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Here’s a good write-up with the actual balance sheet that shows how Hollywood accounting works.  It shows how “Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix” actually LOST $167 million (despite the fact the studio pulled in $350 million of the gross $938 million).

The idea is basically you set up a shell company – a fly-by-night studio – to make the movie.  The shell company makes the movie and then pays back the parent studio company for whatever ‘fees’ the studio would like to have made until the shell company shows a loss.  This then allows those that worked on the film (artists, writers, actors, etc), to not get much of a red cent from a company that is now bankrupt/underwater.

Which is why (as an acquaintance who worked down there told me), you must read the contracts carefully and be guided by someone that knows the biz to avoid being had.  Because if you sign a contract to make a movie about the story you just wrote and agree to a percentage of the profits – you just gave them the story and all your hard work for the rest of that year for free.  Because the shell studio will always show a loss – which means you get a percentage of nothing.

I don’t wonder when the oil companies will start doing this with their drilling wells.  First you set each well up as a shell company that ‘sells’ its oil to its parent company (i.e. BP), then the parent pays them only enough to cover the drilling costs in exchange for the oil.  If the drill ever has a disaster or accident, the only people you could sue would be the ‘broke’ drilling company – a company that is always basically bankrupt (i.e only has enough money for operating costs).  You better believe that oil companies facing $100’s of billions in damages for a single spill are eyeing this idea closely.

The only good news is that the film studios are starting to lose lawsuits against these practices in court.  Hopefully it’ll start straightening these studios out – and discourage others from trying the same tricks.

Just finished watching a playthrough of the new horror game Alan Wake.  I’ve switched from playing a lot of games that I’m just curious about to watching them played on YouTube.  There are tons of people that are playing through a game and recording it as they go.  You can then watch the game played from beginning to end without having to lift a finger; or spend tons of time trying to fight through puzzles/monsters/etc.

“That seems stupid”, you say.  “Isn’t the point of a game to be played?”  Well, I don’t have tons of time to invest in all the great games out there; and I more recently found myself never getting through a good number of games that I bought.  I find this method to be a great compromise because I likely would never have bought this game.  I was curious about it for sure, but knew I was not interested enough to invest the money or the ~20 hours of time to play it.  Its a great way to ‘play’ a games to see what the state of the art is – but not have to spend the amount of time it takes.

I’ve now moved on to Final Fantasy XIII.  That’s a monstrosity estimated at 50-60 hours of gameplay.  I’ve watched the first half of a complete playthrough; and have more recently switched to a playthrough that cuts/edits out the minor battles that pop up every 30 seconds or so.  Makes for a much faster viewing of the worlds and story.  If they release a PC version of FF XIII, I’ll buy it for sure.

Believe it or not, public records are available about where people are moving.  Just click on the county you’re interested in, and then see how many people are moving in/out of that county.  Lots of black?  Folks are moving in.  Lots of red?  They’re moving out.

http://images.forbes.com/jb/migration/m.swf

I’d love to meet the engineers who designed this or read a paper on the mathematics that makes this work.

Here’s a video of them making a heart shape:

Own your own piece of World-cup craziness: your own vuvuzella!  On sale now at Amazon for $6.99

Or watch the video:
Or the Techno remix: