Picture
Walt Disney in his prime.
Late last year, a news report stated that Walt Disney Pictures had made Rich Ross its new chairman, a position vacated by Dick Cook, who in actuality had been elbowed out due to serious problems within the motion picture arm of the operation. The main issue at hand (pardon the pun) was a lack of consistent quality product. This had been putting a noticeable dent on financial results for the multi-billion dollar corporation.

For once, a conglomerate film studio conceded the obvious: that vacuous motion pictures just could be the culprit that’s hurting their fiscal bottom line. However, this kind of problem began to manifest itself a long time ago, side by side with Hollywood’s willingness to succumb to a gradual erosion of its moral footing. Mainstream media figure Michael Coren once aptly described the movie capital as being one of the world’s most dysfunctional communities.

The founders of the Disney company were Walt Disney (artist, entrepreneur, showman) and his brother, Roy O. Disney. Here are a few highlights:

1923 - Disney Brothers Studio established

1926 – name change to Walt Disney Studio

1928 – creation of cartoon character icon Mickey Mouse and the milestone short, Steamboat Willie

1937 – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is released during the Christmas season. The first feature-length cartoon in film history becomes a runaway hit.

1954 – debut of Disneyland TV show on ABC. Under the Disneyland banner, construction of amusement and recreation park begins.

1955 - The Mickey Mouse Club show starts on TV October 1955, lasting four years to September
1959. It makes a star of Annette Funicello who will almost single-handedly carry Disney’s record label, Buena Vista, to profitability.

1961 –  TV series changed to Walt Disney’s Wonderful World Of Color.

1966 -  December 15, Walt Disney dies.

1969 – TV show becomes The Wonderful World Of Disney.

1971 – December 20, Roy O. Disney dies.

1983 – continuous TV series ends after 29 years.

2009 – December 16, Roy E. Disney, the nephew of Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney’s son, dies. He was the last active defender of the company’s legacy.

    Roy E. Disney presided over two famous “Save Disney” battles (1984 and 2003-2005) in his quest to hold back the colossal trend that was pushing away his uncle’s vision of solid, wholesome entertainment steeped in creative, glorious and natural animation. But with Roy E. Disney now gone, hardly a visible shred is left of Walt Disney’s once originative multitudes. However, gold stashed away in the vaults provides a minute reminder of glory days gone by. Tellingly, every succession of company executives never fails to recognize the value of archival material, sometimes exploiting it to the point of ridiculousness.

This brings me to John Cameron’s science-fiction, 3-D film, Avatar (2009), the highest money-maker in the history of Tinseltown. Given the sorry state of the industry, this is truly astonishing and appalling.

Although I suspect I won’t win a popularity contest by my abhorrence of the long, downward spiral that still inflicts Hollywood today, thankfully, at least I am not alone. The Washington Post published an opinion piece by Gene Weingarten, titled ‘Tinseltown for toddlers’ (January 23, 2010) in which the writer correctly muses that Avatar’s plot is as thin as “a soup made by boiling a single mosquito.”

He continues: “The real heroes of action dramas are no longer swashbucklers like Steve McQueen. They are pale, pimpled people with overbites – cubicle bound techno-geeks skilled at computer-generated imagery (CGI), a science that has made it possible to realistically create absolutely anything... the problem is that when absolutely anything is possible, absolutely nothing is special.”

I rest my case.

Note: included in this year’s Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair is the uniquely fascinating article, Coloring the Kingdom; concerning the 100 or so women who laboured as inkers and painters in the preparation of such Walt Disney animated classics as Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942).


Andrew Merey is a Whitby resident who’s interested in music and movie history. He has contributed articles to This Week since 2003.

 
 
Picture
Hollywood Stock Exchange is tentatively set to launch as a real-money commodity exchange April 20.

A spokesman said the exchange is "on track" to begin listing films' boxoffice projections for live trading from that date. HSX filed with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission for approval as an active trading site in November 2008 and recently entered the final phase of regulatory review.

Since 1998, HSX has allowed just-for-fun traders to buy and sell valueless shares in Hollywood films based on forecasts of what the pics will ring up. Once launched, a new HSX site will list current and imminent movie releases with their projected four-week domestic grosses and allow exchange users to take long or short positions on the films.

A formal announcement about rules and guidelines for HSX users is expected closer to the launch. The exchange hopes to lure hobbyist investors as well as industry professionals, though the latter will be prohibited from improper insider activity.

For instance, distribution execs with access to early boxoffice data will be barred from making trades on the exchange after a film has opened. But film financiers will be allowed to invest in HSX an amount equal to a minority percentage of their total investment in a movie.

Investors wishing to participate in the exchange will buy "contracts" priced at one one-millionth of a film's projected boxoffice, with films to be listed on the exchange from the time productions are announced in the industry trade papers. Trading will begin six months before a movie's anticipated wide release.

HSX is owned by U.K.-based investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

"The number of people who visit movie theaters each year and form opinions about a film's success is in the tens of millions," Cantor Exchange president Richard Jaycobs said. "We believe that's the reason the public response to this product has been very positive."

Cantor Entertainment chief Andrew Wing said the exchange targets movie distributors, exhibitors, producers and other investors seeking "an unprecedented public market to create liquidity and hedge their daily business activities."

Until now, HSX revenue has come from industry ad sales and the sale of customer-use data to Hollywood marketing outfits.
 
 
Picture
Hannah, Jenna, Laurie and Mitch in the Northland
Making an independent film in these challenging times is a labor of love. For the past fourteen months I've worked hard with film director Matthew Wilson and his partner producer Dana Louise Stewart to complete Real N' Raw.

Working with Animators-Ink, Ltd. and seeing the project through to the end has been a huge learning experience for me as a producer, as an entrepreneur and as a person who loves to help someone do their dream.

We have simply enjoyed an amazing summer here in New Zealand. On behalf of our team at Transparent Pictures, Ltd. we want to personally and professionally thank Dana Louise Stewart and Matthew Wilson for their collaboration, partnership and support during the making of the film.

Blessings to all!

With the film now done, look for a lot more postings here at this blog.