OK, so remember back a few weeks ago when my buddy Jonathan Newman was talking about copyright and specifically answering Nina Paley's objection that musicians should own their own music? And I suspected that she thought that music worked the same way to composers as comic books worked toward the original artists?
Well now I've actually seen Sita Sings the Blues. And oh. Now I get it.
What Nina Paley did was the best trick to producing a movie. Get a bunch of great music in it and then just do whatever you want. That's a sure-fire way to make a movie people want to see. Anybody can do that. Spend all the money making the soundtrack (or better yet, have someone else spend all the money on the sound track) and then make any kind of image you want over the top of it. Easy stuff. MTV proves this all the time.
Hell, I have this great movie -- it's about a girl and... something happens. You know. I haven't actually worked it all out and I don't have to. Why? Because the soundtrack is all Rolling Stones songs, with a couple Led Zeppelin songs thrown in. Just wait 'till you see the part of the picture with "Kashmir" playing under it. The movie is amazing. It's guaranteed to make millions of dollars. We don't need to shoot it for any money and nobody will care if the lead can't act. Because it's got all these great songs in it. If I had the rights to the music I could walk into any studio in the world and demand millions of dollars and kilos of coke to write and direct the picture.
Oh wait. Those capitalist pigs won't let me have the rights to their music for free. Avast ye Jimmy Page and Mick Jagger!
Right?
Whatevs...
OK, so I'll make an animated feature using Rogers and Hammerstein tunes. Oh wait, I still can't do that because their estates still own the music.
Dang. Now to make a musical I'll have to get off my lazy butt and actually create a soundtrack first. That sounds like a lot of work... Work is hard...
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