“Leaked” set photos, teasers for teaser trailers and poster premiere dates have all become standard bits of movie marketing in the last few years. This one today from Paul Thomas Anderson, who is currently finishing up his 1950s cult-themed film The Master, is probably my favorite of them all. The director emailed photos of the film’s 65mm negative being cut by hand to Anderson fan-site Cigarettes and Red Vines. From his verse-styled accompanying text:

These shots include our lovely
Negative Cutter, Simone, imported
all the way from France to cut 65mm
negative. She does it all with a pair
of scissors from Staples.

The posts author then cropped and inverted the one picture of the film’s actual negative and shared it on Flickr:

I never thought I’d hear about a negative cut again for a major U.S. release. It should come as no surprise that I’m more excited for The Master than any other 65mm release I can recall.

Brilliant scoop from Cigarettes and Red Vines¹ and a great way for Anderson to pump up his cinematically nerdy fans.

A selling point of digital cinema to the creative community was the promise of complete control over the film’s look and sound, so that the audience gets exactly what the filmmaker envisioned. To assure that integrity, the director will have to shoot and finish the project on digital. That will take away an entire dimension of choice—specifically, shooting on film.

Another great long post from David Bordwell. Perhaps the best bit is at the beginning when he teases a new book on the industry-wide digital shift “due out on this site in a few days.” Given the depth of his “Pandora’s digital box” series, color me excited.

I considered linking this Forbes article yesterday that blames HBO for the unprecedented level of piracy Game of Thrones has experienced this season, but something seemed a bit off about it. Thankfully, Dustin Curtis took the time to do something Forbes writer Erik Kain didn’t: some journalism.

Kain cites an interview with Eric Kessler, HBO’s president, in which he claims Internet streaming is a passing fad. Curtis watched the original interview and transcribed large swaths of it. Turns out Kain just made shit up.

Who would believe that the president of HBO is so dense that he would make such an absurd comment? It’s so unbelievable that I went the primary source, a 40 minute video interview with Mr. Kessler, which draws a fascinating picture of HBO’s business strategy. After listening to the entire interview twice, I could not pinpoint where Kessler actually said “temporary phenomenon.” He hinted at the opposite, in fact, and then he articulately rationalized HBO’s position from a business perspective.

I am yet to watch the entire interview myself, but I’m glad someone did and offered some analysis instead of writing a shocking, link-baiting article.¹ Kessler lays out HBO’s business model, which was the missing link that stank up Kain’s original piece. From Forbes:

We subscribe to cable-TV for only a few months of the year – just so we can watch Game of Thrones. But I would happily pay more for a stand-alone HBO GO service year round than the $15 (I think) it costs to tack on HBO to our cable. This would net HBO even more revenue over the course of a year. Quite a bit more, actually.

Bullshit.

I too would prefer to get HBO Go on its own, without a cable subscription, or have the ability to purchase new content on iTunes or Amazon, but I know that HBO makes a great deal of money from agreements with the cable companies. Here’s network president, Kessler, as quoted by Curtis:

There are 60, 70, 80,000 customer service agents on the phone every day, and you know what they’re talking about? They’re talking about HBO. The affiliate covers that cost. The billing systems. That’s the affiliates. If you watch HBO 5 minutes a month or 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, that’s not a cost we have. In addition, we benefit tremendously from the fact that the cable operator bundles HBO into existing packages. So if they offer double-play or triple-play, you know, they say, get HBO free for three months. The ability to market and bundle with the affiliates is very beneficial to us.

HBO is in the business of making content, not building infrastructure. By allowing the cable affiliates to shoulder the costs of delivering and selling the network, they can focus on making great content that people want to watch. Delivering that content is another business altogether.

I don’t entirely agree with Kessler’s assessment of the current state of things. His explanation of why HBO will stick to its plan is because it would be too difficult to branch out and deliver content on its own. I respect that, but I don’t think it’s very forward thinking. It is, however, an extremely considered position. Here’s Kessler again:

You know, you go to Netflix or any others, and there are hundreds of thousands of pieces of content that you’re streaming. We will never compete in that ballpark. We don’t want to compete in that ballpark.

What we compete on is quality. If you want HBO programming, the only place to stream it is through Go or through our affiliate portals.

HBO is perfectly happy with the way things are and feels that the risks of building their own delivery network outweigh the benefits. Clearly, given the caliber and the popularity of their content, they are doing something right.

The premium network will experience extreme piracy as their portal becomes comparatively closed over the next few years, but will that be their undoing? Not yet.

I was skeptical that this post by Joss Whedon on Whedonesque, a fan-run message board, was legit, but now that the Washington Post went ahead and published a story on it I feel pretty confident it was in fact penned by the director of the record-setting box office smash of the moment, The Avengers. The message to his fans is rather shticky¹ but there is one nugget in there I think is worth discussing.

When “asked” about how he would feel if Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises eclipses the runaway financial success of his feature debut, Whedon had this to say:

I’m glad I made you ask that. I will feel sad. But let’s look at the bigger picture, and I can’t say this enough: THIS IS NOT A ZERO SUM GAME. Our successes, whoever has the mostest, are a boon to each other. We’re in the business of proving that superhero movies aren’t just eye-candy (they’re eye-TRUFFLES!). People seem intent on setting us against each other, and though I’m proud to be Woody Strode to Nolan’s Kirk Douglas, I think they’re missing the point. Whatever TDKR does on its first weekend, the only stat that matters to me is the ticket I’M definitely buying. Nolan and Raimi INVENTED the true superhero flick, yo. (Special mention to Jon Favreau and James Gunn.) Happy to be in the mix.

Tongue-in-cheek as his piece is² I think this excerpt comes from a genuine place. Box office numbers have long been the bludgeoning stick of Hollywood’s power set, but that goofiness has seeped into fan culture. Which superhero is better? Well, which one had a better opening weekend? Box office, for many, isn’t just a way for big wigs to flex but a way of taking audience temperature.

I don’t that’s true anymore, chiefly because I don’t get the sense that audiences actually like these movies all that much. It feels like every few weeks a film comes out that is massively, stupendously just good enough that people come out in droves to see it. Whenever I talk to people who love big budget superhero films there is always this sense of apologism, that they love these movies because they’re not “Oscar fodder” or “great movies.” The Avengers, it turns out, isn’t just good enough, it’s more good enough than the other superhero films out there, about $500 million more good enough so far.

Whedon took the opportunity of being at the center of a zeitgeist to ply his fans with this fun “I’m still me” posting, to let them know that he is still the same nerd he was when he came into this game. I can’t help but wonder about his off-handed remark about the invention of the superhero movie though. He’s left out a major contributor to the form and I think there’s more to it than just plain forgetfulness. The modern superhero craze would not exist in its current form without the contributions of Bryan Singer, but I don’t know that fans will agree with that.

We can split hairs about the history of superhero cinema,³ but Singer’s 2000 X-Men changed the landscape of superheroes on film. Suddenly these movies could be darkly existential outings with complex characters, not the gloss and razzle-dazzle of, say, a Joel Schumacher affair. X-Men opens at Auschwitz, for goodness sake. Without fear of fan reprisal, Singer took the source material and made what holds up as a great film, perhaps still the best of the Marvel breed.

I could maybe see a world in which Sam Raimi makes his Spider-Man if Singer had never dipped his toes into comic books, but I see no way that Christopher Nolan would have ever gone in the direction he did with Batman Begins without the existence of X-Men. Singer cut the genre⁴ down to its core and showed other filmmakers that you can make serious work out of these layered yarns. He kicked off this movement and it seems he has gotten lost in the conversation.

Whedon wasn’t making a judgement as to who is the best filmmaker; he was simply talking to his fans on their level, reiterating accepted knowledge to fire them up. Nolan and Raimi and Jon Favreau and James Gunn (whose Super was something of a comic-lover’s wet dream inasmuch as it provided all the gooey raunch that better filmmakers know to leave out) are names that resonate with this set and get them pumped. Singer, on the other hand, is still stupidly paying for Superman Returns, a film I believe was an incredible exhumation of the oft-doomed franchise. But fans didn’t like it and Singer got the boot.⁵

There are so many odd accepted truths about these films, like that Ang Lee’s Hulk was a disaster or that nobody liked Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I disagree with both of those assertions but I get sideways glances when I pronounce that fact. “You liked that?” Very much so, actually. I don’t know where these homogenized opinions came from. Did the rise of the Internet congeal opinions? Has Rotten Tomatoes infiltrated the minds of moviegoers, making movie goodness a binary metric? Or maybe things were always like this and I’ve only noticed it recently.

The Avengers, for all its heart, is only a so-so film that barely carries the mark of Whedon’s efforts. It does little to move us forward and certainly doesn’t seem like the filmmaker was able to squeeze much of his own personality into the piece.⁶ It’s a box office smash and it’s certainly good enough, but it’s no X-Men (or Superman Returns for that matter). I’d like to see the form elevated instead of being massaged, but ticket sales tell a different story. The more of the same you make the more money you can rake in.

I want Bryan Singer back.

A movie review on Amazon is not Roger Ebert, and if you’d ask any avid reader, they’d all tell you that the one isn’t even comparable to the other and that they’d never even consider getting their entertainment criticism on Amazon or through a cold, anonymous recommmendation [sic] engine on Netflix. Yet that’s exactly what so many Americans are doing now. Nobody makes any sort of conscious decision to stop reading entertainment journalism and arts criticism. It just turns out that way.

Debrouwere’s May 4th article has been causing a stir across the web because it gets to the heart of the problems with old media. The crux of his argument is that journalism isn’t just changing, it’s being replaced by other kinds of content many of us never anticipated.

He gets so much right about what’s wrong with the old way of thinking about journalism. The above quote, the only bit in his piece that relates to film criticism, nails it. Most readers probably still claim to love reading film reviews, but in reality that’s just not where they’re getting most of their movie advice from.

Read every word of Debrouwere’s piece. It’s a sobering breakdown of where the industry is. He wraps it back around to the notion that by letting go of our old, stodgy outlook of journalism (and other things that used to fill newspapers) we can look forward to a more exciting written future. I’m game.

This summer, Indiewire is partnering with the Festival del Film Locarno – aka the Locarno Film Festival – along with the Swiss Association of Film Journalists and the Film Society of Lincoln Center to run a workshop for aspiring film critics.

Indiewire and Locarno will select six college-age participants to attend the two-week festival in early August, where they'll write about the program in a deadline-driven environment. With the support of Gohner Stiftung, the festival will provide housing from July 31 through August 11. Indiewire will contribute with a share of the travel expenses depending on the country of origin of the participant.

Sounds like an amazing opportunity.

If you’re the right age and even remotely interested in writing about film, I suggest you apply.

I heard about Drafts, Agile Tortoise’s iPhone notes app, when it initially launched. I’ve been a fan of the company’s apps for some time. I am still blown away by Terminology’s deep integration with Instapaper, and Phraseology has turned out to be my go-to iPad text app for editing long for pieces. So it was only a matter of time before I got on this train…

Drafts is an app with a very simple premise: write stuff. The interface is extremely spare by design. Launch the app and you are brought immediately to a new, blank note with the keyboard ready for typing. The 1.1 update Agile Tortoise pushed out this week allows you to send your text to a slew of other apps, including OmniFocus, Tweetbot, Sparrow and any app that recognizes plain text via iOS’s stock “Open in…” function. On top of that (and this is what sold me) you can even send your text to Dropbox (more on this in a moment).

I refrained from purchasing Drafts until this week because I didn’t see where it fit into my life. Since the initial version had no form of document sync I thought it would just add clutter and cruft to my workflow. As it turns out, my workflow already was cluttered; Drafts actually alleviated some of that mess.

Here’s a word on Dropbox integration from the Drafts 1.1 release notes:

“Save to Dropbox” action. Note this is not sync, but an export feature. Once you link your Dropbox account, selecting this action exports a timestamped text file to the /Apps/Drafts folder in your Dropbox.

Sync, by its very nature, adds a layer of complexity to any app. When do my documents sync? Where do they go? What happens if the sync gets interrupted? Even at its best, sync can get sloppy fast. Apps that sync over Dropbox seem to interact with it differently. For example, if I’m working on a document in Byword on my Mac and save it to Dropbox, if I leave the Mac app open and then go edit the document elsewhere, say on my iPhone (or even in another app on my Mac), it will cause a conflict. So I have to remember to close all instances of the app, something I learned the hard way. By forgoing sync altogether, that complexity melts away in Drafts.

For years now I have considered true sync an absolute minimum for any plain text editing app that I use. Drafts’ implementation, however, forced me to reconsider why I thought sync was so vital. For the most part, I sync files that I either am currently or soon will be editing. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could, or even should, write something on an iOS device that wouldn’t eventually be finessed into a final piece, that I could just write.

Back before the days of polished iOS writing apps, I always rode the subway with a notebook and a pen, often scrawling whatever came to mind. I rarely even turned that writing into anything later, it was just my way of working through some ideas. While I still keep a Field Notes memo book with me most of the time, I rarely turn to it anymore; all of my mobile writing happens on iOS.

The victim of this change has been my aimless scribblings. Nearly every app I use on iOS utilizes the same basic “document” model. Whatever I write usually needs a name and/or tags so that it can be differentiated from the other documents. As such, I couldn’t open an app and start writing Without feeling like I was working on something. That isn’t the only kind of reading I should be limiting myself to.

Drafts fills this crucial, creative void for me. I have no compunction about launching it and typing, well, anything. What I see, what I feel, what I’m thinking about for a potential future project, anything at all. I didn’t even realize I hadn’t been writing like this anymore, but I’m glad I now have a simple, fast solution for doing so. For 99¢, how could I not have bought it sooner?

The team over at Turnstyle just launched a new weekly column over at Turnstyle (where I also wrote a bit of coverage from SXSW) featuring the writing of yours truly called “Watch This.” Every week I’m going to feature and critique a film I find on the Web. From the first post, which went up a few hours ago:

Art, of any discipline, can only be as strong as its criticism. Critics are usually remembered for their harshest writings, but it is often the most critical writings that contribute to the unending conversation about cinema. Is it even possible to think about the rise of New Hollywood without the writings of Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris? Critics can boost the profile of unknown work, enhance the global discussion of cinema and in some cases challenge filmmakers to make more complex films.

With that in mind, I have found that Web video, on the whole, is lacking in serious widespread criticism. Yes, online filmmakers have their champions, but there is such a glut of content uploaded every day that the critical community can barely keep up. Dated as it may be, the weekly theatrical release paradigm has allowed criticism to flourish alongside it. My goal is to sift through Web videos and, once a week, share with you a film that catches my eye and deserves some close inspection. Hopefully, this space will be a weekly snapshot of what is happening in the online film community.

I’m excited to see how this project goes.

Excellent reporting by David Carr from the New York Times on the significance of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He paints a picture of the technology industry throwing its weight around in Washington as the “new” celebrities on the hill.

Carr opens the piece with an anecdote about Judd Apatow meeting Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman and former CEO:

“Wow, I had to do a double take when I heard his name,” Mr. Apatow said, adding later that the company is “so central to my life. It threw me. It was like suddenly being introduced to the person who invented fire.”

The nerd in me is wondering if Apatow is just talking about Gmail (the obvious entry point), or if most of his work is stored and shared in Google Docs. Regardless, what better advertising for Google’s services than proof that the rich, creative and powerful rely on them? More important: what better proof that, whether they like it or not, the technology and entertainment industries are intertwined?

Joel Epstein published this excellent piece at the New York Review of Books yesterday. He manages to break down some of the more dubious dark corners of the Department of Justices suit against Apple and the major publishing houses without getting too deep into the weeds of legalese.

Here he describes what books will look like in the near future:

Independent editorial start-ups posting their books on appropriate web sites have already begun to emerge and more will follow. The cost of entry will be slight. The essential capital will be editorial talent and energy, as it had been in the glory days before conglomeration when editors were themselves de facto publishers, publicists, and marketers. Many start-ups will fail. Some will not. Specificity, reflecting the structure of the web, will matter: a guide to the cultivation of daffodils will more likely succeed than a more diffuse gardening title.

The digital revolution is having the same effect on movies. Keywords: talent and energy. That’s a future that doesn’t look to bleak to me.