TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "business"
The Numbers - Most Profitable Movies, Based on Return on Investment
Lots of interesting numbers over at, uh, The Numbers.
(via @tedhope)
How to think about money
I wrote in chapter nine of Steal Like An Artist: “Most people I know hate to think about money. Do yourself a favor: Learn about money as soon as you can.”
Here are 10 of my favorite quotes about money:
“The key to eternal happiness is low overhead and no debt.”
—Lynda Barry“The best way to instantly raise your standard of living is to live in the past.”
—Lore Sjoberg“True economy consists in always making the income exceed the out-go. Wear the old clothes a little longer… live on plainer food if need be; so that, under all circumstances, unless some unforeseen accident occurs, there will be a margin in favor of income.”
—P.T. Barnum“The trick is… to be fiscally responsible so you can be creatively reckless.”
— Tom Rothman“If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do. That’s the key to the whole thing.”
—Bill Cunningham“Writers, actors, and prostitutes all face the same fundamental economic problem: they are competing with amateurs who are pretty good and will work for nothing.”
—Moss Hart“The Renaissance, like everything else, had to be financed.”
—Tommy Howells”I think things up in the morning; I sell ’em in the afternoon.”
—John Waters“I sell something for money, then I spend less than I make.”
—Marco Arment“Sellout…I’m not crazy about that word. We’re all entrepreneurs. To me, I don’t care if you own a furniture store or whatever — the best sign you can put up is SOLD OUT.”
—Bill Withers
There’s an interview with Neal Pollack over at the AV Club where he reveals the sales numbers for his books (as he summarizes, “Ten thousand copies appears to be my threshold”) and talks openly and honestly about his career, and how “celebrity” and buzz don’t automatically translate into sales or money. Everyone who aspires to a career writing books (particularly fiction) should read it.
I was trying to turn Alternadad into some massive multimedia empire. And it failed! [Laughs.] I totally fucking failed! Instead of doing what I did well, which was write, I was trying to cash in big time and become some mogul… In the end, I was kind of dizzy because I wasn’t doing what I set out to do, what I dreamed of doing, which was be a writer. Instead, I was just a salesman trying to sell some ill-conceived idea of a lifestyle.
The piece is part of the AVClub’s “Money Matters” column, where “creative people discuss what they’re not supposed to: the intersection of entertainment and commerce, as well as moments in their lives and careers when they bottomed out financially and/or professionally.”
It all reminds me of Lynda Barry’s advice: “The key to eternal happiness is low overhead and no debt.”
BLVR: I think it’s admirable that you refuse to lasso your creative potential for the simple sake of commercial viability. It seems you just let your writing fly and if that means nobody wants what comes of it, so be it.
PP: Nothing to admire. No sacrifice involved, but rather an enfeeblement that prevents any other kind of writing than that which one does. I used to ask Don [Barthelme] why he did not write a blockbuster and cash in, to which he’d say, “Can’t.” I thought he meant can’t violate my pure vision, my self. He meant “can’t,” as hard as that is to believe, given his range…
From a great 1979 Atlantic profile of George Lucas:
Star Wars was manufactured. When a competent corporation prepares a new product, it does market research. George Lucas did precisely that. When he says that the film was written for toys (“I love them, I’m really into that”), he also means he had merchandising in mind, all the sideshow goods that go with a really successful film. He thought of T-shirts and transfers, records, models, kits, and dolls. His enthusiasm for the comic strips was real and unforced; he had a gallery selling comic-book art in New York.
From the start, Lucas was determined to control the selling of the film, and of its by-products. “Normally you just sign a standard contract with a studio,” he says, “but we wanted merchandising, sequels, all those things. I didn’t ask for another $1 million-just the merchandising rights. And Fox thought that was a fair trade.” Lucasfilm Ltd.,. the production company George Lucas set up in July 1971, “already had a merchandising department as big as Twentieth Century-Fox has. And it was better. When I was doing the film deal, I had already hired the guy to handle that stuff.”
…The idea of Star Wars was simply to make a “real gee-whiz movie.” It would be a high adventure film for children, a pleasure film which would be a logical end to the road down which Coppola had directed his apparently cold, remote associate. As Graffiti went out around the country, Lucas refined his ideas. He toyed with remaking the great Flash Gordon serials, with Dale Arden in peril and the evil Emperor Ming; but the owners of the rights wanted a high price and overstringent controls on how their characters were used. Instead, Lucas began to research. “I researched kids’ movies,” he says, “and how they work and how myths work; and I looked very carefully at the elements of films within that fairy-tale genre which made them successful.” Some of his conclusions were almost fanciful. “I found that myth always took place over the hill, in some exotic, far-off land. For the Greeks, it was Ulysses going off into the unknown. For Victorian England it was India or North Africa or treasure islands. For America it was Out West. There had to be strange savages and bizarre things in an exotic land. Now the last of that mythology died out in the mid-1950s, with the last of the men who knew the Old West. The last ‘over the hill’ is space.”
Filed under: Star Wars
Cartoonist Gabrielle Bell is doing watercolor portraits over Skype. They’re tiny and amazing, and $35 I think. This might be the best possible use for Skype, although the scientific research isn’t in yet.
What a great idea. I love it when cartoonists use new technology to update old ways of making dough — painting portraits is almost as old as painting itself, but add the Skype element and you’ve got something new. I’m reminded of when Ray Fenwick adopted an “arts grant” model for drawing in his sketchbook.
“There is a mathematical formula to why you got famous. It isn’t some magical thing that just started happening.” —Chad Kroeger
Some numbers to cheer you up on a Monday:
Average yearly income of Nickelback lead singer Chad Kroeger: $9,700,000
Songs Kroeger has written for Nickelback and other recording artists since 2001: 150+
Number of singles Nickelback have had on the Billboard Hot 100: 19
Number of Nickelback albums sold worldwide: 50,000,000
Average cost of a Nickelback ticket: $61
Average attendance at a Nickelback concert: 11,000
Estimated profit for one Nickelback show: $500,000
Estimated payout for Nickelback’s 2008 LiveNation deal: $50,000,000-$70,000,000
“Great to meet you guys. Have fun, get drunk, get blowjobs.” —Chad Kroeger
(Thx, Mark!)
