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Rating: 
Summary: SOMEBODY KNOWS SOMETHING. . . .
Review: Go to the library and read the 9-page Epilogue, esp. the last two sentences, which state, "There is no formula. Nobody knows anything."*Somebody* DOES knows something, though. . . . This book is a compilation of articles that strive to predict box-office success, and also demonstrate the power and influence of stars, directors, producers, etc. on this success. Devany and his former Ph.D. student, David Walls, make convincing arguments in their papers, which were published to satisfy academic requirements. Yet De Vany admits in the end that "nobody knows anything." Awww, man! And here we are, looking for a magic bullet! I gave it three stars for its good background information about Hollywood, in general. And I highly recommend it to anyone in the biz, as it provides a primer on how to view the industry, from a mathematical (at least stochastic) point of view. If I were writing a book on Hollywood economics, I'd state up front right away what my premise is: nobody knows anything. Or do they? Hollywood bosses should be encouraged to STUDY this book and learn something from it. Do they? NO. Why? Because it tells them what they already know: nobody knows diddly. Somebody knows something, or there wouldn't be successful production companies out there. De Vany does admit that most of the profit is garnered by a very few, which is true. These highly profitable movies are often produced by highly skilled people. Do we say that these people don't know anything? I doubt it. There are some hypotheses that one can posit about these extreme successes, and someone in the future will doubtless ask the right one and then find the right statistic to support it well. Right now, let's just leave it at this: Somebody knows something . . . and they ain't tellin' nobody.
Rating:
Summary: SOMEBODY KNOWS SOMETHING. . . .
Review: Go to the library and read the 9-page Epilogue, esp. the last two sentences, which state, "There is no formula. Nobody knows anything." *Somebody* DOES knows something, though. . . . This book is a compilation of articles that strive to predict box-office success, and also demonstrate the power and influence of stars, directors, producers, etc. on this success. Devany and his former Ph.D. student, David Walls, make convincing arguments in their papers, which were published to satisfy academic requirements. Yet De Vany admits in the end that "nobody knows anything." Awww, man! And here we are, looking for a magic bullet! I gave it three stars for its good background information about Hollywood, in general. And I highly recommend it to anyone in the biz, as it provides a primer on how to view the industry, from a mathematical (at least stochastic) point of view. If I were writing a book on Hollywood economics, I'd state up front right away what my premise is: nobody knows anything. Or do they? Hollywood bosses should be encouraged to STUDY this book and learn something from it. Do they? NO. Why? Because it tells them what they already know: nobody knows diddly. Somebody knows something, or there wouldn't be successful production companies out there. De Vany does admit that most of the profit is garnered by a very few, which is true. These highly profitable movies are often produced by highly skilled people. Do we say that these people don't know anything? I doubt it. There are some hypotheses that one can posit about these extreme successes, and someone in the future will doubtless ask the right one and then find the right statistic to support it well. Right now, let's just leave it at this: Somebody knows something . . . and they ain't tellin' nobody.
Rating: 
Summary: Movies can be Diverse. Will the execs heed?
Review: Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry by Arthur De Vanyn (Routledge) (Hardcover)
What do stars do for a movie? Aside from earning a higher least revenue, a star movie has only a slightly higher chance of making a profit than a non-star movie De Vanyn shows. If the star's agent extracts the higher expected profit in the star's fee, then the movie almost surely will lose money. This De Vanyn calls the curse of the superstar.
Opening big and leading at the box office is a momentary success. A movie has to attain or sustain box-office dominance over many weeks to make major money. The size of the opening does not predict how the ensuing battles will evolve or how much money the film will take in. Why do executives compete so strongly for stars when they can assure no more than a higher expectation of a movie's least revenue? It seems to be based on a belief that the opening predicts how much a movie will make. That turns out to be false, as this study shows.
The articles are grouped into four parts: dynamics, wild uncertainty, judges and lawyers and extremes. There are three chapters in each of these parts. De Vanyn writes a brief introduction to each part noting the main issues, techniques and results of the papers contained therein. De Vanyn has not sacrificed rigor or completeness; these are refereed articles, published in scientific journals and their results have been independently confirmed and replicated by other authors many times over.
De Vanyn also provides a couple of new chapters that were not published previously. One of these concerns artists, primarily actors and directors. It examines how productive they are and how they are paid. De Vanyn establishes the Price-Evans law of artists, estimate the half life of a star and see if one can separate luck from talent in career patterns. In another new work for this book, De Vanyn puts all this work into a more complete model, a model that begins to bridge the gap between standard management and economic models and the reality of the business.
In the Epilogue he muses on how one might manage a business where nobody knows anything. It is here that De Vanyn takes up the fundamental flaws his research reveals about the way the modern corporate studio manages the movie business.
Finally perhaps we will see why conventional models fail spectacularly to explain the movies and why De Vanyn had to invent a new kind of economics to come to grips with this endlessly fascinating business. Perhaps De Vanyn has built a consistent and fundamental model of the industry that is of interest not just to scientists, but to movie fans and moviemakers, too. And De Vanyn shows that these models can be applied to other industries as well.
In science, as in the movies, creativity takes you to unexpected places. This study is exciting because we get unexpected and wonderful discoveries. It is hard to imagine at the outset that by applying high-brow mathematical and statistical science we end up proving Goldman's fundamental truth that, in the movies, "nobody knows anything."
None of these results is more surprising than finding out that, hard-headed science puts the creative process at the very center of the motion picture universe. There is no fool proof formula. Outcomes cannot be predicted. There is no reason for management to get in the way of the creative process. Now tell then that! Character, creativity and good story-telling trump everything else. Now let's see some fresh movies made!
Rating: 
Summary: Wow.
Review: I skipped the high-falutin' parts with integral calculus...BUT: Anyone who is investing a nickel in ANY entertainment medium should read this book. The buying public is discerning, fickle and SMART. Crap stinks and the first to catch a wiff of a film that stinks are like Paul Revere coming out of the theater. On the other hand, a great film can fizzle due to any number of peculiar reasons such as distribution decisions or competing releases. There is also interesting treatment of the demise of studio-owned movie houses and an argument in favor of lifting the ban.
William Goldman ("nobody knows nothin'", or something like that) has it figured out: write screenplays and wait. The Princess Bride, case in point. He even wrote the book AFTER the movie hit big.
Let somebody else put his money into film production. There is a fine line between genius and lunacy...the buying public determines which he is.
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