The CORE, bitches!

With apologies to Chapelle.

Today, via Oliver Willis, (mine was based on the giant French one, this is in Mexico):


and ...

Japanese Journey to Center of the Earth (oh we tell you it's just a drill. I signed an NDA ...)

Aaron's invention in the movie was based on both this and a project a friend of mine worked on for his graduate degree:

New Radar Can See Through Walls

My point is not validation, as petty as I can occasionally be. My point is that science is cool, and will provide all the fantastic ingredients we desire for our wee scifi adventures.

Brings back memories of arguments at the studio. When I came on the project, they were rather proud of the ideas they'd come up with ...

Studio: The vessel that digs to the center of the earth --
John: Yes?
Studio: Has a diamond windshield.
John: ...
Studio: DIAMOND WINDSHIELD!
John: You realize, this vessel digs. It is constantly digging.
Studio: Yes!
John: Then what will you see through this windshield?
Studio: Not following.
John: You know when you're driving through very heavy rain, and you can barely see?
Studio: Yes.
John: Now imagine that rain is magma and rock.
Studio: ... oh.

The fact that I managed to keep the dinosaurs out of the movie (I am not shitting you) was a bloody miracle in itself. This is generally why the science in sci fi movie sucks, by the way. It's not that we writers have no faith in the audience being able to understand the science -- it's getting the science past executives who a.) are science illiterate and b.) believe that if they don't understand it, the rube audience won't.

(That's not because they're elitist, by the way. They're narcissistic. That distinction is, if not important, at least relevant)

In retrospect, it is -- with the exception of one or two particularly awful bits of plotting from the studio (Project DESTINI) -- exactly what Jon Amiel and I set out to make. An old school 1960's science hero movie.

Also in retrospect, we probably should have told Paramount that's what we were making, as they were rather expecting Armageddon. Whoops.

Now as to that "wiring a computer to a shortwave radio" crap in Transformers, don't look at me.

Beginner's Guide to BitTorrent

Over at Lifehacker. Seeing as several studios have just signed distribution deals using this mechanism, this is a useful and perfectly legal bit of information you should know in analyzing current media delivery systems and their impact on production.

More Than Blah Blah

Casting, meetings. In the meantime, courtesy of David Slack, who I met as our staff writer on Jackie Chan Adventures and is now a big-time one hour writer ...

ROLL OUT!

What Profit a Man ...

It's an older article, 2005 but useful for those of you who dabble -- a breakdown of Hollywood's Profits, Demystified.

But the studios' real El Dorado is television. What makes television licensing, both at home and abroad, especially profitable for the studios is that virtually all the expenses required to market a television program, including tapes and advertising, are borne by the licensee. The studios only have to pay the residuals to the guilds and unions, which varies between movies and TV and average roughly 10 percent. The studios get to keep the other 90 percent. In 2004, this amounted to slightly more than $15.9 billion, making it the studios' single-richest source of profits.

This El Dorado comes from many tiers of the television industry. (Click here to see a table of this data.) In 2004, studios made $3.9 billion from licensing their films, shorts, and TV series to the American broadcast networks—all of which are now owned by the corporate parents of the studios, creating a cozy, not to say incestuous, relationship. Another $4 billion came from licensing studio films to pay-per-view TV. All the studios have an "output" arrangement with pay-per-view TV channels to sell them an entire slate of films at fixed prices. Warner Bros., for example, sells all its films to its corporate sibling HBO, and Paramount sells all its films to its corporate sibling Showtime. Overseas, almost all the main pay-per-view TV outlets are owned or controlled by the studios' corporate parents. Finally, $9.8 billion comes from so-called library sales, through which the studios license their movies and TV programs over and over again to cable networks, local stations, and foreign broadcasters. Fifty-nine percent of this immense $17.7 billion of revenue from television licensing comes from America, which is not surprising, considering that on an average day fewer than 2 percent of Americans go to movie theaters, while more than 90 percent watch something at home on TV. And without these profits from TV, no Hollywood studio could survive.

That's a lot of cash in play, and a perfectly good reason, from an objective standpoint, for the studios to go bugnuts when they sense new distribution methods may be a threat. They bitch and whinge about piracy with movies, but the real heat is in the television battle, as that's the form most likely to be impacted by downloaded entertainment.

Media Relations

Casting sesssions for the movie and finishing Blue Beetle #19 before Joan has kittens. To fill the time and pursuant to some of the discussion in the last post's comments, a link to the classic James Fallows article "Why Americans Hate the Media." from 1996. Oh, and The Glass Teat, since you kids today, arrrr... etc etc, insert cranky old guy noise. It's amazing how Ellison's issues with the media during the Nixon Administration are still relevant. Although considering the current Administration is really just the last gasp of the guys who got into power during Nixon's time, it may instead be entirely expected.

SDCC '07: Wonderland, Monkey and Boing, Among Other Business

Yes, well, "regular dispatches" from SDCC rather depended on the web connection on my Treo not suddenly collapsing and spitting cryptic error messages at me. As if there were any other kind.

Via Treo-cam, that's interweb game-theory blogger (and former professional gamer) Alice, myself in the middle, and the infamous Cory Doctorow, who at that very captured moment is blogging. With his brain. His Comic-con photos are here.

I don't often take or look at photos of myself -- usually wielding the camera -- so it's always a bit disconcerting to see the Roscommon barman I'm genetically predisposed to be obliterate any possibility that I might ever come across as a swanky Hollywood writer. A suit doesn't improve matters; I look like the same bartender, just on his way to a funeral.

Maybe a shot with the adorable, elfin Blue Beetle artist Rafael Albuquerque ...




... bloody hell. Time to give it up, open the lesbian pub I've always talked about and just settle back behind the pine where I belong.

Rafael, by the way, brought an astounding number of art supplies to our signing. While many artists crank out pencil or pen sketches for fans, I could see Rafael switching between watercolors, pencil smudges, Sharpies and more on each sketch. The lad draws at some weird sort of distorted redshift speed.

I didn't take a lot of pictures, as I prefer to walk around and actually read the little indies and talk to the booth humans. However, for a bit of scale, some bleached-out but still readable pics taken from up in the DC greenroom over the main floor.


Now imagine that extending for twenty five rows to the left, and twenty five more rows to the right.

The Con's current scale hammers home the hackiness of the standard American media narrative. I noticed multiple news camera crews, and each time it was the same. 124,000 people at the Con, give or take. But if you turn on your news coverage you won't see the giggling, happy five year-olds with their parents, having the "together family time" we're always whinging on about. You won't see the young woman who wrote and drew a comic about her time as a soldier in Israel. You won't see the scrum of young Marines I spotted as they compared Magic the Gathering cards. You won't meet the junior high teachers who are using my comic in their predominantly Hispanic classrooms to spark discussion about racial representation in the media. You won't see the indie film-makers, the kid who shot this 25 minutes in a week and left every industry pro who stumbled across him slack-jawed.

A thousand stories, tens of thousands of familes ... yet the newshacks couldn't wait to hustle up the dozen or so real freaks in costumes, the literally .001% that gave them what they wanted. Not even the kids in the Harry Potter outfits, or the Japanese anime kids, or even the clever unfolding Transformer rigs -- no, they found every empty-eyed overweight forty-five year old Flash or flab-rolled part-time stripper Catwoman and latched on tight for the creepy interview.

In the American media there are two constants. In politics, it is always and forever 1968, and liberals are Dirty Fucking Hippies. In culture, anyone who decides to poke their head out of the cultural world of the CBS primetime line-up is a sad, basement-dwelling loner screaming into his Hello Kitty pillow as crackling video dubs of the original Spider-Man cartoon flicker on his television.

I still came away happy, though. I saw literally thousands of families rummaging through comics, and games, and alternative media ... and the kicker is they didn't know they were supposed to be embarrassed.

Oh, and I saw a drunken Will Wheaton kill a guy with a 20-sided die. That was pretty cool too.

And this. I'm still not sure how I feel about this.