Sunday, March 18, 2012

Standardized Liability


            Business people often like to compare themselves to large carnivorous animals. This is meant to give an impression of strength and power. However, they never seem to notice that the vicious animals that they compare themselves with are either endangered or hunted for sport.
            In nature the most successful animals are scavengers. This can be seen in any populated area that has been overrun by squirrels, rats, raccoons, and mice. The larger and more complex an area becomes the better the scavengers seem to do.
            The reason for this is adaptation. The carnivores that seem so impressive are adapted to live in a standardized and stable environment with a set amount of resources upon which to draw. Whenever there is a change in that environment, or the nature of the resources, the carnivores die out almost instantly.
            Scavengers are forced, by their very nature, to constantly adapt to changing resources and environments. Since they never know what they will have to work with they require intelligence, versatility, and creativity in order to constantly find uses for whatever they have available to work with. Because of this the things that kill off the large predators rarely affect them.
            This analogy is particularly relevant to the production industry in the modern era of economic and technological change. With fiscal resources at an absolute minimum, and a technological environment that is drastically different than anything seen before, it is incredibly easy to see the correlation between large businesses and large predators. Neither is able to adapt easily to a change in resources or environment.
            This also means that smaller ventures that are willing to try radically new approaches in order to adapt to the changing business environment have an enormous edge resulting from their willingness to act like scavengers in order to obtain resources and their creative adaptability in finding new uses for the available resources.
            This means that by the end of the decade we should see a radicle power shift in the production industry and the business community. The carnivores are all going to disappear. And, the long-term survivors will be those with the greatest ability to adapt, change, invent, and push the boundaries of what is considered standardized practice.

The A-List


            There is a lot of talk in the production industry about the need to have an A-List celebrity attached to a project in order to obtain funding. This is a bit misleading.
            First, most people do not understand exactly what an A-List celebrity is. There is a general understanding that an A-List celebrity is someone extremely well known, and therefore marketable. But, the term actually comes from a complex system of measurement invented by an entertainment journalist named James Ulmer.
            The Ulmer Scale is a rating system designed to quantify an actor’s value to a production. It includes an analysis of professional demeanor, public image, historical box office success, willingness to travel in order to promote a film, and their over-all versatility in handling different roles.
            An actor’s placement on the Ulmer Scale then determines their marketability in terms of a score similar to a person’s credit score. These scores are then broken down into subcategories that are given letter grades.
            The top percentage, and highest paid, are categorized as the A-List. Slightly lesser known actors, new faces in the industry, and pop stars that may not last are then categorized as the B-List. The C-List is then populated by working actors with a solid body of work that are recognizable, but are easily forgotten.
            The final category of marketable talent is the D-List. This is an unusual category because it contains smaller celebrities with little market value, but they tend to be incredibly vocal about their ranking. This is the List that tends to contain the majority of comedians, stand-up acts, live performers, and general extroverted personalities. While their pay scale is at the bottom and their marketability is ranked as minimal they still manage to maintain a cult status that is nearly as great as the reputations associated with A-List celebrities.
            The flaw in the Ulmer Scale is that it is based on a broad generalization of the production industry as a whole. It can only determine an actor’s value to a production that is designed for standardized mass media exposure. There is no inherent methodology within the Ulmer Scale for determining an actor’s value to a production that has a specific target demographic.
            For example, a romantic comedy that targets an LGBT audience would benefit more from signing Ellen DeGeneres than it would from signing Will Smith. Or, similarly, a production designed to target a young Latino audience would benefit more from including Jessica Alba than a well know A-List actor like Danny DeVito
            Therefore, the importance of having an A-List actor attached to your production in order to obtain financing is not exactly a rule so much as it is a guideline. You must be able to analyze your production in advance in order to determine what actor would be the most valuable to your production as an individual business venture, not just to the industry as a whole.