Business, film and Chuck Lorre's vanity cards

Today’s WSJ has an amusing article about Chuck Lorre, a writer and producer of tv’s “Two and a Half Men” and “The Big Bang Theory.” Seems Lorre posts little vanity cards at the end of his shows that appear very briefly but can be read via dvr. The article has an example of a recent card from Monday. Here’s an excerpt:

When I began writing these vanity cards, I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day they would be the subject of an extensive article in The Wall Street Journal (or as I like to call it, The Depressingly Inevitable Next Step Toward the End of a Free Press in America, Thanks a Lot Rupert, Journal). But I digress into a bitter diatribe on the profit-fueled degradation of journalism that spells the end of any hope for rational debate in this country from my initial point — which is, gratitude for all the attention my cards are receiving. I mean, let’s face it, a vanity card, by definition, is merely an exercise in personal vanity. The truly legitimate production card at the end of each episode belongs to the Warner Brothers Corporation. They’re the monolithic, multi-tiered, entirely un-integrated, boy-did-we-make-a-colossal-boo-boo-with-AOL entity which owns the facility we shoot in, deficit-finances production, distributes the shows around the world, and most importantly, maintains the shaky book-keeping necessary to hide the profits while blowing a fortune on Speed Racer. . . .

This interests me because it perfectly supports my theory of capitalism in film. In my paper, Wall Street and Vine, I argue that artists in general, and film artists in particular, are not so much anti-business as anti-capitalist. They have that attitude because they believe the capitalists constrain creative expression – particularly in film, in which expression takes wads of money. In other words, anti-capitalism in film is a product of artists' resentment.

Why do the capitalists permit their vassals to smuggle this resentment into their films? Well, agency theory teaches us that constraints on agents are costly, and these costs are only worthwhile up to a point. It makes no sense to spend $10 to reduce theft by $9. By the same token, it would not pay for studios to put such tight constraints on their writers and directors that they could not attract the best people.

Thus, the best people get more slack. Or as Leslie Moonves says in the WSJ article: "If someone wants to give me two hit television shows, they won't hear from me -- except for when I'm going to get in trouble with the FCC."

Another way of looking at this is that giving artists more creative freedom is a way of paying them. The pay is pretty cheap, too, if the resentment is unleashed in a minor plot twist, for example, that doesn’t really bother most people, and pleases at least some of the audience. Why make the villain a possibly politically incorrect stereotype when you can use an evil drug company?

My theory focuses on film, and suggests that commercial television might be different because the need to sell advertising introduces a monitor in the form of the advertising market. So you wouldn’t expect Mr. Lorre’s screeds to go into the show. But a quick little shot only legible via dvr is a different matter.

Until this WSJ article, I had only a lot of circumstantial evidence of my artists' resentment theory of anti-capitalism in film. But now I’ve got a great anecdote, which after all is the singular of data.

Comments

[Xmas]

Actually...

Lorre started doing the vanity cards before DVRs. He put them at the end of Dharma and Greg, and people that used to record the shows on VCRs got a nice treat by pausing the show when the vanity card was up.