Watching The Wolf of Wall Street was a guilty pleasure for me. It wasn’t that the movie valorizes Jordan Belfort’s crimes, which defrauded victims of more than a hundred million dollars, but I felt uneasy about being entertained by a work of art indirectly derived from the pain of others – especially since it wasn’t clear that the injured parties were participating in the movie’s profits.
The movie literally and figuratively kept the victims of Belfort’s fraud outside the frame. In only a few scenes do we hear even the disembodied voices of the defrauded investors. But imagine what it would be like to watch the movie in the presence of one of Belfort’s 1,500 real-life victims, whose ranks included architects, engineers, insurance agents, real estate appraisers, and other middle-class professionals.
The movie repeats Belfort’s claim that his firm only targeted the super-rich. The idea is that we needn’t worry so much about who was hurt by these crimes, because these investors were so wealthy that they wouldn’t be as impacted by the loss of a few dollars. But some of his victims’ families tell a very different story: “My father lost practically a quarter-million dollars,” said one man, whose father, an engineer, was cold-called at home by a Stratton broker. His father suffered a stroke under the stress of his losses. As another investor puts it: “I’m not a rich guy, and I’ve been paying for it ever since.”
In The Knockoff Economy,we wrote about how turning products into experiences is one way to blunt the detrimental effects of copies. Products – especially digital ones – are often very easy to copy. But experiences can be highly copy-resistant. Just think of music: it’s easy to pirate a song, but it’s very difficult to effectively pirate a live show. Or movies: it’s easy to pirate a film, but it’s impossible to pirate the experience of watching a movie at a premium theater like The Arclight Hollywood in Los Angeles. You can’t cheaply copy the comfy reserved seats, the fancy food and drink, the great sight lines and sound.
All this, of course, comes at a price. But it helps justify the idea of going to a movie theater in an age when home downloads, on a widescreen computer monitor, can be pretty good.
Our local movie house in suburban London charges £11.90 for a regular ticket, and even seniors pay £8.90 (over $13). But there is a special for seniors (ages 60+): Every Tuesday they show a recent movie (e.g., Lincoln is showing on May 21) and charge only £3 ($4.60). Moreover, you get “free tea, coffee and biscuits!” Such a deal—so how can they make money off this, or is it just altruism by the theater owners toward us old folks?
The movie costs no extra rental, and the only variable costs are the wages of the one or two workers who sell the tickets and make the eats. The fixed costs—of the movie rental, the theater and heating/electricity, are irrelevant for the owner’s decision. I should think that, if they can sell even 20 tickets, they will increase their profits.
The hit movie of a few weeks ago was Breaking Dawn Part 2, which several of my grandkids saw on opening night. A grandson reports that at the first showing there was a full 30 minutes of advertisements before the movie, more than he’d ever seen. He figured correctly that the captive audience (people lined up for hours to see the first showing) would fill the theater immediately, implicitly increasing the demand for advertisements. That made the advertising time more valuable, so the theater responded by offering more ads. I would bet too that they charged the advertisers more per minute for the right to show their ads—implicitly thus increasing price as well as quantity. (HT to SCH)
I saw Argo the other night (yes yes, very good, and kudos to all involved). But then I watched this TV ad – for a newspaper, of all things!, the Guardian – and I think it may end up being more memorable than the film.
In the town where we stay on the New Jersey shore the local movie theater advertises: In case of rain, we will have an extra show at 1PM on weekdays. Pretty clever. If it’s rainy, the demand curve for going to the movies shifts rightward—who wants to go to the beach in the rain. Accordingly, the theater increases the amount of showings supplied to the market. But why don’t they raise the price of tickets on bad-weather days? Presumably because it would create bad will among customers who might feel exploited, but perhaps there are other reasons. (I can’t imagine that it is difficult to alter prices on a daily basis.)
Supporters of stronger intellectual property enforcement — such as those behind the proposed new Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) bills in Congress — argue that online piracy is a huge problem, one which costs the U.S. economy between $200 and $250 billion per year, and is responsible for the loss of 750,000 American jobs.
These numbers seem truly dire: a $250 billion per year loss would be almost $800 for every man, woman, and child in America. And 750,000 jobs – that’s twice the number of those employed in the entire motion picture industry in 2010.
Does media concentration lead to biased coverage? A new paper from two Berkeley economists,Stefano Delavigna and Alec Kennedy, studies News Corp. and Time Warner, and approaches the big question through a small window: movie reviews. Here’s the abstract:
Stephen Dubner’s first book, Turbulent Souls, has been optioned by The Group Entertainment (Variety‘s report here), with writer Larry Gross (48 Hours, True Crime, We Don’t Live Here Anymore) to adapt the memoir for the big screen. Not that we have a say in this, but just for fun we’d like to find out which actor Freakonomics readers think should play the Dubner in the film.
Two years ago, I asked for suggestions for the most memorable movie lines of recent years, to help with the next edition of The Yale Book of Quotations. Let me repeat my “bleg” from that time, and ask again for suggestions
From a new CDC report: “To monitor the extent to which tobacco use is shown in popular movies, Thumbs Up! Thumbs Down! (TUTD), a project of Breathe California of Sacramento-Emigrant Trails, counted the occurrences of tobacco use (termed “incidents”) shown in U.S. top-grossing movies during 1991-2009. This report summarizes the results of that study, which found that the number of tobacco incidents depicted in the movies during this period peaked in 2005 and then progressively declined.”
Imagine a world where Hollywood producers could predict, with scientific precision, the box office revenue a movie will generate just by reading the screenplay. A new forecasting model devised by a trio of marketing professors from Wharton and NYU promises to deliver something like that.
Sunday’s Oscar night will be different. First, there are now ten nominees for best picture. But perhaps more importantly, the voting system has changed.
Joining a growing number of people who are selling their burial plots for some extra income, Elsie Poncher is auctioning her late husband’s crypt on eBay, hoping to use the proceeds to pay off the $1.6 million mortgage on her house in Beverly Hills.
You know that sensation when you’re reading an article in your morning newspaper and, about three grafs in, you start imagining the movie version and you can practically hear the Hollywood studios scrambling to get hold of the writer and the subject in order to lock up their life rights?
That’s what Obi-Wan Kenobi really said in Star Wars (1977), according to AMC’s list of famous film misquotes, not the popular variant, which is properly attributed to Han Solo. The list also includes famous quotes that, AMC claims, were never actually spoken in the films to which they’re linked: “Me Tarzan, you Jane,” for example. For the doubters — run them past Fred Shapiro.
Feedback is such an elemental ingredient of nearly any human activity — consider the importance of coaching and teaching in particular, but also think about the creative arts — and yet there is huge variance on how much feedback a given person may get, or choose to accept. The web is probably the grandest (or at least the noisiest) feedback . . .
I took my four children to the movie Coraline this weekend. After the movie, I asked them how they liked it. Their four answers: “great,” “good,” “O.K.,” and “Thank God it is over.” Coming from my kids, who always say the latest movie is their favorite, those are not very positive reviews. I have never been in a movie theater . . .
I blogged a while back about the remarkable documentary film Smile Pinki that follows two young children as they have cleft surgery. One of those children is named Pinki. Last night Smile Pinki won an Academy Award. Pinki was there, having flown in from India.
New York magazine, riffing on Drew Barrymore‘s starring role in the film adaptation of He’s Just Not That Into You, suggests 10 other self-help books that should be Barrymore vehicles, including Freakonomics: Drew Barrymore stars as a free-spirited Northwestern economics grad student who ventures into the Cabrini Green projects on the south side of Chicago to research the lives of . . .
Dan Glickman We recently solicited your questions for Dan Glickman, C.E.O. of the Motion Picture Association of America. In his answers below, he discusses, among other topics, the source of his piracy figures and why the ratings board isn’t the “morality police.” He also tells us what he thinks of the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which critiqued . . .
I recently whined about some of the historical inaccuracies in the HBO mini-series John Adams. If I had seen this list first — the Ten Most Historically Inaccurate Movies — I would have held my tongue. Here, according to Yahoo!’s list, are the ten worst offenders: 10,000 B.C., Gladiator, 300, The Last Samurai, Apocalypto, Memoirs of a Geisha, Braveheart, Elizabeth: . . .
I have not seen the film Beyond Belief by Beth Murphy, but I have heard spectacular things about it. The film tells the story of two Sept. 11th widows who are working to help widows in Afghanistan. Here is the trailer. For those of you in Chicago, the local chapter of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) is . . .
Prenatal lead exposure linked to male obesity. (Earlier) Researchers test Iraqi teenagers’ self-esteem. Cities in Japan, Sardinia, California boast the world’s longest-living populations. Helvetica makes list of “Top Ten new releases to inspire social change.” (Earlier)
A few days ago, Levitt blogged about an interesting study finding that violent movies reduce crime (at least in the short run). The reason, according to the study’s authors, Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna, is simply that more violent movies means fewer drunken louts on the streets. It is simply an incapacitation effect. One way of testing this hypothesis would . . .
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is one politician who can credibly claim that he is truly responsible for reducing crime, at least if you believe a new study by economists Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna. It isn’t his policies as governor, however, that he can take credit for, but rather his acting roles. In their new paper entitled “Does Movie Violence . . .
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