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Musings Report 2022-28 7-9-22 The Perils of Too Much and the Rewards of Too Little
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The Perils of Too Much and the Rewards of Too Little
The many perils of filmmaking are well-documented: filming in remote locations goes awry, actors are injured or fall ill, studios and banks cut off funding as the film goes over-budget, special effects don't work, scripts are hastily rewritten, first-cut edits are disasters and so on.
These documentaries chronicle the difficulties of ambitious film-making in remote locations: Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmakers Apocalypse (1991, 1:36 hrs) on the making of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola (1979)
Burden of Dreams (1982, 1:35 hrs) on the making of Fitzcarraldo 1982, Werner Herzog
On a lighter note, the comedy Tropic Thunder is a send-up of film-making gone off the rails in a remote jungle.
The history of George Lucas making the first Star Wars film is an instructive example of surmounting the many challenges of ambitious film-making on a tight budget.
When money is tight, time is tight, as the movie-making stops when the money runs out.
Lucas famously wanted control of his next film (Star Wars) after seeing his previous effort American Graffiti edited (i.e. butchered) by the studio.
Since he didn't have enough money to fund the production, he needed the financial backing of a studio, 20th Century Fox.
His proposed budget was $13 million in 1976 ($68 million in today's money), Fox proposed $7 million and they settled on $11 million.
$11 million is what you find online as the film's official budget, but it went horrendously over-budget, costing $18 million by the end ($90 million today).
The studio wanted to close the production down the moment costs exceeded the budget, and only the heroic support of 20th Century Fox executive Alan Ladd, Jr. enabled Lucas to race to a hasty completion.
The effort drove Lucas to the edge of physical collapse.
For Lucas wasn't just making a movie, he was creating new technical tools and special-effects processes for making movies, all of which were developed on the fly in an ad hoc process of experimentation and trial and error.
Trial and error means lots of things don't work at first and have to be tossed out, an expensive process. This makes it all the more remarkable that Lucas managed to make Star Wars for roughly one-third of modern-day live-action/special effects extravaganzas with budgets around $300 million.
Lucas ended up feeling he'd made a lesser version of what he'd wanted to make and so he added scenes 20+ years later, scenes many of us find distracting and/or out of character.
Could he have done more with a much larger budget? The answer came a few years later with the sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, which was originally budgeted for $20 million ($85 million in today's dollars) and then boosted to $25 million ($106 million today).
The Bank of America had loaned Lucas $21 million of the $25 million, and when the filming went over that budget, the bank pulled the loan, forcing Lucas to find another bank to cover the BofA loan and another $5 million to complete the movie.
The Bank of Boston made the loan, and predictably became very nervous as the production exceeded $30 million. The final production cost was about $31 million ($132 million today, less than half the cost of epics today). Once again, Lucas funded the development of new technologies and processes as part of the budget.
Lucas had poured all the money he'd made on Star Wars into LucasFilm, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) and the other companies he'd founded to bring his vision into the real world, and if Empire had failed at the box office, it would have financially ruined him.
Live-action and special-effects film-making is labor-intensive and capital-intensive. The number of people working on Empire exceeded 300 at the height of production, and every week's payroll cost several million of today's dollars. Delays due to bad weather and technical problems added millions as the cost. (A studio building scheduled for their use burned to the ground and had to be rebuilt.)
The long days and time pressure burns our directors, line producers, crew, actors and technicians.
The constraints of budget and time force everyone to "get it done" via "whatever it takes": work-arounds, quick fixes, substitutions, etc.
One of the special effects crew summarized it thusly: "We try to find the path that will yield optimum results." What's left unsaid is "optimum results within tight constraints and multiple failures."
There are many examples of the same time/budget pressures yielding phenomenal results. The two Voyager spacecraft, for example, were under tight financial and time constraints, as the launch window offered a once-in-a-generation opportunity.
Record-Breaking Voyager Spacecraft Begin to Power Down: The pioneering probes are still running after nearly 45 years in space.
Lucas observed that betting the farm was the only way to get his films done. "I'm just as used to having things fail as I am to having them succeed. But I usually have to bet the store in order to make it work, so everything either sinks or swims. There is no in-between."
Would the films have been better had the budget and time allotted doubled? The easy answer is "of course," but this discounts the tremendous rewards of having too little time and money to veer away from optimizing results within constraints that force hard choices and rapid trial-and-error adaptation.
As for The Perils of Too Much, in film-making, there's Heaven's Gate and other big-budget flops. In the world of corporate bloat, there's this entertaining look at the life of a young intern at tech giant LinkedIn: (via Tom D.)
Corporate America Is Adult Day Care (21 min)
This isn't a comprehensive depiction of working for LinkedIn or other tech companies, of course, but nonetheless, these curated clips are emblematic of an upper echelon culture with a surfeit of everything.
As one of the hosts commented, this is how empires end. There's plenty of money for indulgence and excess, and plenty of time for meetings and to enjoy being taken care of by others.
The developed world has had too much of everything for so long that it has lost the ability to optimize results within tight constraints.
Please read Why America Can’t Build for a detailed account of what happens when there's plenty of everything: no constraints of time, money or process, and so no optimization of results. Every stakeholder has endless time to dawdle over all the options and deliberate on all the advocacy of other stakeholders. The refrain is always: we need another meeting and another study.
Yes, there are stakeholders and meetings that produce results, but lacking constraints on money and time, there are no incentives to optimize results and every incentive to increase the budget and extend the timeline.
The conventional view holds that scarcities and constraints are terrible because they force us to make hard decisions (triage) and optimize results, but this is precisely why we should welcome scarcities and constraints.
Highlights of the Blog
Why Nations Fail 7/8/22
You Know What Would Be Really Irritating? A Crazy Rally to New Highs 7/7/22
The One Solution to All Our Problems 7/5/22
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Received permission from a neighbor to cut down a tall, fast-growing trash tree on his property that was shading our new garden from the morning sun.
Better to offer to do the work rather than ask a neighbor to spend money and be told "no." I chopped the tree down and cut the branches into lengths with a sharp garden handsaw. The branches will become compost under our breadfruit tree.
One of our pineapples ripened, it was delicious.
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Record-Breaking Voyager Spacecraft Begin to Power Down: The pioneering probes are still running after nearly 45 years in space.
On the Dangers of Cryptocurrencies and the Uselessness of Blockchain -- comments defending blockchain worth reading....
Do we need a new theory of evolution? -- worth a careful read....
Cancelled flight? Shoddy clothing? Disappointing meal? Blame skimpflation, the hidden curse of 2022
Can the Government Even Pay the Rising Interest Expense on its Gigantic Debt as the Fed Pushes up Rates? Yes. Here’s Why
Internet Explorer shutdown to cause Japan headaches 'for months'
Four Takeaways From a Times Investigation Into China’s Expanding Surveillance State
Cost of Living Is Really All About Housing
Chilli peppers, coffee, wine: how the climate crisis is causing food shortages
U.S. power companies face supply-chain crisis this summer
Stress and the Pressure Performance Curve (via Moaxian) -- hadn't heard of Boreout and Zone of Delusion...
My Adult Children Are Moving Out. Here’s What No One Told Me I’d Feel.
"I believe that filmmaking -- as, probably, is everything -- is a game you should play with all your cards, and all your dice, and whatever else you've got. So, each time I make a movie, I give it everything I have. I think everyone should, and I think everyone should do everything they do that way." Francis Ford Coppola
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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