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If your movie pitch got rejected, perhaps you weren’t using the right buzzwords. Mike Jacobsen of See Mike Draw explains the secret of pitching a blockbuster to Hollywood: Link
See also Mike Jacobsen’s T-Shirt designs at the NeatoShop
Could your friendly neighborhood Blockbuster be a relic of the past? Yes, according to Douglas A. McIntyre of 24/7 Wall St. In fact, Blockbuster is just one of 10 national brands that may disappear as soon as next year:
Blockbuster was the national leader in the video rental business for nearly two decades. Now it is contemplating Chapter 11 to eliminate debt. The company lost $65 million last quarter. Its revenue continues to fall rapidly as firms such as Redbox and NetFlix (Nasdaq: NFLX – News) siphon off its revenue. Blockbuster has more than 6,000 stores, so it is hard to imagine that the company could disappear. But, there is some precedent, even if it is on a smaller scale. Blockbuster rival Movie Gallery said in February that it would close all of its 2,400 U.S. stores. Blockbuster’s model of renting movies through physical locations has been destroyed by cable and satellite video on demand, DVDs via mail and dispensing machines. Blockbuster may still be around as a company that has movie kiosks and a small mail and Internet-delivered content business. But its brick and-mortar business is dead.
Link (Photo: TheTruthAbout [Flickr]) – via Yahoo!
Trivia for you: Back in 2000, when Netflix was young and losing money, Blockbuster had a chance to scoop the company for a mere $50 million. Instead, they decided to ink a 20-year deal with Enron on video-on-demand when the energy company was getting into telecom. Now, Netflix is a billion dollar company, and we all know how Enron ended!
It makes sense that a movie has to conform to our average attention span. This way we will not get bored during the film. Cornell University psychologist James Cutting has worked out the formula for delivering a blockbuster hit.
To find out whether the length of camera shots in films might follow 1/f too, Cutting measured the duration of every shot in 150 high-grossing Hollywood movies in various genres released between 1935 and 2005. He then turned these into a series of waves for each film. He found that later films were more likely to obey the 1/f law than earlier ones (Psychological Science, in press). But he stresses that it isn’t just fast-paced action films like Die Hard II that follow 1/f. Rather, the important thing is having shots of similar length that recur in a regular pattern throughout a film.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
David Thorne is at it again. The guy who tried to pay a bill with a picture of a spider and suffered through a surprise apartment inspection now has overdue video rentals. The correspondence between Thorne and Blockbuster Video goes about as you’d expect (if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance…), but there is a delicious twist at the end.
Dear Megan,
With the possible exception of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, the movies were not worth watching let alone stealing. In Logan’s Run, for example, the computer crashed at the end when presented with conflicting facts and blew up destroying the entire city. When my computer crashes I carry on a little bit and have a cigarette while it is rebooting. I don’t have to search through rubble for my loved ones. The same programmers probably designed the Blockbuster ‘returned or not’ database.
Aaron Siebers, 27, had a problem. He was skateboarding one afternoon, fell, and ripped his Blockbuster-issued khakis. Worried about getting "written up," Aaron hatched a criminally (not so) brilliant plan:
Instead of just calling in sick, he stabbed himself in the leg and showed up at work claiming to have just been attacked by three Hispanic males. Siebers, who told cops he was assaulted as he walked toward the Blockbuster in Edgewater, had a deep stab wound in one leg and several other minor cuts on his face and stomach. As investigators began hunting for the assailants, they reviewed surveillance video from outside a Target store where Siebers claimed the attack occurred. The footage, however, showed no such assault. Confronted by cops, Siebers, pictured in the below mug shot, admitted that he had stabbed himself. He told investigators about the skateboarding accident, the resulting ripped pants, and how "he did not want to lose his job so he stabbed himself in the leg," according to an arrest affidavit sworn by Officer Shawna Naumann.
Cooks in Liberia are wily geniuses when it comes to recycling stuff. No oven? Not a problem – just take an old Blockbuster Video Quik Drop box and make it into one!
Details over at AfriGadget:
They showed me the oven, a big metal cabinet against the far wall; looks like a refrigerator on legs, to allow a coal pit to fit under the bottom, but when I get near it, I see it’s a Blockbuster Quick Drop Booth! The front, where the slit had been closed, faces the wall and the back door is to access the oven; inside are several fridge trays, on which they lay the pans. The door is then locked with a simple bolt and sealed all around with wet cloths.
The cake was fabulous.
Link – via BB Gadgets
