Forget that I'm fifty 'cause you just got paid

It is a dark moment in life when you find yourself in agreement with Fran O'Sullivan. New Zealand is hardly the only nation to screw up (Private Eye jokes about Boris Johnson saying the Delhi Olympics have set the standard London must aim for) but reading the Hobbit news is depressing - and I don't even like Tolkien. On the union side is an actor (no comment), an Australian (oh, clever) and a New Zealander who was involved in a previous legal dispute with one of the producers*. On the other side is one of the most expensive and precarious movies ever proposed: $500 million on sticks to make lightning strike a fourth (/fifth) time after years of rights wrangles during a financial recession. No studio needs to make The Hobbit: Twilight Eclipse cost $60 million and made $689 million, and its key sequence was three teenagers talking inside a tent. If you had asked your brain to pick a production to boycott it would have said "not that Tolkien one." Now in a world where movie budgets are never what they seem, the fate of millions rests in the hands of... the tax man.

(*I assume it's her. Unless - scarily - there are three of them.)

Postscript: In 2009, Simon Whipp complained to the Australian Courier Mail about the possibility of an American taking on the role of Mad Max:

"Performers have long held the view that traditional Australian characters should be played by Australian performers and immigration regulations reflect that," said assistant federal secretary Simon Whipp... "If the producers cast other than an Australian performer, it would be very disappointing."

In 2003 Whipp said Australia's media and cultural industries must be protected from foreign interference:

The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance attracted a crowd of more than 250 to the Sydney Opera House on 6 October to draw attention to the threat to our culture and media industries if the government does not secure a cultural carve-out in the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement.

"It really is crunch time," said Simon Whipp of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, who fears the government's previous support for the exclusion of Australian media and cultural industries from the free trade agreement may be jeopardised if it surrenders its right to control future kinds of screen and cultural forms.

"A proposal which does not protect the right of governments to react to these changes as, and when, they happen will mean that future governments are not able to support and promote Australian culture as governments have to date," said Whipp.

That's the great thing about nationalism: one country is all you need.

Image cache

(c/- Soviet lunar lander, Brick Lane cat, art cat (misc), Christina Hendricks, Garance Doré, Escape From New York, Belleville)

Plant one on me

Sam Raimi has nabbed the screen rights to John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids. John Carpenter made a melancholy Midwich Cuckoos once (a remake of Village of the Damned) but if I could do a Wyndham it would be The Kraken Wakes. Scary disaster SF with human harvesting, a deeply uneasy conclusion and, if I remember rightly, a classic Wyndham scientress. (White coat, crisp accent, chipper attitude, slow pulse rate, usually called Jean or Carol or something. There's always one in British SF - the "Oh, bother - radium" sort. Highly alluring.) Anyway. I can never work out why someone isn't making Kraken - or, for that matter, Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat. Period British SF is ripe for a Hammer-style comeback.

In the 1930s Wyndham wrote pulp, including crime novels. After the war (he worked on ciphers in the army) he changed his pen name and wrote Triffids, which made him famous. It had the line "When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere." Do people still write smart-ass science fiction like that? William Gibson does, I guess.

I've promised myself I'll finish this draft by the end of October, and then throw myself off a bridge* take a holiday. I'm staring at pages of handscrawl thinking I should really type them up, but it doesn't feel like the right time yet. This is doubtless something to do with energy levels. Why can't novels write themselves? Oh, wait...

Update: *Good news about feeling bad.

Ways of seeing

An alternative history of Hollywood, in other people's words:

"In 1913 many movie-makers headed west [to California] to avoid the fees imposed by Thomas Edison, who owned patents on the movie-making process."

"Films really blossomed in the 1920s, expanding upon the foundations of film from earlier years. Most US film production at the start of the decade occurred in or near Hollywood on the West Coast."

1943: "The wartime income tax accelerated the move by top Hollywood talent to set–up independent production companies, often as a corporation to produce a single feature film. By doing this, highly paid producers, directors and stars can be taxed at the capital gains rate of 25%, rather than at the personal income tax rate which can be as high as 80–90%."

1946: "The Internal Revenue Service closes the tax loophole for single–picture corporations. This forces many independent Hollywood production companies to seek out permanent financial and distribution deals with the major studios."

1948: "Under the terms of an agreement with the United Kingdom, American film companies will reinvest the $60 million profit, recently made in England, in various "permitted uses" such as hiring British talent, buying British story properties, etc. The English, in return, will reduce the 1947 tax on American films by 75%."

"Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, world cinema truly took off, but Hollywood struggled. Many countries began offering tax incentives to film crews willing to produce in their locations, drawing tourist money into their struggling economies."

"From the mid-1970s onwards, the Hollywood studios revived. The slide of box office revenue was brought to a standstill. Revenues were stabilized by the joint effect of seven different factors. First, the blockbuster movie increased cinema attendance... Second, the U.S. film industry received several kinds of tax breaks from the early 1970s onwards, which were kept in force until the mid-1980s, when Hollywood was in good shape again."

"Hollywood studios' invisible financing, including government subsidies and tax-credit deals, is no where better illustrated than in the way Paramount put together the deal for Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001). The budget, including Angelina Jolie's $9 million fee, was a staggering $94 million on paper. But after Paramount applied the arcane art of studio financing, of which the deal is a minor masterpiece, the studio's outlay was only $8.7 million.

"First, it got $65 million from Intermedia Films in Germany in exchange for distribution rights for six countries: Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan. These "pre-sales" left Paramount with the rights to market its film to the rest of the world.

"Second, it arranged to have part of the film shot in Britain so that it would qualify for Section 48 tax relief. This allowed it to make a sale-leaseback transaction with the British Lombard bank through which (on paper only) Lara Croft was sold to British investors, who collected a multimillion subsidy from the British government, and then sold it back to Paramount via a lease and option for less than Paramount paid (in effect, giving it a share of the tax-relief subsidy.) Through this financial alchemy in Britain, Paramount netted, up front, a cool $12 million."

"In recent years, film and television productions have fled California for states and countries that have offered lavish tax incentives. Louisiana, whose rebate includes reimbursing productions for 25% of what is spent in state, recently lured "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." After Michigan passed a law that reimburses productions for 42% of in-state spending, it succeeded in getting the filming of "Gran Torino" to move to Detroit from Minnesota, which has its own incentive program. New Mexico, Rhode Island and Georgia all have enacted similar incentives... The rapid outflow of productions has meant Hollywood must now fight for the industry that bears its name."

"The five-year, $500 million incentive program, signed into law in February 2010, began accepting applications on July 1. In a statement, Schwarzenegger said the tax credits were crucial for retaining film and television productions — and the economic multiplier effects — in California.

"The governor's announcement, citing statistics from the California Film Commission, pointed to a 50 percent decline in the number of films shot in California since 2003. In an effort to lure production back to the economically struggling state, the incentive program will cover 20 percent of expenses for feature films with budgets up to $75 million and 25 percent of expenses for independent films with budgets capped at $10 million. Eligible television programs that have filmed entirely outside California and have since relocated can receive credits for 25 percent of expenses."

Now playing

New single's out, too. Sounds pretty good...

L.A. Dies on the Roof

The secret life of bookmarks

A bonus of buying secondhand books is finding the previous owner's markings in the text and folded corners as bookmarks. Or in this case, a postcard memory of the Hotel Bauer Grunwald, with no name or date. When I first read it I thought it said "Remember choix outside!", as in "choice" but I think it says "chox" as in chocolates. First glance was better.