Joe Queenan movie biz based on recycling ideas

Joe Queenan is a highly entertaining writer on film, author of a number of books and many columns like this one where he overviews a large number of flicks in considering a theme, actor, genre or director.

In short, along with the likes of legendary producer Art Linson, his writing is a great tool for expanding your knowledge of film.

I've picked out a single quote from a lengthy feature reflecting on the career of 87 year-old Clint Eastwood, The Man With No Name apart from Dirty Harry and so forth. A 40 DVD Eastwood boxset has been released - I estimate I've seen about 30 of those flicks - and Queenan's take is fair on this huge collection and those that were excluded from the set (though Any Which But Loose is fun as well as dumb!).

In terms of learning cinematic technique, it's the excluded Spaghetti Western dollar trilogy I'd recommend - the boxset of those has great extras showing how director Sergio Leone worked - and he in turn borrowed liberally from the great Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa, whose Yojimbo and Seven Samurai remain masterpieces more than a half century later.

Here he sums up the nature of the industry in one pithy statement:

Movie-making is not so much a process of making new films as of remaking old ones. 

He goes on to add:

Stories work today because they worked yesterday. People never get tired of seeing good triumph over evil, because the only place they ever get to see this happen is in the cinema.

The meaning of Clint: what watching 40 Eastwood films has taught me.

BUDGET Cost of IP rights and screenplay

I'll add to this in time; first up a $5m novel rights example with Scorsese and DiCaprio attached - screenplay adaptation could cost the same again depending on how many writers are contracted to draft it:

Rights to Flower Moon – as it’s known to industry insiders – were snapped up by Imperative last year for a reported $5 million, and a script has reportedly been drafted by veteran Oscar-winning scribe Eric Roth of Forrest Gump and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button fame.

...

A beginner's guide to blockbusters

Great article from Murdoch paper The Times taking a wry, but well-informed, look at the process of making a hit movie - lots here you can reference, especially within your coursework blogs and evaluations:

From Times Online

-->

April 24, 2010

A beginner's guide to blockbusters

You need neither script nor star to have a box office success, it’s all just a matter of timing, chutzpah and explosives

--> --> --> --> --> -->

“The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things — Bread and Games!”
So wrote the poet Juvenal in AD104, but then he never lived to witness the blockbuster movie season in America: one long canyon run stretching between Memorial Day and Labour Day, in which the studios loose one $200-million behemoth after another in what amounts to what one observer has called a “multimillion-dollar demolition derby played with Porsches”. To make sense of all this, here is a ten-point guide to surviving the summer season.
1. Pick a date. Any date, as long as it lies between May and August. The summer used to be a wasteland, the place the studios dumped dreck like Electra Glide in Blue (“He’s a good cop. On a big bike. On a bad road”); blockbusters were things that happened once in a generation, like Gone with the Wind. But then along came Jaws and Star Wars, ripping up all known box-office records, and audiences hunkered down for repeats. Blockbusters became things that happened every year. Now, a new one is expected every week. This year Iron Man 2 on May 7 is followed a week later by Robin Hood, then Shrek Forever After, then Prince Caspian, all jostling for position.
“There are more teens living in America now than in the history of this country,” says Tom Sherak, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “It’s all about when the schools are out. It’s driven by that, by how you get them into theatres