Bits Blog: Hollywood Director Takes On Texting While Driving

Hollywood Undead — Ex-Singer Sues Band Over ‘Brutal’ Beatdown

Hollywood Undead
Ex-Singer Sues Band
Over 'Brutal' Beatdown
Former Hollywood Undead singer Aron "Deuce" Erlichman didn't just quit his band ... he's now SUING them for assault and battery -- claiming they ambushed him outside an L.A. club ... and beat the holy hell out of him.

TMZ broke the story ... Erlichman filed a police report against ex-bandmates Dylan "FunnyMan" Alvarez and Jorel "J-Dog" Decker earlier this year, claiming they jumped him outside Angels & Kings in Hollywood on May 25th ... punching, kicking, and stomping him.

Now, he's filed a lawsuit against them and others -- claiming the "brutal" attack caused permanent damage to him and his friend, who was also allegedly victimized in the beating.

Erlichman -- repped by courthouse colossus Donald Karpel -- is suing for unspecified damages.

Calls to the Hollywood Undead were not returned.

Hollywood Ponders a Path From App to Hit Show

Hollywood is watching and wondering. It would help solve a continual problem for studios, which require more fresh source material than is available. With production companies cranking out more than 700 films and 50 major new television shows a year, even agents joke that there are no new ideas, only new screenwriters.

Lately, a mobile start-up called Outfit7 has been offering itself as a potential solution. Outfit7 is behind Talking Friends, a collection of 19 apps in which cartoon animals respond to a user’s touch and repeat (almost) anything in funny voices.

The Talking Friends apps, most of which are free, are hugely popular — about 500 million global downloads and more than 120 million active monthly users, according to an Outfit7 executive, Narry Singh, who uses the title “chief business guru.”

Guided by senior agents at William Morris Endeavor, Outfit7 has recently started to pursue movie and television deals based on its characters, which include Tom, an irreverent cat, and Ben, a gassy dog. “The studio system is waking up to the power of mobile as a form of franchise creation — that the next Shrek or Mickey Mouse could start as an app,” contended Andy Mooney, an adviser to Talking Friends and the former chairman of Disney Consumer Products.

Some evidence backs him up. Disney has television work on the drawing board for Swampy, the smiling reptilian star of its mobile game Where’s My Water? An Angry Birds movie is planned for 2015, shepherded by the former chairman of Marvel Studios.

But entertainment company partners also seem to be reacting with caution. DreamWorks Animation, 20th Century Fox and Nickelodeon have all taken a look at Talking Friends, but so far the only visible progress is an animated Web series for Disney.com and Disney’s YouTube channel. (The Web shorts have been popular, with 10 installments generating “an impressive 83 million views in total,” according to James Pitaro, co-president of Disney Interactive.)

Aside from worries that mobile games are fads, a concern exacerbated by recent troubles at Zynga, apps face the same challenge in Hollywood as more traditional video games, studio officials say. They are both active, first-person experiences; the player has control over where the action goes. But movies and television shows are passive experiences, and sitting and watching a screen often leaves game fans feeling bored.

Movies based on video games have routinely disappointed at the box office, with the notable exception of the Tomb Raider and Resident Evil franchises.

Because apps are used by people of all ages — in contrast to most video games, which have a core audience of young men — there is the added challenge of defining an audience. Should Talking Tom be a cartoon for children on Nickelodeon? Or is it something more grown-up, perhaps for Spike or Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim? The wrong move could narrow the following. A Nickelodeon show, for instance, could make Talking Tom uncool for men in their 20s.

Merchandising is another sticky area. App makers want to keep potentially lucrative toy rights for themselves. But studio executives say it is hard for them to justify pouring tens of millions of dollars into the creation of a movie or television show unless there is an added revenue stream as an incentive.

It may be the marketing opportunities, and not the intellectual property itself, that bring Hollywood and app makers closer together, said Peter Levin, chief executive of Legendary Entertainment’s Nerdist Industries, a multimedia company, and an early adviser to Rovio, the Finnish owner of Angry Birds. When an app maker like Outfit7 can reach into 500 million pockets and promote a Talking Friends film or television series, “that’s some breathtaking reach,” he said.

That marketing power appears to have been a major factor in the early success of Disney’s Web-based Talking Friends series. Outfit7 promotes the videos in part by sending its app users alerts as they play on their phones. Over half of the Disney.com views originate from the apps, Mr. Singh said. “It’s like a really powerful celebrity endorsement,” he said.

Outfit7, which employs 65 people and makes money by selling advertising, was founded in 2009 by a man named Samo Login, who got the idea after buying a picture of a cat for $60 at Turbosquid, a 3-D model marketplace. The concept, according to Mr. Singh, involved creating a mobile game that did not have any winners or losers.

The result was Talking Tom, which was introduced in 2010 and became a viral hit. (This year, much to Outfit7’s surprise, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel made a YouTube greeting featuring Talking Tom.)

What really stunned Mr. Singh and his colleagues, however, was user data showing that most fans were clustered between ages 13 and 44, a wide range even for casual gaming. Users are almost evenly split between men and women.

“Our long-term goal is to make sure Talking Friends become a lasting consumer brand,” Mr. Singh said. “Right now, we’re feeling out Hollywood, and Hollywood is feeling out us.”

Hollywood Acts Warily at Comic-Con, Fearing Bad Publicity

But he also played it safe — very safe — by not so much as mentioning, much less demonstrating, the filmmaking wizardry at the heart of the project. That left big questions about the movie industry’s future unanswered and added to a theme of this year’s Comic-Con: Hollywood has come to fear this place.

Mr. Jackson is shooting his two “Hobbit” movies, the first of which is to arrive in theaters in December, at an unusually fast 48 frames a second, twice the standard rate. The result can startle — colors appear brighter, images sharper and motion smoother — and Mr. Jackson, the Oscar-winning director of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, thinks the technique can transform moviegoing.

“We have to provide a cinematic experience that brings people back to theaters,” he told reporters.

But an estimated 6,500 fans did not have that experience when they gathered in Comic-Con’s cavernous Hall H moments earlier to see the new footage. A large number of them had camped through the night. (Ian McKellen, who portrayed the wizard Gandalf, was struck by the fans’ youth. “It is astonishing that most people at the presentation just now have never seen ‘The Lord of the Rings’ in theaters,” he observed at a news conference.)

With devotion like that, one might think that Comic-Con would be a relatively low-risk place for Mr. Jackson and his studio backers, led by Warner Brothers, to take 48-frame-projection for a test drive. This is a crowd that has been starved for a successor to “Avatar,” a movie that was supposed to herald a transformed moviegoing experience that has so far not arrived.

Still, Mr. Jackson, one of Hollywood’s boldest directors, made the unexpectedly timid decision to present “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” in a standard format here — it was not even in 3-D — because he feared an online outcry that could hurt box-office results.

It is no small worry. “Unexpected Journey” and “The Hobbit: There and Back Again,” due next year, together carry an estimated $800 million in production and global marketing costs.

“I didn’t want to repeat the Cinema-Con experience,” Mr. Jackson explained. At that convention, held in April for movie theater owners, his high-speed presentation of “Unexpected Journey” footage received a sharply mixed reaction. “Hall H is not the place” where he wanted fans to experience it, he said.

Mr. Jackson was far from the only one holding back in San Diego this year. Three of Hollywood’s six major movie studios — Paramount, Universal and 20th Century Fox — decided not to come at all rather than risk showing footage for distant movies with still-unfinished special effects.

On Saturday, the director Zack Snyder, there to promote his new Superman movie, “Man of Steel,” set for release next June, showed a trailer with no overt villain. When fans asked about the bad guy, Mr. Snyder hemmed, hawed and decided to treat that bit of news like a state secret: everyone in the movie will be “relatable,” he offered.

“Trust me” seemed to be Mr. Snyder’s message; he described his movie and its components as “awesome” 10 or 12 times. But the brief atmospheric footage that he presented was not so much awesome as adequate. The clips hinted at the sort of moody, gritty superhero revisionism that has been standard since Christopher Nolan, a producer of “Man of Steel,” directed “Batman Begins” in 2005.

Entertainment companies come to Comic-Con with the goal of igniting controlled brush fires on the Web — a burst of positive Twitter, blog and Facebook chatter that spreads to the mainstream and creates new fans. But the Comic-Con crowd is a discerning one and frequently refuses to cooperate. This can create difficult (sometimes impossible) messes for studio marketers to mop up.