Ted Newsom wrote:
Grrr.

And rightly so.

Cheers, Ted!   smiley: pimp   smiley: glasses   smiley: devil

Yeah man.  Grrrrrrr is needed or we'll all be nothing more than one more goober putting stuff up on youtube for free to make the share-holders of Das Googhle, unt Das Yeu Tuben, rich from our efforts.

Though I bet certain politically correct alternate-versions of Comic Book Guy on the Matt Smith thread would be happy with that.  Hah.

Meanwhile, I thought I treat you to a concrete example of the problems-to-come this thread addresses.  And hopefully some wannabees will cringe and make a brown smear in their fruit-of-the-looms after reading it.

The example is the case of a tapeworm, who liked to refer to Itself an "auteur".  

This particular tapeworm had an idea for a genre film, and managed to con a bunch of people with talents and skills to make this film for It, on a deferred-payment work -scheme.  This film was derivative, to say the least; the kindest thing one could say about this flick would be to call it "derivative fanboy dreck ".  

Which might have been acceptable, except for the fact that this dreck, this pathetic "used wank-kleenex" of a video game inspired by Vertigo Comics material couldn't have happened without tons of work, hard work, by people who are "below-the-line".  Everything that buttressed the no-talent, plagiaristic core of the "director" came from the hard work of people with real skills that could actually DO things.  And sadly, got suckered in by The Tapeworm.  They did work that outside of the USA, would have amounted to over $200,000 worth of services including-but-not-limited-to stunt-work in fight scenes, constructing sets, DAYS without sleep working layers upon layers over the green-screened raw footage.


On deferral.


After the film came out, and later went out on disk for rental and purchase, The tapeworm bragged about "making a big-budget-kind-of-film on a shoestring budget", to the press and media.  Bragged that aside from the deferred work rates (again, let's remember this is amounting to around $200k for non USA rates, so that's at least half a mil of work, by IATSE and SAG standards), it only cost roughly $250,000 to get the film into the cinemas, and soon after, available for rental and sale on disk at dvd/video-stores.


Let that sink in.  The Tapeworm says - basically - that the cost of the film was $50,000, to make prints of the work, the work that the Tapeworm conned everyone else to make for It.


The tapeworm, later, brags about how "its" film made over $750k.   $750,000 at the box-office alone, without any dvd rentals or sales or merch or ancillary-profits, and this $750,000 was *after* the costs of the film-prints for the cinemas and theaters and all promotional costs, etc, had been deducted.  "Adjusted gross".


So, there should have been *way over* $300,000 left over, from which to pay the minimal fees to everyone who worked on the film,  the people who made that film happen.  With a big chunk of change left over, which could be paid out in other ways, maybe in some parr passu arrangement, or to re-invest in a new film with some actual, proper salaries paid to below-the-line professionals.


Yet no-one who made the film happen for this %%%%-bag got paid.  Other than the small coterie of smarmy "co-producers" and "executive-producers".


Costume designers?  Seamstresses?  Make-up artists?  SFX Make-artists?  Prop designers?  The main storyboard artist who had to do over WAY over  200 pages of 'boards, with three frames/screens per board?


They never saw a dime.  


That math does not work.  But when questioned about these numbers that don't add up, when questioned on this con-job, the pieces of sh!tt involved said nothing.  They merely disappeared, with the auteur apparently moving to below-the-line jobs for advertising and realty-TV crap.  


They got off easy.


What really bites is when someone that starts as cast or crew, or a writer bitching about points on dvd sales, decides to make their own project, and because of their narcissistic $*@!+!@* (especially from some of these WGA wannabees who've barely been more than a Reader or a staff-writer on something like "Anger Management"), they have some metaphysical-aneurism, and afterwards, for some reason, believe that their presumed "talent" makes them a "Director" or "Creator" and that they can con people.  This coming from their utterly-askew misperception of their so-called "talent", which til now has never made them more than one of the pages or Tracy Morgan's flunkies on 30 Rock.   


Keep the faith, all.