We went to see The Great Gatsby last night.
Hated it.
Hated… hated… hated…
OK.
Hated.
Talking about it to Lisa over dinner after the movie (she rather liked it, I think), she asked why I hated it so much.
Aside from all the gratuitous 3D ‘special effects’, my biggest problem was the simplicity of the characters; their two-dimensional characters (ironic in a 3D movie).
I said, “compare it to Breaking Bad. In Breaking Bad the characters are all so complex and engaging.”
Like everyone else, (as far as I can tell), we are watching Breaking Bad in one of those marathon events that Netflix now allows you to do.
We also watched Mad Men in this way.. and The Killing (the Scandinavian version), and The Bridge (likewise), and now House of Cards (BBC version).
Overall, with the exception of House Hunters International, we have pretty much abandoned conventional TV.
In the ‘olden days’ we used to compare TV to movies. Movies won.
Movies were ‘overpowering’, when they worked.
Watching Star Wars (to show my age and then some) on the ‘big screen’ (to show my age again) was simply mind-blowing compared to watching something on a TV set, even if it was 25″ (again, to show my age).
The technology of movie-making, always on the cutting edge of CGI, was astounding.
But then, a funny thing happened.
As the technology got better, the story lines and character developments seemed to get progressively weaker.
Maybe this was bad writing, but maybe it was something else.
As Lisa pointed out to me, Breaking Bad and Mad Men have lots of time to allow their characters to develop. The Great Gatsby doesn’t.
The Great Gatsby is only (only???) 142 minutes.
Even if it seemed like endless hours, 142 minutes, while very long for a movie, is a fairly short time to develop complex characters (particularly when you have to leave space for dead bodies being tossed into the air, particularly if you repeat the same shot three times. (But enough complaining)).
Breaking Bad is now in its fifth season. At 13 shows to a season, that is 780 minutes per season, times five seasons or 3900 minutes devoted to Breaking Bad vs. the 142 minutes devoted to The Great Gatsby.
That’s a big difference.
The Great Gatsby was produced at a cost of somewhere between $105m and $127m (that’s the web for you). That comes out to just a tad under $775,000 per minute.
Breaking Bad is produced at a cost of $3m per episode, which comes out to $39m per episode or just a tad under $200m for the five seasons combined. (OR… $50,000 per minute).
By way of comparison, Mad Men is budgeted at $2.5m per episode or $41,666 per minute.
Where is your money better spent?
One might argue that the returns on The Great Gatsby will be far greater than the costs. Maybe this is true, maybe once you factor in the distribution and promotion costs this is not so true (see Hollywood Bookkeeping). But even if it is a success, for every Great Gatsby there is a Water World.
What makes the Netflix/Online experience of watching Mad Men or The Killing or House of Cards or Breaking Bad so interesting is that it is not television; and it is not the movies.
The web is evolving into a third medium or entertainment. A place where you can watch what you want, when you want for as long as you want.
And, as things like Mad Men or Breaking Bad live on the web forever (unlike The Great Gatsby which will soon be replaced by something else at my local theater), have an extremely long tail.
It is true that The Great Gatsby will soon enough migrate to Netflix, but there it will be measured head to head with Breaking Bad. Complex characters vs. simply drawn characters. I think in that post-cinema world Breaking Bad wins hands down.
Copyright Michael Rosenblum 2013
1 Comment
Malcolm Thomson May 20, 2013
Your post took me back almost exactly twenty years. Until 1993 it had been my ambition to make my career as a cinéaste, producing theatrical motion pictures.I had achieved this goal in the context of two or three movies, low budget productions in France.
But I realized that film production involved a disproportionate investment of time… the efforts to raise the financing, the pitch to distributors, the prep prior to shooting, the actual principal photgrapahy and then the post production… when compared with the final output of a couple of hours of entertainment. Three years easily invested, and all for two hours of end product on the big screen.
I had a hard time explaining to colleagues that I welcomed a move from cinema to television soap opera. Five half-hour episodes delivered week in, week out! A storyworld expanding and deepening over decades! Characters who over time become as complex and rounded as any of the people we know in real life.
I shall certainly use your post to encourage much younger colleagues to start in long-form episodic drama before taking on the challenge of one-off short-form filmmaking.