That was fun yesterday—in case you missed it, I randomly blew off steam about an old pet peeve of mine, which is when we’d release a cool CD and people would immediately respond, “Now, we need...” and list the next score they wanted.
Here is the message board discussion that resulted. There’s also one the FSM Facebook page (please “like” that, if you haven’t done so already?).
To be clear: I’m not actually upset when people say this. As long as people are not hostile to other users or defamatory or insane—all opinions are welcome on our message board. I truly mean that.
I think business owners who try to police their audience’s opinions and constantly need praise and affirmation from them are just a bunch of losers. And that’s my opinion!
The best reaction, for me personally, came from Michael V. Gerhard at La-La Land Records—who reminded me that we, the label producers, would do the exact same thing to the film companies! They’d give us a license for our pet title, and we’d immediately hit them up for the next thing we wanted.
It reminded me of one of my all-time favorite emails, circa 2010, the beginning of which is quoted above: “Lukas—You’re killing here here.” (This was after I sent her a proposal for a bunch of catalog titles, some of them painfully obscure, with barely any license money involved.)
I say “favorite” not because I relish the thought of (metaphorically) killing anybody, but because this particular executive (name redacted to protect her identity) was super awesome and accommodating to us, and to me personally.
She made several of my dream projects happen...and yet I couldn’t help but try to take so many chomps at the apple, she was searching for the ejector seat button. Sorry!
But it goes to show—we’re all human. And because we all like this obscure music, we’re all pushy and demanding, in our way, to capitalize on any opportunity to access it.
In other news, I’ve recorded a new YouTube “screenplay show” with my friend Charlie Vignola:
In this one, we critique script loglines that were tweeted to us for our feedback.
I think it’s reasonably educational, but we’re trying to figure out if this is something we should do on a regular basis. I’m just not sure how comfortable people will be sending loglines, or bracing themselves for our constructive criticism of their idea to be immortalized on YouTube.
Doing this show is a reminder that promoting anything in this day and age is so very difficult. On the one hand, it’s simpler than ever, with social media...but to cut through the clutter, you need a celebrity, a famous movie franchise, or very attractive people in underwear—middle-aged talking heads are probably the hardest thing to promote!
But we’re having a good time doing it—and I’m grateful to Charlie, whose 30-year career at Jerry Bruckheimer Productions gives him way more credibility than I’ll ever have.
Briefly...
If you have a sec (and that’s all it takes), can you go to my imdb.com page to artificially boost my stupid “star rating”?
Thanks!