"Complete Unknown," starring Rachel Weisz, is Joshua Marston's third film, but his first in English; in a new epsiode of "Song Exploder," Andra Day dissects "Forever Mine"; more people than ever are canceling pay TV services, and that has networks worried.
How cord cutting is wreaking havoc on big events like the Olympics, VMAs
Cord cutting — the term for TV customers abandoning pay TV services — continues to impact the TV industry.
From April to June of this year, more than 800,000 subscribers canceled their traditional television plans — whether from cable companies, satellite providers or telephone companies. That’s the most people who have ever cut the cord in one financial quarter, and it’s also a big explanation for the consistent, industry-wide drop in television viewership.
The MTV Video Music Awards are usually a decent draw, and this year featured performances by Beyoncé and Rhianna, but the audience for the Aug. 25 show dropped 34% from last year. But there is a bright spot for Viacom: the digital streaming audience for the event increased by 70% from last year.
Meg James is a media reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and she joined senior producer Oscar Garza on The Frame to make sense of this cord cutting mess — how it's changing the relationship between networks and advertisers, and why streaming still plays second fiddle to traditional broadcasts.
Interview Highlights:
This is somewhat astounding: from April to June of this year, the second quarter, more than 800,000 people canceled their pay TV subscriptions. In your story, you quoted an analyst from the industry consulting firm that comes up with these numbers. How did he assess those numbers?
SNL Kagan, which is a very prominent consulting firm that monitors the media industry, [has] been tracking homes with pay-TV for more than a decade, and they've noticed a sharp uptick in the number of subscribers who are dropping their subscriptions. The second quarter of this year has been the biggest drop that they've recorded since they started this service more than a decade ago.
Those numbers would at least partially explain the drop in ratings for the Olympics, for example, and also the dramatic drop the ratings for the MTV Video Music Awards. How are the broadcast and cable networks responding to this new reality?
I wouldn't say they're panicked, but they're very concerned. As you saw, the ratings were down about 20% for the Olympics, and that caught NBC by surprise. The numbers for the VMAs were also way down, and I think it shows that people are watching TV differently than they were just two or three years ago. Companies are trying to figure out how to respond to these changes.
In fact, both NBC and Viacom are touting the huge growth of audiences who are watching live streams on their computers. How do networks sell spots to advertisers for these live events, now that they're almost guaranteed to make a bigger impact on streaming than they used to, as opposed to television?
Well, the networks are trying to sell ads the old-fashioned way, with 30-second spots. They're also sort of rejiggering commercial breaks, and that's one of the criticisms that NBC faced [during the Rio Olympics], that they had bunched up the ads in more rapid breaks. People felt like, Oh my gosh, we're seeing so many more commercials.
It was interesting because there was a study released that said there were about the same number of commercials for the Olympics in 2012 as there were this year, but people felt that there were so many more. I think a lot of people are used to new technology now — they have DVRs, they're fast-forwarding through ads, and this is really becoming an issue for the media companies.
They're [also] trying to sell ads and impressions on the video sites, but the revenue they're bringing in from their digital offerings is far less than what they traditionally have brought in from their regular TV channels.
But if you're streaming a live event on your computer, aren't you essentially watching the broadcast? Or do they package those differently?
Yes and no. Most times, they package them a little bit differently, but it's been sort of a push-pull among the television networks and advertisers. One reason why is because advertisers are used to paying less for digital ads than they are on TV, and so they want to pay less for the eyeballs on the digital stream.
Also, it's easier to divert your attention when you're watching online during a commercial break. It's always been known that people didn't watch all the commercials on TV, but you didn't have the level of data that you do right now, which really shows the ad avoidance.
If the trend toward social media buzz and streaming continues, and of course there's no sign that it won't continue, are the networks able to see the point at which digital streaming advertising will overtake broadcast advertising?
If they have, they haven't publicly said that. I think it's probably a little too soon — even though NBC had huge, huge numbers for their streaming audience, they still had something like an average of 25 million viewers a night watching the tape delay broadcast of the events from Rio. That's a huge audience, and they're rightly trying to hold on to that old way of making money, because it's been far more lucrative.
Rachel Weisz shifts identities in Joshua Marston's thought-provoking 'Complete Unknown'
A new film is trying to answer Bob Dylan's 1965 question: How does it feel to be without a home, like a complete unknown?
“Complete Unknown,” the third feature film by director Joshua Marston, was co-written by he and playwright Julian Sheppard. It stars Rachel Weisz as a bit of a rolling stone — her character is constantly reinventing her identity at the expense of her personal relationships.
The Los Angeles-born director explained that his motivation for writing her character was an academic one:
I got into filmmaking to play anthropologist and to, with every movie, delve into a different world and a different set of characters and sort of sink into that.
“Complete Unknown” is Marston’s first English language feature. “Maria Full of Grace,” from 2004, was in Spanish, and his 2011 film, “The Forgiveness of Blood,” was in Albanian. “Complete Unknown” made its premiere at the Sundance film festival this year where Amazon studios picked it up for distribution.
Amazon’s film division is run by Ted Hope and Bob Berney, who are old hands in the indie film world. “Complete Unknown” was one of a slew of movies they bought in Park City.
When The Frame’s John Horn sat down at Sundance with Marston, he talked more about the film's main themes and how his collaboration with Julian Sheppard got started.
Hear the full interview by clicking the play button at the top of this post. Highlights below.
Interview Highlights:
On his collaboration with Julian Sheppard:
Julian and I have known each other since 2001. We met at an artist colony called the McDowell Colony — it's very well known — and he was working on a screenplay at the time. We've known each other ever since. Years later, I was just coming out of a bad breakup with a film that hadn't come to fruition and I happened to see Julian at a party and I told him that I was going to be having lunch and he said, well do you want to kick around some ideas? So we started talking about ideas. We, from the beginning, knew we wanted to tell a story about a woman who was not who she presented herself to be. Then, in talking through that, [we] landed on this image of, what would it be like to be at a party and look across the room and see a woman who you were quite certain you knew and hadn't seen in many years and then be introduced to her and have her be presented as a completely other person? And we sort of went from there.
On developing Rachel Weisz's character:
When Rachel and I started working together, we immediately began having these very complex conversations that lasted all the way to the last day of shooting about the extent to which her character is or is not truly the people whom she says she is. On the one hand, she's doing some fabrication and she's creating backstories for each of these people that she becomes. On the other hand, once she's in a new identity, she is fully in that identity. She's actually being that person. For me, that was the interest. That's the way I view it is that, you are actually all of these people.
On being back at Sundance for the first time since his 2004 debut:
It's a trip to be back. I'm trying consciously not to compare experiences, but it's hard not to. The experience with "Maria Full of Grace" was sort of the dream experience that anyone could have at Sundance. I was an unknown, all the actresses were unknown and people were then stopping them on the street asking for their autographs. What's nice this time around is that I get the benefit of the opposite, which is a packed house because people are curious to see what I've done next. That's very gratifying.
On how the themes of "Complete Unknown" were shaped by his own experiences:
My personal connection is at two levels. One is yes, within the realm of filmmaking I'm reinventing myself to a certain extent with every movie. I'm trying to do something different. Definitely this movie is different from my last two. We were joking about the fact that it's my first English language feature film after doing one in Spanish and one in Albanian. So in that respect, I'm reinventing myself. But there's also just the fantasy of — and I'm sure this happens to you and everyone — you're doing what you do and then you meet someone who's out across the other side of the planet saving lives and doing something important. You think, wow it would be really great to do what that person's doing. There's that fantasy of shifting gears.
"Complete Unknown" opens in theaters on September 2nd. Amazon has not yet given a date for when it will be made available to stream.