 |  |  |  |  |
the
current
Monday
Report
below!
This week's report by Steve Kostecke,
Editor-in-Chief of the ULA
"The Oscar for Best
Product Placement"
The movie Capote provides a clear example of how today’s Arts &
Entertainment conveyor belt rolls along. Just by sorting out a handful
of facts about the film and the book it was semi-created to advertise,
a lot is revealed about how today’s conglomerate publishing houses
operate.
Fact #1: The film Capote was made by Sony Pictures, part of the
Sony conglomerate.
One of the subtle tricks of the disseminate-for-gain media is to
seamlessly weave various products together – preferably products
produced within the same conglomerate – in such a way that
“consumers” (which is our role in existence) do not realize that they
are getting the hard sell. Think of a show as popular as Sex and the
City and the cocktails that the women drink – like the “Absolut
Hunk,” which was created by the show for the show’s “consumers”
and which is now a common item on hip cocktail menus throughout
urban America. Point being: In Cold Blood is the “Absolut Hunk” of
Capote if not of the whole movie season of 2005. This differs from a
flick like the latest Harry Potter, since that franchise consists of
movies directly based on the book series. The twist with Capote is: it
isn’t based on In Cold Blood; it was half-created for the promotion of
In Cold Blood (the basis of this halfness is coming up). Capote was
conceived and carried out with such an overbearing product-
placement in it – leaving the viewer overly-salivating to purchase the
product by movie’s end – that one has to be suspicious about Sony
Pictures’s motives and where the product originates.
Fact #2: The book In Cold Blood is published under the Vintage
imprint within Random House within the German-based Bertelsmann
conglomerate
Sony and Bertelsmann are separate conglomerates, of course – but,
Sony contains no book publishing component, and Bertelsmann
contains no movie production component. Why did the two of them
work together to whip fallow lit into an Oscar-grasping flick? As it
turns out:
Fact #3: Sony and Bertelsmann combined forces to form the
enormously profitable Sony BMG Music Entertainment company in
November 2003 (50% Sony; 50% Bertelsmann) (the 50% of
Bertelsmann representing the go go go for the marketing of In Cold
Blood in Capote)
Two and a half years ago, then, these two behemoths began what I’ll
call an initial experiment in merging. Not that Sony or Bertelsmann
are only testing the waters with each other: they have a variety of
slight overlaps with other conglomerates in other areas of the media.
The big boys – all of them – are constantly in flux and elbowing their
ways towards a more primary and profitable position. Keep in mind:
in 1980 there were about 40 disparate media corporations in control
of what Americans overall saw, read, heard, and, essentially, thought.
Today there are only about ten conglomerates that take care of this
mind control for us. This trend of mergers and concentration of
ungodly wealth into smaller and smaller pinpoints will no doubt
continue – till in the future we may end up talking about the past
“Corporate Wars” and how the prevailing Corporation provides for
us all (this allusion taken from the original film Rollerball – made
three decades ago!). To suggest as I am that Sony and Bertelsmann
worked very closely together on the making of Capote should be no
extraordinary claim. To suggest even further as I am that the two
conglomerates will officially coalesce in more areas than just music
in the not-too-distant future – say, book publishing and film
production? – is also not very far out of hand. The incredible
financial success of Sony BMG Music Entertainment and now of
Capote must be a mouth-drooling appetizer. Just take a gander at the
next fact:
Fact #4: As of March 2006, the sales of In Cold Blood have been
ranked in the teens at amazon.com!
This is an amazing achievement in marketing for a book that came
out forty years ago, and sheer genius on how to make profit from
great writers of the past when there are no great (corporately-
published) writers of the present. When a movie comes out with
characters in it who describe a book as “astonishing” and making
claims that the face of American Literature will forever be changed
by it – how can “consumers” resist? They’ve had so little
astonishment the past twenty-five years, they’re pushovers. It’s a
cakewalk. And the fact that Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Oscar
for best actor just adds icing to that cake.
And consider this: all the push-and-shove of In Cold Blood that is
experienced scene after scene after scene in Capote, when there was
a literary movement and another novel – On The Road, by a writer
whom Capote disparaged – that was still in process at that time of
honestly changing forever the face of American literature and culture
and bringing about the rise of the New Left. In Cold Blood was, in
comparison, not much more than literary-elite-ism-as-usual, with an
author who gallivanted about and cherished how he basked in the
celebrity literati limelight. But you would never guess so much from
watching the film Capote. You come out of the theater inspired with
the belief that In Cold Blood was the absolutely most important book
of its era. The suits at Bertelsmann that overlord Random House
must be grinning profusely.
My point in all this is: writers and writers-to-be need to comprehend
that books nowadays are nothing but products in conglomerate eyes
– at the exact same level, for instance, as boxes of cereal or erectile-
dysfunction pills. As soon as this is grasped, the essential nature of
the American publishing realm can be clearly understood. Capote isn’
t a movie based on In Cold Blood: Capote is a movie based on selling
In Cold Blood. (And it’s not even truly a bio-pic: it deals only with
the five years that Truman Capote worked on the book.) In Cold
Blood is a product like any other product that comes off an assembly
line. And because it’s nothing but a product, it must be nothing but
sold, and profit margins must be nothing but met or, hopefully,
surpassed.
The newish aspect of this legerdemain brought about by the Sony and
Bertelsmann overlap is the way they have hoodwinked the public
into believing that Capote is wholly “film art” (and Oscars maintain
this belief) when, in fact, it is one-half art – granted – but it’s also
one gigantic half sly and skillful advertising.
Expect to see more and more of this seamless integration of products
in this fashion. It’s the next logical step. Innovative ways of reviving
such things as great books and great writers have to be conjured up,
especially since the literary fiction and writers that the corporate
publishers are foisting on the American public these days are of such
an inauthentic, indoctrinated, and just plain sick nature (see the ULA
website for our documentation of this claim). The machinery of
today’s corporate publishing world only succeeds in repulsing – both
actively and passively – writers of significance who have something
significant to say about our society and selves. It doesn’t matter
where you’re from, what your origins are. If your product – or
“book” as you may call it – cannot be proven to people with MBAs
and no concept of literary merit that it is saleable, then it is not
worthy of the production line. “Literary merit” is an alien beast to
the people who inhabit the offices on Madison Avenue. They studied
business, not art; money, not soul.
And there you have it: because of this current corrupted nature of the
state of American Lit & Letters – where only things with a corporate
stamp of approval on them are efficiently produced, distributed, and
readily made available to “consumers” – the only true literary voices
worth listening to are struggling in the independent and underground
publishing scenes. The samizdat press – just as it used to be during
Soviet Russia – is now the only place to find literary authenticity in
America. Think on that.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Kostecke edits the ULA’s communal lit-zine Slush Pile, which
can be purchased in the ULA zine and book store.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GO HERE TO ENTER THE MONDAY REPORT BOX.
