Filmmaker Rodrigo Garcia and actor Ewan McGregor team up for a fresh take on a centuries-old story from the Bible. Chadwick Boseman follows roles as Jackie Robinson and James Brown with the a new hero -- the Black Panther. Ticketmaster settles a class action lawsuit with barely a dent. YACHT's sex tape prank ends in a backlash.
Why consumers are the real losers in the Schlesinger v. Ticketmaster lawsuit settlement
If you've ever bought a ticket via Ticketmaster, you've felt the sting of its surcharges — handling fees, shipping fees, "convenience fees" — which can easily add up to more than half of the ticket's face value. By the time you check out, that $40 ticket is more like $60.
For more than a decade, a class action lawsuit against Ticketmaster over those fees worked its way through the courts. A settlement was reached early in 2015 in which Ticketmaster agreed to offer $383 million in discounts on future ticket purchases by parties to the class action suit. However, Ticketmaster could end up paying out no more than $45 million.
The ticket buyers who were party to the suit have recently begun receiving e-mail notices that spell out the agreement.
The Frame's John Horn spoke with Eric Reed, an attorney and contributor to the financial site The Street, who wrote “Ticketmaster Probably Owes You Money: Here’s How to Try to Get It" — about how customers are still getting the short end of the stick.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
I’m a big fan of Wilco and I want to see them in concert. So I go to Ticketmaster, buy my concert tickets but before I get them, I have to pay all these added charges. But none of those fees reflect Ticketmaster’s real costs, right?
The problem, and what the plaintiffs alleged, was that Ticketmaster represented these things as transaction fees that they themselves were paying when in fact it was set up as a profit center for the company. So they were telling you that you had to pay $5 to $10 for shipping, $5 to $10 for processing, when they're pocketing most if not all of that money.
But like a lot of class action lawsuit settlements, there's a feeling among some people that the people who made out the best are the lawyers. What are the consumers gonna get?
Not much. So this is a kind of settlement called a coupon settlement. The coupon settlement is this idea that instead of actually giving back a cash award, the customers are given a discount. What a lot of people feel like, and I agree with them, is that it's just stupid. I mean, why do I have to go back and shop in a place that I just said wronged me? Why do they get rewarded for wrongdoing with repeat business?
The actual savings is just two bucks a ticket, is that right?
$2.25. You can also be entitled to $5 off of shipping depending on which section of the class you fall into, but we're talking really small change here.
You cite a study that a vast majority of cases like this produce no benefits to most members in the class action itself.
Generally speaking, yes. The members of a consumer suit, like this one or anything that basically says a product or service wronged a large group of people, the problem is that you just never see the money. You get one of these emails that drops into your box, even if it makes it past your spam filter, what are you going to do? Go claim your $2 in winnings?
The lawyers, I guess, would argue that without class action lawsuits against companies like Ticketmaster, there's no way for these companies to be policed and to actually charge fees that are reasonable and actually reflect their true cost. Isn't that the real benefit in the litigation?
And they're 100% right. Class action suits are a very good idea, but the problem is that for a class action suit to get to this point, the consumer has already been wronged. If you bought from Ticketmaster, you were taken for a ride or allegedly. So the problem with not getting any of the money to the class members on the back-end is that they're not actually getting back what they were said to have lost.
Chadwick Boseman: from Jackie Robinson to James Brown to Black Panther
In a matter of a couple years, Chadwick Boseman has become one of Hollywood's most versatile and talented stars. He portrayed Jackie Robinson in 2013's "42," which led to a widely-praised role as James Brown in 2014's "Get On Up."
However, it's Boseman's new role that might cement his place at the forefront of today's leading men. At the end of 2014, he was cast as Marvel's Black Panther — the company's first black stand-alone superhero on screen. Boseman makes his debut as Black Panther in "Captain America: Civil War" before starring in a spin-off movie, currently scheduled for release in 2018.
Boseman stopped by The Frame on the heels of the Black Panther announcement. He opened up about having to convince himself that he could play James Brown, the fact that Hollywood isn't quite ready for black actors to play non race-specific roles, and what it means to play a superhero who could one day become an action figure for kids of all races.
Interview Highlights:
What was the audition process for playing James Brown in "Get On Up?"
They had tried to get me to read the script for months. And then we had a conversation on the phone, and the conversation convinced me, like, Oh yeah, of course, what are you thinking? Of course you want to meet [director Tate Taylor], because you do want to work with him one day. Just go in; he'll see who you are as an artist, but he'll also see that this is not right for you. That's what I expected to happen. [laughs]
But I started prepping for it, and I started to see these things about James Brown that I really liked, so once I did that reading, those things came across. I didn't know how much they would come across, but they sent that tape [of a James Brown performance] to my manager and said, "Have him look at this."
So my manager, my agent and I looked at it, and they didn't say anything except, "Well, what do you think about it?" I said, "But I can't! [laughs] I don't know if I can dance like James Brown, I don't know if I could sing, I don't know about the performance." But they said, "What do you think about the tape?" I said, "I see how I could do it." [laughs]
So you're really having to cast yourself! I mean, the person you're trying to sell isn't the studio, it isn't the director — you're really convincing yourself that you can pull this off.
Yeah, but I still wasn't sure. I just saw a couple of things that were the entry points into who he was.
What were those entry points?
Well, the thing I was worried about the most was the caricature of James Brown, the parody of James Brown. So the one thing I tried to do in that initial audition — and I'm not saying it was good or that it was what I ended up doing — [was] to find this really honest place, no matter how old he was.
I had to play him in that audition at 63 and at 35, and from those two scenes I really saw the difference in age, and I also saw a certain honesty there that I didn't realize I had reached until I saw the tape. But once I saw that I was like, "Okay, this is going to be a lot of work, but if you pull it off..."
You've played Jackie Robinson, you've played James Brown, and you're playing Black Panther. Are you at a place now where the parts you're reading for are not race-specific?
Well, yes and no. Some are still race-specific. In a lot of cases they're looking for an African-American guy, or a guy of African descent, who can play this role. I'm one of the people who would pop up for that. In other cases, there are some roles — a few, and it's not as much as I would like though.
We're talking about Hollywood, a town that presents itself as very liberal, open-minded and progressive, and you're saying they're not there yet.
No. No, they're not. "They" or "we"? I should say "we," because I can't separate myself from it. We're not there yet. It's definitely a different road for actors of color in terms of choices that you have, mainly because of the mythologies that are used to make movies are viewed as European or Western mythologies. So people have in their heads, "This is a white actor's role."
It's hard to get that out of people's heads, so for me those roles have come, but in some cases they're still not what you want to do. It still might not be the right movie or the right director for you at that moment. But it's definitely different now than it was before "42."
If "Black Panther" works, in a couple of years there will be kids with their Black Panther action figures next to their beds. How does it make you feel to be part of that?
That's one of the first things I thought about when we left the announcement event with Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans. I saw fans outside with the rendering of Black Panther and [as] I was signing them I was sitting there like, Oh my gosh! And we were close to Halloween, so over that week I saw people with Iron Man costumes, Captain America costumes, Spider-Man costumes, and I was like, That's going to happen [with Black Panther]. It blew my mind.
It's important because there will be black kids who have the Black Panther outfit and action figure, as well as Latino kids and white kids. It's an amazing thought that it helps from the opposite side to do what you were talking about earlier, about the non-specific racial casting; the idea that this person can be a hero. I feel like "42" did the same thing: there are so many kids from various backgrounds that see Jackie Robinson as a hero, and even though the movie is about race, the heroic spirit has no racial boundaries. So it's amazing to be a part of any of that.
This story first aired in December 2014.
Ewan McGregor plays Jesus and the devil in Rodrigo Garcia's 'Last Days in the Desert'
There are plenty of movies about Jesus, but "Last Days in the Desert" might have the most intriguing — or strangest — premise: use the same actor to portray both Jesus and Satan.
In "Last Days in the Desert," that actor is Ewan McGregor, who stars both as Jesus — wandering the desert for 40 days — and The Demon, Yeshua's devilish mirror. The movie was written and directed by Rodrigo García, the Colombian filmmaker who made “Albert Nobbs” and “Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her.” And "Last Days" is showing at the AFI Film Festival before hitting theaters next January.
When McGregor and García joined us at the Sundance Film Festival, they talked about the ways in which shooting in a real desert affected the movie and how they approached putting Jesus on the big screen.
Interview Highlights:
Ewan, how does the environment in which you filmed affect your performance or your state of mind while you're acting in this film?
McGregor: We were such a small unit and we had such a small footprint, and especially our first week, where we were shooting Yeshua's walking through the desert in different locations, we were moving quite a lot between the shots and between the set-ups. There was nowhere and nothing else to do.
There was no phone reception, there was nowhere to go other than just find a little spot in the desert and sit down and look at the sky and look at the landscape.And that's totally infused in the performance, I think. It's what I used to do when I was a little kid, and now we move so quickly in our modern lives and we don't have time to just sit around.
Last night, I was looking at a scene where I'm playing with some stones. I realized that's something I really enjoy — sitting, playing with stones or sticks, and just looking, thinking, and letting things bubble up from your subconscious. It's a really beautiful, relaxing thing, and I think when you're playing somebody like Jesus who's thoughtful and pensive, that was very helpful.
Writer-director Rodrigo García on the set of "Last Days in the Desert". Photo courtesy of Francois Duhamel.
Rodrigo, people who know the story of Jesus in the desert can interpret it however they want. Some people look at it as history, some view it as parable, some see it as myth, and there are many other possible interpretations. Did you have a main idea in your mind about what this story represented?
García: You cannot go into a story about Jesus without all the things that are a given — you know the context, you know the outcome, you know the destiny. I sort of freed myself in a couple of ways, by narrowing it down just to three days in his life that are completely out of the context of the Gospel, and also I only concentrated on the human side.
As a writer-director, you always have to ask yourself, If this was me, then what? Have you put yourself in that position? There's no point for a director to say, "Well, even if I was God, then what?" Although some directors do that. [laughs] So I avoided the divine side altogether, and I just dealt with the human.
Ewan, I think there are in fact more books written about Jesus than any person in the history of the world, and yet there probably aren't as many books about the Devil. So as you're preparing for both roles, is one more challenging than the other? In watching the film, there seems to be a certain sparkle in your eyes while you're playing the Devil that you maybe don't have when you're Jesus. Is that just the nature of a difference between the characters, or was one actually more enjoyable or easier to play?
McGregor: They became closer than I had imagined. I hadn't given the demon as much thought, it's true to say, going into the film. When you're approaching the start of a movie where you're playing Jesus, the Jesus part of your brain is being exercised more than anything else. [laughs]
It's quite a daunting proposition, so I hadn't really given the demon as much thought. But I'm quite glad, in a way, because if I had approached the demon in a bigger way or a more obvious "bad guy" way...I don't know, there's something terribly interesting about the fact that they're closer than you might imagine.
García: I think the way you played it, it does come out as a brother — his fallen brother. Two brothers, one striving to do good, and the other having fallen already. And I think that fraternal thing between them is one of the achievements of the performance.
McGregor: And you gave me incredible moments to play, where we see the demon's fragility, or his jealousy, or his pride. And there's a moment where we part at the end where there's disappointment in both sides. They've been walking through the desert together for quite a long time, and they're a sort of company for each other. It's quite bizarre.