Film history for fools -- box office disasters

Consider this a footnote to the previous Motley Fool rant.

There's an old and very common saying in Hollywood that the biggest money-losing film ever was the Sound of Music. The joke here is that though the film did rather well...

Upon its initial release, The Sound of Music briefly displaced Gone with the Wind as the highest-grossing film of all-time; taking re-releases into account, it ultimately grossed $286 million internationally. Adjusted to contemporary prices it is the third highest-grossing film of all-time at the North American box office and the fifth highest-grossing film worldwide.

... The films it inspired lost a lot of money. That's a bit of an oversimplification. Music was just the last of a string of hit musicals in the early Sixties ( West Side Story, The Music Man, My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins) but it was the biggest and it suggested an upward trend and, to the extent that it was responsible for what followed, it might well justify that money-losing title. 

The commercially and/or critically unsuccessful films included Camelot, Finian's Rainbow, Hello Dolly!, Sweet Charity, Doctor Dolittle, Star!, Darling Lili, Paint Your Wagon, Song of Norway, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Man of La Mancha, Lost Horizon and Mame. Collectively and individually these failures crippled several of the major studios.

I don't want to push the analogy with comic-book movies but there are similarities, particularly regarding the budgets and the stories executives told themselves to justify them. 

And I'm pretty sure if Motley Fool had been around in, say, 1967, these upcoming movies would have generated lots of optimistic exclamation points.

Because that's the way it is with hot trends, they just keep getting bigger and bigger forever!

And don't forget to invest! Super-powered movies have been some of the highest-grossing films of all time, and as these franchises continue to grow, the numbers are only going to get more impressive. The Motley Fool's new free report "Your Ticket to Cash In on the Superhero Battle of the Century" details what you need to know to profit from your favorite superheroes. Click here to read the full report!

DC Comics Turns to an Anti-Hero in Its Time of Need

As part of researching a couple of ongoing threads, I've been reading more Motley Fool than is good for me lately and it's brought home just how much of a scam MF and most of its ilk is. They've mastered a reassuring, knowing tone despite displaying only the most superficial knowledge of the industries they're discussing.

What's worse, each tired piece of under-researched conventional wisdom is presented as a reason to call your broker. Netflix is going places since it grabbed House of Cards (never mind that they probably overpaid, particularly since they didn't even get syndication rights); Hold it, Netflix might be in trouble because their new kids' show is a spin-off of the flop Turbo (never mind that the Turbo show was part of a much larger Dreamworks deal that involves hits like Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon or that historically spin-offs of hit kid's movies like Disney's Hercules, Lilo and Stitch and even the Lion King haven't been notable hits on their own so it's not clear how much difference a good opening for Turbo would have made).

The truth of the matter is that very few of us should try to pick stocks and if you find yourself frequently saying "I didn't know that" when reading Motley Fool posts you are definitely not one of those few.

Weekend blogging -- Anthromorphic Theater

This cartoon from the aftermath of the meltdown had been lying forgotten in a corner somewhere since it first came out. It's less topical now but it's a nice snapshot of a part of the crisis some people mey have forgotten.

Owning a business in Russia can be tricky, it seems

This story cited by Tyler Cowen really shows the problem of private or corruptible police:

Most of the imprisoned are not there for any political reason. Their incarceration has to do with the nature of Russian corruption, said Elena Panfilova, the director of the Russian branch of Transparency International, a nonprofit group that studies corruption around the globe. Run-of-the-mill bribery schemes, practiced from China to Mexico, usually involve the police, fire inspectors or other regulators asking for payments on the side to allow a business to operate. In these instances, the interests of the business owners and corrupt officials are aligned — both ultimately want the enterprise to succeed.

But in Russia, the police benefit from arrests. They profit by soliciting a bribe from a rival to remove competition, by taking money from the family for release, or by selling seized goods. Promotion depends on an informal quota of arrests. Police officers who seize businesses became common enough to have earned the nickname “werewolves in epaulets.”

This type of problem really points out why you need a state that is strong and well functioning.  Because there is a bad equilibrium for a police force to shift into (see above), it is critical that there be an external check on the shift into these equilibrium.  It also tells us just how valuable a tradition of "good government" is and how deeply we should prize it. 

The word 'metacognitive' is usually a bad sign

Lucy Calkins of the Reading and Writing Project at Teachers College has an article on something I should probably be paying more attention to.

In April, hundreds of thousands of children in grades 3-8 in New York State took Pearson’s version of the totally new Common Core aligned literacy exams. The students’ scores on those tests have yet to come out, but the New York State Department and Pearson’s scores have been accumulating as well, and accounts of how well they’ve done on this test are not good. Each week, another journalist produces a blog or a column that begins, “I recently obtained a bootlegged copy of the New York State English Language Arts (ELA) exam…” and then the article proceeds to critique the exam. One recent journalist, for example, wrote, “I received full copies of each of the sixth, seventh and eighth grade tests…” before going on to ponder the implications of this iteration of the test (andreagabor.com). More than a month ago. The Post distributed copies and quoted excerpts of the 5th grade exam.

Ironically, it feels as if the only people who are studying the test and writing their responses to it are teachers and principals. Because this is a closed test, educators risk losing their jobs if they obtain and speak out about boot-legged copy of standardized tests. Still, it is possible for the world to hear the observations and concerns that educators have about the test. The day after the ELA, the organization I lead – the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project – opened a site (http://elafeedback.com) on which educators could post observations made during the test, and thoughts and concerns about the test. More than a thousand responses have been entered onto that site, and altogether, the responses show that teachers, principals and superintendents from both high achieving and high need schools have deep concerns about New York State’s test. Elafeedback.com gives a window into what educators are concerned about in regard to these tests. Now the question is – is anyone listening?

...

It is entirely likely that this test will be influential (even controlling) in decisions about how reading and writing are taught. It is especially likely that the exams will become curriculum in any state or city in which standardized tests have become deciding factors in whether teachers are hired or fired. In NYC, the scores that students receive on Pearson’s tests determine whether students have access to selective middle schools and secondary schools, allowing the tests to take on inordinate importance. On top of that, in NYC, teachers are ranked by name in newspapers based upon the scores their students receive, and this, again, means that the tests become an all-important measuring stick.

In the online posts at elafeedback.com, you’ll find a few issues that are raised again and again. One of these addresses the interpretation Pearson makes of close reading of nonfiction. For most teachers, the goal of teaching kids to read nonfiction successfully is to teach in such a way that students can learn from the nonfiction they read. That is, if they read an article on the Pony Express, the goal is that they learn quite a bit about that topic. If you look at the Common Core standards themselves, this reading work would encompass standards 1-3, which asks students to determine central ideas and supporting details, and analyze their development in the text, as well as standards 7-9, which asks students to synthesize and integrate, compare and contrast, and weigh and evaluate, ideas suggested by texts on the same subject.

Yet the Pearson exam seems to have asked few or no questions that addressed standards 7-9, as they chose to present students only with isolated texts rather than text sets, and many questions on standards 4-6, that ask students to analyze the craft and structure of texts. “Which term best describes the structure used in paragraphs 4-6?” “Why did the author include the image of….in line 12 of paragraph 5?” This sort of highly metacognitive, analytical reading-writing connection work is not usually the primary reading lens of nonfiction readers. Teachers are getting the message that their instruction should no longer channel students to read lots of nonfiction in order to expand their knowledge and grow ideas about a topic. Teachers are gathering that what counts to Pearson and New York State is that even children as young as nine year olds read nonfiction texts in order to analyze the author’s craft. This work has been propagated through the Publishers Criterion, a document offered by two authors of the Common Core, after the CCSS was ratified. As one poster, Sandra Wilde wrote, “ the items are constructed in a very narrow way, not from the standards themselves but from a narrow set of ideas - based on the Publisher's Guidelines”

I wish I had time to spend on this issue. It's too complex to discuss without doing your homework (which I haven't done), but I do have a few brief observations:

1. The reform movement has always been based on an odd alliance of that saw a chance to advance their generally well intended but otherwise disparate goals. One of these groups is theorists who wanted to try different pedagogical approaches and were running into resistance from the teaching establishment.

2. Though reform is often presented as a return to common sense basics, some of these pedagogical approaches, particularly those involving reading and writing, seem quite arcane. From first and second grade, a great deal of time is spent on fairly obscure concepts like the distinction between perspective and point of view.

3. If the tests we use to evaluate students, schools and teachers incorporate these ideas, then these approaches will become the standard.

and

4. While I don't want to dismissive of these approaches, I have a very different view. Kids are amazingly intelligent and inquisitive. If you give them the ability to read with little effort and good comprehension and you get them to read widely and deeply and to write clearly and thoughtfully, they will teach themselves better than you ever could.

Tech companies may lie to you but we never do

Item number 5 from The Worst Lies Tech Companies Tell You:

Cord cutters, pay attention: There is no such thing as an HDTV antenna. Or to put it another way, any TV antenna you've ever used, ever, is an HDTV antenna. Yes, all of them.

Check out the update on this post from 2010 or this post from 2011. (I've actually grown more suspicious of  some other aspects of that 2011 story, partly because the account conflicts with some things I've observed and partly because the New York Times has a record of serial inaccuracy on the OTA story.)

Jon Chait has to be pranking us?

I say this because of this review he posts of a book that seems deeply ahistorical:

The new right-wing book of the moment is American Betrayal, by Diana West, which offers the thesis that American foreign policy under presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower was secretly controlled by the Soviet Union. If this sounds like the sort of tract that would be written by somebody who thinks Joe McCarthy was absolutely right about everything, well, that’s exactly what Diana West does believe. She’s also quite the birther.

and

West argues not just that there were communist spies in the government or that American foreign policy failed to take a strong enough line, but that the Soviets controlled the American government in the way they controlled, say, East Germany. For instance, West argues that America provoked Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor — an American working for the Soviets “subverted relations between the US and Japan by inserting ‘ultimatum’ language into the cable flow that actually spurred the Japanese attack.”

So the downfall of the communist US government was due to John F Kennedy, lion of the right wing?  Who managed to squeak out a victory over Soviet pawn Rich Nixon (Eisenhower's Vice President, after all)?  Making JFK and Lyndon Johnson leading the only actual American led government in this 40 year period of subjugation?  Making the Great Society what a non-communist government would introduce in opposition to the communism of Richard Nixon? 

I am not saying that these things aren't possible in the sense of "logically possible".  But the Korean war and the Berlin blockage seem like odd policy decisions if the United States was a soviet satellite in the sense of East Germany.  Look what happened to Hungary in 1956 when it decided to buck Soviet control!  Now, this is completely separate from a claim that these presidents were rabid socialists or a competing strain of communist (kind of like China was).  It is the direct control from Moscow that seems to beg for a very high level of evidence.

So I guess I prefer to believe that Jon Chait got his facts wrong rather than actually imagining anybody would posit this theory of US history. 

The Epidemiology of Laughter

No, really. This post by famed sitcom writer/producer/director Ken Levine illustrate how infectious laughter follows some of the same rules as other infectious phenomena.

Comedy plays better in confined spaces. Laughs are louder when they don’t drift away.

Now you may say this is a superstition and I just want to be near that massage parlor, but (1) they don’t give group on’s, and (2) being in close quarters amplifies the laughter and laughter is infectious.

Whenever a sitcom episode goes into production the first order of business is a table reading. Several large tables are set up, the actors sit across from each other and read the script aloud as the writers and executives sit around them. Many shows I’ve worked on just hold their table readings right on their cavernous sound stages. On shows I’ve produced I insist we hold the table readings in conference rooms. Yes, it’s a little cramped, and chairs are pushed up against walls, but the difference in the reaction is startling. Laughs are so much bigger when you’re not at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.  Jokes are so much funnier when they don't echo.

Lest you think it’s just me, the table readings for CHEERS, FRASIER, WINGS, THE SIMPSONS, and BECKER were all held in conference rooms.

Levine also addresses the question of whether you should initially test a concept under overly friendly or overly hostile conditions.

Do we get an unfair reading as a result? Do the scripts appear funnier than they really are? Sometimes. There are producers who won’t change jokes later if it worked at the table reading. I’m not one of them. If a joke doesn’t work when it’s on its feet I cut it.  Table readings can always be deceiving.

But way more often, I’ve seen bad table readings done on the stage then gone back to the room and changed the shit out of the script. Later that day we'd have a runthrough of the original table draft and 70% of the stuff we planned to cut suddenly worked.

I’d rather err on the side of the table reading going well. Especially since you have the network and studio there as well. The less nervous they all are about the script, the better it is for all concerned.

The Totem Pole

Via Andrew Gelman, Gary Rubinstein has a very good post on what he observed while visiting a KIPP school in NYC (part of a larger series). I'll be getting back to the big issues Rubinstein raises soon, but first I wanted to take a moment on this side issue.

One thing that I see in schools a lot is the most experienced teachers getting to teach the high level class while the newbies have to teach the ninth grade remedial classes.  I suppose that this is some kind of reward for longevity, but it really is unfair.  If it really is about ‘the kids’ the new teachers should teach some of those easier classes.  I’m sorry to report that at KIPP they seemed to have the same sort of totem pole going on.  In the ninth grade wing is where I saw the most first year TFAers.

We hear a lot of complaints about how soft things supposedly are for long-time teachers, but the one place I've actually seen extensive evidence of this is an area that almost no one mentions (except, of course, for Rubinstein).

As a rule, first year teachers are best suited for advanced classes both in terms of strengths and weaknesses. New teachers tend to take a while to stop thinking in college terms. They are generally weak in classroom management and in those special communication skills needed for to handle lower level classes. Talking about concepts with peers and professors is very different from discussing those same concepts with bored ninth graders running behind grade level.

On the plus side, those concepts are fresher for just-out-of-college teachers and they inspire more passion. New teachers generally have more energy and are better able to keep up with classes of academically advanced kids. On top of that, college bound students often respond better to teachers they see as part of the college experience..

There is, as always, a context of bigger issues here, but for now, if you're looking for a reform to get behind, you could do worse than  tearing down that totem pole.

At this point, seeing even inaccurate coverage of OTA television seems like a triumph

This Marketplace story does leave a bit to be desired in terms of accuracy and completeness. In the audio version, the reporter, Sally Herships, like almost everyone covering this story, seems confused by digital versus amplified antennas and TV antennas versus satellite leading her to greatly overstate the price range of the equipment -- think under $10 if you don't need amplification (if not cheaper) -- and she failed to mention that the picture quality is actually better for free TV or that, in the region being discussed, you can get close to one hundred channels over the air or that with an adapter you can watch and digitally record those channels on you laptop.

All of that aside, this is still a story about doing without cable (or at least certain channels on cable), airing on one of the biggest and most respected financial news programs and it lists rabbit ears as the first option. I've been following this story closely for years now and I honestly can't recall this happening before. There have been a few voices in the wilderness on the subject -- Rajiv Sethi being perhaps the first and most notable -- but that was the blogosphere. A story like this in mainstream media is a very promising development, particularly given that the last time I heard the topic broached on Marketplace it was immediately dismissed by their guest expert (from the NYT, of course) who claimed that you can only get "a handful of channels" with an antenna in LA.

The story digital broadcasting has always come down to the question of whether the superior technology could establish a foothold before regulatory capture and the huge imbalance of hype drove it out of business. In that context, this is a good day for the medium.

Metablogging -- stag hunts, misalignment, principal agents and all that jazz

Shortly after Josh Marshall posted this analysis of recent events in the GOP, Joseph called me up to compare reactions. We've been having this conversation for so many years that much of it has devolved into a self-referential shorthand. As an illustration, at one point, after a fairly long-winded comment by me, Joseph simply said "Stag hunt." and tossed the ball back to me and we moved on to the next topic.

We agreed (with, I assume, fingers crossed on both ends of the line) that we'd write some posts on the subject, but I'm starting to think that it might be more useful to step back for a minute and talk about how we've been framing the question of what's going on in the Republican Party (politically, not socially or in terms of policy. Those are entirely different metaposts).

For years now, the two of us have been talking about the post-Tea Party GOP in terms of a multi-player stag hunt. Over the past few years the stakes (particularly the costs of failure) have increased. At the same time, participation rates required to take down the stag have also increased. As a result, progressively smaller groups have gained the power to kill the enterprise. (In a different conversation Joseph pointed out that, in a military context, shooting deserters is also a predictable result of this situation.) We could dig deeper into examples and implications (particularly with respect to the trade off between the power of an alliance vs. its stability) but for now I want to limit the discussion to framing.

(there might also be a place here to talk about symmetry breaking, but I'd need to give that some thought first.)

Another way of looking at the story we've found useful is to look at misalignment of interests, especially what looks to us two non-economists as a particularly nasty two-level principal agent problem where a small group of big donors determine the pool of viable candidates and a relatively small but coherent subgroup of the primary voters make the purchasing decisions for the entire party. You'll notice that, like the stag hunt frame, under this scenario small groups can acquire disproportionate power.

And of course there's the mandatory Influence reference, framing the story in terms of social psychology. If you check out the chapters on commitment and consistency, social proof, and scarcity you'll find all sorts of applicable discussions of the ways groups united by a common belief system deal with ideological challenges and the loss of dominance.

Nothing particularly fresh or profound here, but these idea have proven a pretty good framework recently. I'm not saying they should be the basis of the standard narrative -- I'm not sure there should be a standard narrative -- but they do come in handy. More importantly, I think you can make the case that too little of the public discourse is spent examining underlying assumptions and asking about the different ways to frame our questions.

The real challenge of Libertarian populism

According to Wikipedia, the night-watchman state (a foundation of Libertarianism) is defined as:

A night-watchman state, or a minimal state, is variously defined by sources. In the strictest sense, it is a form of government in political philosophy where the state's only legitimate function is the protection of individuals from assault, theft, breach of contract, and fraud, and the only legitimate governmental institutions are the military, police, and courts.

The bolding was added by me.

I think the real challenge of Libertarianism is not issues like Libertarian populism but rather the requirement that a Libertarian state protect against fraud.  I think that this is a more important the weaker that government gets, the more critical each function becomes.  Yet modern corporations are increasingly being allowed to get away with Fraud (and with changing of contracts).  These are huge problems because if you are going to enforce contracts against the politically weak, you also need to enforce them against the politically strong or you really do get feudalism. 

Trials like that of the S&P ratings schemes (where they argued ratings were puffery) are critical because it may be the case that a reasonable person might well think that misrepresentation was a form of fraud.  Saying that "lies=marketing" seems to be a rather obvious attempt to evade the antifraud portion of the states function. 

In the same sense, changing the rules under which a corporation operates can be an extremely dodgy move.  Changing the rules can be okay, but the optics are terrible when a major corporation shifts the rules when an initial attempt to do something fails.  It doesn't matter that the main victim is Carl Icahn. who is hardly at risk of poverty. 

To me, this is really the central issue of the modern Libertarian approach.  It isn't impossible that you could have a Libertarian populism, but I think the backbone of this approach would have to be that the same rules apply to everyone (even if they have a lot of money). 

Price discrimination at Ralph's

This is a new one on me.

I was in the grocery store last night when the thought hit me that I hadn't had a root beer float in a long time, too long in fact, but as I walked back and forth along the soda aisle I could not find any cheap root beer. There were various Coke and Pepsi products but to get a reasonable price you had to buy four (I don't drink much soda -- eight liters is a bit much). There were also expensive specialty brands, but no house brands. Annoyed, I grabbed a bottle of A&W and went on with my shopping only to see the store brands I was looking for one aisle over mixed in rather incongruously with the sports drinks.

Normally you'd expect to see the house brands near the corresponding name brand products, but I suspect that the previously mentioned "buy four" promotions prompted the shift, that given the choice between paying the inflated list price or dealing with the inconvenience of buying far more than they needed, too many customers were saying to hell with it and grabbing a Shasta or a Big K which had no restrictions and was even cheaper than the discounted name brands.

Given the competition from places like Wal-Mart and Food-4-Less and the 99 cents store, stocking cheap store brands can keep price sensitive customers coming back but making those brands hard to find can keep the less price sensitive customers spending more than they have to.

Worst Statistic of the Day

Via Lawyers, Guns, and Money comes the piece most detached from reality I've seen this year:

When Josh McFarland graduated from Stanford he owed $40,000 in student loans and couldn't fathom a way he'd ever pay it off and have a future for himself - not unusual for the typical young adult these days. Then he went to work for Google.

As a product manager, he got stock options and cashed them in over the five years he worked there. He married a fellow Google employee, so she had stock too. Then she moved on to Yelp, and he quit to launch TellApart, which provides technology solutions for e-commerce sites. Now 33, McFarland has a 3-year-old and a newborn and no longer has to think about his student loan: His company has $17.75 million in venture capital investment. While he doesn't consider himself retire-now rich, his piece of the company affords him what he calls "breathing room" and what other people might call wealth.

McFarland is on the starting end of Generation Y, the cohort born in the United States after 1980 that is typically portrayed as saddled with massive student debt, underemployed and underpaid. More than a third of the 80 million group of so-called millennials live with their parents, according to the Pew Research Group.

But McFarland is part of the sizeable minority that is doing quite well: 12 million Gen Y-ers make more than $100,000, according to the Ipsos MediaCT's Mendelsohn Affluent Survey. Many of them, in technology fields, live frugal work-based lifestyles and are not saddled with the six-digit student debt held by doctors and lawyers.

Paul Campos researched this statistic and discovered where it came from:

The source of the wrongheaded statistic appears to be this: the cited survey claims 59 million Americans live in households with incomes of $100,000 plus, and that 20% of “affluent consumers” are in the Gen Y cohort (this appears to mean that 20% of the adults who live in households with $100,000+ incomes are of this age). The story’s author then did some very bad math to generate the claim that “12 million Gen Y-ers make more than $100,000.” 

But that is totally different than these people making > $100,000 per annum.  That could also be people who are utterly unemployable living in their parent's basement. Or a trophy wife/husband of a hedge-fund billionaire. Or it could be 5 young adults sharing a house together, all making $22,000 a year as Starbucks' employees. 

At the very least it uses a highly no-representative sample and portrays the wealth of young adults in a completely misleading way.  This does not add to the conversation and it appears in the New York Times.  If only they had a prominent economist on staff who could consult over this type of data . . .

Weekend blogging -- Patents and product testing

Of course, these days I'm sure someone has patented the general idea of making a death ray. Perhaps that's an upside of having trolls.