somehow my tag keeps getting changed
Making a traditional movie is following a big business socialist model and that’s why it’s expensive. The unions demand outrageous pay for jobs no more complicated or involved than moving scenery or running wires. The writer’s guild has a hammerlock on screenplays and the cost of those is through the roof. The cost of everything else is scaled to the big expense drivers. “What, you’re making a 250 million movie? Well, the cost of shooting in our city is 30 million.” (When it could be done for the cost of shutting down a street or two on a Saturday morning.) Then there’s the tax structure and the depreciation schedules. Read the credits that run for 20 minutes, “second grip assistant to the first grip, John Smith.”
How is it that really good movies can be made for chicken scratch so long as they’re outside of the studio system? Take “Army of the Dead.” No name actors and shot for almost nothing. Then when the same guys start making money and enter the system the quality of the film footage goes up but the story gets politically corrected, focus-grouped, test-audience-d, and watered down so it won’t offend anybody.
Films can be made for much less. But first the current system must be allowed to fail.
>>>No, Speilburg is reading some very clear and obtuse writing on the wall.
Well, yeah, but in typical Spielbergian fashion, he’s simply telling his audience what they already know, hoping to manipulate a “gasp!” from them (which is what he does in his movies, by the way).
It’s been clear and obtuse for some time now that the new technologies put the power of an entire studio in the hands of anyone. For just a few thousand dollars, one can buy a camera with higher resolution than traditional 35mm film; a lighting kit; a decent microphone or two; a Mac; Final Cut Pro editing software; After Effects software (for titles, special effects, etc.); and a DVD burner. All of these things make Spielberg and Lucas superfluous.
What Spielberg carefully avoided mentioning was that the new technologies also make pricey film schools superfluous. Everything one needs to know about the technical aspects of making a film can be learned by taking some inexpensive online courses.
It is inevitable for the same reasons the changes in music this last decade were inevitable.
Ever cheaper costs to produce the product.
When Sun records first produced recordings of Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, and Johnny Cash the studio they used cost about three million dollars. In 1998 an aspiring musician could build a home studio just as capable for thirteen thousand dollars. Costs have continued to free fall since then.
Though the decrease of cost in video production lags that of audio, it is going to the same place.
And without the wall of cost, what is to keep the people with the talent working for someone else? The same thing that keeps musicians stuck in the same band.