Nothing to see here

Really.

I've moved operations over to: http://mrjeremydylan.tumblr.com/

Much shinier.

Only 4 hours left to help fund my documentary on 2-time Grammy winner Jim Lauderdale

As you probably know if you've been in any kind of contact with me in the last two months - either in the real world or social media - I'm making a documentary about Jim Lauderdale.

For the uninitiated, Jim is the best dressed man in Americana music. Writer of hit country tunes for George Strait, Patty Loveless, Blake Shelton, the Dixie Chicks and more, winner of 2 Grammys for his stellar, bluegrass albums, host of 2 radio shows and the annual Americana Music Awards and tai chi master.

I've been working in the country music industry here in Australia for the past five years and have been lucky enough to become friends with Jim. He may be the nicest man in show business. He's also had an unconventional, twisted kind of career and has worked with everyone from Elvis Costello to Willie Nelson.

We were touring the Beatles museum in Liverpool a couple of years ago when I got the notion that his life and career would make a great documentary film. I pitched it to Jim, he signed off and last June I took off to Music City, USA - otherwise known as Nashville. I got to interview folks like Buddy Miller, Gary Allan, Jerry Douglas and Randy Kohrs. Saw Jim get inducted into the Blue Ridge Hall of Fame. Fun times.

That footage ended up as a 45-minute documentary for Australia's Country Music Channel, which premiered last month and aired six or seven times across March. It was well received too. At the CMC Rocks the Hunter festival this year, one of the artists found out I was the director and hugged me.

But you can only tell so much story in 45-minutes, especially when you're paying for it all out of your own back pocket. So in the intervening period since wrapping filming last year, I got together with a great producer named Chris Kamen and we've been putting together a plan to return to the US and cut a swathe through Tennessee, California and North Carolina - capturing Jim on the road and in the studio and picking up interviews some of the collaborators I couldn't schedule the first time around.

To finance the second round of filming, we took to the crowdfunding site IndieGoGo. Over the past forty-five days, we've raised an astounding $10,783! We couldn't have done this without the support of people like the Americana Music Association, British film and television critic Boyd Hilton, Whispering Bob Harris, BBC Radio FiveLive's Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo and the incomparable Stephen Fry - who continues to be exceedingly nice to me for no good reason.

It's been damn inspiring to see the love for Jim and his music that people out there have. The comments accompanying donations about personal connections with songs and experiences with Jim over the years have made me doubly sure I'm right to tell his story. It also puts a pretty big weight of responsibility on my shoulders to not fuck this up.

The fundraising campaign is almost at an end - but don't fret! You can still give me money help fund the documentary! Just go here: http://www.indiegogo.com/Jim-Lauderdale-The-King-of-Broken-Hearts

Every dollar helps. Lots of dollars help more! But seriously, I'm so grateful for everyone who's spared us some of their hard-earned cash. Y'all rock. And when I jump on a plane on Sunday to head to the US, you're the wind at my back.

See you on the LauderTrail!

- Jeremy Dylan

A response to the response to the response

Hollywood screenwriter and part-time Eddie Stubbs impersonator John August has blogged in response to my response to his podcast in response to trends in... and I've gone cross-eyed.

Mr. August's blog post can be found here: http://johnaugust.com/2012/ownership-in-a-digital-age

His argument is very persuasive and the benefits of this kind of cloud-style renting scheme are clear. I suspect, as with many technological innovations, the tipping point will be generational. Just the generation of adolescents to follow my own have entered a world in which digital music downloading is a norm and not something they have to adjust to, future generations of kids will ease into a cloud service without reservations.

The biggest hurdle for me is the lack of a transfer of control. The media is controlled by a company, to whom you pay for the privilege of watching it. If your relationship with the company is compromised in any number of ways, you lose that access.

I've been buying DVDs for eleven years now, and my attitudes regarding media ownership have been shaped by my experiences through that period. Were I born today, my adolescent experiences would probably leave me with a very different perspective.

In matters such as these, it's always good to refer to Douglas Adams' rules governing our reactions to technology:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;


2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;


3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.


Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

I'm a little over eight years shy of thirty, but I've often been told I have the mind of an elderly British person.

The last paragraph of Mr. August's blog strikes an optimistic tone:

But that’s me. I rarely re-watch movies. I rarely re-read books. For folks wired the other way — which I suspect is a sizable majority — ownership of atoms makes a lot of sense. I think we’ll continue to have ways to buy physical books and movies. It’s not either/or.


Aside from my surprise that August rarely re-watches movies - I thought addiction of that kind was epidemic among writers and directors - this presents a hopeful picture of the path forward.

I see the points in the plus column on this - I know plenty of, mostly my age, people who'd love to the cloud services reach prominence. I just hope they continue to cater to us old timers who like stacking things on our shelves.

Now that's enough procrastination. Time to get back to writing my Sarah Palin origin story screenplay...

The Collapse of the Ownership Society

CDs should be more expensive!

But more on that later...

John August and Craig Mazin are Hollywood screenwriters. August, among other things, wrote the film and upcoming stage musical versions of Big Fish, and Mazin, among other things, wrote the seventh highest grossing film of 2011. Together, the two host an increasingly excellent podcast named Scriptnotes, which concerns itself with screenwriting and the business of being a screenwriter.

In a recent episode, August and Mazin presaged a dystopian future in which entertainment exists only in an ethereal online space and nobody owns anything. Apparently, we are marching inexorably towards this brave new world and any attempts to halt the approach would be futile.

In summary, in the future, people will rent everything. You won't buy DVDs, or even digital files. When you want a movie, you get out your phone, computer and/or television and find the film online through an app or website (ala Hulu or HBO Go) and pay a small charge, allowing you to stream the film across any devices you happen to own that can do so. You might start watching Back to the Future III on your laptop, then need to go buy some milk. So you pick up your iPhone and watch the second act on that while you walk back and forth to the grocery store, then finish it off on your iPad-thin 60-inch television when you return home.

That probably sounds ideal to a lot of people. Personally, I haven't rented a movie since Tony Blair left Parliament. I don't have the time to watch all the DVDs that I own, let alone wander down to Blockbuster and pay money for the right to watch one movie in extremely limited time period. I don't want my viewing habits dictated by the distribution method - except for that wonderful period at the start of a film's release life when you get to sit in a darkened room with a bunch of strangers and watch a pristine print on a massive screen.

I like owning things. I own The Philadelphia Story. I own all seven seasons of The West Wing. I own The Last Waltz. I paid a one-off charge at a store at some point, and in exchange, I own these things. I can watch them as often as I feel like, whenever I feel like, in perpetuity, and it costs me nothing further. I don't need to be connected to the internet to do so. And no one can take away my ability to watch it. If I come across someone who's never seen The West Wing (seriously?), then I can lend them my copy. While they have it, I can't watch it, which is only fair. If they get bitten by the Sorkin bug, they can trot off and buy their own copies, and enjoy the associated privileges I listed above.

To shift gears slightly, I'd like to put forth an idea: CDs should cost more.

I could make a similar argument with DVDs, but it's much more true for CDs, so I'll make it for them instead.

This transition away from ownership and towards a renting/streaming/cloud-based method of experiencing entertainment is a consequence of the devaluation of entertainment products that has been in full force since the beginning of online music piracy over a decade. Young people don't like paying for shit at the best of times, but these last couple of batches of young people don't feel like music is something that should be paid for. I should know, I'm 21.

At a rough estimate, half the people in my age bracket have illegally downloaded at least half of their music collections. I know one aspiring musician who has never paid for a single song, let alone an album. I have a feeling that were they to reach stardom and find themselves unable to maintain a living wage due to the impact of piracy on their record sales, they would fail to appreciate the irony. It simply never occurs to them to buy music instead of stealing it.

One of the results of this is that I pay less for CDs now than I did when I was fourteen. If CD prices had risen commensurate with inflation, they'd be sitting around $40, rather than $15-20. Is that an excessively high price?

If I go to Subway, I pay $6 for a sandwich that I'll finish in five minutes. A few hours later, I'll be hungry and need to eat something else. If I spent $15 - or even $40 - on a copy of, say, Who's Next by The Who, I will experience countless hours of unimaginable joy, comfort, pleasure and emotional release over the next sixty-something years. I'll never need to pay for the CD again (it's already been remastered, so no jokes about that) and I can put the songs on my iPod, phone and computer at no extra charge. That one payment I made to JB Hi-Fi when I was seventeen will still be paying off when I'm in my eighties. I'd call that a bargain. Yet, I still hear people bitching about CDs being overpriced.

Renting makes sense for things you are only going to use once at a very specific time, especially if it's staring obsolesce in the face. I'm not going to buy a large truck because I know I'll need to move house at some point in the future, I'll rent it on the day I actually need to get a wardrobe across town. That money doesn't result in any permanent ownership for me, but there's no reason for me to own a truck. I'm unlikely be sitting at home, too broke to go out for the night, and think 'Thank god I own that truck - there's a night's entertainment', the way I sometime do with my copy of L. A. Confidential.

Renting is dead money. It's like food, except food is a one-off experience by necessity. I'm not one of those people who fetishizes jewel cases, but I want to own things. And I can't afford to rent.

Relevant Links:
- While I was typing this out, John August wrote a great blog post on digital distribution platforms.
- If you live in Australia, JB Hi-Fi stocks an excellent selection of CDs and DVDs at wonderful prices.
- The best movie I saw last year was Midnight In Paris, which you can buy now on DVD or Blu-Ray. Allen's acceptance speech for Best Screenplay at the Golden Globes was the best of the night, although it featured fewer jokes about Michael Fassbender's penis than George Clooney's.