in prision for doing something thats legal in at least 18 states in the country for medicinal use and legal for recreational use in 2 states so far...one nation indivisable under god my ass!!! DON"T GET IT TWISTED PEOPLE...
Re: “Which Bushwick Bookstore Is Right For You?”
Who's that good-looking guy with the hat in the top pic? I'm going to Molasses!
Re: “Nobody Got Laid at The Armory Show This Weekend”
I'm confused. His ad says "strictly platonic." Where is the ad where he has no shirt on??!!!
Re: “10 Memes That Are Still Funny at the End of 2012”
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Re: “Girls Recap: Don't Ash In My Mermaid”
"Chelsea is very central." I figured she was talking about art... maybe she was trying to make a sly Booth Jonathan reference.
Re: “Full Price at the Metropolitan Museum is a "Tourist Tax"!”
Yo yo pa is right. Suggested admission doesn't exist to subsidize New Yorkers.
That said, we should keep in mind that the Met is acquiring the Whitney's old building and unlike The Met and Cloisters that won't be on public land. That building may retain its admission price.
Re: “Full Price at the Metropolitan Museum is a "Tourist Tax"!”
I don't think they can ruin it, necessarily.
Your comment presumes that the Met instituted that policy out of the goodness of their hearts. Not so. They get millions of dollars a year from the city and the museum sits on public land, so free admission is part of a deal. Most of their money for operating expenses comes out of their monster endowment, so the admissions fees are a minor part of their finances anyway.
Re: “Snapchat: Bad for Sexting, Good for Art”
I agree with this article totally. To add on, an artist can use this app to engage customers. Spontaneous moments can be combined with sharing the artists' process via videos and pictures.
-Matt
http://www.yourdigitalimage.com
Re: “Why City Composting Should Start in Brooklyn, NOT Staten Island”
The curbside pilot in SI isn't about Bloomberg or DSNY making an effort to expand composting, it's a three card monty to ease SIers and elected officials (most who have been kept in the dark by technocrats) to the idea of re-importing "waste", which DSNY has illegally been doing with material collected from farmers markets in boroughs other than Staten Island for over a year now. While SI deserves green initiatives just as much as any other borough, this top-down, "we know better than you" approach that is a signature trait of many NYC administrations does very little to empower communities to take composting into their own hands.
Also, the author states that SI is the least "green" borough, which may be valid if measured by the number of residents that are convinced of their own self-righteous accomplishments in achieving a smaller environmental footprint (Brooklyn and Manhattan would probably be contenders for the top spot). If measured by the amount of undeveloped open space vegetated by native plants, capacity to sequester carbon, absorb rainwater, air quality, and noise pollution, SI would come up on top as "greenest".
Re: “Stars Cover "Fairytale of New York," Should Not Have Done That”
pipe the fuck down
Re: “Sex, Love, and Brooklyn: The Price of Eternal Youth”
great piece!
