Author: VD

The decentralization of Hollywood

An interesting analysis of some of the changes coming to Hollywood and the entertainment industry:

In the 1980’s super agent Michael Ovitz positioned his talent agency CAA as one of the most important chess pieces on the board controlling actors, scripts, producers, how studios were bought and sold, music rights, all the way through to sports contracts. Agents held the power. But today the world of agenting is very different and a major power shift is underway.

First, most of the big agencies have sold out to major hedge funds where their first responsibility is to revenue and profits which means yearly growth at all costs. This need to feed the engine has forced agencies to dig their tentacles deeper and deeper into the entertainment community, eking out every possible penny. Spreading tentacles isn’t new. Just read ‘When Hollywood Had a King’ to see how Lew Wasserman came up against the U.S. government in 1962 as he tightened his powerful grip over all things entertainment. In Lew’s case the U.S. government stepped in forcing him to choose between being an agent or running what is now Comcast NBCUniversal — he chose Universal. Today, it’s not one single thing that is cutting off agencies’ far reaching tentacles but a storm on many fronts that is leaving most agencies with very little space to move. The result: massive damage that will likely take years to rebuild, leaving space for others to fill the void.

For one, the Writers Guild of America’s has been standing firm that agents not be able to produce/finance movies. This is essentially exactly what Lew came up against in 1962. This strange practice of your agency, who negotiates your deal, also being your employer has been going on behind closed doors for a long time. But in recent years the agenting world got more brazen about including it in their business model to look more attractive to their new Wall Street owners. This backfired with the Writer’s Guild, seizing the opportunity to win back a little more power into the hands of the writers and their membership, agreed to strike in April 2019. Top Hollywood writers fired their agents and in doing so a key piece of Hollywood power was taken from the agents: 360 packaging (the process whereby agents package their writer, director, producer, and acting clients together so that a studio buys a package and the agency can charge a premium packaging fee which some argue incentivized them to keeps clients’ fees lower so they can make room for their own fees).

If this were all the agencies faced, they could overcome this hurdle and still reign supreme. Historically, agents were masters of their craft in coming up with complex structures for their top clients’ ownership, profit participation, merchandise, box office bonuses, etc. Needless to say, studios were also masters in creative accounting, working to keep as much money in their accounts and away from the talents’ bank accounts as possible. But the game was there. A game of give and take, all pinned to public data around international sales and box office. Playing this game helped agents look powerful and valuable to their clients so they remain signed to a ten percenter.

But then came Netflix and the likes.

Global distribution, hidden streaming numbers, and clear data driven decisions vs booking talent based on industry ‘heat’. Now agents have many of their bargaining chips taken off the table and their creative dealmaking tools are a shadow of what they once were. How much extra value do agents now offer compared to lawyers and managers?

At the same time agencies have pushed hard into new entertainment revenue streams. The biggest: live events for their music artists — the last remaining cash cows for a music industry decimated by streaming technology in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. But with the global pandemic many of these agencies have gotten caught without a chair to sit on as the music stopped playing in global arenas and stay-at-home orders swept the globe. With COVID-19 nobody is going to concerts — and they won’t be for a good time yet. Similarly agencies were hit with cancelled sporting events where big margins were also made by the agents not only representing athletes but integrating brands and driving marketing strategies.

Through these multiple one-two punches, the biggest players in Hollywood are on wobbly knees and the bell isn’t going to save them anytime soon.

Needless to say, the less power that can be wielded by Jesus-hating, devil-worshipping agents, the better. Also, while we can’t say anything about it yet, things are proceeding well on the Rebel’s Run front. And by “well” I mean very well indeed.

Seems legit

Apparently they’re conducting polls for Republicans at the offices of the Daily Wire now:

Republicans overwhelmingly expect President Trump to be their nominee this fall, but nearly one-in-four GOP voters would prefer someone else.

Sure they would. Let’s face it. The truth is that we’re all pining for Jeb Bush. There is a man you want in a crisis.

Please clap.

Revising Internet history

For SJWs and their historical antecedents, it is always Year Zero and we have always been at war with Eastasia:

Last month, MIT Technology Review went after the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine – a service that preserves historical versions of webpages and allows users to access archives of these pages when they’re deleted.

MIT Technology Review complained that these archives were allowing coronavirus “misinformation” to evade moderators and fact-checkers and that these archived coronavirus articles had “better performance than most mainstream media news stories.”

Now, just a few weeks later, the Wayback Machine has started to add warning labels to some of its archives, while also forcing users to log in to view some of the archived content on the site.

The warning labels are bright yellow, appear at the top of some archived pages, and tell users when a post was removed for violating a site’s content policy.

Every institution and organization that is not dedicated to rooting out and keeping out the parasites will eventually be converged by them. No rational appeals to functionality, competence, merit, or profit will ever suffice to stop them.

Quantum Mortis on Thursdays

Quantum Mortis fans will be pleased to know that Arkhaven Comics will be publishing weekly episodes on Webtoons. They will also note that we have touched up the illustrations and recolored the entire first issue. Episode 1, Military Assistance, is already live. If you’re an Arkhaven backer, please don’t hesitate to subscribe.

And Arkhaven now has your weekdays covered, with webtoons running every Monday through Friday. We’ll be adding more soon, as Chicago Typewriter, Go, Monster, Go!, and Knights in Shadow are all in production now. With the traditional comics industry reeling, this is what William S. Lind would describe as the obvious schwerpunkt.

Plandemic?

I’m sure the conspiracy mirrorists will explain this away as a repurposed bill, but the facts certainly appears to be damning on their face. From Wikipedia:

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, also known as the CARES Act, is a law meant to address the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. In its original form, it was introduced in the United States Congress as H.R. 748 by Joe Courtney (D-CT) on January 24, 2019 although the bill was amended before it was passed.

It can’t be denied that an awful lot of people in the US government, which is to say the US Deep State, appeared to know about the pandemic before it officially started.

My operating theory is that the Deep State launched the virus as an attack on China and Iran, and China used its influence with the WHO as well as the globalist enthusiasm for immigration and international engagement to ensure that the attack blew back on the USA.

Which, of course, was probably just fine with the Deep State, as they thought they’d be able to blame the negative consequences on President Trump. But, as is his usual wont, he ju-jitsued them with his immediate travel ban.

Why Flynn was targeted

And why the Prometheans are fighting so hard in a last ditch, ex post facto attempt to prevent the DOJ from dropping the charges against him:

In early April, Powell told the Vicki McKenna Show that the disgraced intel leader and others in the intelligence community were targeting Flynn over billions of taxpayer dollars that he knew were not being properly accounted for.

“Powell, who took over Flynn’s defense last summer, told the Vicki McKenna Show on 1310 WIBA Madison on Tuesday that her client was ‘totally set up’ because he threatened to expose wrongdoing by top intelligence officials in the Obama administration,” the Washington Examiner reported Wednesday.

“He was going to audit the intel agencies because he knew about the billions [former Obama era CIA Director John] Brennan and company were running off books,” she said.

It’s happening. It’s all going to come out, and probably before the end of the year. And Americans are not going to be happy to discover that the Obama administration was complicit in the Stasi-like surveillance of every US citizen in and out of the country.

EA’s Game Gestapo

If someone had written this in a novel, you would have dismissed it as being heavy-handed and too over-the-top to be even remotely credible. EA is now using genuine Stasi agents to police gamers:

Electronic Arts’ Berlin office just entered into a troubling partnership, one that has German gamers reeling. The EA office in Berlin recently announced it was partnering with the Amadeu Antonio Foundation and its program “Keine Pixel für Faschisten” [No Pixels for Fascists]. The Orwellian program seeks to monitor political beliefs in the video game industry and among players for “racism, sexism, and anti-semitism.”

The Foundation is headed by Anette Kahane, a former agent of the East German Ministry of Security, also known as the Stasi — the repressive secret police that monitored and brutally suppressed dissent in East Germany after the Second World War. At its height, the Stasi had over 102,000 officers and nearly a quarter of a million of its own citizens spying on family members, neighbours and colleagues for wrongthink.

In a German news profile from 2019, Kahane’s activity in the Stasi was revealed through leaked documents. She was considered an excellent asset, enthusiastic in the performance of her work, and submitted intimate information to the Government on the lives of her friends, family, journalists, and even Chilean immigrants fleeing the fascist Pinochet regime. She also wrote extensive reports detailing people’s private lives, from weddings to teenager’s birthday parties.

In fairness, I suppose it can be hard to come by the necessary five-years experience thought policing required for the average Trust & Safety Council job these days.

It’s astonishing how many people across the political spectrum genuinely prefer secret police and thought crime to the possibility that someone, somewhere, might call them racist or anti-semitic.

Big Bear banned by Podbean

Dear podcaster:

We have received several complaints about your podcast episodes for violating Podbean’s terms with offensive and racist language. You can see in our terms of use https://www.podbean.com/podbean-terms that this is not permitted on our platform.

You will not submit any User Content that may be deemed as pornography, defamatory, libelous, obscene, harassing, threatening, incendiary, abusive, racist, offensive, deceptive or fraudulent, encouraging criminal or harmful conduct, or which otherwise violates the rights of the Company or any third party (including any intellectual property rights, privacy rights, contractual or fiduciary rights).

Accordingly, we have locked your account and refunded the annual payment to your card ending in 2379. You will see the refund as a credit approximately 5-10 business days later, depending upon the bank.

Please feel free to contact us with any questions.

Sincerely,
The Podbean Team

My first reaction: WTF is a Podbean? UPDATE: Apparently I have 780,147 Darkstream downloads from Podbean.

My second reaction: it’s a good thing UATV subscribers can listen to and download mp3 files directly from the new UATV site.

I am aware the Darkstreams are still available on Podbean. I plan to remove them, but not yet. We’ll remove them all when we give MP3 access to the Darkstream on UATV to non-subscribers.

The Ride Never Ends.

She turned me into a newt!

Episode 3 of Hypergamouse is now live on Webtoons. Don’t forget to subscribe to it, as that is the primary metric there and it will alert you when a new episode is uploaded. As you can see from the screencap taken this morning on the left, the more subscribers, the more the algorithm favors the comic, and the virtuous cycle continues. What is remarkable about that #4 ranking is that the number of episodes for the other top 5 comics range from 95 to 220. AH is on Episode 5.

Also, if you are a UATV Basic subscriber, please check your email. You have been cordially invited to check out the brand new site! We had a minor issue earlier this morning which prevented video playback, but it’s been resolved, so please login, change your password, and watch/listen to a video or two. Then let me know how the performance worked for you. Please note this is not an invitation to sperg about nonexist features or demonstrate your awesome technical knowledge; the site is still in Alpha and we’re bringing in people gradually to see how well it handles the increasing bandwidth load.

Once we’ve got all the subscribers invited and using it successfully, we’ll move the URL pointers and start transitioning the apps. Iterative design, iterative development.

UPDATE: No Darkstream tonight as I spent the time fixing my streaming software and getting rid of the delay that cropped up recently. Turned out the Nvidea driver needed an update.