Posted on 11/30/2005 12:26:58 PM PST by minus_273
Hollywood often complains about box office slumps. They blame piracy, they blame DVD sales, they blame anyone and anything but themselves. You see Hollywood’s a bit like North Korea, if they ever admitted that the regime they run was flawed and oppressive the people at the top of the tower would come crashing down. So, like any good regime, they choose to blame their failures on the peasants for either not submitting a big enough offering or stealing from the state. The savvier public, however, blame an endless onslaught of mediocre, hollow projects that are touted as remakes, sequels, prequels, re-imaginings, reinventions or video game adaptations. To me that’s just a whole lot of different ways for marketing people to say “lazy recycled crap” but I digress.
But ask yourself this; what if you discovered a miraculous way to make a profit from making these bad movies? An ingenious way to guarantee that if your movie flops, you’ll actually make money. Wouldn’t a box office slump be the perfect climate for you; slipping your bad movies into a world where blockbusters are failing weekly? If it flops, the studios will blame the ticket buyers for not buying or the “illegal” downloaders for stealing instead of you for intentionally sucking. Meanwhile, you sit back safe and secure in the knowledge that while your project drops out of the 300 theatres it was showing in after 2 weeks, it is actually making you a mint. Sound unlikely?
(Excerpt) Read more at cinemablend.com ...
The author is a moron. He blames "capitalism" for a phenomenon that is only possible through government-imposed tax codes.
yeah, i noticed that too. To many liberals, any profit of any kind =capitalism. Looking beyond that, it is an interesting article
This explains sooooo much about... Tim Burton.
To keep up the H'weird braggadocio lifestyle, actors, like ballplayers, receive gluttonous amounts of money for less than stellar performance. Now this money comes from various means especially from the consumer in jacked up high prices at the movie theatre. In this atmosphere of high-priced movie theatre entertainment with mediocre acting and shrinking movie-goers, one wonders how long H'weird will stay in existence.
Ed Wood? I'm a big fan of his work--it takes a lot to pursue a dream when you have absolutely zero talent. He did what he loved and will be remembered as a passionate if hilariously inept film-maker. It's too bad he died before he could see his movies rise in the public consciousness.
It saddens me to see Hollywood continue to throw money into mindless, meaningless crap. Speaking as someone who wants to go into the film business as a director/producer it is frustrating to see the screw ups of the world get their chance to fail time and time and time again while talented people are overlooked simply because they're not rich or connected.
Hollywood likes to lecture on how the rich get everything handed to them, but in typical lefty fashion it's someone else's responsible to correct the problem. They're going to just keep promoting it.
How does a tax write-off become a gold mine?
You STILL have to have earned the money in the first place. So what, it's 100% deductible. Big deal. It's also 100% down a rat hole. If I want a 100% tax deduction on money I'm going to burn, I'll ask my employer to stop paying me. Therefore that money that I would have had and burnt, was 100% tax free!
The author must have snuck out to a movie the day his English teacher explained the difference between "your" and "you're."
It was a waste of money. I should have taken him bowling instead.
Yours, Mine & Ours doesn't even look good from the trailer...
Where is he blaming it on capitalism? He explains that it has to do with a loophole in the German tax code. (But you have to read the whole article, not just the excerpt! :-)
"Ability is of little account without opportunity." Napoleon I
I quote the following directly from the article, which I did read in its entirety before I originally posted:
Boll’s movies aren’t being made out of a love for cinema. They are a shallow exercise in money-making greed and exploitation. Rich Germans getting richer by exploiting the stupidity of the Hollywood system and the naivety of critics like us, who never thought to question the true motives of why these horrible, horrible movies existed. Pure and unfiltered 21st century capitalism.
:-)
bttt
Would that he were a moron. Unfortunately, most people have this knee-jerk reaction thanks to a century of deceipt by "the intellectuals" who bought the Marxist lies and fed them into our universities.
The author is a moron for more than that.
You cannot make money simply by not paying taxes on zero earnings.
Boll makes money simply because he gets paid regardless of if his movies flop or not. He would likely make more money if they were successful, but he's still getting paid money to produce them.
What this author seems to be unable to understand is that while the investors don't pay taxes if they don't make money on their investment, they also lose their investment if the movie loses money.
If you lose a million dollars not paying taxes on zero profits doesn't help you any. You still lost a million dollars.
It all depends on what end it deducts from and the person's opinion of paying taxes. If it deducts from taxable income you're right it's a wash, still out the money and who really cares what it does to your tax bill; if it deducts from your tax PAYMENT though it's a different matter entirely, a few of those kind of tax deductions can turn the ugliest tax bill into a refund, and even if it doesn't most folks would rather give money to just about anybody that isn't the government.
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