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Let’s Be (A Little) Evil
Via Reason, here’s a small but delicious little story:
Charlie Lyne, a filmmaker and critic based in London, started a Kickstarter project in November to finance his movie Paint Drying, which is exactly what it sounds like. The [British Board of Film Classification] requires filmmakers to pay per minute for films to be watched and then classified, so the more money Lyne raised, the more paint-drying footage he could make the censors watch. Some 686 backers and 5,936 pounds ($8,666.56) later, the final film is 607 minutes long. […] Mandatory censorship is repulsive enough, but the BBFC throws salt in the wound by requiring filmmakers to pay for their own classification. To obtain a rating, there is an initial fee of 101 pounds ($147) with an additional 7.09 pounds ($10.35) per minute of footage. Even a relatively short 90-minute feature would cost over a thousand U.S. dollars. You can also be charged more if you want to release a 2D and a 3D version of the same movie.
After the BBFC has watched your film and rated it for theatrical release, it requires you to pay 57 pounds ($83) plus 4.56 pounds ($7) per minute if you want to sell DVDs. To screen a trailer for your movie in theaters, there’s a 76 pound ($111) submission fee, plus 6.08 pounds ($9) per minute. All of this creates the same barrier-to-entry issues we see in other heavily regulated industries. Costs that don’t faze large studios can be prohibitive to smaller ones and independent filmmakers looking to make a name for themselves.
I like several things about this: It’s funny; Nobody actually gets hurt; The damage is focused entirely on those who deserve it; And it makes the right people look like fools. And while it may not accomplish much on its own besides eliciting a bit of deserved schadenfreude, it could be an effective part of a larger strategy in pursuit of a specific goal.
For us, that goal could be something along the lines of that described by Charles Murray in By The People. In addition to his proposed Madison Fund — which seeks to make enforcement of bad laws prohibitively expensive and/or troublesome for the government — we might be able to use this sort of tactic to play a little offense … and have some fun.
But like the Madison Fund — which wouldn’t fight all regulation, but only the most wrong-headed and oppressive — it’d be important for anyone employing this sort of trolling to choose its targets well. Harassing Muslim store owners into serving non-halal food exposes the madness of modern public accommodations law, but it’s both unjust to the Muslim who was (literally) minding his business and makes us look like jerks .. because we’d be jerks to do that. I’d much rather target people who are actually to blame for undermining society than take advantage of a convenient bystander.
So Ricochet, put your thinking caps on. There are race-hustlers, regulators, and busybodies who need to be messed with.
Published in Culture
Its called black knighting and its awesome.
What a fantastic story.
Can we make congress participate in SS, Medicare and Obamacare?
I also pay a tax in London to own a TV. They actually came to my flat to determine if I had one since none was registered at my address. (I don’t, so they left empty handed). Mandatory funding for the BBC.
They are a good bit more accustomed to invasive government over here.
This is a great story.
But as usual the joke is on us: it’s very likely the government bureaucrat didn’t actually watch the whole thing (and not as they would another entry).
This sounds stupid. The ratings people did not bother to watch that movie I am sure of it.
At a random point in the 607 minutes one includes some 10-15 second scene which absolutely requires a classification under current regulation.
If missed well then of course there must be explanations, investigations, questions to Parliament regarding why the BBFC fell down on the job…
Ah but what if they randomly stuck painted nudes drying, or worse some religious saying painted on a wall, like “the truth will set you free” or “thou shall not bear false witness”.
I was once harassed by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. I bought a Brooklyn brownstone that had replacement windows, which were installed by the previous owner. Allegedly, someone complained about the windows, but only after I bought the property. (This is what the LPC told me.) In any event, the windows were non-compliant, because along the top they were straight, and they should have been slightly arched.
I kid you not.
The LPC caused me some misery and wasted my time over a couple of years, but their enforcement is weak, so I was not fined, and I dragged out my movement toward compliant-window installation as much as possible. The primary hammer the LPC wields is to prevent the sale of a property that has a violation outstanding.
(By the way, I said to the LPC, “I am not an expert in the window regulations; I don’t see how I would have known the windows were not compliant; if I had asked, would you have sent an inspector to view the property before I bought it, to assure me that there was nothing that could constitute a violation?” The answer: “No.”)
Eventually, the time came to sell the property. Fortuitously, I discovered that in the LPC’s system the address they had entered for my house was incorrect! Therefore, I was able sell it, as it was not flagged as a property with an outstanding violation.
(To be continued.)
(Continued.)
My proposal to harass the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission:
One of the sweetest things Mrs. Of England has ever done for me is to go without television for years in support of my protest against the BBC. What makes this even sweeter is that
a: I wasn’t living with her for most of this time (at the point she agreed to it, I was in Iraq, later in England rather than Scotland, then in the US),
b: I did generally have TV where I lived; she was joining me in a fast that I wasn’t really partaking of. Obviously, US and Iraqi TV ownership doesn’t fund iniquity, and I stayed with my parents when I was in London, in blatant contradiction of the biblical concept of marriage (in which a man leaves his parents and cleaves unto his wife). My parents were much less likely to do the right thing and stick it to the Beeb.
c: She really likes the BBC and approves of it being funded. The issue for me is one of a terrible organization being funded in a terrible way. For her, it’s one of a great organization being funded in a kind of bad way.
Happily, introducing her to Netflix and Amazon Video later took a little of the sting, but I remain supremely grateful.
Is the 3D version of the movie worth wearing those weird glasses for 607 minutes?
Yes, and then every two years we hold a public vote on whether to continue those programs, so they can sit and wring their hands about their future, too…
They need to make a longer sequel called “Tap Dripping.”
Meh.
I think that a movie ratings system is useful to the public. If you are making a movie and you want to show it in theaters, then it is good for the public to know before they view the movie what sort of content it might contain. If there needs to be an exclusion for art-house films that can be addressed via legislation.
DVD’s generally contain content that is not in the theatrical release so it is not crazy to ask for a re-rate of the material.
Anyway, for a typical movie of 100 minutes the fees do not seem outrageous. Although it seems to me this could be an opportunity for privatization which would likely lower rating fees. I would watch a 100 minute movie and make notes to classify them for much less than $1,150 and I am pretty reliable.
Mischievous ≠ Evil
(Then again, the etymology of “mischief” is “bad ending”. Hmm…)
Yeah, yeah, it’s cute. And as impotent rages against the heavens go, it’s creative. I retain my belief that Charles Murray is whistling past the graveyard with the Madison Fund. You cannot be a little in rebellion. If the system is as corrupt as he thinks it is, do you really think a lawyer who refuses to go after the most obvious source of corruption (taxation, religious liberty) is going to so much as slow the rot one inch? They’ll simply go around him -or if that fails, find some way to crush the lawyer. Then go around him.
Been done before to some success. The “yak fat” case helped end the Interstate Commerce Commission. A Nebraska trucking company, tired of proposing freight tariffs, entered a proposed tariff of $0.45 per cwt for hauling yak fat from Omaha to Chicago. The rate was duly entered, and the competing railroads contested the rate, so the ICC repealed the tariff. The dispute hit the papers and a reporter asked the trucker how many yaks there were in Nebraska, and he said maybe a couple in zoos, but if there were a market for yak fat, he was willing to haul it to Chicago for 45 cents a hundred weight.
That case and a few others showed the silliness of federal regulation of freight rates, and helped start deregulation in the 1970s.
The guy should up the ante by throwing in a joke about Islam* somewhere around the 400 minute mark.
*originally I was going to say throw a pair of boobs on the screen, but then I figured that the censors wouldn’t care much about those and might actually be amused by it.
And 401K only. No more pensions.
Interstate commerce yak fat regulation could be “snapped back” a lot faster than sanctions against Iran!