21st November 2011
The Vision Thing
“The director has achieved the trifecta of a fulfilling, creative life: enough money to do only what truly interests him, enough freedom to attack those projects in a way that is satisfying, and enough appreciation from his peers to tame—just slightly, just ever so slightly—the neurotic beast of self-doubt. After 22 movies, five commercials, 13 documentaries, a handful of music videos, three children, five wives, and 25 studios; after insolvency and misery, after box-office failures and years of going unappreciated; after the one Oscar and all the others he should have won, Marty Scorsese has earned the right that every creative person dreams of: the right never to be bored. And what all this adds up to in his case, what this really means to this particular man, is that he has earned the right to continue to fret every little detail in the world well into the next decade and for as long as he cares to make movies.
24th March 2011
Morgan Spurlock: I'm With the Brand
“Brands and content creators have struggled over control and influence for more than a century. As Spurlock writes in the production notes handed out at screenings of his film, “In the 1800s, Jules Verne sold the naming rights to shipping companies in Around the World in 80 Days, and in the early days of film, Thomas Edison put ads for his own products in the movies.” Radio pioneers like Fred Allen (who quipped, back in the early 1950s, that TV “allows people who haven’t anything to do to watch people who haven’t done anything” — hello, Paris Hilton and her fans!) battled and assuaged their sponsors in the same uneasy way that network news shows do now. Richard Sandomir of The New York Times recently reported that some announcers at ESPN were paid by Nike and Reebok to wear their shoes. Writing on the media-industry blog Romenesko, investigative journalist David Cay Johnston was dismayed: “If [Robert] Iger [CEO of Disney, which owns ESPN] does nothing,” he will leave “doubt as to who may be on the take, whose agenda is being advanced by greasing palms, and which critical stories are fueled by under-the-table payments.” Given this kind of hand-wringing, it’s fair to ask, as Spurlock’s movie does: Just what kind of purity are we looking for? How clean does content need to be — or can it be?
