Why are money and creativite integrity always in opposition?

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Permalink Reply by Florica Cimpoies on February 15, 2010 at 11:24pm

This is an honest stand up for a great vision that I truly appreciate!


Florica

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Permalink Reply by kent fuselier on February 23, 2010 at 2:26pm

I share a similar experience when I executive produced my first film. They had been through the ringer with this issue everywhere they'd ever gone in Hollywood. This was one of the top creative crews on the planet, but never really had a chance to express themselves. I told them I desired no creative control whatsoever and not to let anyone else imply they were in control. They were dumbfounded, presumed there was no way to get financing without some control - to which I replied, I don't watch movies, I don't even like them. If I do want to watch one, I'll pick it up at blockbuster for a dollar. What the hell am I going to try and tell you guys about creativity that won't be for the financial detriment and negative impact of the project.

True to my words, I didn't get involved outside of small technical issues and I don't hire an attorney to interpret the law and then argue with him or her based off what I didn't know that brought me in there in the first place. I haven't even watched the film but plan to someday. I really had no passion for the art, and that was not believable because I was dealing with artists. The outcome was as expected. Why would I spend a million dollars to try and force a crew to make a movie for my entertainment when theres a thousand others I'd like better available tonight for the downloding?

Some other correlations that become obvious - artists are dreamers living on another planet generally. They need to be for the most part, and I've felt its my job to deliver a location that allows them to do this without interruption. But when you make art, its yours, and the creation also involves the ego when it comes to the artists perception of the work. When you boil ego, isolation, and living on another planet and try to place a value on this to others, its really hard. You need someone thats not engrossed in that circle. From there, sometimes it may become apparent that a project is turning out unmarketable, and changes need to be reconsidered for the profitability of the group. Thats really hard to hear sometimes for an artist in love with his work.

Then lastly, you can draw some relevance to the quality and type of art that attracts its consumers. This works from a negative correlation most of the time exaggerated exponentially, thereby sometimes making it exponentially more profitable to deliver low end consumer crap than something that appeals to mozart. High end entertainment generally attracts a high end client, who is #1 wholly in the minority and #2 in the position to pay less for anything he purchases, given the negotiating and business assets that likely got him there in the first place.

While the artist usually is also attracted to this same area, if you end up with an end product that is capped in these two areas without planning on it from the start, its going to kill you financially. This is another example I often run across where you need to appeal to poor people, who are in the masses and generally have little financial sense to care how much they pay for a given resource. They'll pay more, and theres hundreds of times more of them.

Thats when, if you want to appeal to a wide audience that is attracted to crap without content, its time to call billy ray cyrus and tell him, no, no, we're not wanting to sound that bad. the calls not for you - could you get miley on the phone and send out her last cd so we can sound just like her?

We've managed at this point to produce an array of content, some manipulated and engineered to sell sugared snacks and cereal during a commercial, and then times when a project might appeal to a narrow audience but still keep everyone in touch with what they got in the business for in the first place. In our world, there are many times we need to get involved, and there are times when we don't. It does influence the cash flow and to argue with me you could produce what you want and sell it to someone, or copy miley cyrus albums and sell them faster than you can print them. See, there is a situation where a financier could step in and make a sound change from the former to the latter because it has a proven track record of the highest profitability on the planet.

I'll close on a study that bewildered us to find kids prefer listening to 96 hz downloads with pops, clicks, and glitches than a master copy of the same song. We almost never found the correlation as it['s so unexpected, but the most common comment regarding the master was that it just didn't sound right. And generally it was something in their voice. We'd known for a century when you play something on the radio or otherwise, it doesn't matter what it is, after 5-10 times you've become trained to tolerate it, many times like it, or god-forbid purchase it. From an artist or producer standpoint, we'd cringe to think of producing lower quality content than we're capable of, but true to listening to something on the radio, if kids have been trained to like the lower quality and will purchase it over the other, you'd be insane to do anything else. Reconsider this from a mp3 bit rate issue to widen the scope. If anyone is listening to certain quality levels of production, talent, and creativity, this is an expected consumer choice and thus more profitable and like living with cancer sometimes for an artist to deliver.

My background comes from movie production, to which I do get involved with from time to time now that I have a few under my belt, but the latter examples are from record production, to which there is a much more highly developed sales platform involving very different factors that make it far more susceptible to changes in content resulting in changes to profit margins. In a dream world, you can create and produce to your heart's content, and film and video is more true to freedom and flexibility as a of how we sell and market it.

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