📈 first Derivative [90]
📈 first Derivative [90]
Saturday | June 24, 2023
Apologies for the delay, I was in Colombia last week and have been fighting off a cold this week. I’m traveling again next week but should be able to send out another issue. If not, back to regular cadence the following week.
If you’re in NY, check out Okdongsik, which just got reviewed by Pete Wells. One of my favorite new restaurants by one of my favorite restaurant groups.
Good reading,
-Teddy
🇷🇺💥 Lots of unconfirmed reports flying around but it seems that there may be a coup of sorts happening in Russia. I’d process all the facts very conservatively and this info will probably be outdated by the time you read this. Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Russian paramilitary Wagner Group, has released statements accusing the Russian military of attacking his troops, criticizing the rationale for the Ukraine invasion, and calling for a “march for justice” (presumably to Moscow). (WSJ | Yaroslav Trofimov | Jun 2023)
“But seeing that we are unbroken, they launched missile strikes on our rear bases. An enormous amount of our combat comrades have died. We will decide how to respond to this crime. The next step is ours,” he said. “This is not a military coup, this is a march of justice. Our actions do not impede the troops.”
He added that [Vladimir Putin]’s administration, the government, the police and the Russian National Guard will function as normal “once we finish.”
“Justice in the armed forces will be restored, and after that justice in all of Russia,” Prigozhin said.
Certainly sounds like a coup. Reportedly there is a warrant out for Prigozhin’s arrest and the FSB has urged Wagner soldiers to arrest Prigozhin and not to follow his orders. Very curious where everything will be by morning Eastern Time (it’s a ~13 hour drive from Rostov to Moscow) as the repercussions for the war in Ukraine and the stability of a nuclear world power are clearly enormous.
📚🏇🌅 Cormac McCarthy, the preeminent American novelist who died 11 days ago, had a long and unlikely path to mainstream literary acclaim, one unlikely to be replicated again. (NYT | Dan Sinykin | Jun 2023)
He was a 32-year-old University of Tennessee dropout with no literary agent who’d submitted a poorly typed manuscript of his first novel by mail to Random House. From the slush pile, it found its way to Albert Erskine’s desk. Mr. Erskine had edited Ralph Ellison, Robert Penn Warren and, most pertinently, the writer Mr. McCarthy had most closely styled his work on: William Faulkner. Mr. Erskine liked the manuscript, and Random House published the novel, “The Orchard Keeper,” a gnarled, strange and decidedly uncommercial debut.
And later luck, or fate, had its hand again:
After Mr. Erskine retired, Mr. McCarthy wrote to the agent Lynn Nesbit (who represented Robert Caro, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison and Tom Wolfe, among many others) to seek representation. “I’ve never had an agent before,” Mr. McCarthy wrote, as recounted in The Cut, “but I’m thinking now of getting one, and if you’re interested in talking to me, please call me before noon Rocky Mountain time.” She passed his letter along to an ambitious protégée, Amanda “Binky” Urban — who, as it happened, had read “Suttree” and considered it “an amazing book.”
On the structural changes in the publishing industry:
In the 1960s, large corporations began acquiring publishing houses, consolidating the industry into fewer and fewer conglomerates. In the 1970s, inflation increased the price of books even as wages stagnated and consumers had less to spend. Shareholder value became corporate scripture, inducing managerial demands for quarterly growth. For publishing, this meant marketing, publicity and sales departments grew and gained influence. Editors spent more time in meetings and filling out profit-and-loss forms. Literary agents became essential intermediaries, as publishing houses no longer riffled through submissions to find emerging talents. A poorly typed manuscript like Mr. McCarthy’s debut would struggle to make it into, let alone be rescued from, a slush pile.
💡🎞💰 Great piece covering Pixar at a crossroads that looks at how a company maintains or loses its DNA and whether the right strategy is to double down or adapt to a new reality. Pixar is so often thought of as the corporate embodiment of creativity translated to financial success, not unlike Steve Job’s other legacy, Apple. As always, great writing and insight from Matt Belloni. Worth reading in full (if you can’t, email me). (Puck | Matt Belloni | Jun 2023)
At this point, most people in Hollywood know the Pixar tenets: The “braintrust” that interrogated each film and filmmaker as if it were a PhD dissertation; the willingness to scrap perfectly okay projects, even if it meant pushing deadlines—refusing to “feed the Beast,” as [Ed Catmull] calls it—to change scripts mid-production or even to replace directors
But following a leadership change in 2018, Pixar’s recent films have underperformed and suffered the ignominy of going straight to Disney+, amid increased oversight and interference from parent company Disney.
It all highlights the paradoxical question facing Pixar: Its entire brand is based on using innovative technology to take the kind of major creative swings needed to break through and create something long-lasting and great, but what if the market no longer supports that model? Does it still make sense to produce $200 million original features like Elemental when the path to profitability these days is far tougher? After all, the other studios, like Universal’s Illumination, have figured out how to do this for less money…
On the other hand, can Pixar afford to not spend what it spends? Is the new fiscal reality for Disney a recipe for the kind of creative mediocrity and feeding the Beast that required [Bob Iger] to buy Pixar in the first place…
The piece also touches on the creative shift in Pixar’s more filmmaker-driven storytelling that others have also commented on, but it may just be that box office success is harder to achieve than in the era of its classic hits and the paradigm shift to streaming and reliance on existing IP are uniquely challenging for Pixar’s original animation.
look at the Illumination movies of the so-called post-pandemic era: Sing 2 ($405 million worldwide amid theater shutdowns), Minions: The Rise of Gru ($939 million), and The Super Mario Bros. Movie ($1.3 billion and counting). All well-done, and congrats to Illumination C.E.O. Chris Meledandri, who may have leapfrogged Marvel’s Kevin Feige as the most important creative executive at any Hollywood studio. But those movies are all pre-existing franchises. The real test for Meledandri will be with Migration, an original movie co-written by Mike White, over the holidays. Let’s see whether that cracks $500 million.
I hope the company can get its mojo back and succeed while remaining true to itself because it feels like a paragon of American business at its best, a nexus of commercial success and uncompromising creative vision.
Easier said than done, of course. Pixar just does a lot of things that other animation studios don’t. It carries more well-paid employees, including filmmakers, because it mostly promotes from within, and it tries to avoid “rolling” staff off when they aren’t assigned to a particular project… Pixar films are made in California, where labor costs are higher, rather than farmed out, or produced in France, at the studio that Illumination owns there.
Maybe Pixar will have to follow the cue of Apple. Designed in California, but assembled elsewhere.