Postmodernism

Postmodernism
Seeing is not always believing and believing is more than seeing

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Amazon.com and the New Hollywood 2

I think the best comparison to this deal is actually YouTube.

If you put something up, don't do it for the money, the odds are electron-microscope small. You should only be looking for recognition; and even those odds are micro. That said, some people have gotten six or seven figure deals from YouTube... Hence the allure.

However, what you post, will no doubt be rehashed and used by thousands of other people -- much like YouTube -- and your "credit" will be lost in that mix, and your chances for money are almost non-existent.

In my mind what Amazon Studios will become (or wants to become) is a searchable library of scripts, that writers -- maybe teams of writers hired by, or in cahoots with Amazon Studios -- use to find templates of script to rewrite. Or maybe even a diamond in the rough, with the right polish could be sellable.

Because the whole thing cost Amazon nothing, and they only (imagine to / might) pay out money when the real prospect of money is in sight -- i.e. when a studio or other party has actual interest in a project -- so the real coup for them is the library of material they will accumulate, and the traffic to the site / publicity. In essence, they have already won.

I can totally see Amazon hiring a writer, or rather a group of writers, to rewrite the best of the scripts on the site, also for pennies, and thus they have totally reduced to cost of getting a (strong?) piece of material for their studio at rock bottom cost. They are even looking to foster mass comment/contribution by the masses via a thread like this, giving notes/ideas for free, and who would thus likely go see the film even though they will get no credit or money...

-- See how this is all working? --

If they can get one feature film off the ground to make at least $50 million. It will be a massive profit for them, where as for a normal studio, it likely would not be.

"New Hollywood"

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