We had a great, informative and entertaining dinner with Brad Holcman.

We are limited to a maximum of 15 reservations; first come, first served.

UPDATE: There are only a couple of spots left.  Reserve your space now.

To ensure attendance, we will be collecting an $11.00 deposit from UMEC members and a $16.00 deposit from non-members. All attendees will be entitled to a $10.00 credit for any food or drink ordered at the restaurant.  This essentially makes the cost $1.00 for members and $6.00 for non-members.  Our intimate alumni dinners allow you to interact with our special guests in a smaller, more personalized setting. You don’t want to miss this unique opportunity to spend some time with this top TV executive. If you wish to join or renew your membership, please visit the UMEC website at http://umec.la/join/.

Brad Holcman

Brad Holcman is the Director of Creative Affairs for fox21, a production arm of 20th Century Fox Television, delivering scripted and unscripted programming to network and cable outlets.  Brad is responsible for all alternative and reality development including the projects: “Countdown” (NBC), “Untitled Steve Carell Sketch Comedy Series” (ABC), “Parent Trap” w/ Jamie Kennedy (TBS), “Family Bonding” (A&E), “Model Apartment” (A&E).   Brad also assists with fox21’s current slate of drama, comedy, and animated scripted projects including “Homeland” on Showtime, “Sons of Anarchy” on FX and “Breakout Kings” on A&E.  He is the covering executive and lead developer of the recently sold animated series “Brickleberry” to Comedy Central (Daniel Tosh).

Additionally, Brad is responsible for 20^th Century Fox TV’s first-look deals to generate unscripted projects with other production companies including Krasnow Produtions (Stuart Krasnow), Ryan Murphy TV, Brett Ratner TV, Shawn Levy/Marty Adelstein, and Carousel (Steve Carell).  He is a frequent guest speaker at the major unscripted conferences including: RealScreen, Factual Entertainment Forum, Banff World Television Festival, and The West Doc. Brad’s previous projects have also included “Beauty and the Geek” for The CW, “Game Show in My Head” on CBS, and “Saved” for TNT.  Before landing at fox21 he worked at 20th Century Fox Television in Drama Development. Brad received his Bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan in Sports Management and Communication.

If you are interested in attending, please follow these instructions to reserve a seat:

1. Send an email with your reservation request to umecla@gmail.com.  Include your full name, email address and a phone number.  

2. We will fill available spots from all emails received on a first come, first served basis. Send your request now and secure your place in the queue.

3. If your reservation is accepted, you will receive an email invoice from us requesting payment of your deposit within 48 hours.

4. If you do not send your payment within 48 hours after we send the request for payment, you will lose your spot and your name will go to the bottom of the list.

5.  We will accept reservations and payments until all spots are filled.  Everyone else will be added to a waitlist in the order we received their request.  If you are waitlisted, we will notify you what number you are on the list.

6. Reservations may be cancelled up to 48 hours before the event for a full refund (minus $1.00) by sending an email to umecla@gmail.com.

7. Cancellations made between 48 hours prior to the event and 12:00 noon on the day of the event will be entitled to a refund of their payment less $5.00.

8. Cancellations made after 12:00 noon on the day of the event will forfeit the entire deposit.  No-shows will forfeit the entire deposit as well as earn a hefty dose of bad karma.

9.  We are not responsible for late or misdirected emails.  Please provide us with an email you check often.

10. To be considered a paid member, your membership must be current at the time you make your reservation and also on the day of the event.

11. $10.00 of your deposit will be credited to your food and drink tab.  No refund will be due if you order less than $10.00.

12. This event will sell out.  Make your request for a reservation as soon as you know you wish to attend.

UMEC-LA is hosting a casual mixer next week, Wednesday, October 12^th at Barnery’s Beanery in West Hollywood. Come talk to old friends, meet some new friends and network with everyone.  Enjoy some food and drinks and great people at one of LA’s landmark restaurants.

Mixer Details

Wednesday, October 12^th

7:00pm-? (Karaoke starts at 10pm)

Barney’s Beanery (the Original)

8447 Santa Monica Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA  

(323) 654-2287

http://barneysbeanery.com/

Wood Ranch BBQ and Grill – on the patio
189 The Grove Drive, Y-80 (near Fairfax Ave. and 3rd Street)
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Tuesday August 23rd
7pm-10pm (or as long as people are having a good time)

I guess this is an attempt to add a sense of faux-excitement to the Oscar process, but the biggest issue with the Best Picture race is… the wasted drama of the whole affair.

WHAT’S WASTED DRAMA?

Wasted drama is a phrase I use when talking about screenplays and movies in which a certain amount of the narrative is wasted space because the audience/reader doesn’t care about some element that the screenwriter/filmmaker wants you to care about. I coined the phrase back when Robert Zemeckis’ CONTACT was released; in the trailers, you saw Jodie Foster climbing into the spaceship and making contact… yet in the movie, there’s this whole sequence in the 2nd Act where the spaceship gets destroyed and the characters’ hopes of getting into space are dashed (but we knew from the trailer and just the layout of the film that Jodie Foster was going to go into space in that spaceship)… and then it’s revealed that a “shadow back-up” of the spaceship (which supposedly was prohibitively expensive and required some rare parts and elements to even make) was being concurrently built in Japan(?!?!?!). And so Jodie got to make contact in that ship.

Now that whole sequence, which was maybe 20 to 25 minutes of screen time, was wasted drama; we knew the outcome and weren’t fooled, in fact bored, by the diversion… regardless of how high quality the filmmaking is/was.

I KNOW THE SCORE BEFORE THE GAME IS PLAYED

The same thing has transpired in the last 5 or 6 Best Picture races (and Oscars in general); think about it, we all knew that THE KING’S SPEECH was going to take home the top prize WHEN THE NOMINATIONS were announced (not that it was undeserved, that movie is great and inspiring; exactly what you want from a movie). Even though Fincher’s THE SOCIAL NETWORK was supposedly running neck-n-neck, Hollywood insiders and Vegas bookies knew the score… so it’s wasted drama, the idea of putting 10 films in the pool, or even 5 these days! I think maybe the year BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN lost to CRASH was the only year in the last decade that it was NOT writ large what film was going to grab the gold statue days, if not weeks, before the ceremony.

Take a quick look:
2010: Hurt Locker beat Avatar (the only two films that were in truly in contention)
2009: Slumdog Millionaire (it had to win, too unique and transcendent of a film not to).
2008: No Country For Old Men (it was the creative Coen Brothers’ time)
2007: The Departed (it was Martin Scorsese’s moment)
2006: Crash (upset!!!)
2005: Million Dollar Baby (Clint doesn’t loose)
2004: Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (too much weight of the whole Tolkein event)
2003: Chicago* – last time it was anybody’s guess who was going to win, and I think everyone thought Gangs of New York or The Pianist was going to win that year (probably split the vote).

The major anticipation with this years list of films is going to be the actual number of nominees… it surely won’t be ten again, perhaps only 6 or 7… and then we’ll know the front-runner/shoe-in is a week later, if we don’t know already.

It’s kind of like the NBA Playoffs when they expanded the first round from a 5-Game Series to a 7-Game Series, all but guaranteeing that the No. 8 Seed will lose. Sure, it didn’t happen this year with the Memphis Grizzlies (but they’re not really an 8 seed, if you look at their personnel and record), yet it’s such a rarity… and that kind of rarity does happen (witness Crash…), but the whole reason for watching is to see who won. Why watch if you know who won ahead of time… it’s like DVRing a game, knowing the outcome, yet watching it without skipping the commercials anyway!

When it comes what’s going to happen with the Oscars – 10 films, 5 films, 7 or 8 films – there needs to be less shoe-in films. Now the answer to that could be that less impact films are being made (too risky). However, all the films are usually very good (and let’s not talk about the snubs that happen every year), and at least deserving of the nomination, if not winning… yet of late there’s seems to be little guesswork. And that’s all that I’m saying, I spend three hours of my Sunday watching the Oscar broadcast and would it kill for there to be some sense of surprise?

MASS MEDIA MARKETING HANDCUFFS
Although perhaps the real reason why it’s snap to choose the best picture winner the day the nominations are announced (and that’s the real the anxiety-filled moments) is that movie-making is a victim of the marketing departments controlling the fate what’s going to be in the theaters or not.

The skyrocketing and punishing marketing costs that a film must incur usually outstrips nearly every other element in the process – more expensive than all A-List Stars on film, the CGI budget or all the producers. And oddly, the marketing expense isn’t included as a line item in the budget (yet it is on the profit and loss statement) – when it needs to be, so the true profitability of a film can be assessed or even estimated. The marketing is everything, take a look at Warner Brothers’ Green Lantern with its estimated $100m in domestic (!) marketing! [$35m is typical, $70m on a big summer tentpole], and because marketing IS everything, it’s 150% of everything when it comes to Oscar campaigns and races.

Obviously the Academy can’t go back to 5 films (hence the range of 5 to 10), but the process in itself is flawed due to the narrow focus of the state of cinema in the US in the first place.

Little Bar - 757 S. La Brea Ave. (a block south of Wilshire) – street parking (free after 6pm) also, Bank of America parking lot is up the block (also free after 6pm)  http://www.littlebarlounge.com/index.html

Hope to see you there.

Graphic novels are currently all the rage in Hollywood as source material for movies (witness this summer – Thor, Priest, Captain America, X-men: First Class, Green Lantern), and yet the actual comic market is dwindling and appealing to fanboy (men in their early to late 30s and up!) and DC and Marvel (the two biggest names on the block for the past 70 years) are making a strong push for digital download comics to tablet like devices (iPad, Xoom, you know the drill).

In September, DC Comics relaunches all of its major titles with new “no. 1” issues, and basically starts the mythology and continuity over with its entire universe. This is a gamble (one that I’ll at least put money down on) to lure new readers to the fold (old readers will read, gripe perhaps, but still read, because they lover the medium and the characters are like best friends they’ve never met). It’s interesting, because 25 years ago DC did something similar with the now-famous Crisis On Infinite Earth maxi-series (which ushered in the plethora of mostly terribly company-wide crossovers); Crisis (as it is known in comic parlance) was designed to streamline the exponentially vast and unwieldy DC multiverse that grow over the prior 50 years (Crisis coincided with the 50^th anniversary of DC as a publishing entity).

WHAT CRISIS DID (or HOPED TO DO)

At the time DC had “infinite Earths” where there were different histories of the DC Universe, and it was just too unwieldy. For instance, Earth-1 was the current and primary Earth of the modern continuity. However, the older versions of Superman, Batman, Flash, Green Arrow, and the Justice Society of America (incarnations of the characters who first appeared in the 1930s and 1940s) couldn’t be “replaced” and banished to the archives… so they existed on Earth-2, and there were too many “Earths” to keep track of, and to enable new readers to actually thoroughly enjoy reading DC Comics. So to clean out the redundancies and unwieldiness, DC Editor-in-Chief Jeannette Khan authorized Marv Wolfman and George Perez to burn down the house and build it up new again (with some safeguards).

THE BIG CAPE WAS THE MAIN PROBLEM

The biggest revision was with Superman; maligned-at-the-time writer/artist John Byrne stripped down Superman of most his historic continuity and hit “reset” with his MAN OF STEEL miniseries. Was it a success? Perhaps because arch villain Lex Luthor was also reimagined as a corrupt politician looking to gain control of the world through financial dominance (this was the mid 80s, so that was part of the zeitgeist… funny how things don’t change), and that changed the dynamic of Superman and his continuity. Other big changes were the death of Barry Allen the Silver Age Flash (the man in the red suit, not to be confused with Jay Garret the Golden Age Flash with the silver, Hermes-esque helmet). I argued in a few letters to the editor that Barry Allen was killed because he represented a means to travel back and forth between the infinite earths by achieving a certain vibrational pattern (I’m soooo showing my inner comic fanboy/geek, but so what? I loved reading comics from like 20 years).

Crisis caused an endless series of debates among comic fans, and I wonder how many were actually driven from the market; but overall I think DC was better off, because there wasn’t a need to service 50 years of continuity that no doubt hamstrung writers and artists.

MARVEL’S ULTIMATE PLAN

A decade ago Marvel did something similar with its “Ultimate” line of books – centered around Spider-man; it was ostensibly done to make Spider-man more accessible to kids (all the FF characters in the Ultimate Universe were in their late teens or early 20s) and new readers because the Tobey Maguire Spiderman movie propelled comics into the front and center of pop culture. But other stalwarts of the Marvel Universe followed suit, like The Ultimates, The X-men, Hulk, and Fantastic Four.

DC ROLLS THE DICE WITH THE TAILOR

DC is going ahead with costume redesigns (courtesy of Geoff Johns and fan-favorite Jim Lee) and perhaps new (variations on) origins of the major and minor heroes… this isn’t new, again, because back when the Silver Age Heroes appeared there were costume revamps and some origin changes, too. Even Superman and Batman had changes, they might not be readily apparent to the casual observer, but fans (not just diehard ones) know the different; other characters like Hawkman, The Atom, Green Lantern and Green Arrow considerably changed. And some events like Superman’s entire time as Superboy was erased from the DC universe (damning all those really exciting Jim Shooter Legion of Super-Hero stories). But the thing to remember about that “reset” was, there was maybe only 15 or so years of historical continuity to abolish, since then the Silver Age has run for close to 50 years (because most of the major events of Crisis were gradually eroded away… even Barry Allen returned after close to a 20 year absence; that was kind of the last straw of credibility for me.

WHAT WE COULD EXPECT

So whatever happens with DC’s 21^st “Reset” of its dense, popular and beloved comic book heroes and universe, it’ll perhaps make comics more accessible. I stopped reading comics after close to two decades about four or five years ago… the weight of the continuity drained the excitement and unpredictable nature of the stories out of the medium. You know certain characters are just never going to die, and if someone happens to, then a semi-creative writer will come up with some eyebrow raising conceit to bring back a character. The old rule of, “if you don’t see a body, then they’re not dead” became a drama-killing joke in comicdom.

WHY RESETS ARE GOOD

Resets are necessary to keep a franchise fresh and accessible. J.J. Abrams reset STAR TREK, all for the better if you ask me. Everyone loves the Kirk-Spock-Bones dynamic, and since those actors can’t play those roles – in the prime of their storytelling lives – the reboot with new actors and changes in the history and continuity (e.g. the destruction of Vulcan) could signal that everything is fair game (even a new Star Trek TV series with Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty and Uhura). The big question mark with DC’s reset is will they stick with it? Will the creative teams yearn of the old days, old ways and old conventions, patterns and grooves? To be bold, you would hope that the editorial staff for the next decade at least is vigilant in vetoing the return of the old in the inner workings. The original Batgirl is returning with the paralysis inflicted upon her by The Joker in the seemingly at the time one-shot (and still masterful) “The Killing Joke.” I applaud this; don’t even make her Barbara Gordon; or if you do, don’t give her the personality of the previous one. Be bold like that. I’m most curious to see the costumes and see how events of the second decade of the 21^st century affect the origins and motivations of the characters.

WHAT IF… IT FAILED

Marvel used to have this really cool series called “What If…” in which certain primal events in the Marvel Universe history turned out differently (hence the genius title); but the re-imagined events only lasted for one issue, and they usually resulted in the retiring of the heroes or the events occurred in some other fashion. But this DC thing could be revolutionary for a very insular pop culture institution that has governed a great deal of pop culture beyond the pages of news pulp 4-color disposable diversions (consider that everything is on high-quality paper to accommodate the computer coloring that now goes on).

PIQUED INTEREST IN OLD FAVORITES

I might be tempted to start reading my favorites again; and they were many – Aquaman, Green Arrow, Teen Titans, Robin (which reminds me, will Dick Grayson be Robin again? Or will Nightwing be a character at the beginning or yet to come? And will the Teen Titans be the original or the “new”?), Flash, Justice League, Spectre, Detective Comics, Black Canary, the Legion of Super Heroes (which has been completely rebooted at least 3 times since 1990) and maybe a few others; not sure what those original 52 will consist of… the Black Batman, based in Africa, is going to be interesting, just like how Marvel’s Black Panther was interesting, when they finally gave him some teeth in the 90s, after 30 years of being as impenetrable as the GOP think Barack Obama is, and completely uninteresting (yet, with enormous potential).

More to come…