The Real Secret To Juno's Success

Last night Anu and I were debating what about Juno made it a financial success -- not the unpredictable, uncontrollable forces of coincidence (such as the Xmas 07 boost), but the deliberate elements of the script which made it able to capitalize on those coincidental events. I often write in a similar genre (or tone, or style, or however you choose to describe it's narrative niche), and we were discussing what it is about some of my scripts that may or may not reflect the elements of success found in Juno. We came to the conclusion that a a quirky indie film, with unusual characters, and deal with difficult subject matter, is more easily accepted by general audiences if it is ultimately warm, upbeat, and family friendly (particularly: the story centers around familial love and its ability to overcome social pressures, which was an element in both Juno and Little Miss Sunshine). Of course, like Juno and LMS, it also needs to be well written, with compelling characterizations, enough of a traditional story structure to allow a general audience to relate, and witty dialog.

I remain unconvinced. That sounds both credible and thoughtful, so clearly the success must instead be attributable to a gimmick that's instantly recognizable and understandable (and doesn't require the writer to actually put in any thought or effort). Clearly it wasn't the case that Cody wrote an excellent script, which Reitman (and the cast) turned into a charmingly compelling film -- no, there's obviously some trick here, and I'm going to figure out what it is.

Much has been made of Diablo Cody's past as a stripper, and while perhaps that gimmick works for some, I don't think the Full Monty approach is going to work given my particular physique. Therefore, I have deduced that the gimmick here is using the formula (Name for the Devil + Town in Wyoming) to generate one's nom de plume. That, dear readers, is unequivocably the secret to Juno's success.

Therefore, I am opening it up to a vote as to which of these names you think is most likely to guarantee immediate fame and fortune when slapped onto the cover of my next script:

What Devil + Wyoming nom de plume should I select to guarantee instant success?

	Satan Cheyenne
	Lucifer Medicine Bow
	Chernobog Thermopolis
	Belial Worland
	Beelzebub Torringon
	Abaddon Kemmerer
	Voland Pinedale
	Iblis Sheridan
	Old Nick Jackson
	Angra Mainyu Laramie

skip to results

Once I've selected an appropriate "Diabolically Wyoming" name, it's really only a matter of days, perhaps mere minutes, until I join the ranks of the rich and famous. Free rides in my gold-plated LearJet for all readers of this blog!

Taco Bell Offers Exciting Underpaid Opportunity To Feel Like A Scab

Today Speak Media Blog commented on this announcement by Taco Bell and their PR vendor that they're willing to pay $260 (in Taco Bell "food") for writers to create advertising copy for their condiment packaging.

The headline on Trading Markets reads "Taco Bell Offers Striking Writers a Spicy Creative Outlet" and the press release claims: "...Taco Bell wanted to show its support for the thousands of creative minds itching to press pen to paper..." The offer to pay in food is hinted at being a great altruistic move to help "starving" strikers.

That's not altruism, that's an offer that says: "come ply your trade for us for a pittance." Advertising copywriters are well paid in cash, not handouts. $260 (in in-kind merchandise) for copy for a national campaign for a major brand? Are you kidding me?

It's not altruistic, it's insulting. Never mind that Taco Bell's food isn't particularly good (and most of the writers who are striking are in LA, where you can get real Mexican food cheaper), even if it were the most splendid food in all the land it's still an insult to ask a striking worker to come do a job that undercuts their fellow tradespeople.

I hope that people see through this, and realize that it's an insult to the striking writers, who are professionals on strike over serious contract matters relevant to their livelihoods and not random contestants in a lame in-store PR contest printed on placemats. It's an affront to their fellow writers as well -- those being the copywriters whose business they are asking the striking writers to publicly undercut.

Studios Looking for the Next Juno?

I also posted a version of this as a comment on Alligators In A Helicopter.

The question is: how to repeat the (financial) success of Juno.

I think studios will have a hard time making a film to capture "the" Juno audience, because I don't think it has one audience. It's a film that, due to a variety of factors, was in the right place at the right time to attract multiple audiences.

One factor is that in a downbeat political and economic climate and when a lot of downer films are out, Juno is quite light despite its potentially difficult and melodramatic subject matter. It also balances aspects of how it deals with the teen pregnancy issue in a way that allows it to sit on the fence and avoid alienating either Liberals or Conservatives too readily.

Another factor is that pretty much every Xmas 07 film exceeded box office expectations (Alvin and the Chipmunks over $200M, you gotta be kidding) -- and Juno got an Oscar nomination bump (not as good as an Oscar bump, but it did increase its profile in the media), AND Fox advertised the heck out of it for a film in its genre and cost range (which they also did successfully for LMS).

Plus, it was good -- but lots of equally good or better films, often ones targeted at a similar base audience (hipsters), fail -- even ones which might even have had crossover appeal had they gotten legs out the gate.

I am not sure that the Juno factors can all be deliberately repeated. I think the best studios can do is take more chances on cheaper films that aren't designed to be blockbusters, knowing that like with more expensive films some will hit and some won't -- but when they do, the payoff is a bigger multiplier. I hope they will, because that strategy means more opportunities for those of us who don't get those "hey, here's a million bucks, go write me a guaranteed blockbuster" type of calls.

I'm encouraged, because Juno is in my own natural genre (a truly successful pair of writers recently agreed to have lunch with me and share some insights, and we talked about how we both were angry at not naving written LMS or Juno ourselves. It made me feel better to know that successful people also get angry about not having written scripts they loved).

However, I don't think that being in that genre, and being good, is quite enough. There are a lot more factors that also need to line up.

The Amazing work of Chris Kuksi

Kris Kuksi is one of my new favorite artists. His work is obviously influenced by H.R. Giger and his ilk, but as this image:

shows, Kuksi also has a directly political side which is generally missing from Giger's work (which is not to say Giger is totally devoid of social commentary, but overt politics is not part of it). Kuksi's meticulous sculptures that blend Gigerian biomechanical stylings with a Gothic architectural feel are, I feel, his most compelling works. These hellish dioramas are grotesque emotional narratives, vibrant in three spatial dimensions but frozen in time.

Kuksi's work is both visually and intellectually compelling, and I look forward to seeing more of it in the future.

One Man's PR Blunder is Another's Hilarious Stunt

Shel Holtz culled a list of Public Relations based blunders from Money's 2007 "101 Dumbest Moments in Business" for his blog. It's an interesting list, but this is the one I'm most interested in:

#21—The Cartoon Network hires a marketing agency to place electronic lightboards promoting its characters. In Boston, they’re mistaken for bombs, creating a crisis.

I am a fan of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the show being advertised (or I was, when it was still funny), and I must say that for its target demographic that stupid stunt was pretty funny both for the original intent of the campaign (an in-joke revolving around a pair of popular characters in the series, the Mooninites, and their proclivity for "signaling" with their middle fingers) and because of the way it went so horribly awry in Boston (and things going horribly awry is the whole basis of ATHF's humor -- well, when it has a basis). ATHF's viewership was sagging because of a couple of sub-par seasons and it was not the campaign, but rather the free publicity given to the news about the blunder, which got at least me to go back and give ATHF a second chance. This stunt worked in because to ATHF fans, that stunt was indeed a signal. It at least made me think: "hey, they might be doing funny stuff again." Comedy Central and their Advertising and PR vendors understood their audience.

To Money and Mr. Holtz this is a blunder. This may in fact be the case when the costs of dealing with the legal mess are taken into account, versus any profit gains made from the publicity (and if the PR folks get involved with any criminal charges because of the stunt, that's really not worth it). However, if ultimately these costs were not excessive, it's not so obviously a blunder to me. For the target demographic, it was a good idea that went wrong in just the right way (sticking it to the man and getting busted by the man is something the ATHF audience fully empathizes with).

The other entries in the list fail the "there's no such thing as bad publicity" test, because they really reflect badly on the company even in the eyes of their target demographic -- with the exception of:

#17—Redux is warned by the FDA to rename its energy drink, which was called Cocaine. It was renamed to Censored, then NoName.

Which was a blunder of similar character to the ATHF blunder. From a cost perspective it may not have been worth making the mistake (especially if they had to recall already packaged product), but the publicity of the SNAFU works in the brand's favor with its demographic for much the same reason the ATHF blunder does.

(An aside: why was Wikipedia on the list? It's not even really a business, by its own self definition. Its nonprofit, user-driven nature and the cultural and academic trust issue really should have been explored thoroughly. I'll try to get to that in a future post. Otherwise, an interesting list for anyone involved with any business large or small, as is much of the rest of the full 101.)

Pixar Fans to build their own WAL-E

This is pretty cool: a group of WAL-E fans have formed a group to design and build a real world WAL-E. If you're interested in joining in, go to http://www.wall-ebuilders.com/ and sign up. The project leader, "Jawa Lunk," has some cool pics and it looks like he and his crew have done some other fun projects before. The Pixar WAL-E character team (disclaimer: I am a member of that team, though I did not work on WAL-E himself) has both hardware and software hackers as well as several model builders on it -- including one who is trying to piece together an authentic Millenium Falcon from the original kit-bashed model kits. So, while I can't speak on behalf of anyone other than myself (least of all my employer), I suspect that there will be a lot of enthusiasm within our ranks for the WAL-E builders and best wishes for their success.

read more | digg story

My Advice To Los Angeles

I also posted this as a comment in John August's blog. It is my advice to Angelinos about having their city get eaten by monsters.

LA is not a city, it’s a federation of affiliated suburbs. I think this leads Angelinos to forget there is a downtown, replete with skyscrapers to knock over for an enterprising young monster. Sure, even Angelinos don’t know what most of them are (the most recognizable tall building being the Capitol Records building, which obviously isn’t in that downtown cluster), and that’s the problem — recognition. Why would a monster want to knock over a bunch of obscure buildings when New York has so many exciting, high profile buildings to knock over. It’s not that LA isn’t a delicious snack, it’s just that today’s monster has a reputation to build. Simply having a Myspace page isn’t enough. Every monster has one of those now. No, in today’s saturated media climate, if you can’t knock down the Empire State Building, or the Chrysler Building, or even the measly Flatiron Building, nobody’s going to pay attention. “Monster knocks over generic skyscraper” just isn’t a catchy headline.

The sprawl would probably require a fast moving monster to wreak havoc at enough recognizable landmarks that anyone would want to film his or her exploits, but even a sufficiently speedy monster would think twice before chowing down on LA — the cost/benefit ratio just isn’t good enough. Even San Francisco has more recognizable landmarks per square mile. What Angelinos need to do in order to attract monsters, frankly, is remember the names of some of the buildings and talk them up. “Oh, the Fnord Building is so — glassy. It’s the glassiest building on the whole west coast.”

After all, it works both ways. In today’s media saturated climate, if a city wants to be eaten by monsters then the residents need to show some civic pride. Don’t just complain about it, stir up some viral marketing for even the most obscure of landmarks (coating them with meat and/or trapping a monster’s offspring inside of one helps, too). What monster wants to go down in history as having destroyed “some building” in LA?

Hopefully this advice will help all Angelinos in their efforts to have their city eaten. Best of luck!

My Oscar Picks & Musings

An expansion of my Alligators in a Helicopter comment.

Best Picture: There Will Be Blood
Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Best Adapted Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson
Overall, There Will Be Blood had the obsessive, over-the-top expansiveness of a great film. And, the bitter cynicism of an Upton Sinclair adaptation really appeals to me, to boot.

Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis
DDL chewed some very expansive scenery in There Will Be Blood. I'd really like to see it go to Viggo Mortenson -- not because his performance was better, per-se, but because he's such an underappreciated actor.

Best Actress: Laura Linney
Though, frankly, if Juno is nominated for script, director and picture, Ellen Page should be up here because her performance is what made the other nominations possible. Ellen Page really made that film, even if the terrible, unbearable soundtrack of relentless preciously ironic folk songs -- a soundtrack so bad I almost walked out of the film in the first few minutes when it was really overused -- was really her doing.

Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem
Excellent screen villain. His character made that film the phenomenon it has become, even more so than th Coen's excellent directing and Tommy Lee Jones (who I think is great), as far as I'm concerned.

Best Supporting Actress: Tilda Swinton
I heart Tilda Swinton. There's really not much other logic behind my choice.

Best Animated Film: Ratatouille
I know I'm biased here, since I worked on Ratatouille, but Surf's Up just was not as good of a film (but it was good). Persepolis was a good film, as a film and a story, but the animation performance is not award worthy. I think Persepolis is a worthy competitor, but even if you think its serious subject matter makes it better story-wise (and I don't, I think it's an apples to oranges comparison, but I will say Brad did a sterling job with the Rat story), the actual animation performance element makes it not the best choice.

Foreign Film: Katyn
I'm a "gimme" for this film -- my opinion is probably not very reliable given my predisposition to the subject matter.

Documentary: No End In Sight
Lots of good Iraq documentaries, but you have to pick only one...

Cinematography: The Assasination of Jesse James...
Roger Deakins should win for one of his two films, it's time he got his well deserved Oscar kudos. He's been nominated six times, he's one of the great Cinematographers of all time, and he's also a heck of a nice guy (I had the privilege of taking a one-day class with him, and he was very cool). Robert Elswit is also deserving for There Will Be Blood -- actually so are Janusz Kaminski for Diving Bell and Seamus McGarvey for Atonement -- but Deakins deserves his due.

Visual Effects: Pirates
Transformers is not as undeserving as some claim, and I would not be unhappy to see it win also, but the work in Pirates is some really good stuff. I think Transformers probably will win because Pirates will be seen as just follow-on work from the first two films, but that's fine with me. Golden Compass, on the other hand, didn't really blow me away (either the film or the VFX).

Art Direction: Sweeney Todd
My hands-down favorite. Art Direction made this film better than it otherwise would have been (I like Tim Burton, but I think he should have made more changes to the source material and made it better).

Sound Editing: Ratatouille
Sound Mixing: Ratatouille
I am biased. But I do really like all the sound work that gets done for our films.

Editing: The Bourne Ultimatum
Not a great film, per-se, but a nice job with the editing.

Best Original Screenplay: Ratatouille
I'd like to see an animated film win this once, and as mentioned, I'm biased. I'm pretty sure that Juno will win simply for being the little indie film that could, which is also fine (even though it makes me jealous as it's a script close in style and genre to what I most commonly write), as it was a pretty good script -- but Michael Clayton was perhaps better, so if that wins, that's cool too.

Short Live Action: Haven't seen enough of them.

Short Animated: Don't care for any of the ones I've seen.
I preferred The Ark, which was a Cannes official selection this year.

Other categories: Either haven't seen enough of the entrants to judge, or don't care for what's there.

That's my two cents on this year's Oscars, except to say this: Neither Stanley Kubrick nor Peter O'Toole ever won an Oscar, so in the final analysis, who cares?

So, Why Do I Have A Blog Again?

I've been hesitant about, perhaps even resistant to, blogging for quite some time.

Why the reluctance?

For starters, I hate the alleged word "blog." Just what the hell is a "blog?" The canonical answer is: "it's short for Web log."

Well kiddies, back in my day this was a Web Log:

66.249.67.200 - - [13/Jan/2008:06:54:04 -0800] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 10
96 "-" "Googlebot-Image/1.0"
66.249.67.200 - - [13/Jan/2008:06:54:04 -0800] "GET /poles/Witold_Pilecki-100.jp
g HTTP/1.1" 200 30075 "-" "Googlebot-Image/1.0"
67.142.130.13 - - [13/Jan/2008:09:02:22 -0800] "GET /poles/Berek_joselewicz.jpg
HTTP/1.1" 200 16566 "http://images.google.com/images?q=+Maria+Sk%C5%82odowska&gb
v=2&ndsp=20&svnum=50&hl=en&safe=off&start=40&sa=N" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSI
E 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; IEMB3; IEMB3)"
67.142.130.13 - - [13/Jan/2008:09:04:18 -0800] "GET /poles/Jozef_Pilsudski1.jpg
HTTP/1.1" 200 27906 "http://images.google.com/images?q=+Maria+Sk%C5%82odowska+yo
ung&gbv=2&ndsp=20&svnum=50&hl=en&safe=off&start=60&sa=N" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatibl
e; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; IEMB3; IEMB3)"

And as far as I'm concerned, it still is. Once upon a time I wrote software to analyze these logs. Quite good software, I might add. However, this software failed to make me rich, neither through my own efforts at peddling it nor those of my various employers. So not only is the terminology dumb, and wrong, but it also brings back memories of my own "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" escapades (which, admittedly, had much less gunplay than 50 Cent's).

Let me reiterate here: "Blog" is a stupid word.

This practice should really be called a Web Journal or Diary, or Micropublishing, or Digipropaganda, or something along those lines (perhaps all those things, depending on the content).

Next, we have the issue of "early adopter resentment."

Back a zillion years ago (the 80's and 90's) I was quite active on all the predecessor forms of digitally emulating the act of standing on a soapbox in the middle of Washington Square Park and ranting at anyone who passes by. Bulletin boards (BBSes), mail aliases (including ones run via uucp exchanges, and on Fidonet), usenet, mu*s (the social kind), and many different kinds of early web systems for publishing content (including several systems I wrote myself) -- you name it, I was all up in it. In junior high school, I even published a few political writings to some kind of school-to-school BBS system using the school's teletype. (Nerds even older than myself can continue the chain from here. I can only wish that I could rant about having to use punch cards to post my Arpanet invectives against the dangers of hard disks and their excessive numbers of moving parts.)

Not a dang one of these things made me a rich and famous writer / artist / philosopher / internationally hailed genius of all things like Ben Franklin or Buckaroo Banzai.

It was not at all because I was younger, a lesser writer, and prone to long periods of inactivity due to hoarding my writings and artwork in the vein hope that some professional publisher, film studio or gallery would be along with an offer "any minute now."

No, not at all.

It was because technology sucks. Internet, you go to Hell.

The technology really did suck for quite a while. Early blogging software sucked (so does much of the current crop, really). I figured, for a long time, I'd just write better software myself and put it on my Website. Maybe someday I still will. But in the meantime, I realized that while I repeatedly redesign the ultimate Web Micropublishing Software over and over in my head, and occasionally start writing it only to be preempted by an even better idea, perhaps I should see what stopgap measures existed out in the land of suckware.

Finally, I experienced pretty much all the other concerns that hold people back: not enough time / too busy working, hate everything the moment it becomes trendy, don't just want to be part of the meaningless din of Internet stupidity, am perfectly happy actually standing on the street and ranting at people, thanks -- all the usual stuff.

So, then -- why DO I have a blog again?

One day I woke up and realized that, suddenly, people clearly younger, meaner and stupider than I were getting real, creative, high profile writing jobs -- from blogging.


"Fuck that," says I. I gotta get me some of that blogging, yo. (Note the hip and trendy lingo in that sentence. It is a sign of my attempting to signal utter capitulation to the form.)

I mean, I co-authored quite an interesting 600 page book in 06 (The Path to Posthumanity). It was published, and maybe a dozen people have read it. Meanwhile, pretty much every stupid thing that's ever been posted on the Internet gets read a million times, if my e-mail inbox is any indication. We should have just e-mailed out the book under the subject heading "read This and SEXY coeds will want you NOW!"

And after all these years of my mother telling me to be more positive, all of a sudden trite-yet-cynical observations, insistent declarations of unfounded opinions as fact, pithy commentary, and incoherent, curmudgeonly invectives are "in."

Sweet! I can do that. I hate all sorts of things. Like Blogging, for example.

And yet, here I am, doing it.

You may have won this time, Internet. But I'll be back. Oh yes, I shall. I'm coming for you, Internet.

New Science Fiction and Philosophy Journal Released

SciPhi - a new journal of Sci-Fi and Philosophy

This new electronic (text and audio -- a print version is optional) journal of science fiction and philosophy has just launched. It includes my first (co-authored with Ben Goertzel) short story to be published in quite a number of years, as well as stories by Paul S. Jenkins, Matt Wallace, Lee Battersby, Jason Pomerantz, Geoffre Maloney, Stephen Dedman and others. Each issue comes in audio and text versions without any DRM, and will go CC after 1 year. It's a worthwhile endeavor to support, and at $7 an issue it's not very expensive. If you like philosophical science fiction, I recommend checking it out.

read more | digg story