BoxOffice® Pro - May 2013

mpaa news
You could say The Credits is a love letter
to film- and television-making. You could say
we’re pulling back the curtain to give the scores
of magic-makers the spotlight they deserve. You
could say we just love movies and TV, plain
and simple. All of this is true. At six months
young, we know our aspirations of elevating the
profiles of Hollywood’s brilliant creators and
makers are not meager, but we just can’t help
it—we’re fans on a mission. Here are a few of
the stories you can find on our site:
Education
Always looking to educate film lovers, we’ve
spoken with astrophysicists on which of their
favorite space disaster movies got their science
right (note: Deep Impact did the asteroid thing
much better than Armageddon), as well as with
neuroscientists on what actually happens to our
brains when we watch films. We welcomed film
students back to class with a week-long look
behind the scenes of some of the greatest film
schools in America, visiting the American Film
Institute; speaking with Marty Kaplan, the
founding director of the Norman Lear Center
at USC; and going on location at CalArts. We
also covered Journeys in Film, an innovative
new project that provides foreign films and
accompanying curricula to middle-school classrooms,
speaking with veteran stage and screen
actor Tony Shalhoub on the instructive power
of the cinema.
on location
We’ve been on location in Albuquerque and
New Orleans, where television and film have
been helping drive an economic resurgence.
We’ve been to Atlanta to look at the EUE/
Screen Gems studio and traveled to Austin for
a behind-the-scenes look at the Austin Film
Festival. We’ve spent time in Las Vegas for
Variety’s Entertainment Summit at CES and
strolled the massive 100,000-square-foot North
Hollywood warehouse of Western Costume, a
100-year old company that has up to 5 million
pieces of clothing, accessories, and footwear
used in films.
makers
From music supervisor Randall Poster (the
man behind the music in every Wes Anderson
film and the Hangover movies) to casting director
Pat Moran, we’ve been mapping the galaxy
of stars behind the stars everyone knows about.
Stars like makeup artist Steve LaPorte, sound
supervisor Scott Gershin, and Oscar-nominated
costume designer Sarah Greenwood. We’ve
chatted with long-time icons such as X-Files
creator Chris Carter, Forrest Gump screenwriter
Eric Roth, and Bridesmaids director and
Freaks and Geeks creator Paul Feig. We’ve also
spoken with lesser-known shining lights like
The Walking Dead’s zombie guru Jake Garber,
Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Beast of
the Southern Wild Lucy Alibar, and stuntman
extraordinaire Hugh O’Brien.
innovators
We count innovation in film as one of our
most present subjects. We’ve picked the brains of
Oscar-winning visionary filmmaker and inventor
Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey, Close
Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner)
and Bill Westenhoffer, the Oscar-winning SFX
supervisor who helped create the world of Life of
Pi. We’ve also delved into innovation happening
at the studios, from getting to know Warner
Bros. tech ops president Darcy Antonellis, chatting
with Disney’s chief technology officer Andy
Hendrickson about Wreck-It Ralph, and finding
out about Sony Pictures’ Screen Gems going
green on the set of Think Like a Man.
We’ve not only gone behind the scenes of
films and film studios but inside the cinema—looking
at the burgeoning technological
advancements in movie theaters with the return
of Smell-O-Vision, 4D cinema, the wired
cinema, the brave new world of sensory film,
and the advent of social cinema, covering new
companies such as Tugg.com, which allows
motivated audiences to screen the films they
want to see in their local theaters.
exclusive insights
Not only do we focus on Hollywood’s
unsung heroes, but we also create news
ourselves—notably in conducting our own
presidential survey of 501 voters during the
run-up to the 2012 presidential election,
asking them a host of questions, such as which
fictional president they’d elect, who they might
cast as the president and why, and what their
favorite film about a president was. As for that
first question, none other than CinemaCon
Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Harrison
Ford, as President James Marshall from Air
Force One, was selected—er, elected.
During Oscar season, we weren’t content
with allowing other outlets to take care of
handicapping who might take home a statue—so
in a partnership with Brandwatch, we
created our own Oscars predictive algorithm,
an app called the DataViz, which monitored
online mentions of Oscar nominees and analyzed
the data, predicting the correct winners an
astonishing 83 percent of the time.
promoting important
documentaries
We’ve promoted films that have an opportunity
to effect real change in the world.
From Eugene Jarecki’s documentary about the
prison industrial complex, The House I Live In,
to Robert Robbins’ recently released film on
female education in developing nations, Girl
Rising, these filmmakers and the stories they’ve
told have been prominently featured on the
site.
content protection
We’re not just about spotlighting the work
of the unsung heroes of Hollywood but protecting
it too. From interviews with filmmakers
like music supervisor Randall Poster, production
designer Gavin Bocquet, composers John Ottman
and John Debney, writer-director Derek
Cianfrance, DreamWorks animator T.J. Nabors,
director Michael Apted, studio executives like
Darcy Antonellis, and the movie poster masterminds
from Allied Creative, we’ve introduced
the world to the hard-working professionals
who are directly affected by piracy and gotten
their feedback on how it affects them, their
peers, and their craft.
We’re also keen to call out the increasing
number of options for accessing our favorite
content everywhere. We’re film fans, and it
shouldn’t come as any surprise that our phones,
tablets, and computers are full of films. We
share with readers some of our favorite platforms
for finding these films, from cloud-based
Ultraviolet to the “Netflix of indie films,”
Fandor.
the word is spreading
When we launched in mid-September of
2012, The Los Angeles Times ran a piece on the
launch of the site. Since then, we’ve been written
about or linked to by the New York Times,
USA Today, Esquire, and The Huffington Post, to
name a few. More importantly, we have creators
and makers from across the country reaching
out to us—wanting our help to tell their stories.
We hope you’ll join us as we continue
to revel in and try better to understand the
magicians who make the magic we love. And
after checking us out, more than anything, we
hope the next time you are in the theater that
you’ll savor what little popcorn you have left, sit
back, and stay in the theater until the last of the
credits has rolled.
24 BoxOffice ® Pro The Business of Movies may 2013