Nobody owns anything. Part 1

By Gonzalo López Martí /  LMMIAMI.COM

#content #intellectualproperty

• We all know the running phrase in Hollywood: nobody knows anything.
• As Jim McNamara pointed out with his usual showmanship, charisma and refreshing candor during the last AHAA enclave, not even test screenings shed much light on the potential success of a movie: they are just an industry-sanctioned mechanism to cover the asses of folks crazy enough to greenlight projects.
• Mr. McNamara was one of the most successful TV executives in the country.
• That we know.
• He cashed out and, allegedly flush with moolah after stewarding the sale of Telemundo to NBC Universal a few years ago, decided to try his hand on the big screen.
• He of all people should know what smells of success and what doesn’t, right?
• Who better than Big Jim to be a successful, swashbuckling movie producer catering to Hispanic audiences?
• Still, Mr. McNamara openly admits he is at loss when confronted with a new movie development.
• It’s anyone’s guess what might happen at the box office.
• Creating content is an obscure art.
• It takes one big pair of c**ones.
• Or a considerable level of delusion.
• It is a business of gamblers operating on passion and gut feeling.
• There are trends, sure.
• There are a few loose rules of thumb.
• There are intricacies that somehow help the big machine grind on.
• Nevertheless, in essence, it’s all one big toss up.
• With the particularity that some people manage to fail better than others.
• For instance, when Francis Ford Coppola was shooting Apocalypse now in the Philippines he received a telegram from LA instructing him to abort the project.
• He’d run over budget and the suits back in SoCal had decided the flick in progress had all the trappings of a bomb (pun intended).
• Coppola destroyed the telegram and kept shooting.
• Never mind that Martin Sheen had had a minor heart attack on set and Marlon Brando had lost the few marbles he had left somewhere in the rainforest.
• The film became a box office smash and one of the most important masterpieces of the century.
• Which still did not prevent Coppola from filing for chapter 11 a few years later, after a string of commercial flops.
• George Lucas shopped his “Star Wars” idea to all the major studios in Hollywood.
• Four of them passed on the opportunity, which they considered a far fetched passion project by a rookie, untested filmmaker.
• Speaking of George Lucas: his and Steven Spielberg’s fist choice to star in the Indiana Jones saga was… (drum roll):
• Tom Selleck.
• Tom passed.
• He claimed it was not the right fit for his career.
• LOL
• Nobody.
• Knows.
• Anything.
• To add insult to injury, now there’s a new running phrase in the digitally ravaged hills of Hollywoodland: nobody owns anything.
• Intellectual property is over.
• Digital distribution is a minefield.
• Piracy is pillaging the box office.
• It not only applies to Hollywood.
• The same is true about TV, literature, music.
• When every single human being roams the planet with a smartphone consuming & generating content 24/7 everything becomes public domain, fair use, creative commons or whatever we want to call it, slice it or dice it.
• To be continued.