Kristin here–

For some reason, the November 10 issue of Entertainment Weekly ran a story right up front in their “Newsnotes” section as to whether Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan would be a success based on its internet hype. By the time the magazine showed up in our mailbox early the week after the November 3 release, the film had spectacularly won the weekend. Won it despite being in only 837 theaters. Won it with an average $31,607 per screen average for a total weekend haul of $26,455,463. By the way, shortly before the release, Fox actually reduced the number of planned theaters, wary about the film’s dubious chances. (I swear I said at the time, what are they thinking?)

The film predicted by Variety to win the weekend,, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause came in a respectable second on 3,458 screens, averaged $5,640 and totaled $19,504,038. Flushed Away was not far behind, on 3,707 screen, averaging $5,075 and totaling $18,814,323. It seems fairly obvious that the two family-oriented films split that audience, while the considerable non-family-oriented audience had one obvious choice.

This film was hyped to an extent that few $18 million movies are. A clip was posted on YouTube shortly before the release, as the EW article points out, and chat, photos, and reviews filled the internet. EW’s question was this: Would Borat suffer the fate of Snakes on a Plane? That film caused huge amounts of buzz in cyberspace but reaped somewhat disappointing ticket sales for a horror-thriller. The film’s worldwide box-office, $59,377,419 on a reported budget of $33 million, wasn’t great, but it wasn’t disastrous, either. I suspect DVD sales will be much higher and put the film in the black.

The semi-failure of Snakes has led to speculation, as in EW’s article, that maybe the internet isn’t as powerful a means of publicizing films as the studios hoped. Borat’s success demonstrates that we just plain don’t know yet. Probably in some cases, yes, in some cases, no—just as with other forms of publicity. EW assigns grades to films’ trailers. Maybe someday they’ll do the same for internet campaigns.

Sure, Borat was all over the internet, but it was also all over the other media. You had to be living in a lighthouse on Easter Island if you wanted to miss all the PR. Sasha Baron Cohen himself was everywhere, including the sidewalk in front of the White House, promoting the film. He wisely appeared as Borat rather than as himself, giving people beyond his relatively small existing fan base a vivid hint of what they could expect from the film. The hype fed upon itself as the regular print and broadcast media began to treat the film as news precisely because it was becoming ubiquitous—and because the colorful Cohen/Borat made for great infotainment.

Even as I was drafting this entry, boxofficemojo.com posted the estimates for the Friday-night box-office figures. Not surprisingly, the top three films of last weekend look set to become the top three films of this weekend. Borat’s percentage of drop between weekends will probably be pretty low, a sign of a film with good word-of-mouth in addition to hype. “Borat on a Plane?” EW asks. Clearly not.

I’m interested in the relationship between online interest and the success of films. When I say “online interest,” I mostly mean the many fan-created sites and chatroom discussion that range far beyond a studio’s own campaign in cyberspace. In The Frodo Franchise, I’ve got two chapters on the relationship of The Lord of the Rings to the online publicity, from official to highly unofficial. There the internet clearly made a difference and boosted the film’s success, for a variety of reasons. But for other films without a built-in fan base that break out and generate widespread interest in cyberspace—The Blair Witch Project being the most obvious exception—the case is not so clear.

The contrasting cases of Borat and Snakes on a Plane are fascinating, and I’m planning to write more about the subject when the DVD of the latter comes out on January 2 (complete with a “Snakes on a Blog” supplement). I’ll explore why the two met such different fates despite the apparent similarity of the build-up on the internet.

Kristin here—

Variety today announces the splendid news that Black Sheep has been picked up for distribution in the U.S. by The Weinstein Company.  At last!

It’s not the latest masterpiece from Iran or a new Oscar-bait documentary.  It’s a comic horror film from New Zealand.  I have no idea whether it’s any good, but it’s got a great tagline:  “There are 40 million sheep in New Zealand … and they’re pissed off!”  Naturally Black Sheep revolves around one of those genetic experiments that go terribly wrong.  It’s the first feature by writer/director Jonathan King.

I’ve known about Black Sheep for quite some time, since one part of The Frodo Franchise deals with the impact that The Lord of the Rings had on the Kiwi film industry.  Of course Rings helped draw other blockbuster productions to New Zealand, but for a while there was a fear that the small-budget local films would suffer—costs driven up, competition for talent, and so on.  Fortunately, Rings turned out to be good for New Zealand’s own filmmakers.

Before Rings, it was rare for Kiwi films to draw international attention, and they tended not to do well at home, either.  For a while Whale Rider (2002) looked like it might just be one of those occasional exceptions.  Most directors were working abroad. The main support for most domestic films was, and is, the New Zealand Film Commission.  I had the pleasure of interviewing the Commission’s head, Dr. Ruth Harley, twice during my research.  The first time was in October, 2003, when it was not yet clear whether Rings would swamp local filmmaking and be a one-time bonanza for New Zealand.  The second time was at the American Film Market about a year ago, when filmmaking in the country was bustling and Harley declared that the industry was having its best year ever.  The momentum seems to be holding steady, if not increasing.

Naturally I’ve tried to see the new Kiwi films as they appeared.  I enjoyed watching In My Father’s Den (2004) in the Empire Theatre in Wellington (where The Return of the King had had its world premiere the year before).  I very much liked The World’s Fastest Indian (2005), with an engaging performance by Anthony Hopkins, but unfortunately it was not well publicized during its American release.  Even River Queen (2005), with all the tales of its troubled production, turned out to be an impressive epic.  It’s a pity that the charming comedy about gay adolescents in rural New Zealand, 50 Ways of Saying Fabulous (2005), has not gotten wider distribution.

More films are on the way, and several expat directors have returned home to work.  Variety reviewed Sionne’s Wedding (retitled Samoan Wedding for distribution abroad) at the Montreal World Film Festival last month, declaring it “an instantly exportable comedy that will play gangbusters in all situations.”  It was a huge hit in New Zealand, where audiences have become interested in the local product in the wake of Rings.  More recently Variety praised Out of the Blue, a thriller starring Karl Urban  It’s only the second feature directed by Robert Sarkies, whose Scarfies (1999) was critically and popularly well-received.  These and others in the pipeline suggest that Kiwi filmmaking is on a healthy footing.

Black Sheep has been intriguing to me for a more specific reason.  It’s the first small New Zealand film to have its special effects done by Weta Workshop, which had previously stuck to epics like Rings, Master and Commander, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.  Peter Jackson and his partners in the various filmmaking facilities in “Wellywood” provide services to other films than their own, and they particularly want to encourage local filmmaking.  Black Sheep is a step in that direction.  Early publicity for the film quoted Weta head Richard Taylor as saying, “We’re looking forward to turning some beautiful little sheep into crazed killers.”  The publicity photo from Variety certainly gives that lamb a slightly Gollumesque look.

King is already at work on his second feature, The Tattooist, and the NZ Film Commission’s slate of projects makes it look as though the beautiful little country will continue the small but steady production that had long been its filmmakers’ goal.

Kristin here–

For more than three years, I’ve been immersed in the many aspects of the Lord of the Rings film franchise. One of my favorite parts of the film is its musical track, by the deservedly twice-Oscared Howard Shore. I have no idea how many times I’ve listened to the three soundtrack CDs while I work on The Frodo Franchise. Then there came the complete music from The Fellowship of the Ring, on 3 CDs. This morning I pre-ordered my copy of the complete Two Towers music, due out November 7.

Before this project, Shore was not really on my radar screen. I’m not a big David Cronenberg fan (though I like The Fly, The Dead Zone, and A History of Violence), and Shore has scored more films for his fellow Canadian than for any other director. Once I became enamored of the Rings score, I investigated a bit and realized that this was the same composer who had done the lyrically mournful music for The Silence of the Lambs. I had written a book chapter on that film in Storytelling in the New Hollywood, and I had always enjoyed the soundtrack without noticing who had written the music.

I started listening to some of Shore’s other movie scores. The man excels at portentous music, no doubt, as in Panic Room. Still, he is remarkably versatile and has a gift for weird orchestration. After the Rings tracks, my favorite is Ed Wood (which Danny Elfman was apparently initially supposed to score, as he usually does for Tim Burton films). The Ed Wood music, with its inspired and surrealist combination of theramin and bongos, may be the funniest part of the film. Shore created a mean pastiche of Renaissance music in Looking for Richard, and his music for The Aviator demonstrates yet again how fortunate we are that the late 19^th Century/Early 20^th Century symphonic tradition lives on in movie music.

I suppose ordering the Two Towers score reminded me of the latest Shore original-soundtrack CD I have acquired and very much enjoyed: Soul of the Ultimate Nation. No, you haven’t somehow overlooked a major new film. SUN, as it has come to be known, is a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game), being developed by Korean game company Webzen. Unless you haunt the various gaming websites, you probably don’t know about Shore’s contribution to it.

Fortunately, though, the score has already been released, but only on Sony’s Korean label. For a picture of the cover, you can go to amazon.com, but you will learn that “THIS TITLE IS CURRENTLY NOT AVAILABLE.” To be further tantalized, read Jeff Bond’s review on GameDaily (originally published in The Hollywood Reporter).

Equally fortunately, there are companies that specialize in bringing Asian pop culture to its fans here in the USA. I was able simply to ask David to order me a copy of the CD from one of his regular suppliers, YesAsia, and a few days later the UPS truck dropped it on our doorstep.

Shore’s SUN score is a big, lush orchestral piece, using a theremin as well as organ and chorus. It’s in the tradition of the Rings track, though very different. I think Shore’s fans would find it very appealing, so it’s ironic that so few people are even aware of the existence of such a major composition.

Why is that? As with most MMORPGs, which are hugely complicated and time-consuming to set up compared to PC and console games. (Partly for that reason, there was no MMORPG licensed for the film of Rings, though there is currently one, Shadows of Angmar, in development based on Tolkien’s novel.) The progress of actually getting SUN online has been glacial, and no official release date has been announced. SUN apparently started its beta-testing phase this past spring, but only players in South Korea are participating. As happens with these big on-line games, there has been information on the Internet for a long time, with fans already anticipating SUN’s eventual arrival. Presumably when the full-fledged game becomes available to players worldwide, Shore’s soundtrack will be sold more widely.

I bring up this topic in the context of a film-related blog because there is getting to be more and more of an overlap between the film and game industries. Ten years ago the music for a game might be generated on a Casio electronic keyboard. Now top composers from the world of movies are increasingly moving back and forth. Bond’s article talks about this, and I deal with it in my chapter on the Rings videogames in The Frodo Franchise. It’s part of a general convergence between the two media, as games become more like films and, in some cases at least, films become more like games.

Kristin here–

There was a time when studying film fans was something sociologists or film-industry marketing people did. Sociologists wanted to find out why fans behaved the way they did because it was interesting and often strange, and the industry wanted to figure out fan behavior so they could sell movies to them more effectively.

Then, a couple of decades ago, a new kind of expert came along: the fans themselves. People who had gone to the university to study film, television, literature, or other aspects of popular culture gradually realized that they could study themselves, their kids, and the people they met at fan conventions and later on the internet.

Prof. Henry Jenkins did not originate the study of fandoms, but he has been perhaps the most influential “aca/fan,” as he terms himself on his blog. (The term “fan academic” also gets used to describe this new field of study.) These days books and articles and web publications about fandoms are proliferating, but just about any of them will cite Henry’s seminal 1992 book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture (Routledge).

Henry doesn’t study fans to find out what makes them tick. He knows that. He’s one of them, a participant in fan cons, a player of video games, an explorer of the multimedia sagas like those of Star Trek and The Matrix that have grown up in the age of franchise culture. He received his doctorate here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where David was his dissertation advisor, and we have followed his career, as they say, with great interest. Straight out of the gate he was hired by MIT, where he is now the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. (Read more about his prolific and wide-ranging activities at his blog.)

This year two books by Henry appeared: Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture and Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (both New York University Press). Given that my The Frodo Franchise has chapters on Lord of the Rings video games and fan culture on the Internet, I thought I’d start with the first. Henry assured me, however, that Convergence Culture represented a more current and probably more relevant overview, so I started with it instead.

This terrific book uses a series of case studies to give an overview of how digital media have expanded the possibilities for participatory fan culture. It also shows how the producers of popular culture have reacted to this new empowerment of the consumers. Only two chapters focus on films: “Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling” and “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Grassroots Creativity Meets the Media Industry.” In the modern entertainment industry, however, films are increasingly linked to other media, and no one has a better grasp of the overall relationship among popular media than Henry.

Convergence Culture is unusual, perhaps unique, in offering an overview of the entertainment industry from the perspective both of the big corporations that control popular media creations and of the fans, who often appropriate those creations for their own purposes. Much of the book depends on interviews with fans and executives alike. Henry is evenhanded in dealing with both points of view—except when the big firms try to stifle fan creativity through intimidation and the invocation of copyright and trademark control.

Here Henry is firmly on the side of the fans. The chapter on Star Wars mentioned above reviews the love-hate relationship George Lucas has had with fan websites that post innumerable works derived from his saga. Another chapter, “Why Heather Can Write,” details how Warner Bros. attempted to squelch fan creativity based on the Harry Potter series. Henry provides a cogent argument for rewriting fair-use laws to accommodate amateur, not-for-profit activities that utilize characters and situations from copyrighted works.

So am I an aca/fan, too? I wouldn’t exactly describe myself as one, though in this new book I have dabbled in that approach, meeting many fellow Lord of the Rings fans in person and in cyberspace. One has to admire members of the various fandoms and the amount of time and effort they are willing to put into keeping themselves and others informed about the objects of their fascination. They also lovingly create their own works (fanfiction, fanart, machinema, RPGs, and so on) derived from their favorite books, games, movies, TV shows, and comics. Most of the results aren’t masterpieces, of course, but that’s true of “real” artworks created by professionals and aspiring professionals as well. If enough of just about anything gets made, some of it is bound to be good. I’ve found some excellent Lord of the Rings fanfiction among the many conventional, sometimes nearly unreadable tales I have sampled. And Chocolate Cake City’s Brokeback to the Future demonstrates what David likes to describe as “the spontaneous genius of the American people” (usually in reference to the speed with which any significant event generates a body of tasteless jokes, or, in this case, parodies).

For all the attempts to analyze audiences through questionnaires and interviews and other traditional methods, Henry shows that the best way to understand fans is as an insider. The aca/fan approach is spreading as the study of popular media and fandoms gains legitimacy within academe, and it is lucky to have an enthusiastic, intelligent pioneer in Henry Jenkins.