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Back in the day I used to read “The Furious D Show” (old blog, you can probably still find it) but one point he would always come back to (and you can still see it today) is that business in Hollywood is <i>deeply</i> dysfunctional. The famous example being something like “Empire Strikes back” was not considered profitable until like… the 2000s?
Basically the studios and others will cheat in every conceivable way to try and save a nickel even if they would save dollars by just being fair and honest. Instead all these shenanigans lead to more and more complicated contracts and bloating budgets because it’s the only way the workers can rest assured they’re going to get paid.
As he said back in 2014:
<blockquote>Hollywood history is littered with the corpses of schemes designed to keep money out of the hands of the people who earned it. It’s why Hollywood has unions, and deals where anyone with the slightest amount of clout tries to screw as much money as they can up front because they know they’re going to get screwed later.
The problem is that while the costs of the technological means of production have more or less collapsed, the cost of actually making a Hollywood movie have an inflation rate not seen outside of Weimar Germany.
So in the short run they will get away with it, but in the long run, they’re only making their own financial problems get worse and worse.</blockquote>
One of his other classic posts on the matter.
https://dknowsall.blogspot.com/2014/11/hollywood-babble-on-on-1196-special.html
Decade later, seems he’s still right.
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Eric July’s been wondering where the money keeps going for these inflated budgets, theorizing some scamming was going on. Sounds like he might be on to something.
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Oh I would bet he doesn’t even know the half of it. You can really have some fun rabbit trails to run down all the old controversies in Hollywood – and just involving the business side.
https://dknowsall.blogspot.com/2015/07/hollywood-babble-on-on-1239-random-stuff.html
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did my comment get eaten by the internet or do you hold them for approval?
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I do on The Clutter Reports but not here. Nothing in my filters.
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Never mind. Apparently the links sent it to the spam filter. Fixing.
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ok. just the first then. you can delete the second attempt
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