Tag: Harvey Weinstein

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Episode 600 – Joe Coleman

Virtual Memories Show 600:
Joe Coleman

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“I don’t step back that often when I’m in there, because I’m inside this tiny bit of the universe. For me, that’s what living things are: endless world within world within world within world.”

For my 600th episode, the great artist Joe Coleman joins the show to celebrate his phenomenal new career-spanning retrospective book, A DOORWAY TO JOE: The Art of Joe Coleman (Fantagraphics). We talk about art, mortality, mythography, history, the corruption of the flesh, the nature of evil, his Odditorium & the power of relics, Dr. Mombooze-o‘s send-off for his dead parents, playing Whac-A-Mole with T-cell lymphoma, getting arrested for being an Infernal Machine, taxi-driving in NYC’s Travis Bickle era, the inspiration of the Hubble telescope, the pagan Celtic roots in Irish Catholicism, what it’s like to work on one square-inch of a painting for 8 hours at a time, our respective appearances on the Uncle Floyd Show, playing in the Steel Tips with Patrick McDonnell & Karen O’Connell, and how he found his love and muse in Whitney Ward. (Also, this one’s got an interminable intro, so jump to the 15:45 mark to start the conversation.) Give it a listen! And go lose yourself in A DOORWAY TO JOE!

“Even when my paintings are based on a historical subject, I still approach it like a self-portrait.”

“An afterlife? You gotta concentrate on this life, that’s what I need to do. I’ll find out about the other stuff when I need to.”

“I work on wood, not canvas, because I want the surface as smooth as glass. Any texture would prevent the information I could uncover.”

“It’s the corruption of the flesh that makes us all one, and it is holy as well.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

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About our Guest

Joe Coleman is a world-renowned painter, writer, and performer who has exhibited for five decades in major museums throughout the world including one-man exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, the Barbican Centre in London, and Tilton Gallery and Dickinson Gallery in New York. His collectors have included Iggy Pop, Jim Jarmusch, Anthony Bourdain, Leonardo DiCaprio, and H.R. Giger. He was the subject of an award-winning feature length documentary, Rest in Pieces: A Portrait of Joe Coleman (1997) and lives with his wife Whitney Ward in upstate New York.

Follow Joe on Instagram.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Joe & Whitney’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos of me, Joe & Whitney by me. It’s on my instagram.

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Inglourious ROI

With their “media empire” on the verge of collapse, the Weinstein brothers were pulling out all the stops to promote the opening of Inglourious Basterds last week. They’ve even played the contrition card in explaining to the NYTimes that they lost their focus after leaving Disney and starting their own company, using investor money to buy a fashion line, invest in a TV channel and a social networking site, and other activities that don’t qualify as making movies people would pay to see. (Here’s a fun takedown of that article, at the AV Club.)

So it must be gratifying to them that the new Tarantino movie was #1 at the box office this weekend, with nearly $38 million in tickets sold. The marketing is a bit misleading, since the Basterds — a squad of Jewish-American soldiers who ambush and scalp Nazis in occupied France — don’t actually get much screen time. But that’s a minor quibble. I still enjoyed the heck out of the film; it just wasn’t the movie it was marketed as. (I’m assuming the 4-hour DVD version will have plenty more carnage.)

Which leads me to this WSJ article about the movie’s performance and its marketing. It highlights the problems the Weinstein Co. still faces, but the article also seems to have buried the lede:

Part of the success of “Inglourious Basterds,” which was directed by Quentin Tarantino, comes from its $35 million marketing campaign, which Weinstein Co. executives say Harvey Weinstein approached with a renewed focus after missing the mark of previous campaigns. Last year for example, the company used stick figure drawings to sell Kevin Smith’s “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” which underperformed at the box office.

Let me see if I have this correct: the film grossed $38 million domestically and the marketing cost $35 million? With another $27 million in overseas sales, the movie made $65 million last weekend.

If that $35 mil. covers worldwide marketing, then they spent 54 cents for every dollar in ticket sales. If it was only for the domestic campaign, then it was almost 1 dollar spent for 1 dollar in sales (which are shared with the movie theaters).

Between this marketing campaign and the movie’s production cost of $65-70 million, that means this big success is still $35-40 million behind the 8-ball. Sure, there a lot of other revenue streams to help them close the gap, but this is probably not a good model for running a business.