‘Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts’

June 25, 2023 12:16 PM

Four Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse crew members say unsustainable working conditions are behind the success of the animated film.

Multiple Across the Spider-Verse crew members — ranging from artists to production executives who have worked anywhere from five to a dozen years in the animation business — describe the process of making the the $150 million Sony project as uniquely arduous, involving a relentless kind of revisionism that compelled approximately 100 artists to flee the movie before its completion. Four of these crew members agreed to speak pseudonymously about the sprint to finish the movie three years into the sequel’s development and production, a period whose franticness they attribute to Lord’s management style — in particular, his seeming inability to conceptualize 3-D animation during the early planning stages and his preference to edit fully rendered work instead.

While frequent major overhauls are standard operating procedure in animation (Pixar films can take between four and seven years to plot, animate, and render), those changes typically occur early on during development and storyboarding stages. But these Spider-Verse 2 crew members say they were asked to make alterations to already-approved animated sequences that created a backlog of work across multiple late-stage departments.

Michelle Grady, the executive vice-president and general manager of Sony Pictures Imageworks, agrees, claiming that Lord is not to blame for the delays. He, as the main messenger for editorial changes coming from the three co-directors, executive producers, Miller, and the studio, is instead a convenient target for worker ire. “It really does happen on every film,” she says of the revisions. “Truly, honestly, it can be a little bit frustrating, but we always try to explain that this is the process.”

“One of the things about animation that makes it such a wonderful thing to work on is that you get to keep going until the story is right,” adds Pascal. “If the story isn’t right, you have to keep going until it is.” To the workers who felt demoralized by having to revise final renders five times in a row, the Spider-Verse producer says, “I guess, Welcome to making a movie.”

Grady says the sources who spoke to Vulture are not representative of the majority of crew on Spider-Verse 2, who she says found the production process difficult yet “extraordinarily rewarding.” But our sources’ concerns amplify those of the Animation Guild, a 6,000-member branch of Hollywood’s below-the-line union IATSE, established in 1952 to ensure equitable employment practices within a once-sleepy industry that has become a multibillion-dollar powerhouse since the animation explosion of the 1990s. A half-century ago, there were around 1,000 animators working in Hollywood, around half of them just for Disney. In 2023, no data exists for the number of artists, digital compositors, and effects specialists working across the globe, but their ranks have grown exponentially to meet the metastasizing demand for animated fare. Like organizers within the VFX and gaming worlds (which often overlap with each other and with animation), TAG hopes to formally obtain a seat at the bargaining table of an industry that is increasingly reliant on animation talent but that has historically treated its artists and technicians as gig workers.

posted by Pachylad (48 comments total)

...a period whose franticness they attribute to Lord’s management style

"A metaphor for capitalism."
posted by AlSweigart at 12:29 PM on June 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Context: Pixel F*cked, an article about strenuous revision processes across the film industry, especially fx heavy productions like marvel movies.
posted by kaibutsu at 12:38 PM on June 25, 2023 [8 favorites]

A lot of animators and artists on twitter are annoyed at the article title since it implies these sorts of working conditions are necessary for success. It isn't. If anything, they succeeded despite the terrible management and unreasonable demands. In contrast, Arcane is also visually impressive but they gave the animators way more time to work on it.
posted by picklenickle at 12:38 PM on June 25, 2023 [18 favorites]

With great power comes ... accountability?
posted by chavenet at 12:42 PM on June 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

"I saw a similar discourse happen when I said Big Mouth treated me better than any other show I’d worked on and people were like “well if treating artists like people makes shows like Big Mouth we should abuse them more”, but I’ll tell you what actually happens - If the cool, high art projects treat their artists like garbage, those artists burn out and go to the jobs that treat them well. You don’t get better art from abused artists, you get the best, most experienced artists avoiding those projects after they’ve been burned. Cool projects aren’t made better by bad conditions. They have bad conditions because they know that by virtue of being cool and desirable, they won’t have a hard time finding more bodies to throw into the pulp mill when if they grind up all the ones they already have." - Kelly Turnbull
posted by Pachylad at 12:44 PM on June 25, 2023 [29 favorites]

the metastasizing demand for animated fare

The demand for animated movies is like a cancer? I'm... not sure the author intended that, but maybe they did.
posted by doctornemo at 12:50 PM on June 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

'The companys' metastizing demand for animated fare seeing audiences respond to its popularity' was how I chose to (charitably) interpret it.
posted by Pachylad at 12:52 PM on June 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

On some level all these movies have become really fancy Pixar movies. But I don't hear about Pixar abusing their animators like this. I follow a couple on twitter and they're always really happy with their creative workplace.

How do we get studio executives to realize they're making fancy Pixar movies with these CGI farms, and to stop abusing their artists? I have no idea. Late stage capitalism sucks.
posted by hippybear at 12:56 PM on June 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

> pushed to work more than 11 hours a day, seven days a week, for more than a year

That's an inhuman amount of overwork. No one can be productive for that many hours a week, for that long. Severe case of viewing workers as interchangeable cogs.

I hope the unions for digital animators and effects workers can make some headway, because they're badly needed.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:18 PM on June 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

Here's an ungated version of the main article
posted by chavenet at 1:23 PM on June 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

The writer of this article, Chris Lee, was recently on the Into It podcast discussing this topic. Into It is also under the Vulture/Vox Media umbrella.

Lee posited that another part of the problem is who the studios have often hired to direct these expected CGI-heavy blockbusters. Filmmakers who've achieved some success and name recognition for their previous work, but have little to no experience directing in CGI, can also contribute to the intense pressure on animators and other digital artists. Some of these directors learn on the job but perhaps not fast enough for the studio's release schedule. So then studio management steps in and adds more levels of complication.

The podcast episode: While Writers Strike, Special Effects Artists Try To Unionize
posted by fuse theorem at 1:31 PM on June 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

Yeah, I think doing animation direction is all about getting the animatics/storyboards exactly right and then making tiny timing adjustments. If you're wanting fully rendered material to edit, what you're wanting to do is actually shoot live action footage to edit. The workflow is so entirely different that it can be a bit of a mindfuck and abuse machine if you don't approach the work correctly. That seems to be what is happening in this instance, and I'm sure others.
posted by hippybear at 1:38 PM on June 25, 2023 [12 favorites]

Sssso it turns out that pretty much *all* of the animated features released by Sony Pictures Animation (a union shop) were actually done over at Sony Pictures Imageworks (not a union shop). SPI seems to be a non-union shop because it started life as a CG effects unit - and that discipline is one of the glaring exceptions to the general norm of Hollywood being unionized.

Okay, fuck watching a single SPA feature ever again then. I worked in the industry and I do understand that being a union shop entails a certain level of hassle for everyone involved, and that there is a certain minimum size your studio needs to be before it's worth that hassle, but SPA/SPI is well above that size. I'd have to ask my friends who stayed in the industry exactly where it is but I'm guessing it's probably somewhere between 20-100 artists. Really I think this applies to any company or organization, we just have been beaten down by about forty years of the government tacitly turning its back on any and all union-busting efforts.

I wish the people who are staying on at SPI for Spiderverse 3, and the people who are getting hired for it, the absolute best of luck in unionizing the fuck out of that place. I ain't touching Spiderverse 3 unless I hear they've managed to do that.

And on top of it, Lord does sound like a shitty producer. This whole story is a bigger-budget version of the crap I went through when I worked under John Krikfalusi, who was notorious for busting deadlines by making his staff re-do endless variants until it was Right. At least Lord doesn't have a "bad boy" reputation that's being used as an excuse for boning underaged staff.
posted by egypturnash at 3:25 PM on June 25, 2023 [20 favorites]

in particular, his seeming inability to conceptualize 3-D animation during the early planning stages and his preference to edit fully rendered work instead.

This always results in a nightmare. If you're working like this, you need three or four times the budget, but you never get it, and it's the animators who are forced to suffer.

It doesn't matter how nice of a person you want to be, if you're in that position and you can't do 90% of your work from storyboards, you will cause suffering.
posted by clawsoon at 3:38 PM on June 25, 2023 [6 favorites]

I don't know that I know enough about animation or the story of this particular film to distinguish between "arduous" and "abusive" (I mean, I don't care so much if you find it "demoralizing" to have to revise work five times to get it right, but I do care if people are actually working 11x7x365), but let's get everyone involved here unionized and then the people who know the most can sort it out amongst themselves.
posted by praemunire at 6:26 PM on June 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

“I can’t visualize blueprints. Let’s tear down the building and rebuild it 5 times until we get it right.”
posted by ryanrs at 7:13 PM on June 25, 2023 [30 favorites]

Lee posited that another part of the problem is who the studios have often hired to direct these expected CGI-heavy blockbusters. Filmmakers who've achieved some success and name recognition for their previous work, but have little to no experience directing in CGI, can also contribute to the intense pressure on animators and other digital artists.

Say what you will about Phil Lord, but I don't think you can fault his past animation/CGI experience.
posted by Gadarene at 7:16 PM on June 25, 2023

Say what you will about Phil Lord, but I don't think you can fault his past animation/CGI experience.

I mean, this is coming straight from the animators on ATSV, who are dealing with a person who seemingly (if he needs to see a finished shot - and not a storyboard/animatic - to know if they are moving in the right direction) has no clue about how to make a 3D animated film. You know when you are working with a person who has never animated before and who hasn't taken the time to learn exactly what goes into the craft when they think that starting something over from the beginning is not that big a deal. (yes, it happens - there are sequences that don't work as well as you think they will so you have to try something different - but it should be here and there, not over and over again.) That's a failure of directing, not a failure on the part of the artists.

Lord's IMDB has a single credit as an animator, on one episode of the 90s sitcom "Caroline in the City".
posted by matcha action at 7:47 PM on June 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

I mean, it sounds like a super inefficient management system, but both Spiderverse films are next-level brilliant and gorgeous, so there's a certain extent to which you can't argue with results. What was never clear to me was that the people working 11 hours weren't paid commensurately. If they are indeed being ripped off, then yeah, fuck these dudes, but the directors and studio seemed content to let people sit on their hands for months.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 8:03 PM on June 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

Lord's IMDB has a single credit as an animator, on one episode of the 90s sitcom "Caroline in the City".

You're talking about Phil Lord, the guy who created Clone High and directed Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs and The Lego Movie?

That Phil Lord?

I grant you he may not have hands-on animating experience, I guess, and I am certainly not condoning his management style on this Spider-Verse film, but an animation neophyte he absolutely is not.
posted by Gadarene at 8:05 PM on June 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

(In other words, for whatever else his faults, the description "[f]ilmmakers who've achieved some success and name recognition for their previous work, but have little to no experience directing in CGI" does not remotely apply to him. That was my only point.)
posted by Gadarene at 8:08 PM on June 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

both Spiderverse films are next-level brilliant and gorgeous, so there's a certain extent to which you can't argue with results

Yeah, you can certainly argue with results produced in an abusive system (if it was), but it's a little strange to me to see people scoffing at the artistic skill of the person responsible for the overall vision of Across. Possibly his method doesn't work on a large-scale film without exploiting the workers because it requires so much re-doing, and, if that's true, it's too "expensive" to be perpetuated. But we're going to sneer at this amateur who only produced the most imaginative and effective animated film in a few years, while working with the unwieldy Marvel canon?
posted by praemunire at 8:15 PM on June 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

You're talking about Phil Lord, the guy who created Clone High and directed Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs and The Lego Movie?

That Phil Lord?

I know who Phil Lord is.

He was never an animator and yes, that matters for making animated movies. If you were a live-action producer who thought you could throw out half a movie, over and over again, and start over, he would be thrown off a production because the costs would skyrocket, actors would be unavailable for reshoots, the director would refuse to do the reshoots, etc. But because it's animators sitting behind a computer and they're somehow all replaceable cogs, the thing goes forward. People lose their relationships working these kind of hours, they lose their communities, they lose chances to see people they love before they are gone forever. There's no amount of quality in a movie that can make that OK.
posted by matcha action at 8:28 PM on June 25, 2023 [25 favorites]

but the directors and studio seemed content to let people sit on their hands for months.

This is also a common feature of animation projects run by people who don't know how to nail it down in storyboards.

but it's a little strange to me to see people scoffing at the artistic skill of the person responsible for the overall vision of Across.

If you like car analogies: Let's say you think that the Shelby Cobra is the most beautiful car ever made. Then let's say you found out that Carroll Shelby didn't know how to envision what the final car would look like based on models, and he had to have ten cars come off the assembly line before he could make a decision about each change that he wanted to make. Scrap the first ten cars, build another ten cars, make another change, scrap the next ten cars, make another change, etc.

The end result might still be a beautiful car, but you could surely say that a person who worked that way was shit at one very important part of car design.
posted by clawsoon at 8:43 PM on June 25, 2023 [6 favorites]

Or: Imagine an architect who couldn't envision a building based on the drawings, so they insisted on building it, tearing it down, building it again, tearing it down, repeat until they finally got the building they wanted. Even if it ends up being a beautiful building, they're still a shit architect.
posted by clawsoon at 8:46 PM on June 25, 2023 [11 favorites]

I mean, one of the advantages of digital art is that it is _relatively_ cheaper to redo things if they aren't exactly how you like them. As a software developer I've seen lots of projects be relatively successful with an iterative approach where you build something and then rebuild it better based on experience and feedback. Waiting for a perfect design architecture and requirements would have been much more expensive.

The problem here is enforcing arbitrary deadlines and overworking people inhumanly, that is just abuse.
posted by being_quiet at 8:58 PM on June 25, 2023 [9 favorites]

Let's say you think that the Shelby Cobra is the most beautiful car ever made. Then let's say you found out that Carroll Shelby didn't know how to envision what the final car would look like based on models, and he had to have ten cars come off the assembly line before he could make a decision about each change that he wanted to make. Scrap the first ten cars, build another ten cars, make another change, scrap the next ten cars, make another change, etc.

I mean, when writing a complex document, I go through a number of substantial revisions. Sometimes I reorganize the entire thing. This is routine for work which is both intellectually complex and "inexpensive" to start over, and it doesn't mean the person sucks at writing (at least, I hope not).

Now, if it's too time-consuming to do this in animation without slave-driving your animators or taking longer than the studio is willing to allot, then maybe this is not a (currently) viable approach for most movies. But I hesitate to call this an artistic failure, rather than a difference in approach. Particularly with a ludicrously dense and layered film like Across.
posted by praemunire at 9:02 PM on June 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

Say what you will about Phil Lord, but I don't think you can fault his past animation/CGI experience.

To be honest, I imagine his past animation/CGI experience is exactly why he manages projects like this: he's found success doing animated projects in Hollywood, and that's meant that the fucked up process he relied on to get an earlier project over the line becomes Just What You Have To Do To Make A Good Film. The problem is: his previous films also worked because people made heroic efforts to correct for how bad the process was, and eventually, that stops working, and meanwhile, you're bleeding talent that you need to make the next film even better.

I've heard of the exact same creative process in video games, another industry without good union coverage, at BioWare (Mass Effect and Dragon Age, where the "BioWare magic" they relied on completely fell apart with Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda); at CD Projekt (makers of The Witcher series, and also the debacle that was Cyberpunk 2077); and at Naughty Dog (the Uncharted games and The Last of Us - they haven't had a big failure yet but of the team that made Uncharted 2, very few of them are still with the company). It's also untrue there, and there's notable counter-examples of teams that keep good working conditions, keep people together on the same project, and are able to build and refine their skills until they're making absolutely incredible stuff.

As a software developer I've seen lots of projects be relatively successful with an iterative approach where you build something and then rebuild it better based on experience and feedback.

The kind of iteration you refer to here is different to what people are talking about; shipping a movie is more like shipping a boxed product, where you want to do the iteration up front as quickly as possible. What Lord is doing here is like waiting until the release candidate before you start doing any QA or user testing.

(also also: if the insiders are saying they don't have a script for the sequel, that makes me feel much less good about the cliffhanger the last one ended on.)
posted by Merus at 9:14 PM on June 25, 2023 [12 favorites]

I mean, when writing a complex document, I go through a number of substantial revisions. Sometimes I reorganize the entire thing. This is routine for work which is both intellectually complex and "inexpensive" to start over, and it doesn't mean the person sucks at writing (at least, I hope not).

That's exactly when you should be doing lots of revisions and reorganizations, when it's just you and a writer's room and some storyboard artists and an editor. Do it again and again at that stage. Get it tight, get it right. Do that before you put hundreds of people to work.
posted by clawsoon at 9:25 PM on June 25, 2023 [11 favorites]

Get it tight, get it right. Do that before you put hundreds of people to work.

If you're paying the people properly and everyone's making money and the studio's happy, what's the problem here? Across was dazzling. I'm willing to hear that the process is unacceptable because it costs too much to be feasible to do without treating your workers like crap, at least with existing technology, but not that it's not acceptable because it doesn't fit some standard of what the process should be. The process exists to produce certain ends, not the ends to justify the process.

there's notable counter-examples of teams that keep good working conditions, keep people together on the same project, and are able to build and refine their skills until they're making absolutely incredible stuff.

What is the AAA game studio that does this?
posted by praemunire at 9:35 PM on June 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

What is the AAA game studio that does this?

Nintendo.
posted by Merus at 9:42 PM on June 25, 2023 [11 favorites]

People lose their relationships working these kind of hours, they lose their communities, they lose chances to see people they love before they are gone forever. There's no amount of quality in a movie that can make that OK.

this sounds like film production in general, and TV's worse (both areas I've worked a fair bit over the years). It is genuinely puzzling the insane levels of overtime etc that some productions will eat up just to stay on schedule. I've asked many a producer and/or production manager how this makes sense.

They tend to say three things:

a. above the line costs. This is basically the big money people in the production (star actors, star director etc) whose sometimes colossal pay checks are based less on hours worked as days they are tied up (so fewer days, longer days).

b. the cost of rentals (cameras, lights, dollies, trucks, props etc); again paid for by the day not the hour (so fewer days, longer days).

c. who fucking knows?
posted by philip-random at 9:46 PM on June 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

The thing about iterative development is that you keep most of the work that you've done. Often iterations aren't feature complete, just working enough to be useful. I worked on a project where the front end went through something like 8 iterations until the users were happy with it. Meanwhile, while the rest of the project was changing, that was just adding capabilities and doing bug fixes. Even with all of the changes to the front end from week to week, it was substantially the same code.
Throwing out everything and starting over repeatedly is nuts.
posted by Spike Glee at 9:47 PM on June 25, 2023

being_quiet: As a software developer I've seen lots of projects be relatively successful with an iterative approach where you build something and then rebuild it better based on experience and feedback. Waiting for a perfect design architecture and requirements would have been much more expensive.

Imagine an agile software development approach, except that the client refuses to look at any of the work you've done until you've built it out to handle Twitter or Facebook levels of traffic, and only after you've done that will they tell you what they want changed.

If you said to yourself, "I want to create the worst combination of agile and waterfall," this is what you'd get.
posted by clawsoon at 10:03 PM on June 25, 2023 [14 favorites]

Sony lowballs them on their salary with the promise that overtime pay will boost their income to the level that it should be...A movie like this is taking advantage of those people creatively. But the workers are also vulnerable in another sense: They want to stay in Canada. They’re on visas from countries from which they’d ideally like to emigrate. Aspirations to immigrate keep them tied to the studio.

They’re underpaid, so they need the OT to pay their bills. The relocation package doesn’t cover costs. So you can only make a production like this when the people doing it feel as though they have no other choice in what they need to do for their financial security. That’s no way to live your life.

Wow, so much of that is so gross.
posted by mediareport at 4:32 AM on June 26, 2023 [11 favorites]

"Manager who doesn't fundamentally understand the experience of those he's managing" is common in many industries and also is always a nightmare to work for. Not sure why this is hard to believe. I do both comics and bioprocess gruntwork in the lab and have had to deal with this in both jobs, and the amount of times I've had to explain that something is simply physically impossible to someone who got catapulted into their position... Also it is incorrect to assume so much artistic vision is coming out of one person. A crapton of artistic decisions are made by tons of people throughout any animation or other group creative work, and those decisions will play off of each other routinely. People should listen to the animators; it's their experience.
posted by picklenickle at 5:07 AM on June 26, 2023 [8 favorites]

Aight, here's my most accurate analogy yet:

An architect is supervising the building of a 100-room mansion. There are hundreds of workers involved, many different trades and crafts, everybody's work depends on the work that somebody else did before them.

In this analogy, each room in the mansion is a shot, each hallway is a sequence, and each wing is an act. The blueprint is the storyboarded script.

The architect won't settle on floorplans until rooms are finished. All the furnishings, all the electrical, all the plumbing, all the trim. Every highly skilled worker has to complete their job in a bunch of rooms, and only then will the architect walk through them and decide to make a bunch of changes: Move walls, move electrical outlets, change doors, re-route hallways.

You might've spent days carving an ornate doorframe, but you have to throw it away and start over because the architect wants it two inches wider, and they didn't know how to make that decision without seeing your finished product.

And the architect keeps doing that again and again throughout the mansion, sometimes in the same rooms over and over again, until they get exactly the result they want.

Also, the budget stays basically what it would have been if the architect knew how to draw a blueprint of the mansion they wanted in the first place, so the only way to finish it on time is to bully the workers into ridiculously long hours. You're not getting paid for re-carving that doorframe, because that's not in the budget.
posted by clawsoon at 1:20 PM on June 26, 2023 [22 favorites]

Exactly, clawsoon. I also want to push back on the idea that redoing shots over and over is fine as long as the animators are getting paid for the overtime. There's a reason Sisyphus pushing the rock up the mountain over and over again is a punishment. Burnout is a huge problem in the animation industry and it's been interesting for me to learn that hours worked isn't the biggest predictor of burnout but it has more to do with agency over your work, feeling of authorship/pride/mastery in the final product, and a feeling of community with your fellow animators. (Which isn't to say that paid overtime and reasonable hours aren't important - they are necessary, just not the be-all end-all in determining whether animators will burn out on a project)
posted by matcha action at 2:23 PM on June 26, 2023 [6 favorites]

but both Spiderverse films are next-level brilliant and gorgeous, so there's a certain extent to which you can't argue with results

They're not arguing with the results, they're arguing with the process. And arguing that the process was not the only or necessary way to get the results.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:52 PM on June 26, 2023 [6 favorites]

this sounds like film production in general, and TV's worse (both areas I've worked a fair bit over the years). It is genuinely puzzling the insane levels of overtime etc that some productions will eat up just to stay on schedule.

I worked in film production for a while (in crew positions) and the hours could indeed be horrible. However, we wouldn't work them for more than 3 or 4 days in a week.

The idea that these animators were doing it 7 days a week for over a year is horrific.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:54 PM on June 26, 2023

Ugh, as someone who loved the love that clearly went into Into the Spider-Verse, and was really looking forward to seeing this, it's quite the gut punch.

In what may be a fit of synchronicity, I just today ran into this article from A.R. Moxon that strikes some very similar points, and convinces me that no matter how cool you may find the final product, most likely that is despite the abuse rather than because of it.

(Also, I was surprised as others to see Phil Lord named here, since I put The Lego Movie into a similar pantheon of "proving there is grace in this world" works, but I can also never forget that Steven Mnuchin is also credited on that film. (And now I see he also produced Fury Road and Edge of Tomorrow? What in the actual fuck?))
posted by bjrubble at 3:00 PM on June 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

The ones who enjoy shows made in Omelas?
posted by cheshyre at 5:39 PM on June 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

> I don't hear about Pixar abusing their animators like this

'Catmull would later disclose that "a full third of the staff" ended up with some form of RSI by the time the film was finished.'

"oh, no" we're thinking, but...

Pixar did not encourage long hours, and, in fact, set limits on how many hours employees could work by approving or disapproving overtime. Employees' self-imposed compulsions to excel often trumped any other constraints, and were especially common to younger employees.

(also this was the Pixar of 24 years ago & only their second feature)
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 9:05 PM on June 26, 2023

What in the actual fuck?

Executive Producer means you wrote a check, and Mnuchin has been writing checks to finance movies since the early 2000s. It's not like George Miller and James Cameron could just put Fury Road and Avatar on their American Express cards until the ticket sales started happening. Mnuchin (well Dune Entertainment) and others put up the money. And if you put up a large enough share (like with Lego Movie and such gems as Black Mass and Get Hard, lol), you get an Exec Producer credit.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 9:52 PM on June 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think that Pixar does everything in house, and most of its directors are animators. That could be the difference.
posted by Spike Glee at 6:28 AM on June 27, 2023

I don't hear about Pixar abusing their animators like this

No, Pixar abused its animators slightly differently:

John Lasseter’s Pattern of Alleged Misconduct Detailed by Disney/Pixar Insiders

Sources say some women at Pixar knew to turn their heads quickly when encountering him to avoid his kisses. Some used a move they called “the Lasseter” to prevent their boss from putting his hands on their legs.

A longtime insider says he saw a woman seated next to Lasseter in a meeting that occurred more than 15 years ago. “She was bent over and [had her arm] across her thigh,” he says. “The best I can describe it is as a defensive posture … John had his hand on her knee, though, moving around.” After that encounter, this person asked the woman about what he had seen. “She said it was unfortunate for her to wear a skirt that day and if she didn’t have her hand on her own right leg, his hand would have traveled.”

The same source said he once noticed an oddly cropped photo of Lasseter standing between two women at a company function. When he mentioned that to a colleague, he was told, “We had to crop it. Do you know where his hands were?”
posted by mediareport at 8:38 AM on June 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

okay but here is the shit of it though:

it is so beautiful.

so beautiful. this spider-mans movie? it is beautiful in a way that climbs up inside your head. "look," says the movie, "this is what your optic nerve is for. it is for beauty. this is beauty and you should look at it. don't look at other things. other things look wrong. look at the spider-mans movie" and then you say "but, why, why, how is it that the most beautiful thing... why is it spider-man?" and the movie says "ssh ssh shh just watch" and you say "but" and the movie says "sshhh have more spider-mans. be quiet and look at the spider-mans. and listen to some tunes."

movie so pretty i cry.

i don't know i guess this is to say that in addition to the happiness it would bring me were the animators on this film to unionize, it would also bring me joy if we could arrange for a way to have them worshipped as gods.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:21 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Employees' self-imposed compulsions to excel often trumped any other constraints, and were especially common to younger employees.

That's some plausible-deniability bullshit. The company has formal policies limiting hours so that they don't get in legal or public relations trouble; they create an expectation of highest-possible-quality work with limited deadlines; when young, dedicated employees see that the only way to meet both goals is to sacrifice themselves, the company does nothing to enforce their formal policies and instead lets their young employees work themselves to injury and burnout.

The whole industry is like this, and it's especially bad in FX for any big-budget movie. "Burnt out husk of their former self..."

it would also bring me joy if we could arrange for a way to have them worshipped as gods.

Some gods get lauded at the same time they're sacrificed.
posted by clawsoon at 5:25 AM on July 1, 2023 [3 favorites]