blast-o-rama. • issue 067 • 2022-12-04
blast-o-rama.
issue 067 • 2022-12-04
butterflies, they are in my tummy
Greetings, dear readers. As I write this, I am currently watching the US lose to the Netherlands in the World Cup, and I am filled with anticipation for this evening’s Super Art Fight show. Super Art Fight, since it’s inception in 2008, has been based upon the bravado and over-the-top nature of pro-wrestling, and this evening — yesterday, as you read this — we are teaming with the Silver Spring, MD based pro-wrestling company Flying V Fights for a joint show. They consider their format as that of being a live-action comic book, so you can understand why we’re a perfect match. Having been a life long fan of wrestling, this is one of the few things we haven’t done in the nearly 15 years of SAF, and I’m incredibly excited to make this happen. In turn, the next few hours, I’ll be pacing, unsure what to do with myself until 8pm hits and the show is underway. Here goes nothing.
lord give me the confidence of james cameron
Terminator. Titanic. True Lies. The Abyss. Avatar. All movies which were incredibly expensive, pushed the filmmaking medium forum, and more importantly, shut up the naysayers who questioned why James Cameron was so damned driven to make these movies happen. With just a few weeks until the first of four (!) Avatar sequels hits theaters, GQ sat down with Cameron to understand the pressure he’s put himself under with Avatar: The Way of Water.
Nothing would work the first time Cameron and the production tried it. Or the second. Or usually the third. One day in Wellington, New Zealand, where Cameron was finishing the film, he showed me a single effects shot, numbered 405. “That means there’s been 405 versions of this before it gets to me,” he said. Cameron has been working on the movie since 2013; it was due out years ago. In September, he still wasn’t done. The Way of Water was expensive to make—How expensive? “Very fucking,” according to Cameron, who told me he’d informed the studio that the film represented “the worst business case in movie history.” In order to be profitable, he’d said, “you have to be the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history. That’s your threshold. That’s your break even.”
But as Cameron worked late into the evening, day after day, solving the infinite problems that The Way of Water continued to present, he seemed to be enjoying himself. “I like difficult,” he told me. “I’m attracted by difficult. Difficult is a fucking magnet for me. I go straight to difficult. And I think it probably goes back to this idea that there are lots of smart, really gifted, really talented filmmakers out there that just can’t do the difficult stuff. So that gives me a tactical edge to do something nobody else has ever seen, because the really gifted people don’t fucking want to do it.”
See Also: ‘Avatar’ and the Mystery of the Vanishing Blockbuster.
also from across the web
Other reads I enjoyed this week:
- Inside Trevor Noah’s Decision to Leave The Daily Show and What Comes Next – The Hollywood Reporter
- How Did AT&T’s $100 Billion Time Warner Deal Go So Wrong? - The New York Times
- Jordan Peele, Rian Johnson, Tony Kushner and THR Writers Roundtable – The Hollywood Reporter
- Jerry Seinfeld on ‘Comedians in Cars’ Book, Coffee, and Comedy - Esquire
- The Enduring Metal Genius of Metallica - The New Yorker
- Goncharov: why has the internet invented a fake Martin Scorsese film? - The Guardian
- Nicolas Cage and John Carpenter are cinema’s most studious eccentrics - Document
- What Kind of Man Was Anthony Bourdain? - The Atlantic
- The great Wikipedia fundraising controversy - Slate
thanks for reading.
Back with you for the next few weekends, then off for December 25th and January 1st. Thanks for letting me be a part of your day.
-Marty