Movie Studios Research Articles

From Story Line to Box Office: A New Approach for Green-Lighting Movie Scripts

Movie studios often have to choose among thousands of scripts to decide which ones to turn into movies. Despite the huge amount of money at stake, this process—known as green-lighting in the movie industry—is largely a guesswork based on experts’ experience and intuitions. In this paper, we propose a new approach to help studios evaluate scripts that will then lead to more profitable green-lighting decisions. Our approach combines screenwriting domain knowledge, natural-language processing techniques, and statistical learning methods to forecast a movie’s return on investment (ROI) based only on textual information available in movie scripts. We test our model in a holdout decision task to show that our model is able to significantly improve a studio’s gross ROI.

Pirates keep pirating

Record companies and movie studios keep developing new technology to prevent copyright infringement, and the public keeps knocking it down. When it comes to digital rights, are we getting anywhere, asks Barry Fox

Milne v. Slesinger: The Supreme Court Refuses to Review the Ninth Circuit's Limits on the Rights of Authors and their Heirs to Reclaim Transferred Copyrights

[No abtract] Copyright Information: All rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. Contact the author or original publisher for any necessary permissions. eScholarship is not the copyright owner for deposited works. Learn more at http://www.escholarship.org/help_copyright.html#reuse Milne v. Slesinger: The Supreme Court Refuses to Review the Ninth Circuit's Limits on the Rights of Authors and their Heirs to Reclaim Transferred Copyrights By Roxanne E. Christ I. THE RIGHT TO TERMINATE COPYRIGHT ASSIGNMENTS AND LICENSES 34 II. MILNE V. SLESINGER AND WINNIE THE POOH 36 A . Background 36 B. The District Court Decision and Clare Milne's A pp eal 38 III. WHAT MILNE V. SLESINGER MEANS FOR STUDIOS, PUBLISHERS AND OTHER COPYRIGHT TRANSFEREES 41 A. Greater Bargaining Power... in the Ninth Circuit... 41 B. Even within the Ninth Circuit, Milne v. Slesinger Might be Narrowly Construed 42 C. The Supreme Court Might Yet Weigh In 43 IV. CONCLUSION 45 Milne v. Slesinger' is a decision that could massively shift bargaining power from authors and their heirs to publishers and movie studios. In the case, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld a lower court ruling that an agreement revoking and re-granting a prior copyright license validly circumvents termination rights of authors and their heirs under the Copyright Act. In doing so, the Ninth Circuit refused to follow an earlier decision of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that confirmed what most copyright lawyers firmly believed that the 1 Milne v. Stephen Slesinger, Inc., 430 F.3d 1036 (9th Cir. 2005). UCLA ENTERTAINMENT LAW REVIEW termination right of authors and their heirs is inalienable. 2 On June 26, 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the Ninth Circuit's decision. 3 The decision could emasculate a right that most copyright lawyers thought could not be waived: the statutory right of authors and their heirs to terminate prior licenses and copyright assignments. As a result of this decision, at least in California and other states within the Ninth Circuit, movie studios, book publishers, music publishers and other transferees and licensees of copyrighted works are newly empowered to fend off efforts by authors and their heirs to terminate copyright licenses and assignments entered into decades ago and reclaim those rights or renegotiate their terms at prevailing fair market values. For reasons explained below, however, the holding in Milne v. Slesinger may be less promising than studios and other copyright licensees might hope. I. THE RIGHT TO TERMINATE COPYRIGHT ASSIGNMENTS AND

Bits on the Big Screen

Digital cinema is poised to take the movie industry by storm with the introduction of the first specification for digital cinema in July 2005. To create the specification, the digital cinema initiatives was established by seven major studios, Disney, Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal, and Warner Brothers studios. The initiative set a quality threshold, specified a video compression technology and recommended uncompressed sound. Since completing the digital cinema specifications, efforts are focused on addressing the issue of conversion cost. A plan based on a virtual print fee has been proposed wherein movie studios pay the company that provides and installs their digital cinema equipment and software for each showing of a movie on the digital cinema system. While the exact figures haven't been made public, the cost to the movie studio is supposedly lower than the cost of making the equivalent number of film prints. In just five to ten years, the impact of digital cinema is likely to go far beyond the cost savings and quality improvements envisioned now, bringing moviegoers new forms of entertainment that have yet to be imagined

Revenue Sharing and Channel Structure in the Motion Picture Industry

One of the most striking features of movie business is the apparent difference in the contract design over new product introduction. Due to shelf capacity constraints retailers typically receive a higher slotting fee during the initial product introduction phase. In the movie industry, however, theaters offer studios higher proportion of revenues early on in the movie life cycle, even though theaters are also subject to capacity constraints. We argue that the unusual sharing contracts prevalent in the movie industry align the interests of movie studios and exhibitors by inducing studios to choose release dates strategically. We consider a model with multiple risk-neutral studios and one risk-neutral exhibitor. The demand for movies comes from a continuum of homogeneous consumers with a logit demand, which allows for the outside option, whose quality varies over time (seasonality). Because consumers rarely watch the same movie more than ones, we assume that consumers never consider movies they have previously seen. We show that if movie closing date is unaffected by the release, a studio facing a flat sharing rule wishes to release its movie as soon as the movie production is over. For a movie theater, however, the optimal release date is a solution to a complex problem of allocating multiple movies to a limited number of screens in rooms with fixed capacity. Moreover, theaters may care more about concession stand revenue than box office revenue. Our numerical simulations illustrate that sliding-scale sharing rules are a natural candidate for inducing studios to choose their release date in a manner that is more beneficial for the exhibitor. This result is intuitive: for studios, sliding-scale rules stress the revenues of the first week. Thus, the objective becomes to have a strong opening week, postpone their release dates may become beneficial. Our model also offers an insight into why theaters charge the same price for all movies in all seasons. When concession stand revenues are important, the exhibitor wishes to charge a low ticket price in order to increase the overall traffic. Studios, however, prefer a higher price that maximizes the box office revenue. This conflict can be resolved if the exhibitor commits to a fixed ticket price.

A new legal strategy for copyright owners on the internet: MGM v. Grokster

The paper is an in-depth analysis and discussion of the legal actions and court cases concerning peer-to-peer file sharing software on the internet. The US District Court, US Circuit Court of Appeals and US Supreme Court cases analysed involve actions by major movie studios, record companies and song publishers against two major suppliers of the software, Grokster and StreamCast. Fifty million copies of these companies' free software is in use by internet subscribers who use the software to illegally download copyrighted materials. The US Supreme Court decision discussed ultimately holds Grokster and StreamCast liable for inducing these illegal downloads. The decision will have far reaching effects on future software development and marketing of movies and music on the internet.

Clearing Clearplay’s Name: Tracing the Legitimization of Digital Movie Editing Technology

By passing the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 (“FECA”) on February 1, 2005, Congress resolved an ongoing dispute over whether non-copyright holders may commercially edit movies for home viewing. This Act contains a section called the Family Movie Act, which states that software that enables viewers to mute or skip parts of a movie does not violate the motion picture studios’ copyrights. FECA essentially declares that the handful of companies that develop this software to filter out content have won the battle in conference rooms, court, and the Capitol. This Note traces the history of the edited movie industry and its fight for legitimacy, with special focus on the manufacturers of software that filters out language, violence, and sex during movies. Section II focuses on the development of the edited movie industry, Section III on a recently resolved civil case between edited movie companies and movie directors and studios, and Section IV on resolving the legal issues before the court in this civil case. Section V covers the development and passage of FECA and criticizes the way Congress has handled the edited movie debate while proposing a different approach.

Los Angeles 3D survey leads to deep drilling

Most 3D seismic surveys are designed and shot with little concern for movie studio lots, 10-lane freeways, or privacy fences. But when Plains Exploration & Production Co. (PXP) decided to acquire seismic data over the 81-year-old Inglewood Field—the first onshore 3D survey ever conducted in the Los Angeles Basin—the company knew it would be anything but a typical seismic shoot. The field is located in the Baldwin Hills area in the heart of one of the nation's largest and most populous metropolitan areas (Figure 1). Oil production was there long before the buildings, streetlights, and asphalt that have since crowded in and around the field. It is now a few square miles of pump jacks and stock tanks surrounded by urban sprawl. Downtown Los Angeles is only six miles to the east, and Los Angeles International Airport is a short drive south.

Modeling Movie Life Cycles and Market Share

We examine box-office sales in the context of a market share model. This is accomplished by developing a combination of a sliding-window logit model and a gamma diffusion pattern in a hierarchical Bayes framework. We show that accounting for the full choice set available every week not only increases the fit of weekly movie sales but also leads to parameter estimates that depict a richer picture of the movie industry. We show that movie studios appear to have a good understanding of the products they produce, knowing when to support them and when not to. We also show that the effect of the number of opening week screens is overestimated in traditional models. Our research indicates that actors have a direct and directors an indirect effect on consumers’ movie choice. Releasing a movie contemporaneously with other movies of the same genre adversely affects box-office performance all around. Releasing a movie against movies of the same Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rating hurts its sales in the beginning, but there is a displacement effect, which leads to a less severe sales loss in the long run.

Using revenue sharing to create win–win in the video rental supply chain

Recent developments in video rental supply chains seem to indicate that revenue sharing contracts are beneficial to all parties involved in the industry. This paper illustrates a theoretical underpinning of the observed practice. A video rental supply chain is modelled to study pricing and replenishment decision making by the two autonomous firms in the chain, namely a movie studio producing the tapes and a video rental shop renting the tapes to customers. In the model the movie studio is to set the price for selling the tapes to the video rental store and the video rental shop must decide the number of copies of the new movie videotape it should purchase. The paper illustrates that revenue sharing contract can optimize the chain and bring win–win situations to the players in the industry.

Classics for High School Reform

IN JUNE I offer my annual summer reading list for adults. My suggestions have ranged from children's storybooks to fantasy to political commentary, but all the works I choose have special messages for educators and policy makers. The current list is inspired by the scramble to concoct a college-prep curriculum for all students. Let's begin with recommendations for rereading certain classics for inspiration and perhaps also for descriptions of follies and commentaries on them. First, all those warring factions involved in the controversy over No Child Left Behind (NCLB) might expend some of their energy in rereading Homer's tale about the war between the Greeks and the Trojans, the Iliad. The military conflict over Troy lasted 10 years (about enough time for NCLB to reach its zenith) and was continued in the sagas of Virgil. It resulted in thousands of deaths, many slights and insults that involved the gods (federal policy makers), and a series of games, most of which ended in a draw (because the gods intervened). The Greeks finally conquered Troy but were so unmerciful in doing so that the gods punished them, either on their journeys or when they got back home (maybe a warning about the future). And perhaps California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ought to check out a different classical reference: Ovid's Metamorphoses and the misadventures of Hercules. Granted, we understand that the governor's phraseology derives from spending too many years making testosterone- filled movies (e.g., Hercules in New York, 1970), but to suggest that teachers in urban schools should be given extra combat pay goes a bit far. It's an insult to hard-working teachers and the majority of students who want to succeed in classrooms that are short on resources and who live in communities that are long on negative factors. In my years of covering urban schools, I found highly dedicated and competent teachers (not enough of them, for sure); more willingness to explore new ideas for instruction; and, as recent research from the Council of the Great City Schools shows, substantial progress in meeting state accountability standards (even though that is not a perfect measure of progress). Hercules' own temperamental behavior, while finding expression in physical abuse rather than the verbal kind, earned him a 12-year exile during which he was given daunting challenges to overcome. Perhaps Gov. Schwarzenegger's lion- and snake-killing reparations could include making a series of films for UNESCO or the World Institute for Peace. Or, perhaps most excruciating of all, he could make a series for distribution by the NEA and the AFT on the need to ensure that all teachers have sufficient income and adequate professional resources, the kind that businesses provide for valued employees or movie studios bestow on stars. Who knows? Hercules met all his trials and eventually became a god. Another public official, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, could mine lots of classics for inspiration this summer. But one would be especially helpful: On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill. Faced with all the issues regarding NCLB, including rebellion from her own state of Texas, and the problems posed by defending the President's budget- slashing of her department, the secretary chose as her first foray into the policy-making arena a public criticism of a segment on the PBS children's television program Postcards from Buster. In it, Buster portrayed the Easter Bunny visiting a lesbian couple and their children. Spellings later explained that she was hired to uphold the values that Congress dictated for federal support of children's programming, a sort of Faustian bargain. But, rather than recommend Goethe's classic, I think the Mill treatise on liberty is highly appropriate. In On Liberty, this 18th-century Englishman argues for the utmost diversity in thought and civic actions, for protection of minorities, for the greatest possible freedom of thought and expression, and for the benefits of supporting nonconformists. …

Fame's Perpetual Moment

Fame's Perpetual Moment

Murderabilia

Murderabilia

Was the Antitrust Action that Broke Up the Movie Studios Good for the Movies? Evidence from the Stock Market

The Paramount antitrust litigation was a series of eight actions brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ) beginning in 1938 and ending in 1949 against the major motion picture studios. In the early cases the DOJ succeeded in changing industry contracts, but it took a decade of litigation to accomplish what the DOJ wanted, which was to break up the studios and force them to sell their theater chains. We use stock market evidence to evaluate the impact of events in the Paramount litigation on firm value. By the stock market's assessment, the Supreme Court decision was the major event. But the impact of this and other decisions on integrated and nonintegrated defendants, and on a nondefendant, does not support the view that the courts dismantled a successful monopoly; indeed, the contrary may be true. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.

Transforming the screen, 1950-1959

Completing the landmark, award-winning, ten-volume series on the first century of American film, The Fifties covers a particularly tumultuous period. Peter Lev explores the divorce of movie studios from their theater chains; the panic of the blacklist era; the explosive emergence of science fiction as the dominant genre (The Thing, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, War of the Worlds); the rise of television and Hollywood's response to the new medium, as seen in widescreen spectacles (The Robe, The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur) and mature Westerns (High Noon, Shane, The Searchers). The richly detailed text elucidates a number of emerging trends as Hollywood, with its familiar stars and genres, reached out as an industry to the newly acknowledged teenage generation with rock and roll films, and movies as diverse as Rebel Without a Cause and Gidget.

Mickey and the Tramp: Walt Disney's Debt to Charlie Chaplin

In 1928, made film history when his studio released Steamboat Willie, the first animated talkie and the first cartoon to feature Mickey Mouse. Although proved to be forward-thinking with regard to sound and later groundbreaking cinematic technologies, his greatest influence rooted firmly in the past: Chaplin, the master of the silent era. In 1964, by which time Chaplin's Tramp and Disney's Mouse had become two of the most recognizable icons of the filmmaking industry, Frank Rasky wrote in the Toronto Star Weekly that [WaIt] and are the only two authentic geniuses that Hollywood ever spawned (10). By understanding the connections between these two filmmakers and their works, one can better grasp how influenced and how they both reflected and affected American culture and audience sensibilities in the twentieth century. Like most children growing up in America during the early years of filmmaking, fascinated with Chaplin. By the time twelve, he competing in impersonation contests in Kansas City. As he told reporter for Ladies' Home Journal in 1941 interview, get in line with half dozen guys . . . I'd ad lib and play with my cane and gloves. Sometimes I'd win $5, sometimes $2.50, sometimes just get carfare and Mrs. Disney 146). Once he and his childhood friend Walter Pfeiffer performed Charlie and the Count for amateur night at local theater with Disney, as Chaplin, wearing his father's derby, pants, and big work shoes and sporting mustache; they won fourth-place prize of twenty-five cents (Thomas 38). Disney's sister Ruth, quoted in 1932 issue of Silver Screen, confirmed that her brother's ambition in life was to be another Chaplin. Up and down the alley he'd swagger, with bagging trousers, derby hat, floppy shoes, and cane, while one of his pals turned the crank of his new movie camera (qtd. in Syring 8), which he acquired at the age of seventeen. Disney's brother Roy offered succinctly: [HJe always very taken with so he Chaplin (Hubler, Roy int. 50). Disney's impersonation came to be ranked as the second best in Kansas City, and while his Kansas City acting days were limited, his practice of imitating continued after he founded his own movie studio. As animator Ward Kimball recalled, Walt great admirer of Chaplin. always showing us how did certain gag. We thought just as good as Chaplin. Of course, if you asked to do any acting, he'd get little self-conscious, but when he would get carried away with story or gag situation and start imitating something, he just as great as Chaplin (qtd. in Green and Green). As his career progressed, would frequently act out scenes for his animators, punctuating his conversation with expressive gestures and facial contortions (Mr. 146). Disney's performances became mainstay of his studio's story meetings. Calling them a potent force during story discussions, animator Dick Huemer noted that Walt could have been great actor or comedian. . . . would take stories and act them out, kill you with laughing they were so funny. And there it would be. You'd have the feeling. You knew exactly what he wanted (qtd. in Canemaker 27). Animator Marc Davis concurs, saying of Disney, He would act out the parts . . . better than you were able to do it. had wonderful Chaplinesque sense of timing and being able to perform something ... an action ... little idea . . . the way he saw it in pantomime. marvelous at this. You'd go out of your mind if it something you were going to work on (Hubler, Marc Davis int. 15). Just as Disney's acting style inspired by Chaplin, so too his approach to filmmaking. Trained in Chaplin's pantomimic style, approached movies visually rather than verbally, his studio being the first to develop and adopt the use of the storyboard to plan out the visual progression of film. …

The Escalating Copyright Wars

Piracy is one of the biggest threats confronting the entertainment industry today. Every year, the industry is estimated to lose billions of dollars in revenue and faces the potential loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. To protect itself against Internet pirates, the entertainment industry has launched the latest copyright war. So far, the industry has been winning. Among its trophies are the enactment of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Vivendi Universal's defeat and purchase of MP3.com, the movie studios' victory in the DeCSS litigation, the bankruptcy and subsequent sale of Napster and its recent relaunch as a legitimate subscription-based music service, the Supreme Court's rejection of the copyright bargain theory in Eldred v. Ashcroft, and the recording industry's relative success in its mass litigation campaign. Notwithstanding these victories, the war is expanding and has become even more difficult for the industry to fight than it was a year ago. Today, copyright law is no longer a complicated issue that is only of interest and concern to copyright lawyers, legal scholars, technology developers, and intellectual property rightsholders. Rather, it is a matter of public significance, affecting all of us in our daily lives. The ground has shifted. If the entertainment industry does not pay attention to the public and if it continues to use ill-advised battle strategies, it eventually might lose the war. Delivered as part of the 2003 Frontiers in Information and Communications Policy Lecture Series at Michigan State University, this Article examines the strategies used by the entertainment industry to fight the copyright wars: lobbying, litigation, self-help, education, and licensing. It also explores the impact of Eldred v. Ashcroft on these strategies, the decision's ramifications on future constitutional challenges to copyright laws, and recent developments in the international copyright arena. It concludes by arguing that the entertainment industry should change its existing strategies in light of the proliferation of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks and the increased consciousness of copyright issues.

The largest players rule the media playground

The top media companies increasingly do a lot more than create content. The 12 companies outlined in this article deliver content via cable systems and the Internet. They also have investments in makers of personal video recorders (PVRs) and set-top boxes and suppliers of video on demand. Consider the former Moxi Digital, builder of a personal entertainment hub that can play DVDs and CDs and can function as a PVR and a set-top box. Moxi's investors, before Vulcan purchased it, included AOL Time Warner, Vulcan, and Scientific-Atlanta. Vulcan also owns Digeo, another hub maker, with which Moxi was merged. Eight of the companies listed-AOL Time Warner, Comcast, Disney, GE, Liberty Media, Sony, Viacom, and Vulcan-were investors in ReplayTV before it was bought by SonicBlue. TiVo, an up-and-coming PVR maker, has attracted hefty investments from almost all major media companies. The most-connected company is AOL Time Warner. Under its umbrella one of its several movie or TV studios can create a film that gets shown on its HBO channel via the Time Warner cable system. Only US business interests are shown here. Many have overseas media holdings, notably France's Vivendi Universal, Japan's Sony, and News Corp. in Australia.

Is hyperlinking to decryption software illegal?

Is a computer program a form of speech, protected in the United States under the First Amendment of its Constitution, or is it a device? In a case now under appeal, a federal court in New York City ruled that so called DeCSS software $computer code that breaks the encryption scheme of DVDs - while deemed speech of a sort, does not merit the constitutional protection afforded to "pure expression." The federal court agreed with the case's movie-industry plaintiffs that DeCSS "accomplishes a mechanical task," and so resembles a device and is not protected. The court went even further: hyperlinks to pages with the DeCSS code may in some cases not be constitutionally protected speech and could be prohibited from being implemented. The plaintiffs in the case, eight movie studios, belong to an industry trade group, the Motion Picture Association of America, in Encino, Calif. The studios sued 2600, a quarterly magazine for hackers, for publishing the DeCSS code on its Web site and linking to other pages that also displayed the DeCSS code. The suit asked that 2600 be enjoined from both activities. The studios are concerned that code like DeCSS renders their encryption scheme ineffective, and that illegal copying and distribution of digital movies could become widespread.

Digital Transformations

Digital Transformations