The gamecock. (Columbia, S.C.) 1908-2006, August 27, 2004, Page 7, Image 7
MTV award’s statue
gets a Miami makeover
By ELISA TURNER
KRT CAMPUS
As a trophy to display on the
mantle, the MTV Moonman Video
Music Award is no buff and golden
Oscar.
Posed jabbing the MTV flag into
lunar rock, this silvery astronaut
looks only slightly more buff than,
well, the Pillsbury Doughboy
mummified in crinkly aluminum
foil.
But the Moonman’s pudgy
profile is about to take a huge hit.
The super-sized version — 30 feet
tall and 6,500 pounds, to be exact
— of the MTV icon, unveiled last
Saturday, signifies a ■ major
makeover for the Moonman, in
honor of the VMA’s first broadcast
'from Miami on Sunday at the
AmericanAirlines Arena.
Leading a squad of 10 Miami
Dade College students in the
makeover mission was Miami
based artist Robert Chambers. He
was commissioned by the music
channel to work with local college
students to create a unique
sculpture — a sort of artistic hyper
trophy that has been omnipresent
at MTV sponsored pre-Video
Music Awards events this week.
Lending a hand and creative
expertise were several other Miami
Dade alums and past students,
including artists Ralph Provisero
duu miLiidti tuYvidiiu.
The Moonman is a commercial
endeavor, yes, but still in the
general orbit of Chambers’
penchant for art that’s ingeniously
composed of flashing, mechanically
enhanced contraptions steeped in
industrial applications, science
experiments and entertainment
bravura.
“His art really has that non
traditional ‘wow’ factor that would
be very eye-catching, something
that only he could do, and that’s
how we approach our channel,”
said Tod Apmann, director of
grassroots marketing for MTV and
MTV2.
This is an artist who’s made y
sculptures from helicopter parts,
hair gel, and radiant LED displays.
He has shown his work at South
Florida museums, New York
galleries and most recently in a solo
show at the Laumeier Sculpture
Park in St. Louis. Chambers’ art is a
hit with kids and adults alike, said
Laumeier director Glen Gentele.
“Chambers’ work is noisy, it
moves, it’s very cool, funky and
intellectually stimulating,” said
Gentele.
While the recent attention
showered on the visual arts in
South Florida following the success
of Art Basel Miami Beach wasn’t a
direct factor in MTV’s decision to
solicit proposals from several artists
here for this project, Apmann said,
art was a significant draw.
“We were really passionate
about involving local artists,” he
explained. “I know Miami has a
thriving local art scene, and we
wanted to take advantage of that,
being in a new city for the first
time, just to get the excitement out
there.”
1 he product ot many au-mgnters
in a makeshift studio at the Miami
Dade College Wolfson campus,
MTV’s newly-minted, super-sized
Moonman is sheathed in a
glittering column of iridescent
silver fiberglass and diamond
patterned vinyl, part lunar
lightning rod and part hip-hop
blasting hot rod. The sculpture’s
stocky aluminum frame is plumped
up with a vinyl-wrapped Styrofoam
helmet, chest and legs, and dozens
of special effects.
As work progressed on
Moonman, Chambers promised
“lots of chrome and bling-bling on
it. The idea is to turn this into a
Miami-styled low-rider piece.”
Chambers consulted on the project
with Mr. Neon, the manufacturer
that outfitted low-riders in neon for
both “Fast and Furious” movies
and did neon sets for “Miami
Vice.”
The entire work is all pumped
up with swaggering adornments
courtesy of Miami’s car culture:
winking Escalade tail lights, racing
stripes in pulsing purple and green
neon, a mega-watt speaker system,
heaving hydraulic body parts and
other flashy accouterments that
normally deck out bass-pounding
fleets of low-rider cars cruising late
nights along Calle Ocho and in
Coconut Grove and Hialeah.
That’s not all. A hyper-party
trophy if ever there was one,
Moonman can spew a minor
meteor shower of custom-made
confetti.
While limbering up its
hydraulic-powered biceps and
pectorals, it is programmed to
unleash hundreds of tiny silver
Mylar Moonman Mini Me’s as it
rolls about the city this week during
prerVMA festivities.
To accomplish all this, the
Miami Dade College students spent
long hours in a sometimes stifling
workplace that was buffeted by
gusting wind and rain one early
morning around 1 a.m. just as
Hurricane Charley barreled
towards Florida. Blocks of
Styrofoam tumbled in the air. “It
looked like a scene out of
‘Fantasia,’” Chambers said.
The students “just keep banging
away,” he said. From late afternoon
to well past midnight, jigsaw blades
whirred, hammers pounded, and
discussions ensued about circuit
breakers and the correct
geometrical calculations needed to
carve the Moonman’s spherical
liplmpf from mplnn-chanprl wprlpps
of Styrofoam.
After the Moonman’s aluminum
frame arrived at the MDC Student
Life Plaza on Northeast First
Avenue on Aug. 6, its heft
multiplied daily, if not hourly, as
the piece began to look less like a
demented chop shop denizen and
more like a bizarro astronaut
stretched out on his back, enduring
marathon plastic surgery.
Some evenings, Chambers
showed up with take-out Polio
Tropical for the crew. On another
night he explained how coils o'f
yellow cables and black levers
would function like joy-sticks,
allowing owners of low-rider cars
to make their vehicles lurch and
hop, and the car doors open and
shut in sync with the snapping
motion of glitter-painted hoods.
The same sort of levers would put
the VMA Moonman through its
strutting, gawk-at-me paces.
All of this could not have been
further from the red carpet
lavishness of the actual VMA, and
yet the college kids kept coming
back for more.
“I could care less about the
VMAs. I wanted to work with
someone like Robert who could
teach me things,” said Adrian
The Moonman, the MTV Video Music Award’s icon was re-vamped by Miami-based artist Robert
Chambers and Miami-Dade college students for the upcoming ceremony.
Molina, 21, a fine arts major. “He’s
super-inspiring and really open to
ideas.”
The ambitious size of the project
also impressed George Oliphant, a
VJ for mtvlj who spent one day
with MTV segment producer Dan
Luts filming the students at work.
Oliphant has seen plenty of
startling projects on campuses,
including fashion designs made of
moss and peacock feathers at
Rhode Island School of Design.
Still, he said, “I’ve never seen
anything of this magnitude.”
Climbing down from the belly of
the Moonman last week, art
student Patricia Hernandez, 21,
exuded seize-the-day enthusiasm.
She was one of the few on the
student crew who had actually
ridden in a low-rider recently, and
loved helping construct the
Moonman’s hybrid style of “ghetto
fab and cheesiness.”
She said: “I’ve learned more
here than in any art class, between
woodworking, hydraulics and
cutting foam. ... It’s been
amazing.”
Summer blockbusters make
comeback with record sales
By TERRY LAWSON
KRT CAMPUS
So did you know that three of
the 10 top-grossing movies of all
time were released this year? That
yet another was released late last
year and made the bulk of its
fortune in 2004? That 11 of the
Top 20 have been released in the
past five years?
Don’t feel so bad — it’s not
common knowledge. But the
summer of 2004 is headed toward
being the biggest moneymaker in
history. By Labor Day, analysts say,
the domestic box office should
surpass $4 billion, which tops the
previous record-holding summer of
2002. The biggest movie that
summer was “Spider-Man”; the
biggest release this summer has
been “Spider-Man 2,” which has
earned more than $360 million
and, last week, remained in the Top
10 after eight weeks in theaters.
(“Shrek 2,” which opened in the
middle of May, has earned more
than $435 million, making it third
biggest of all time.)
No rewer than eight movies
released this summer — plus three
others released in early or mid-May
— have passed the magic $ 100
million mark, which remains the
blockbuster bell to ring, even in an
age in which movies like “Spider
Man 2” cost $250 million to
produce and market. Ancillary sales
of DVDs — a market that continues
to have runaway growth — often
double a film’s earning power. Many
movies, especially comedies and
thrillers, now earn more from DVD
sales and rentals than they do in
theaters.
There is no end to theories as to
why the motion picture industry
has enjoyed such a dramatic
comeback in the past 20 years. And
although it is true that fewer North
Americans attend movies than they
did in the ’50s, When average
admission was less than $2, it is
also true that until nearly every
U.S. home had a television
(something that didn’t occur until
the ’60s), movies had been
America’s primary entertainment
outlet for two decades.
Today, movies compete for
attention and dollars not only with
network television but also with
cable, more sports franchises, the
home video market, personal
computers and video games. Yes,
there are more movie screens than
ever, and movies are marketed more
aggressively — and more
innovatively, considering the church
group groundswell that has made
Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the
Christ” the eighth-biggest of all time
with $370 million. But there is also a
growing feeling that there is a more
central reason for the movie boom:
“1 think we’re making movies
people want to see,” says Sam
Raimi. Before Raimi was tapped to
direct “Spider-Man” and its sequel,
his most successful film at the box
office had been the baseball drama
“For Love of the Game,” which
took in $35 million during its run.
With an estimated budget of $50
million, it was considered a failure.
“There’s a lot wider variety of
movies out there, more to choose
from, and while the studios still
decide what gets made, the
filmmakers have more power than
they used to. If I want to make a big
expensive summer movie like
‘Spider-Man,’ I have to make it at a
studio in a certain way. But if I
want to go back and make a smaller
movie like ‘The Gift,’ I have the
opportunity to do that, as long as I
can do it for a price.”
“The Gift,” a supernatural drama
from 2000, had a budget of $10
million, most of which went to pay
a cast that included Cate Blanchett
and Keanu Reeves. These stars,
along with many others, routinely
mix big-budget studio movies with
smaller, more personal projects.
The last eight months —
stretching back to December’s “The
Lord of the Rings: The Return of
the King” (seventh of all time) —
prove Raimi’s point.
Wide-appeal, big-budget movies
like his own, “Shrek 2” and “Harry
Potter and the Prisoner of
Azkaban” have earned the lion’s
share of the box office this summer.
The studios accurately call these
franchises “tentpoles” because they
can be counted on to prop up
earnings even if other films fail to
connect. Between them, their take
this season has been staggering,
more than $1 billion.
But savvy marketing techniques
have made high-profile successes of
films without built-in audiences or
major stars, including “The Bourne
Supremacy,” a sequel to a spy
thriller that found a larger audience
on DVD than it did in theaters.
Perhaps most impressively,
“Dodgeball: A True Underdog
Story,” which even its fans call a
stupid comedy, has made more
than $112 million for 20th Century
Fox and could easily double that
with its DVD release.
Marketing also played no small
part in the summer’s most amazing
success story, “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
The Bush-baiting screed from
Michael Moore rode controversy
to the* tune of $116 million,
dwarfing the box-office gross of
any documentary ever.
Documentaries have never been
more popular with audiences than
now. “Super Size Me,” a comic
expose addressing the unhealthy
effect fast food in general (and
McDonald’s in particular) has on the
public, was produced for about
$300,000, and at least three times
that was spent on its marketing. It has
made $11 million. Of the current Top
100 films, 19 are docs. According to
the trade journal Variety, that’s the
highest number in history.
There have been some impressive
flops. “Thunderbirds,” with a
production budget of $57 million, has
earned less than $7 million. “King
Arthur,” which cost $120 million to
mount, has taken in only $51 million.
The $110-million remake of “Around
the World in 80 Days” never got off
the ground, making less than $24
million. “Catwoman” had no claws,
earning back only $38 million for a
studio that spent $100 million
making it and another $35 million
trying to sell it.
All of the above generally
received lukewarm to negative
reviews, but it was the buzz — the
word of mouth — that did them in.
Fox recently became the first
studio of the summer to decline to
prescreen one of its movies, “Alien
vs. Predator,” for critics in time for
Friday newspaper reviews. (Warner
Brothers followed suit, withholding
“Exorcist: The Beginning” in the
same fashion.) Fox’s maneuver paid
off. “Alien Vs. Predator” was the
week’s top film, raking in $38
million. It was, Fox gloated, its
sixth consecutive film to make
more than $20 million in its
opening weekend, a string that
began April 23 with the Denzel
Washington thriller “Man on Fire.”
No less an authority than Tom
Cruise told the Detroit Free Press
recently, the movie business and
the public are obviously in sync.
“We’re making a lot of good
movies, and there’s lot of people
who want to see them. We’re all
getting smarter. Simple as that.”
I
BitTorrent allows movie
fans easier downloading
By Doug Bedell
KRT CAMPUS
Earlier this year, as filmmaker
Michael Moore was putting the
final touches on “Fahrenheit
9/11,” he unwittingly thrust
himself into the debate over
Internet file-trading ethics and
the relatively unknown, free
program BitTorrent.
In an interview, Moore
compared file-sharing of
copyright movies to friends
lending one another purchased
DVDs.
“I don’t agree with copyright
laws,” he said, “and I don’t have a
problem with people
downloading the movie and
sharing it... as long as they’re not
trying to make a profit off my
labor.”
That was all his political
enemies at MooreWatch.com
needed to hear. In hopes of
denting Moore’s box office
profits, the Web site’s manager
decided to help people download
free copies.
But rather than simply posting
one huge pirated version of the
movie for everyone to fight over,
MooreWatch.corn’s backers used
the power of BitTorrent to
distribute tens of thousands of
“Fahrenheits” in a faster, more
efficient manner. All they had to
do was link to a tiny torrent file.
BitTorrent is like the old
Napster with one major twist.
Napster and its peer-to-peer, or
P2P, • cousins connect users
directly with each other to receive
entire files.
That makes downloading full
length, digitized movies a long,
arduous task for both the
downloader and the person
offering the file, especially when
a lot of people are trying to get
the same copy simultaneously.
BitTorrent breaks up large files
into pieces, then allows users to
“swarm” — exchanging small
portions of files with one another
— until everyone has a complete
set.
Download speeds depend on
two factors. First, like the
computer bulletin board systems
of the 1980s, the software keeps
track of how much you
contribute to hosting files for the
group. The more you share, the
faster your downloads.
Second, the more people
trading a file, the more options
for obtaining its pieces.
So, unlike the old Napster,
popularity doesn’t bog down the
process — it gives it a shot of
adrenaline.
But it’s not instantaneous. A
“Sopranos” episode may take six
hours or more to download,
depending on network traffic. A
crude “screener” copy of
“Fahrenheit 9/11” last week
required 36 hours on a
moderately fast DSL connection.
BitTorrent was developed by
Washington programmer Bram
Cohen, 29, and presented to the
world at hacker conventions
more than three years ago.
--1
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