The Monkey Dies

A snappy shorthand for commercial reality is recorded in the often-interesting, occasionally-wrong blog of Keith Boesky: why publishers don't want film licences, particularly King Kong.

"This is exactly the kind of things you said you are looking for. You have two and a half years until the release of the film, the budget is fixed and large and the promotion will be huge."

"Doesn't sound like us. We need big franchises."

"What's bigger than Kong with the director coming off Lord of the Rings?"

"Something with a fixed release 2 years out, guaranteed marketing budget in excess of USD 80 million and guaranteed sequels."

"Wow, that's a tall order. King Kong is kind of unusual though, is it worth an exception."

"No, can't commit. The monkey dies."

Small wonder that Flash minigames are more de rigueur for marketing purposes at present.

Interview Technique

This made me smile: The Onion's Nathan Rabin points out an old interview in which Amy Heckerling makes the mistake that interviewees should never, ever make:

AH: Did you see the movie?

O: Yes, I did.

AH: Did you like it?

O: [Pauses; makes "don't ask me that question" gesture.] Um... There were parts about it that I liked. There were things I liked about it. [Note: This is a lie. —ed.] And it was short. You know? Really short. Only, like, 83 minutes.

I usually do better in these circumstances, although otherwise I'm a terrible interviewer. I've always known this, and have been reminded this week by other people transcribing interviews I have done pausing occasionally to look at me with quizzical, sad expressions at the nonsense I am putting to the luminaries of the games industry.

Three Stories From 'The Onion' That Came True

• Hershey's Ordered To Pay Obese Americans $135 Billion
• Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades
• Bush: Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over

The final one is the scariest. It's like a bullet-point list of everything Bush has done wrong, written years before it happened.

Low-Budget Remakes of Hollywood Movies Set In The Towns In Which I Grew Up

The Bournemouth Identity
Poole Harbour
The Passion of Christchurch
The Sword in Parkstone
The Sway

Science Is Fun

Dammit, Wikipedia

I can't even remember what I was looking for to start with and I've just wasted three hours.

Three Highly Unsuitable Songs That Came Up On iTunes Party Shuffle While We Were Working Stupid Amounts Of Overtime On The Last Magazine Deadline

We Have All The Time In The World
Suicide Is Painless
Theme from Bergerac

User-created content

A piece that made me laugh in Private Eye last week:

As storms battered Britain at the beginning of last week, presenters on Sky News begged viewers to "help us put together the fullest national picture possible" by sending in their photos of the damage... posters on the Football 365 forum, finding that such pisspoor efforts as a shot of a watering can ("the wind blew it around all night") were being featured...rose to the challenge.

And so:

By 11.30am on Tuesday, despite a solemn promise that “your photo will be checked by moderators before it can be displayed,” the 408 photographs in Sky’s “Wild Weather” gallery included a shot of a young Norman Wisdom dismayed by a car crushed by a tree; footballer Carlos Valderama in flooded New Orleans captioned “it’s windy here in Widnes”; a still from the environmental disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow captioned “Whitley Bay”; a suspicious number of scenes of destruction featureing either teddy bears of the athlete and television presenter Kriss Akabusi; and several shots of fallen trees and flooded streets in which missing toddler Madeline McCann was clearly visible in the background.

In other news, I got a new job and moved to London. It's pretty hardcore but I'm on it.