The Stan Lee Foundation has teamed up with comic book artist Todd McFarlane (SPAWN, SPIDER-MAN), and Prismacolor Art Supplies, to find a new superhero. Hundreds of artists have submitted their designs: the superheroes they present are an extremely diverse group when it comes to skin colour, gender and superpowers.
You can vote between now and February 17th for your favourite.
Create A Superhero – Talenthouse.com
Maria Bello was announced this week as the star who will fill Helen Mirren’s shoes in the U.S. remake of Prime Suspect. Given that American TV drama seems to be full of fresh ideas and talent right now, it seems odd that NBC would even consider rebooting a UK show that is almost twenty years old. However, Prime Suspect has long been seen as the gold standard for both female leads and gritty police procedurals, and will garner eager viewers on the name alone. The Closer has often claimed to be the US version of Prime Suspect, but the only similarity really is the female lead.
Salon.com examines the structural and commercial reasons why a remake of Prime Suspect is unlikely to capture even the faintest of flavours of the original: The British have a completely different approach to making TV Drama to the Americans.
American television, in contrast, has more of a factory mentality. They’re making product to sell into syndication, where the magic number is 100 episodes — enough to fill a daily Monday-to-Friday schedule for 20-plus weeks. Speed and efficiency are of the essence because the networks want to squeeze out 100 episodes and hit that syndication jackpot as soon as possible. All the products have to be made in-house using existing tools and processes, stamped out and rolled onto the showroom floor at the same time each year — otherwise sponsors get restless, and Americans bred to expect instant gratifaction grow surly and betrayed. (It’s September. Where’s my show? I want it NOW!)
This approach does suit the production of law-and-order procedurals, and that means boom time for that special group of background artists (or extras) who play corpses. The Wall St Journal (behind a paywall) reports that seven out of ten of the top TV shows require a steady supply of ‘corpse actors’. It’s cheaper to make up a real human being than produce a corpse mannequin, and there’s always plenty of work. However, a certain skill set is required. “According to New York casting director Jonathan Strauss, however, not everyone can carry off the short breaths required on camera.”
The Problem with American remakes of British shows – Salon.com
Corpse Duty: Keeping A Career on Life Support by Playing Dead – WSJ via Hollywood Wiretap
After the fuss last month about the Kennedys mini-series, another movie based on a true story has hit the headlines. This time it’s the turn of the Lifetime Movie Network’s rendering of the Meredith Kercher/Amanda Knox story to attract tabloid ire, thanks to some insensitive comments made by its star, Hayden Panettiere. On playing Knox, who was convicted of the sexual assault and stabbing of her room-mate in 2007:
“You know, she’s a real person. She was a young girl who had dreams and aspirations and was going to Italy to go to school and to broaden her horizons and have experiences and meet new people. And I don’t think that guilty or innocent takes away from that… This is such a vulnerable story, and specifically, Amanda was so needy… My job was to play a girl who, regardless of what happened, was innocent in who she was. She’s not a malicious girl. She didn’t have any intention to do this. This wasn’t an angry or dark girl… Whatever it was that happened that night, people’s lives were ruined. But it was my job to stay pretty true to form in who she seemed to be as a person in court and otherwise.”
The families of both the victim, Meredith Kercher, and Amanda Knox are opposed to the film airing. Knox’s appeal comes up next month, and her legal team feel the inaccuracies in the movie trailer may be prejudicial to that hearing. They’re seeking a broadcast ban.
The Lifetime Movie Network, founded in 1998, mines a rich tradition of true crime ‘movies of the week’, and has always aimed them specifically at a female audience. SVP Tanya Lopez said in a 2009 interview:
“Women like true stories… Women like things that are authentic and that they can learn from. We don’t just do a ‘ripped from the headlines’ movie. We tell the story behind the story, from a female point of view… We’re reporting the emotion and the drama behind the characters. The facts are important to us and we do use them as a blueprint, but what we care about is the dramatic emotional story.”
Although Lifetime haven’t yet formally responded to the fuss, it’s likely that the producers will claim their First Amendment right to interpret the facts as creatively as they see fit, no matter how sleazy, sensationalist and fallacious others might perceive that interpretation to be. That’s entertainment for you, especially entertainment aimed at women, who aren’t meant to be as particular about media accuracy and integrity as men.
Knox Family wanted Hayden Panettiere to Meet Knox in Prison – ABC News
Hayden Panettiere defends vile Meredith Kercher murder film – The Sun
Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy – Lifetime Movie Network
True Stories Offer Cable a Lifetime of Hit Movies– NY Daily News (2009)
For those of us working in the industry, the San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women’s numbers come as no surprise. Their annual Television and Film report states that, despite Kathryn Bigelow’s high profile Best Director win at the Oscars last year, the number of women in prominent filmmaking positions has stagnated since 1998. A paltry 16% of key jobs on the top 250 films of 2010 were held by women (no change from 2009, and equivalent to 1998 levels). Just 2% of the movies had a female cinematographer, 7% were directed by women: it seems the male gaze is the only way we get to view things.
As the list of this year’s Oscar nominees attests (as usual, women are nominated in barely anything but ‘actress’ categories), Hollywood is run by and for men. Women are actively discouraged from even pitching for big-budget projects, according to director Catherine Hardwicke in The Wrap, who thought she might have had a shot at directing The Fighter.
“”I couldn’t get an interview even though my last movie made $400 million…I was told it had to be directed by a man — am I crazy?…It’s about action, it’s about boxing, so a man has to direct it … But they’ll let a man direct Sex in the City or any girly movie you’ve ever heard of.”
This has huge implications – and not just on the aspirations of female creatives trying to break in. Says Martha Lauzen, executive director of the SDSU Center:
“I don’t think people know when they walk into a theater that nine out of 10 times they’ll see a film by a male director…It’s not just an employment issue for women, it’s a cultural one for all of us. Movies make a difference in how we see the world and how we see certain groups of people. These are the architects of our culture.”
Melissa Silverstein, co-founder of the Athena Film Festival adds:
“If this were a Fortune 500 company and they looked at these statistics, they would have a diversity committee working on this immediately… How could you have a company in the 21st century and less than 10% of its leaders are women?”
A diversity committee that could impose a quota system on Hollywood studios, not just to ensure fair representation of women (53% of the US population, never forget), but minorities across the board? Now there’s an appealing thought…
Center for the study of Women in Film and Television
Women still a rarity in top film jobs – LA Times
Despite Bigelow’s Oscar, Celluloid Ceiling Higher Than Ever for Women– The Wrap
Women In Film – let’s make that change
Fox – who had already reinvented the making-money-off-a-TV-show paradigm with American Idol – now see Glee as their next fatted calf, as per this insightful feature from The Hollywood Reporter. It’s not just a show about some high school kids who like to sing and dance any more. It’s a cross-platform marketing juggernaut:
“Just one look around the table at the Gleekly meeting reveals the scope of how mammoth, complicated and promising the show is. In fact, to call it a mere show seems a misnomer. For Glee, gone is the old TV model of making money only off ads (nearly $300,000 per 30-second spot and rising) and syndication. Glee is a brand that, through its inventive packaging of music and the mall-ready charisma of its stars, has redefined how big a TV business can be. Among the participants at the table: the head of consumer products, playing show and tell with the new line of Glee-branded Sephora nail polish; a representative from home entertainment, passing around a Target circular featuring the Season 2, Vol. 1 DVD (the chain accounts for 25% of Glee’s entertainment sales); and vps from publicity, digital (Glee has the No. 1 iPad app) and international, touting the latest numbers out of the U.K., which make Glee the country’s most-watched U.S. series, outperforming Desperate Housewives, Lost and CSI (good news, considering the Glee tour is headed to London’s O2 arena in the summer and promoter Live Nation anticipates successive sellouts). Also on tap: a June reality show on Oxygen awarding a Glee guest role.”
Glee has had a huge cultural impact, on everything from sales of Journey’s back catalogue to attitudes towards gay teens. It’s also caused a lot of controversy for its depictions of teen sexuality – a major consideration given that a big proportion of the audience is under 13. Given the fiscal pressures (Fox is now spending $3.2 to $3.8 million per episode), that means its creators have had to reconsider the responsibilities they have towards their audience (and their potentially angry parents). The last thing they want is a Parents Television Council-led backlash like the one against the MTV version of Skins. Says Ryan Murphy:”“From now on, I will sweat every single word and how we’re presenting it.”
Oh, and Murphy’s reaction to that GQ cover? “It wasn’t great for the brand”.
Inside the Hot Business of ‘Glee’ – The Hollywood Reporter
Back in 1954, comic book publishers were in a lot of trouble. Parents, child psychologists, and the Senate Sub-Committee on Juvenile Delinquency were outraged at the graphic sex and violence depicted in the pages of titles like Murderous Gangsters, Clutching Hand, Lawbreakers, Worlds of Fear et al, especially as so many of them seemed to be aimed at children. So, fearful of legislation, the comic book publishers got together and agreed a Code of Conduct, sanitizing their output practically overnight. They based their restrictions on the Hays Code (which was beginning to lose its hold over movie studio output), and declared:
(Read the full list at Comic Artville)
No zombies or pimp daddies, in other words. EC Comics (publisher of Crime SuspenStories, Frontline Combat, Crypt of Terror and The Haunt of Fear) was the most badly hit, and had only one title (Mad magazine) left within a year. The Code was fairly rigidly enforced until the 1980s, when DC and Marvel started publishing comics that were aimed specifically at adults, and didn’t need the Code seal on the front cover. Other publishers followed suit. Marvel came up with its own rating system in 2001, and, on January 20th, DC Comics stated they will no longer carry the seal either. That left only Archie Comics (publisher of very tame titles) to announce that they will be abandoning the Code at the end of February.
So, farewell then, Comics Code. It seems that more and more censorship structures will be abandoned as anomalies of the twentieth century, as the global, instant, and instantly replicating nature of the internet makes policing popular culture an impossibility.
Check out some Pre-Code Comic Nastiness here – from My Retrospace and some of the juiciest horror stories as kindly scanned in at The Horrors of It All
On the day when Oscar nominations reinforced, once again, that Hollywood is a white man’s party, a strange report: ‘overseas’ box office can be worth more than domestic. Who’da thunk that the rest of the world combined could throw more box office dollars at a movie than Americans at their local multiplexes? Hollywood studios are geared to pronouncing a movie a success or failure based on its first weekend of domestic box office. Perhaps that attitude should change, based on some of the numbers quoted?
There is no better example than the box-office trajectory of the “Ice Age” series. The franchise has largely remained constant in the U.S.–with each of the three films making between $176 and $197 million–while the films have exploded around the globe, with the first film making $207 million overseas, the second one $457 million and the third one a whopping $690 million.
The LA Times frames the story around the assumption that global audiences are dumb enough to fall for gimmicks like 3D, but ignores the implication that US dramas, focused on the malaise of the hegemonic white guy, lack broad appeal, and should probably be put out to pasture.
The strange trajectory of Hollywood movies: Fizzling in US but skyrocketing overseas – LA Times
Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival.
It’s awards season, which means that producer credits for the big movies of the year are coming under scrutiny. These are always contentious, as the job title “producer” is a nebulous one. An actor acts, a writer writes, a director directs – these are all active, specific verbs – but it’s often unclear what a producer does and how many are needed to get a film into theaters. It can take twelve years (as with this season’s favourite, BLACK SWAN) to transform a movie from a script to a hit, and a lot of people need to take on producer duties en route, first developing the screenplay, putting together attachments, financing, and then overseeing physical production before finally shepherding the finished product in front of audiences. The Producers Guild of America is very wary of studio bosses inserting their name into the credits (no one’s going to say no) at the last minute, and has strict criteria that must be met by those claiming the title producer. They also only allow three people to share the honours, which, when it comes to giving out gold statuettes, often leaves some very disgruntled players sitting in the auditorium rather than bounding onstage, speech in hand.
The LA Times has the full story on this year’s diss: Ryan Kavanaugh.
Encouraged by the recent rash of TV-to-movie adaptations (The A Team, Charlie’s Angels, Starsky & Hutch, The Dukes of Hazzard and now 21 Jump Street) that have breathed new life (and residuals) into 70s and 80s ‘classics’, it seems the creators of Dynasty want their turn at the trough of gold.
Dynasty, fondly remembered for its big hair, larger-than-life characters and labyrinthine melodrama, ran on ABC in the US from 1981 to 1989. Originally conceived as a show about a family who ‘lived and sinned in a forty-eight room mansion’, Dynasty was a direct rival to CBS’s primetime hit, Dallas. The first season followed the Dallas template of oil tycoon shenanigans, but the introduction of Alexis Colby (Joan Collins) at the top of season two saw it find its unique selling point, and shot it to the top of the ratings.
Levi-Strauss would have had a field day: for the next seven years, the raven-haired, Machiavellian Alexis grappled (often quite literally, the show was famous for its physical fights between female characters) with silvery-blonde Krystle, for love, money, property, and sometimes just for kicks. The writers toned down the business (i.e. male-driven) story lines in favor of the female stuff, and fed the characters a constant flow of illegitimate children, half-siblings, serial husbands, murder trials, arson attacks and reversals of fortune so sudden and vicious that it was never sure whether Krystle and the forces of good would triumph over Alexis and her minions. Women definitely ruled this world. And viewers lapped it up – the ‘Moldovian Massacre’ cliffhanger episode in 1985 was watched by sixty million people.
Esther and Richard Shapiro are the original creators, and, rather than trying to return to the prime-time glory of the 80s, want the movie to be a prequel, explaining how the characters originally met, and how the battle lines came to be drawn. They envisage a ‘Mad Men-era’ setting for the young Blake Carrington to meet Alexis, his future wife and nemesis, and plan to take a much more cinematic approach:
“In a way, these characters were prisoners in television,” added Richard Shapiro. “We were always constrained by the smaller budget of a TV series, and all the standards and practices that governed the content of the show. In the movie, if we want to have some James Bond style action, we can afford to do that. If we want to have a steamy love scene, we can do that. If we want to go a few steps beyond what they would allow on 1980s TV, we can move ahead those few steps, and then some.”
Gotta hope it’s awesome, and that it makes it to the big screen. The much-hyped Dallas movie is currently languishing in turnaround, as the studio decided not enough young people remembered the TV show to go and see a movie. However, with older, female-skewing audiences becoming more of a target, this could have legs.