More Like a Conspiracy (Part II)

Posted on September 24, 2011 by

So-called conservatives like to imbue market forces with the potency of a panacea.  Limited government and market competition are the hallmark, companion solutions to our every economic woe, so they say; but here’s the truly insidious thing about the aforementioned policy of crap that I believe exists in a large segment of American business:  it’s really a conspiracy of crap.

In order to have real competition in a market, businesses must strive to outdo one another in ways that better serve the consumer.  Better reliability, better pricing, better customer service are all methods by which manufacturers traditionally compete for market-share; but now that the majority of companies have instituted a policy of crap, we consumers can no longer threaten Brand A with a switch to Brand B.  It’s almost as though each brand knows our experience won’t be any better with their competitors.  And that’s because they do know, which makes it a conspiracy, even if it’s not a coordinated one.

Returning to my Whirlpool washer again, which is still not fixed, I am now trapped in a vicious policy requiring continued attempts to fix the machine before the retailer, Lowes, can “request” Whirlpool “consider” replacing this piece of crap  that is under warranty!  On Monday, I’ll call Whirlpool and tear some cubicle-automaton a new one, but to what end?  That poor dope doesn’t make policy; he just reads from a script.  So, I’ll call corporate HQ and blast away at some lobotomized VP of “Customer Experience,” or whatever they call it; and then what?  The lobotomized VP of Customer Experience has been trained to politely take my abuse and calmly explain their replacement policies while apologizing for the inconvenience and thanking me — THANKING ME!! — for being a customer.

And the can of rage I’ll open up on this toady will be to no avail for one simple reason:  I, the consumer, no longer have a bargaining chip.  I can no longer threaten to buy another brand and tell all my friends to do the same.  The VP of Customer Experience will simply say, “I understand how you feel, Sir” because she doesn’t give a shit if I switch to another brand because she knows I’m going to get egregiously rogered by them, too.   Manufacturers aren’t actually competing for market share so much as they’re gang-raping consumers, and swapping them around like doped up sorority girls.  Sorry if that’s a bit graphic for your taste, but the next time you hear some analyst use the word churn, what it really means is gang-raping consumers, and swapping them around like doped up sorority girls.

Instead of competing on legitimate, tangible values (e.g. reliability), most products compete on the illusion of value.  As indicated in my last post, what manufacturers call “innovation” is often some bullshit feature a product never needed in the first place and one that literally makes the product itself unreliable.  Does your dryer really need a setting that says “delicate, white socks with frills on the cuffs” or whatever?  Not only are these new “features” bullshit, but the electronics that support this “innovation” are delicate, cheap, built to fail — and bloody expensive to replace if you didn’t pay the extortion money for the “extended service contract.”

I believe competition is central to a healthy economy in a free society.  But as consumers, we no longer have the freedom to legitimately vote with our pocketbooks,when it comes to some of the goods and services on which we truly depend.  You think you’re angry because there’s too much government?  The reality  is there isn’t enough government.  The idea of consumer protection in everything from the machines we use to the food we eat has been eroded by political forces who claim that the market will solve what the government has no business meddling with in the first place.  So far, this policy has led to a corporate conspiracy to market homogenous crap, differentiated solely by logos.

Read Part III

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A Policy of Crap (Part I)

Posted on September 24, 2011 by

If you really want to understand why the American economy is in so much trouble, don’t look at the politicians on either side of the aisle; look at the company you work for and ask yourself whether or not it has a policy of producing crap.  Here’s a hint:  if you work for a business that makes consumer products, there’s a really good chance that such a policy exists.  Take for instance, a category that for reasons passing understanding, we still call “durable goods.”  This includes major appliances, and we call them durable goods because they’re meant to be the kind of purchase a consumer makes once every decade or more as opposed to, say, an iPod which, although it is fairly expensive, we have somehow accepted is semi-disposable after a couple of years.   To a certain extent, this is Apple’s policy of crap at work inasmuch as it is almost always more cost-effective to replace several of their products than it is to try to repair them unless they’re brand new.  That said, they make excellent computers relative to the rest of the market, so I’m not picking on them.

Appliances, of course, are very different from iPods for two important reasons:  1) they’re expected to last at least a decade or more (your grandmother’s lasted three decades, but let’s not get crazy); and 2) they are devices that keep your life functioning in modern society.  Anyone who’s ever had a major appliance conk out on them for a few weeks knows how utterly disruptive it is to the day-to-day needs of a contemporary family.  I say this wondering if there is a middle-class family that hasn’t experienced this disruption because as far as I can tell, all appliances are now crap.

I guess the top-shelf stuff –  SubZero, Viking, etc. — that most middle-class families can’t afford is pretty good — I wouldn’t know as I haven’t been in a position to buy these brands yet — but the middle to upper-middle grade products, which are by no means cheap, are absolute crap, and the manufacturers who make them know it; and here’s how you know they know it:  the service contract.  You can’t buy a ballpoint pen anymore without a retailer offering you an extended service contract, and do you know what’s really going on here?    The retailer is really saying, “This thing you’re buying is crap.  We know it, you know it, and the manufacturer knows it.  You’ll be lucky if its first failure happens within the year’s warranty, but odds are it will happen in sixteen months, so why don’t you pay us another two hundred dollars now to hedge against the ghastly cost of fixing or replacing this piece of crap?”  Every time I’ve been offered an extended service contract, I feel like a village merchant being shaken down by the local mob.  “Nice oven you bought there.  I wouldn’t want anything to happen to it.”

My most recent disaster product is a washer that is less than a year old.  Good news is it’s still under warranty; bad news is it’s still under warranty, which means the manufacturer (in this case Whirlpool) calls the shots on repair and/or replacement.  The repair guy, Steve, replaced the motor but then discovered other problems throughout the circuitry of the control panel.  So far, we’ve been washerless for about three weeks, and Whirlpool has paid the repair company about 90% of what I paid for the machine at Lowes.  More new parts sit next to me in boxes as I write this, and the repair guy is due back in the middle of this week, which means Whirlpool will  pay even more to repair this machine than I paid to buy it new.  But they have a policy of three attempted repairs before they’ll replace a product, so there it is.

This might seem counter-intutive, right?  Why would Whirlpool spend more to fix a product than it would cost them to replace it?  I suspect it has something to do with the short-term balance sheet on which most companies seem to operate these days.  See in the 1980s, before my generation started buying durable goods, a lot of American businesses seemed to shift their focus from steady growth to quarterly increases in share price; and the legacy of this is a policy of crap.  The most affordable means by which more crap could move off the shelves each quarter became the m.o. of nearly every business from consumer goods to food to pharmaceuticals and financial services; and the mutant child it spawned was what the business world laughably calls “innovation.”

Go online right now and look at how many different types of clothes dryer you can find.  A zillion features, each one with a price point for a machine that basically turns a drum and blows hot air through it.  That’s pretty much all your grandmother’s dryer did, which is why it lasted 30 years and had to be hauled out of her house by a pachyderm when it finally died.  Your dryer, my dryer, has settings — lots of settings that are controlled by delicate electronics that fail if you look at them wrong. Not that there aren’t some improvements that aren’t good ideas, if they were well constructed and assembled, but they’re not.  And when your over-complex, shoddily assembled dryer does fail you for a week or two, take notice of the dryer at the laundromat you’ll inevitably visit.  It tumbles, blows hot air, and has three settings – high, medium, and low.  Put a consumer dryer in a laundromat, and they’d be out of commission in a month.

Speaking of the pre-80s market and appliances, remember the Maytag repair man campaign?  Of course you do.  It was a solid piece of advertising and, I supposed, based on a fairly solid claim.  Funny how such a campaign doesn’t exist anymore.  In fact, I don’t think too many companies even try to engender such brand loyalty based on reliability claims (even if they pay it lip-service) because they know that consumers will switch from brand in the futile hope that one of them isn’t crap.

One might argue that so many crap products are actually good for the economy.  The repair companies get more business; the help desk people who are no help at all stay employed; the retailers inevitably turn more volume because replacing crap products is often preferable to any attempt to fix them; the marketing and advertising guys keep busy making claims that Whirlpool’s crap is better than Kenmore’s or GE’s (and according to Steve the repair guy, they’re all the same); and of course my local laundromat picks up a few bucks from me for a couple of weeks or so.  Sure, the individual consumer suffers frustration, but overall the policy of crap doesn’t look so bad from an economic standpoint, does it?  In the big picture, it’s a disaster.

Whirlpool will lose money on my washing machine, especially if they ultimately have to replace it, but they won’t care because of the amount of crap they’ll move off the the shelves while they stall me on the replacement.  In fact, I’d love to know how much crap they’ve sold just between service calls to my house.  I bet it’s a lot.  Of course, a large percentage of all that other crap is going to fail, too; but as long as the cycle keeps going, it’s all good on paper even if not in real dollars.  Now, in order to keep that cycle going, to keep the steady conveyor of crap in constant motion, Whirlpool and its competitors have to make stuff cheap and fast; and that mostly means make them someplace other than America, which means loss of manufacturing jobs, which means a shrinking middle class, which means fewer families who can afford quality appliances, which means more “innovation” by manufacturers (i.e. even crappier crap).

I worked in corporate communications for 20 years and have been privy to what we’ll call the mindset (companies like to call it “culture”) of about a hundred or so corporations.  My observation is they’re mostly the same, psychologically speaking — short-term focus on share price instead of long-term attention to solid growth based on real value, thereby leading to a culture of greed and selfishness.  Whether it’s  crap appliances disrupting the flow of a household or crap securities nearly crashing the global economy, we have institutionalized a corrupt mindset into an American value based on the idea that if it makes money now, it’s good.  What happens later, is the next guy’s problem.  Well, welcome to later.

Wail all you want about government stimulus — good, bad, or otherwise.  Our economic woes are cultural and deeply ingrained into the psychology of both consumer and producer.  It may take drowning in a sea of crap before the next generation decides to start making shovels.

Read Part II

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Arri ALEXA Observations

Posted on September 18, 2011 by

For better or worse (and we’ll soon see), I wound up shooting gone Elvis myself; and there is no way I would have come close to getting the look I wanted without the ALEXA, graciously loaned to the project by Tamberelli Digital in NYC. Leading up to the shoot, though, I did a fair bit of prep, practice, and refresher work because ALEXA is a film-style camera, and I’d been shooting video for a long time. Light meter?  Measuring tape?  Oh, yeah.

As promised, the ALEXA has 14 stops of latitude, and our need to film an actress driving a car is a good test of this capability because the exterior is several stops hotter than the interior — plus our actress is African American, so the contrast is even greater.  Without gelling windows or lighting up the car’s interior, I mostly got away with it.  A couple of times, I put a LitePanel in the car on Carla, but overall, ALEXA’s claim to hold these radically different levels within acceptable parameters proved true.  In one scene, where she pauses next to a cornfield, the contrast was particularly high, and I do have a choice between a white sky or letting her go a little more silhouette, but the scene has much more film-like fall off from light to dark  than I would have achieved with any other camera I’ve ever used.

The price for the latitude in this case was weight.  The ALEXA weighs over 20lbs with lens and battery on it, so rigging it to a car would have required some pretty heavy duty gear and likely a crew member we couldn’t afford.  Hence, all the car interiors are filmed hand-held, mostly from the passenger seat, using a Zacuto rig.  You can certainly see me breathing but at least a heavy camera is a lot easier to hold steady than a light one.

Weight was also a factor in how little the camera ends up moving throughout the film.  With a compressed schedule, light crew, and heavy camera body, I had to shed jib shots even though we had a Seven Jib with us, and I did have notions of using it in a few cases.  Our first day of shooting became a litmus test for how quickly we could function, and I worried that setup and breakdown time for the jib would kill us.  Had I used a Canon 5D or 7D, moving the camera would obviously have been a lot easier, but those cameras don’t have the T-Stop latitude of the ALEXA, and I didn’t want to trade lighting flexibility for ease of movement.

Several scenes in gone Elvis are shot with available light or minimal light.  I had an HMI Joker 400 Watt I used exactly once and made much more use of the inkies, 650 fresnels, and Kino-Flo Diva light we carried.  One really nice feature of the ALEXA is that you dial in color instead of white balancing.  You choose a base temperature and then adjust according to condidtions.  Ideally, this should be done with a calibrated monitor and LUTs (and assistants!), but in our guerilla mode, I had to shoot really old school and make best estimates about settings based on what I could see in the eyepiece and what I could deduce from the numbers.  I shot in the Log-C color matrix with the notion that, perhaps down the road, we’d have money and reason to get a professional grader and print to film.

The best stuff we shot was a night scene in which our character is stopped in her car by a police officer.  It rained, so filming reverses from outside the car and setting up any lights was out of the question.  We had to shoot the whole thing from inside the hero car and with available light.  At 1600 ISO, the added noise looks like film grain, and the levels and colors are stunning.  The streetlights, flashsing red cop car light, and officer’s flashlight are the only illumination other than a small LitePanel to keep Carla’s face from going completely silhouette.  I wouldn’t trade the look for anything and am glad it rained because that was the right way to shoot that scene.  In fact, I was shooting with SuperSpeeds but wasn’t even open all the way to T1.3.  Focus was critical but not impossible, even crammed into the passenger seat of a Cutlass and sweating my head off.  No other camera that I know could have achieved the look.

Without a doubt, ALEXA’s Achilles’ Heel is power consumption.  It is a battery glutton, and on a fast-paced shoot, moving from location to location, this can be a serious challenge.  The weakest scene in the film was hampered by a few things, but among these was the fact that I was rushing to avoid losing power.  By the time I’d framed up and blocked part of the scene, two bricks were already down.  Two things that might have saved me in this case would have been a quiet, lunchbox generator or a director’s viewfinder or both.  The viewfinder would have helped block the action without turning the camera on, and of course the generator would have obviated the need for batteries.

With the imminent release of gone Elvis the short, we have begun discussions about expanding the film into a larger project, either as a feature or for television.  Given my experience with the ALEXA, I would certainly want to shoot a more expansive and better budgeted version of this story with this camera.  I believe it really is digital’s only serious competitor with film thus far.

NOTE:  Since the original post of this article, gone Elvis has been released.  Information available at www.goneelvis.com

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Doing Our Part for Local Cinema

Posted on September 14, 2011 by

Two years ago, my colleagues and I made a promo film to help raise money when the Chatham Film Club sought to purchase the Crandell theatre in Chatham, NY. Built in 1926, the Crandell is the only single-screen, classic movie theater in Columiba County, and it is home to the FilmColumbia Film Festival, which will host its 12th year this October. Now that the film club owns and operates the Crandell, they continue to raise money for maintenance and upgrades to the facility, including the inadequate Ladies restroom.

Local resident and film star, Parker Posey volunteered her improvisational skills to create this little piece I shot with Nick Lagonia a few weeks ago.

Below that is the original piece I did during the original capital campaign.

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Negligent Blogger

Posted on September 14, 2011 by

I know.  I’ve treated this blog like a red-headed stepchild.  I was pretty diligent there for a while then dropped off the radar.  Whose idea was it to serialize the four-day shoot report anyway?  Suffice to say, I’ve been busy working on gone Elvis rather than summarizing the other three days.  Also, I have to admit that I just haven’t been in the mood to write about anything.  It’s been a hard year.  Freelance gigs that used to pay the bills have become scarce in a market with almost no good news; and gone Elvis itself is something I’ve felt alternately good and bad about through post-production.

I’m happy with certain aspects of the film, disappointed with others.  I know we bit off a little more production than was reasonable with the resources available, but there it is.  I also knew going into production that the script was not inherently a short but a truncated feature, which can be a dangerous decision.  In fact, although I had not set out to make a short as a prelude to a feature, that is now my thinking about this material.  I believe both the subject matter and the character lend themselves to a more expansive story; and with that in mind, I believe the short is a very useful experiment that stands on its own as a viewing experience.  We’ll see.  gone Elvis will debut this October at the FilmColumbia festival in Chatham, New York; and then we’re planning a limited-run, online sneak in collaboration with Operation GI Jane, inviting service women to watch and review the film online.  Beyond that, we’ll look at other festivals and next steps.

In the meantime, here’s the link to the rest of the shoot summaries.

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gone Elvis – Day 1

Posted on July 27, 2011 by

Photo by Jeanne V. Bowerman

Every shoot has a ramp-up period. This was more like a vertical takeoff.  We started rolling with a crew of 3 and cast of 1 at about 8:00am and would wrap Day 1 sometime after midnight with 10 sequences in the can from 8 different locations.  Adding team members throughout the day, we traveled in a caravan around Columbia County, a cross between a film crew and Washington’s motley, volunteer army.  Guerrilla-style film production?  You bet.  And it can work for a film like gone Elvis, if you have a team with the right attitude.  Thankfully, this team did.

Read more here.

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Production Notes – PR & Marketing

Posted on June 15, 2011 by

Debut Screening October 23rd

We are very happy that gone Elvis will debut at our home-town film festival.  FilmColumbia is a great, small, well-curated festival held in Chatham, NY and now celebrating its twelfth year.  Click here for details.

Our Progress to be Followed by IP Rights Organization

As of June, Copyright Alliance will follow gone Elvis through production, citing the film as exemplary of First Lady, Michelle Obama’s new initiative called Joining Forces.  The First Lady met with guild leaders in Hollywood as well as members of Copyright Alliance this past weekend and urged filmmakers to use their talents to tell stories about the lives of people who serve in the U.S. military.

Yesterday, at a meeting hosted by several Hollywood Guilds, including Copyright Alliance members Directors Guild of America,  American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and Writers Guild of America, West, as well as Producers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild, First Lady Michelle Obama urged creators to support military families by incorporating storylines that share the experiences of our military forces into their creative works.

Click here to read the rest of the blog on CA’s website.

A New Alliance with a New Foundation that Helps Military Mothers

On June 8, our film project received a significant endorsement from Operation G.I. Jane, an organization that provides services to help single mothers in the military who have been deployed overseas.  An estimated  16,000   women serving in the armed forces are single mothers; and Operation G.I. Jane, backed by Coggins International, provides the following services to help mitigate the hardships of their circumstances:

    • communication with their children via webcam technology
    • airfare for much-needed visits home
    • necessities kits for both mother and child
    • healing therapy
    • career transitioning

I had a chance to speak with Jula Jane, CEO of both Coggins and G.I. Jane, and in addition to having Coggins join our list of financial backers, we began a dialogue about ways gone Elvis and Operation G.I. Jane might benefit each other and, therefore, expand awareness of these veterans’ issues to a wider audience.  We look forward to collaborating with this group as we produce the film, and we will keep our fans and supporters up to date on developments.

Jeanne V. Bowerman talks to Pilar Alessandra for her “On the Page” Podcast

Click to download podcast “Balls of Steel”

gone Elvis Executive Producer, Jeanne Veillette Bowerman was in Los Angeles last week for the Great American Pitch Fest, and she was also a guest on the On the Page: Screenwriting Podcast, hosted by Pilar Alessandra, director of the On The Page writing program.  What’s really fun about this for me is that Pilar and I went to college together (just a few years ago really), and I’m a big fan of her work in the field of script consultation. In fact, I think her book The Coffee Break Screenwriter is one of the most intelligent approaches to teaching scriptwriting I have ever encountered; and I mean it.  I am not just saying that because she has enough dirt on me to plant a victory garden.  Seriously, check out the book.  I hate scriptwriting guides, but I really like hers.

In this podcast, “Balls of Steel,” Jeanne talks about her development as a writer and about her many projects, most notably her tremendous work with Douglas A. Blackmon on the adaptation of his book Slavery by Another Name.  She also talks about how I convinced (see tricked) her into donning a producer’s hat to work on gone Elvis with me.  She has yet to discover that producer is, in fact, slavery by another name; and I’d appreciate if nobody told her that just yet.

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