Posts Tagged ‘Chaplin’
“I _am_ big. It’s the _pictures_ that got small”*…
Apple paid $10 billion to developers in calendar 2014– thus, iOS app developers earned more than Hollywood did from box office in the U.S. Of course, Hollywood studios make money in foreign theaters, in cable, in home video, and in digital. But, as Horace Dedieu observes…
Apple’s App Store billings is not the complete App revenue picture either. The Apps economy includes Android and ads and service businesses and custom development. Including all revenues, apps are still likely to be bigger than Hollywood.
But there’s more to the story. It’s also likely that the App industry is healthier. On an individual level, some App developers earn more than Hollywood stars, and I would guess that the median income of app developers is higher than the median income of actors [a large majority of whom earn less than $1,000 a year from acting jobs]. The app economy sustains more jobs (627,000 iOS jobs in the US vs. 374,000 in Hollywood) and is easier to enter and has wider reach. As the graph [above] shows, it’s also growing far more rapidly…
Grab some popcorn and read the rest at “Bigger Than Hollywood.”
* “Norma Desmond” (Gloria Swanson) in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard
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As we disable in-app purchases, we might recall that it was on this date in 1931 that City Lights premiered. Written and directed by its star, Charlie Chaplin, the film follows Chaplin’s “Tramp” character as he falls in love with a blind woman (Virginia Cherrill). Though sound films– “talkies”– were the rage at the time, Chaplin produced City Lights as a scored silent– for which he composed the music himself. It was a huge success on its release, grossing over $5 million ($730 million in 2015 dollars). And it has grown in critical stature ever since: In 1992, the Library of Congress selected City Lights for preservation in the United States National Film Registry; then in 2007, the American Film Institute‘s 100 Years… 100 Movies ranked City Lights as the 11th greatest American film of all time. The critic James Agee referred to the final scene in the film as the “greatest single piece of acting ever committed to celluloid.”
All Singing! All Dancing!– All Free!…
From Chaplin and Keaton to Astaire and Olivier; from Kurosawa and Godard to von Sternberg and Tarkovsky; from Scorsese and Hitchcock to Ford and Huston– 300 Free Movies Online.
(Readers should be sure to look through the list to the very bottom, where they will find a list of links to more streaming riches…)
As we politely refuse butter, we might recall that it was on this date in 1958 that Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were married; they celebrated their 50th anniversary just months before Newman succumbed to lung cancer at the age of 83.
Now See The Major Motion Picture!…
From Tim McCool (a Boston College art student who “has been Photoshopping people’s heads onto other people’s bodies for nearly a decade”), via Hyperallergic (a nifty art blog overseen by husband and husband team, Veken Gueyikian and Hrag Vartanian), “Artists Go Hollywood: The Movie Posters,” a series of posters for artists’ biopics that might– nay, that ought to— be made. Consider, for example:
or…
See them all here.
As we smell the popcorn, we might recall that it was on this date in 1889 that Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in London. Young Charles toured the U.S. in 1910 and 1912 with the Fred Karno troupe of vaudevillians, rooming with fellow performer Arthur Stanley Jefferson, who later became known as Stan Laurel. Jackson returned to England (later to return); Chaplin stayed… and became, of course, the most famous motion picture performer of his time, one of the most successful writer-producer-directors of the era, and one of its biggest entertainment moguls (having co-founded United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford).
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