what recession!

looks like i was wrong... kind of....

how families can afford to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars taking the kids out to a movie when the unemployment rate hovers around 9% is astonishing! well... during the great depression i believe the most successful business model was... salons?! i think.

forget that. where are the fresh voices? even what's remaining of the indie world isn't doing anything right now. the only thing selling in town is sequels, prequels and the like. that's it. how many scripts have sold this year.... twenty? thirty? it's a terrible time to be working in the dream factory folks. just an awful time. and as long as the Transformers movies keep doing $200 million dollar five-day weekends, michael bay will continue to make movies and scream at people. and isn't that what's wrong with the world right now? p-13 movies? michael bay? i know i'm not alone out there. and anyone who thinks that bay is half the filmmaker Clouzet is, then they are FOOLING THEMSELVES.
OK. here it is. i'm going to give you 250 million dollars. i'm also going to provide you with the most talented special effects people, demolition experts, stunt men and craft service in the universe. then, i'm going to give you talented actors, two years or so and all the resources of a multi-national conglomerate. just come back with something that works.

michael j. fox had a great line in 'the american president'. he said 'People don't have a choice!... People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand.' of course the response is, "People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the sand because they don't know the difference.'

politics, art, commerce.
people don't change.

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DIRECTING A $5,000 MOVIE LESSON #55
don't overshoot it. work out the blocking sketches in rehearsal but be prepared for things to change on set! if you're using two cameras, make sure you have someone taking notes and pay the $100 dollars to get a guy to be binning and labeling everything (assuming you're shooting to disk, which you better be.) you don't need to make five clone copies of the movie once it's done. just make sure it's broken down into scenes so you and your editor.. or just you most likely... can find everything quickly. if you don't, you may spend three times longer in post then you expected. making money on movies is about making movies. so if you only make one movie every two years you're at a disadvantage. also, and more importantly, being a good director is about making movies. you have to make a lot of them. you just do.