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Table of Contents

Book Information! 3

About the Author! 4

About Edgar Rice Burroughs! 5

Burroughs’ Influence! 5

Why Edgar Rice Burroughs Matters by Michael D. Sellers! 6

Excerpt From John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood! 9

Edgar Rice Burroughs Centennial Presentation - Transcript! 12

Author Photo - Color! 28

Author Photo - Black and White! 29

Endotes and Links! 30.

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Book Information

TRADE PAPERBACK $14.95

EBOOK $6.95

John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood tells the complete story of the hundred year journey of A Princess of Mars from the mind of Edgar Rice Burroughs to cinema screens worldwide. It examines the story itself, the uniqueness of Burroughs’ vision and abilities, and the key choices made by Andrew Stanton in adapting the story. In compelling detail, it also analyzes the marketing campaign that preceded the box office failure. It also explores the steadfast ef-forts by fans and film-makers to transform the legacy of the film from flop to classic, and in the process enable the continuation of the cinematic legacy of John Carter of Mars.

AUTHORMichael D. Sellers

ISBN-13: 978-0-615-68231-0

PAGES: 350

PUBLISHER: UNIVERSAL MEDIA

LEGENDARY AUTHOR, EDITOR, AND SCHOLAR RICHARD A. LUPOFF REVIEW

It took 100 years to bring Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars to the big screen. It took Disney Studios just ten days to declare the film a flop, withdraw it from distribution, and lock it away in the Disney vaults. How did this project, despite its quarter-billion dollar budget, the brilliance of director Andrew Stan-ton, and the creative talents of legendary Pixar Studios, become a calamity of historic proportions?

Michael Sellers, a filmmaker and Hollywood insider himself, saw the disaster approaching and fought to save the project – but without success. In John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood, Sellers details every blunder and betrayal that led to the doom of the motion picture – and that left countless Hollywood careers in the wreckage.

John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood is a must-read for every fan of John Carter and Edgar Rice Bur-roughs, and every film buff intrigued by the “inside baseball” aspects of modern Hollywood.

-- Richard A. Lupoffauthor of Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure

and Barsoom: Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Martian Vision

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About the AuthorMichael D. Sellers grew up enchanted by the novels of Edgar Rice Bur-roughs. Like so many others Burroughs enthusiasts, he waited many decades for a John Carter of Mars film to finally be produced, and found himself eagerly awaiting the release of Disney’s John Carter. By that time, his life’s journey included:

• Magna Cum Laude Graduate of the University of Delaware, where he was a National Finalist for a Rhodes Scholarship and Danforth Fel-lowship . He went on to the NYU Graduate Film School, Master of Fine Arts Program, then moved to Los Angeles to begin a career in film.

•Shortly after arriving in Los Angeles, Sellers was recruited by the Cen-tral Intelligence Agency and for 10 years served as an operations officer for the Clandes-tine Service of the CIA in Warsaw, Poland; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Moscow, USSR; and Manila, Philippines. He participated in some of the most sensitive and significant opera-tions of the US Government, including the top Warsaw Pact Military agent (Col. Ryszard Kuklinski) 1and the Agency’s top Russian agent (Adolf Tolkachev)2 His service in the Phil-ippines involved working with the personal liaison to the CIA of President Corazon Aquino who wrote of Sellers assistance in helping Aquino survive seven coup attempts: “Mike Sellers was the main conduit of information going to and coming from the US government regarding the perilous political situation of the fledgling Philippine democracy Mrs. Aquino had restored…  Our cooperative efforts allowed the young democracy in some cases to preempt and in others to mount a successful defense.” Sellers was awarded the CIA Commendation Medal for his role in helping Aquino suppress the seventh and most dangerous attempted coup. For full information on Sellers CIA career, visit: CIA Service3

• Upon leaving the CIA in 1990, Sellers resumed his career as a filmmaker and since then has written, produced, and/or directed 19 feature films. He has won multiple awards as director and producer of independent feature films, and has authored six produced screenplays. For full information on Sellers’ career as a filmmaker from 1990 - 2012 visit: IMDB Profile Michael D. Sellers 4 and Feature Films of Michael D. Sellers.5

In December 2011, with the release imminent, Sellers launched a blog site, The John Carter Files, which developed a substantial following in the months before the film’s release and has logged more than 3.4 Million visits to date. When Disney’s official trailers for the movie failed to ignite interest, he created his own fan trailer which caught the eye of John Carter director An-drew Stanton and ultimately went viral, leading hundreds of thousands of views and generat-ing articles on over 200 media sites including CNN and the LA Times. He was sought out by the founders of the Facebook Group calling for a John Carter sequel and was instrumental in helping that group grow to 11,000 strong in a few weeks. John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood is a direct response to the many fans and readers who urged Sellers to expand his voluminous and insightful writings about Edgar Rice Burroughs, Andrew Stanton, Disney, and the entire John Carter episode into a book that seeks to understand: “What really happened?”

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About Edgar Rice BurroughsWhen he wrote “A Princess of Mars” in the fall of 1911, Edgar Rice Burroughs was a failed

businessman barely scratching out an existence, resorting to pawning his wife’s jewelry to keep his family of four sheltered and fed. All of that changed with the publication of A Princess of Mars in February of 1912, and Tarzan of the Apes in October 1912. At the time of his death in 1950, Edgar Rice Burroughs was the most widely read author on the planet. A 1947 article noted:6

Today the more than 30,000, 000 copies of his novels in 58 languages and dialects make him the most widely read author on earth. Tidy sales of other items include some 21 Tarzan motion pictures, 364 radio programs, more than 60,000,000 ice-cream cups, 100,000,000 loaves of Tarzan bread, countless num-bers of Tarzan school bags, pencils, paint books, pen-knives, jungle costume, toys, and sweaters. In addi-tion there are the famous Tarzan comic strips, carried by 212 newspapers with a circulation of more than 15,000,000...In short, in one form or another, Tarzan is known to more people on earth than any other fic-tional character.

Burroughs’ InfluenceBurroughs is considered the grandfather of modern science fiction, and his work is credited with being the main inspiration for Flash Gordon, Superman, Star Wars, and Avatar. Bur-roughs’ influence is captured in the following quotes:

Ray Bradbury: “Burroughs is probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world. By giving romance and adventure to a whole generation of boys, Burroughs caused them to go out and decide to become special. Burroughs . . . probably changed more destinies than any other writer in American history. I’ve talked to more biochemists and more astronomers and technologists in various fields, who, when they were ten years old, fell in love with John Carter and Tarzan and decided to become something romantic. Burroughs put us on the moon.” 

Carl Sagan: “I can remember as a child reading with breathless fascination the Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. I journeyed with John Carter, gentleman adventurer from Virginia, to ‘Barsoom,’ as Mars was known to its inhabitants. I can remember spending many an hour in my boyhood…imploring what I believed to be Mars to transport me there.” (“Cosmos” 1980)

Jerry Siegel (on how Burroughs’ John Carter influenced Siegel’s creation of Superman): “John Carter was able to leap great distances because the planet Mars was smaller than the planet Earth, and so he had great strength. I visualized the planet Krypton as a huge planet, much larger than Earth, so that whoever came to Earth from that planet would be able to leap great distances and lift great weights.” –

Steven Spielberg (on Raiders of the Lost Ark): “I’ve always wanted to bring a serial to life that blends . . . elements from Edgar Rice Burroughs.” (regarding “Raiders of the Lost Ark”)

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Why Edgar Rice Burroughs Matters by Michael D. Sellers

Mr. Burroughs convinced me that I could talk with the animals, even if they didn't answer back, and that late nights when I was asleep my soul slipped from my body, slung itself out the window, and frolicked across town never touching the lawns, always hanging from trees where, even later in those nights, I taught myself alphabets and soon learned French and English and danced with the apes when the moon rose. But then again, his greatest gift was teaching me to look at Mars and ask to be taken home. I went home to Mars often when I was eleven and twelve and every year since, and the astronauts with me, as far as the Moon to start, but Mars by the end of the century for sure.... We have commuted because of Mr. Burroughs. Because of him we have printed the Moon. Because of him and men like him, one day in the next five centuries, we will commute forever, we will go away...And never come back....And so live forever.

Ray Bradbury

Edgar Rice Burroughs...predicted the invention of radar, sonar, televi-sion, teletype, the radio compass, the automatic pilot, homing devices on bombs and torpedoes, genetic cloning, living organ transplants, anti-gravity propulsion and many other concepts deemed totally fantastic in his time. His soaring imagination, coupled with the sure instinct of a master storyteller, assures him a position of honor among American writers of the twentieth century

George T. McWhorter, Curator, Burroughs Memorial Collection

In February 1912, two months before Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic, at a time when modern science fiction as we know it did not exist, a serialized novel called Under the Moons of Mars written by a struggling businessman named Edgar Rice Burroughs from Chicago captured the imagination of the readers of All Story Magazine. Later that same year Burroughs’ second creation, Tarzan of the Apes, elevated the new author to the highest level of pulp stardom. In subsequent years Burroughs evolved into a self-publishing millionaire entrepreneur, the first writer to self-incorporate, creating a company, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., which is still in exis-tence today and manages over 100 active trademarks and rights licenses around the world. He became a Southern California Real Estate baron, founding the city known today as Tarzana; he was an admirer of indigenous cultures, a staunch anti-communist and anti-nazi, and when World War II came he became, at 67, the oldest active US War Correspondent. By the time of his death in 1950, Burroughs was the world’s best selling author, with his books, translated into 58 languages, outselling the novels of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzger-ald combined.

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Today, Burroughs is best remembered as the creator of Tarzan. But as popular as Tarzan was -- it was Burroughs depiction of Mars that fired the imagination and creative energies of writers, scientists, and film-makers alike. Scientist and astronomer Carl Sagan attributed his own life-long scientific quest to find life on other planets as having been inspired by Burroughs:

I remember reading with breathless fascination the Mars novels of Ed-gar Rice Burroughs. I journeyed with John Carter, gentleman adven-turer, to Barsoom, as Mars was known by its inhabitants, wandering among beasts of burdens called thoats, winning the hand of the lovely Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, and befriending a ten foot high green fighting man named Tars Tarkas, as the moons of Mars hurtled over-head, on a summer's evening, on Barsoom.

It aroused generations of 8 years olds, myself among them, to consider exploration of the planets as a real possibility - to wonder whether we ourselves might one day journey to the distant planet Mars. John Car-ter got to Barsoom by standing inane open field, spreading his hands, and wishing hard at Mars. I can remember spending many hours in my boyhood, arms resolutely outstretched in an open field at twilight, im-ploring what I believed to be Mars, to transport me there.

The list of extraordinary individuals who cite Burroughs and Barsoom as a formative influence is long and eclectic, and includes Arthur Clarke, Jane Goodall, Ronald Reagan, Billy Graham, George Lucas, and James Cameron.

Ray Bradbury, speaking of the influence Burroughs had on the imaginations and lives of indi-viduals who went on to greatness in creative and scientific fields, wrote:

Burroughs is probably the most influential writer in the history of the world. I've talked to more biochemists and more astronomers who fell in love with John Carter, and decided to become something romantic. Burroughs put us on the moon. All the technologists read Burroughs.

What was Burroughs’ unique gift?

Why is it that after decades of adulthood and me spent reading all the great authors, and appre-ciating them, it is Edgar Rice Burroughs who matters to me more than all the rest? Is it his un-derdog status as a “non-serious” writer whom I feel has not been given his due by the literary establishment? Or is it something else?

Defining what it was about Burroughs that made him stand both from his peers and his modern equivalents is something that the scholars and enthusiasts have all tried to do, but none of quite been able to put their finger on it. It seems to be something that we recognize, but cannot ar-ticulate.

One of the best explanations came from Gore Vidal in his 1967 Esquire article.Vidal wrote of how that “dream-self” that Burroughs created so artfully fulfilled an important purpose: “How many consciously daydream, turning on a story in which the dreamer ceases to be an employee of I.B.M. and becomes a handsome demigod moving through splendid palaces, saving maidens from monsters.....although this sort of Mittyesque daydreaming is supposed to cease in matur-J o h n C a r t e r P r e s s K i t! w w w. t h e j o h n c a r t e r f i l e s . c o m

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ity, I suggest that more adults than we suspect are bemusedly wandering about with a full Technicolor extravaganza going on in their heads.”

While Vidal speaks of a self-generated extravaganza -- how much better to be able to plug in to the extravaganza that Burroughs created with such verve?

Vidal went on to write of Tarzan and John Carter:

All of us need the idea of a world alternative to this one. From Plato's Republic to Opar to Bond-land, at every level, the human imagination has tried to imagine something better for itself than the existing society. Man left Eden when we got up off all fours, endowing most of his descendants with nostalgia as well as chronic backache. In its naive way, the Tarzan legend returns us to that Eden where, free of clothes and the inhibitions of an oppressive society, a man can achieve his continu-ing need, which is, as William Faulkner put it in his high Confederate style, to pre-vail as well as endure. ..... The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining. Since there are few legitimate releases for the average man, he must take to day-dreaming. James Bond, Mike Hammer and Tarzan are all dream-selves, and the aim of each is to establish personal primacy in a world which in reality diminishes the individual.

In the end, I am left with the impression that Burroughs did two things better than any other writer. First, he created vivid worlds with fully articulated histories and cultures and compel-ling characters -- worlds that stay with you as a reader and to which you form an emotional at-tachment. When Carl Sagan speaks of standing outside at night with his arms outstretched to Mars, or Ray Bradbury speaks of wanting to be “taken home” to Barsoom, they are both ac-knowledging that Burroughs created a unique emotional bond between the reader and the world he created. I have read hundreds of science fiction novels depicting thousands of “other worlds”, and none embedded itself in my heart and consciousness like Barsoom. The tragedy of it, a dying planet with long dead ancient glories a mere glimmer in the past; the honor of it, with a chivalric code that brought echoes of an otherworldly Camelot; the power of it as arena for a man to prove himself, find himself worthy, and achieve fulfillment with a cosmic soul-mate -- all of these fired my mind and my heart in ways that no other author ever die, or ever could.

There was something else, though, that was even more meaningful. Ray Bradbury was onto it when, in calling Burroughs the “most influential” writer who ever lived, he said: “I've talked to more biochemists and more astronomers who fell in love with John Carter, and decided to become something romantic.” That was it . . . Burroughs got inside my soul, inside my spirit, and taught me to dream big, and to believe I could do what I set out to do and overcome obsta-cles. He gave me the confidence to believe in these things by creating Tarzan and John Carter and Ulysses Paxton and Jason Gridley, each different yet each bearing an indomitable spirit and will and curiosity and ultimately belief in self. Burroughs gave me that, and like so many oth-ers he influenced my choices.

He deserves to be remembered

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Excerpt From John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood

PROLOGUE: A FIRST INKLING OF TROUBLE

On November 30, 2011, the day that Walt Disney Studios was set to debut the trailer for the Andrew Stanton film John Carter on Good Morning America, I was eagerly waiting for the trailer to air. It would be the best glimpse yet of a film that I’d been waiting for since my child-hood.

I had discovered the Martian tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs at the library at Patch Barracks in Stuttgart Germany during a rainy Little League summer when I was 12, and by the time I reached adulthood I had read all of the Burroughs books multiple times, and been inspired by them. I could sketch from memory an accurate map of Barsoom, recite the full history of the Tharks and John Carter’s relationship with them, and draw accurate renderings of all the crea-tures and cultures of that mystical planet.

Now, decades later, the movie that had existed only in my mind all these years was finally about to become a reality on cinema screens worldwide. The release date was March 9, 2012, exactly 100 days from the unveiling of the trailer, and I was looking forward to watching the climax of the campaign unfold over the coming twelve weeks.

Finally the trailer played, and the campaign was launched.

But... what had been hyped in advance as debut of the full theatrical trailer didn’t turn out to be that at all. Rather, it was a 45 second TV spot, with the first 11 seconds being hampered in presentation by the fact that it was shown by having the camera zoom in slowly on the Times Square giant screen, only cutting to the actual spot ten seconds into it.7 The spot itself seemed disjointed and unfocused. I was disappointed, to put it mildly. The full trailer finally did pre-miere sixteen hours later on Jimmy Kimmel and thankfully it was better than the cut-down ver-sion shown that morning, but it still seemed to miss the mark. Who was John Carter? Why was he leaping hundreds of feet into the air and battling apes in an arena? And where was all this taking place? Of course I knew the answers to all these questions - but I had read the books. What would I think if I just came across this trailer without knowing any of the history?

I wonder what people are saying about it?

I checked online and saw that the trailer, and Disney marketing, were taking a shellacking. The Film Stage wrote:8

After Disney botched the trailer release of the one film that needs all the good buzz it can get, by releasing just 49 [sic] seconds of it early this morning on GMA, we now have the full thing thanks to IGN.... I held some hope after the disappointing first trailer, and the latest one is definitely an improvement, but still not what I hoped for coming from such a great storyteller (also visually speaking) as Stanton....

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Collider.com,9 a top entertainment outlet, offered the following:

Good Morning America had a sneak peek of the new John Carter trailer earlier today, which probably wasn’t the best way to present a hard sell to an unfamiliar audience, not to mention a critical group of fans ready to tear into the film adap-tation that dropped the most interesting half of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Car-ter of Mars....

Troubled, I decided to do a little more checking. Up until this point I had only been paying intermittent casual attention to the campaign -- what had I missed? Was I witnessing a one-time stumble, or an ongoing problem?

On IMDB Pro,10 I checked John Carter’s “MovieMeter” ranking. It was ranked 986 as of November 27, the most recent ranking, meaning 985 movies were receiving more hits and IMDB message board activity than John Carter. This seemed low for a $250M tentpole film 100 days out from its release date. It should be higher, I thought. A lot higher.

I decided to compare John Carter to two comparable upcoming “tentpole” films -- Lion’s Gate’s The Hunger Games, slated for release two weeks after John Carter on March 23, and Disney’s The Avengers slated for release two months after John Carter on May 4. John Carter didn’t need to be ranked higher or even as high as either of these two -- but it should be in the same general vicinity and seeing how these films rank would give an “order of magnitude” in-dication of where the other high profile films slated for a spring release were ranked.

The results? The Hunger Games was ranked 17,11 while The Avengers was ranked 26.12

I pulled up the IMDB Pro Data Table View for each film,13 which includes a week by week summary of ranking and links to each article on the film that appeared in entertainment media outlets for the week. These articles don’t just happen – they are seeded by the publicity team who release to the media stills, concept art, interviews, etc, all according to a pre-determined plan and schedule.

I picked a random week, October 9, and compared John Carter, The Hunger Games, and The Avengers side by side. The Hunger Games publicity team had generated 72 articles placed for the week; The Avengers had placed 149 articles; the John Carter team had generated a total of 9 article placements.

Nine?

I then looked at the entire month of October and compared the article output as monitored by IMDB Pro: The score for October?

Avengers 640, Hunger Games 224, John Carter 31.

Taking the entire period from the end of August until the end of November, the disparity remained the same -- both Avengers and Hunger Games were well over 1,000 articles, and John Carter? \

A whopping 45 articles.

Or, stated differently: IMDB was monitoring a little over four articles per week about John Carter, versus well over 100 per week for the other two.J o h n C a r t e r P r e s s K i t! w w w. t h e j o h n c a r t e r f i l e s . c o m

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What did it mean?

Unless there was something I was missing -- it seemed clear that the John Carter promo-tional campaign was being severely and inexplicably out-hustled and out-worked by each of the other two films. If there were a ten point scale for ranking “effort expended to promote”, The Avengers would rate a 9.4, The Hunger Games would rate an 8.9, and John Carter would be lucky to rate a 3.0.

Complacency? Impossible.

Because of its $250M price tag, the “bar” that John Carter had to get over was higher than either the Avengers, which had a reported cost of $220M, or Hunger Games, with a budget of $80M. Plus John Carter was closer to its release date than either of the other two -- meaning it was deeper into its promotional campaign and should be operating with a greater sense of ur-gency than either of the other two, not lesser.

I tried to imagine any scenario under which it would make sense for John Carter, during a critical period just months prior to its release, to go silent like this. Could there be some artful “lie low” rationale that would explain John Carter being silent while other “tentpole” releases were grinding out the “buzz fodder”?

I couldn’t think of any.

It made no sense.

No sense at all.

Clearly something was seriously amiss.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs Centennial Presentation - Transcript

From August 16-18, 2012, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. and the Burroughs Bibliophiles sponsored a gath-ering in Tarzana to celebrate 100 Years of Tarzan and John Carter. Michael D. Sellers was invited to give a presentation on John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood. Following is a transcript of the presentation and Q and A that followed.

INTRODUCTION BY DR. ROBERT ZEUSCHNERThis is as you all know, the hundredth anniversary of Tarzan of the Apes and John Carter of Mars, this is our annual celebration, the Dum-Dum to end all Dum-Dum’s perhaps, this is pretty amaz-ing, we’re wonderfully happy about the turnout and the calibre of the presentations, and every-thing else, this is only the first day and we’re just doing fabulously.

It’s my honor and my privilege to introduce Michael Sellers whose a Hollywood insider. Mr. Sell-ers is a Burroughs reader and a Burroughs fan and a Burroughs scholar. He has been very active in the John Carter project, trying to get a sequel made. Many of your are probably familiar with his website, if you are not, you should check it out. He has written a book, as the title is : John Carter and The Gods of Hollywood. He has done research as to why John Carter was handled as it was, by Disney, and I will let Mr. Sellers explain why.

PRESENTATION BY MICHAEL SELLERS

Thank you, Bob. The Hollywood insider thing, I have to clarify. My Hollywood is sort of North Hollywood. It’s the low end of town. It’s the little houses with the grips and the gaffers and so on.

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I’m a filmmaker who makes independent feature films budgeted from about a dollar ninety five up to about three million dollars. That does not put me in the same zip code as John Carter and Disney -- although I actually live in the same zip code as Disney. I live in Burbank right outside the gates of Disney but I have rarely had the opportunity to go inside until something having to do with John Carter gave me that opportunity.

In getting organized for this, I discovered that every time I started practicing I would get really longwinded, and so I’ve got a timer over here that’s going to go off, and that’s going to signal the end of it. I do think I have a bit of an organized structure for it, but at the same time I wanted to leave a little time for some questions, if people have some.

BEGINNINGSThe beginning of my involvement with this was really on November 30th. Some of you might re-member that Disney was going to debut the trailer on November 30th on Good Morning Amer-ica. I had not been paying a tremendous amount of attention to the promotion. I knew the movie was coming and I was excited - I had been an Edgar Rice Burrough fan since I was twelve years old when I had discovered these books at the Stars and Stripes Newsstand when I was living on an Army post in Germany, and they really carried me for my whole adolescence. I’ve gone back to these books from times as I’ve gotten older (and older), and they always pay off for me, they work. I don’t have that experience of going back and it being -- that was cool when I was twelve but now, not so much. Quite the opposite. If anything, it’s cooler now.

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So I was waiting for the movie to come out, I had my DVR going, and I’m waiting to see this trailer, and it was not a trailer. It was a forty-five second TV spot and the first twelve seconds was a zoom in on the Times Square jumbotron, so it was presented very poorly, and I was like -- wow, that was kind of disappointing. So I went online because now there is sort of instantaneous reac-tion because the debut of a trailer is sort of an event. And so right away there was a lot of chatter out there like “they botched the trailer debut” and immediately Disney put out guidance, “Oh no, it wasn’t the premiere of the trailer, it was a sneak peek, the premiere will be tonight on Jimmy Kimmel,” so there a bit of damage control going on right from the moment the trailer that wasn’t a trailer premiered.

This was the beginning of my looking at it and wondering -- what’s going on here? At this point I was in fan mode completely. I was not looking at this in some professional context. I was just ex-cited to see the movie. That said, the film professional in me understood that the chioce of No-vember 30th to roll out the trailer was no mistake. That was 100 days before the release date, and that signaled the beginning of the big final push. But my point is -- I was pretty casual in my inter-est at this point. I was like one of those people who only starts paying attention to the Presidential campaign on Labor Day -- that was sort of the thought process.

Over the next few days I started looking online and saw -- there’s a lot of negativity here. I was sur-prised. What have I missed? I haven’t been paying as much attention as I should. So as a first little tiny bit of professional approach to it, I went on to IMDB Pro -- the Internet Movie Data Base and if you’re on the pro version of it where you pay like 30 bucks a year, there are some other features and one of the features is they have for each movie, from the time it is announced, each week it gets a ranking -- a Moviemeter ranking -- and they have what they call the data table, they have every article that was written that week, and they have a link to it. So my thought was that since I’m just getting caught up on November 30th, I’m going to look at what’s been happening the last few months. And as I did, I was shocked at what I found.

I found, first of all, John Carter, a $250M tentpole giant release was ranked number 985, a hun-dred days out -- and I thought that’s pretty odd, that’s like an indie movie ranking -- that’s like one of my movies. Why is it ranked so low? How have they been promoting it? Then I looked at the articles and I went back through the previous twelve weeks week by week. There were a total of 45 articles that had been published and monitored by IMDB. Forty-five articles in 12 weeks? And this is a giant release? There should be many, many more. So I thought maybe I’m missing some-thing here . . . let me check another couple of movies, you know, for comparables and see what I can find.

So I thought - Hunger Games - because that was John Carter’s big competition for the March buzz. I looked at that, and Hunger Games -- now put this in context, John Carter ranked 985, with 45 arti-cles in the last twelve weeks -- Hunger Games ranked sixteen -- 1100 articles in the previous ten weeks. I said well -- that’s more like what I would expect for a tentpole release. And please un-derstand -- this is a measure of effort, these articles don’t just happen, they happen because the

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publicists are publicizing the movie, they’re releasing stills, they’re releasing interviews, feeding the whole buzz machine.

I thought well, maybe there’s a strategy here, you know? (laughter)

Let me see if this is a Disney strategy, let me look for another Disney movie. Let’s see, is there an-other Disney $250m action adventure tentpole franchise film? Yes of course -- the Avengers, right? Avengers was coming out two months after John Carter. So I thought, well, John Carter is two months ahead in the pipeline, theoretically it should have more buzz, more things going. So I looked at Avengers.

Avengers, during the same 12 week period when John Carter had 45 articles, Avengers had 1400, and was ranked number 22.

So . . . I was alarmed. But I thought, well, there are still 100 days to go., and this can turn around. I mean, a movie campaign is different than most any other kind of marketing campaign. It’s more like a political campaign - it all culminates on one day. And as you go along, you are constantly getting feedback, you’re adjusting the message, all the things you do in a political campaign. There are no do-overs for a theatrical movie campaign. I started checking out other aspects -- I looked at Facebook and Twitter. From an indie film point of view, we know a lot about working that side of things because we don’t have the big bucks for a massive advertising campaigns, and so I have a software that lets you monitor social media, lets you see where it’s being mentioned, what the positive-negative sentiment ratio is, and things like that. All of this is part of what big corporations do as reputation management now, so I assumed Disney was doing it. They want to know what the buzz is in the social media sphere, and then they want to be able to take corrective or counter-measures, and so they have this monitoring software.

And so I looked into all of that, hoping to find something that would negate the deficiency I was seeing in publicity -- but by all measures, John Carter was just dead in the water. It just didn’t have much going on. As an ERB fan -- this was disturbing.

THE JOHN CARTER FILES

I thought well . . . can I do anything? Obviously one little tiny guy is not going to be able to make a lot of noise. But the with digital media and publicity I thought okay, well, I can do a little some-thing that might help. So that’s when I created The John Carter Files. And the reason I called it that, was that it was really intended for journalists and bloggers, as a place where every day they could get an update of all the news about John Carter. Doing that would be a simple thing, be-cause using a blogging plugin, you can create an aggregated feed around a keyword. You just order an aggregated feed on John Carter, push a button, and ten seconds later you’ve got all the articles, then you go through and toss out the ones about John Carter the politician from Texas and you end up with the articles about the movie, and then publish that as one t “News About John Car-

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ter” post for the day. Then I would pick out the good ones and give them their own post with a summary and link to the full article. Doing all of this takes about half an hour each day, about one cup of coffee’s worth of time, and then go on about your business.

I reached out to all the entertainment sites that were following John Carter and said, here’s a place where you can get your daily dose of John Carter, and even without having thousands and thou-sands of people coming, the ones that were coming were quality, and I could see they were starting to replay some of the articles, so it helped a little bit. But I wasn’t under any illusions that this could be a game changer -- it’s like a blade of grass against an elephant, to try to make much of a difference, but at least I felt like I could do something. And it was fun, I was enjoying it, it made me feel like I was engaged.

On December 16, Disney released the first TV spots. I immediately whipped out the social media software and started looking to see what was the reaction, and there was almost no reaction. I mean, there should have been very measurable bumps, and there was very little. And the positive negative sentiment ratio was running about six positive to four negative, which is really not good. For example - Hunger Games at the same time was running nine to one, plus the volume was ten times greater. It was absolutely clear at that point -- with the TV ads playing and generating almost no reaction -- that the buzz was really not going where it needed to go.

THE DISNEY MEETING

Over the holidays as I continued to watch the promotion basi-cally flatline, I became . . . I started thinking . . . I started fan-tasizing, that maybe I could talk to Disney. I mean, I live right down the street from Disney Studios in Burbank. I’m in the business -- I’ve made a bunch of movies and done a bunch of theatrical releases. Maybe they would listen to me.

But then I would think -- who are you kidding? One of the things I write about in the book is Gore Vidal who talks about how Edgar Rice Burroughs’ writing resonates because he evokes our “dream self”. According the Vidal, our real self has trouble managing our real world, and this is frustrating.

Meanwhile our ERB dream self, John Carter or Tarzan, is able to dominate his environment, and this is very satisfying to vicariously experience. So in thinking I might actually hae an impact by talking to Disney and getting them to listen -- my dream self was running away with me a little bit. But then I’d think -- who knows, stranger things have happened.

I looked at their output over the whole month of December on their Facebook and Twitter, and I looked at my output on John Carter Files, and it looked pretty good. I had a lot more articles out,

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I had 75 articles that had gone out, and I thought well maybe they’ll take me seriously, and anyway, maybe we can mobilize some fans to help, because part of the whole social media thing--and again, this is an area where indie filmmakers pay more attention traditionally although the big studios do now -- is how do you mobilize fans, how do you mobilize people on the internet to help generate the buzz, and so I thought well, we have a fan base. Everybody’s saying, Edgar Rice Burroughs, 100 years ago, not a big fan base. But it’s small but mighty, right? We have a really loyal and really in-teresting group, who could give interviews, who could do all kinds of things, so with that as sort of the overt request, and after checking with ERB Inc and everybody and kind of making sure that nobody else was already doing that, I got in touch with my old pal Jack Scanlan, a longtime Holly-wood publicist, and with his help put in a request to go in and have a meeting to talk to the Dis-ney people running the campaign. The agenda was to breif them on what I was doing with the John Carter Files, what we might be able to do to bring fans into the social media equation, and to just talk a little bit about the campaign, which was really what I wanted to do.

They were very gracious, we were invited in, we met with Ryan Stankevich, who is the head of pub-licity for all live action movies, including John Carter, and Samantha Gerry who is head of digital marketing, their internet stuff. In advance of the meeting I sent in a fifteen page “white paper” presentation. I sent it in advance, hoping that maybe it would get forwarded around and result in a more substantive meeting -- and I’m pretty sure that’s why Samantha Gerry came because they saw it was getting into digital marketing and social media, which was her area.

So . . . nothing came of it. It was nice, it was cordial, and that was sort of our one effort to try and get in there. We did exchange email addresses and were able to communicate but that was the end of that.

THE SUPER BOWL DEBACLE AND THE FAN TRAILER

The next thing that happened that was significant was -- in that meeting she told us they were going to have a Super Bowl Ad -- so don’t worry, everything’s gonna be fine. We’re going to start kicking .......after February 1st, and the Super Bowl Ad’s gonna be great. I said okay . . . .

So, the Super Bowl ad, as you all -- did you see that? (crowd murmurs). Okay. So, I’m sitting there, I’m excited, this is where it’s all gonna turn around, and you know -- the ad plays and it was a dud. Now, what actually happened to torpedo it was that they bought a sixty second spot, but they got cut to a thirty second spot because they came up in the rotation during an an injury timeout, and in football, that’s something that happens and the result is your sixty second spot can get cut to 30 seconds. Because this is a possibility, you have to submit both. But normally, you’ll submit your best 30 second ad, and your best sixty second ad, and live with what happens. In this case Disney had this Super Bowl sweepstakes thing going on, there was a hidden clue, inside that pullout, they had to go with that, twenty two seconds of pulling out from the title, and then eight seconds of jumping over the ape. So the 30 second spot was really weak -- and as luck would have it, that’s the one that played. It was ranked dead bottom in terms of the movie ads in the Super Bowl, and it

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was ranked in the bottom five overall . And watching it -- my expectations were dashed and I was like -- give me another margarita . . .

It was that night, fueled, I suppose, on margaritas and guacamole, I decided to cut my own damned trailer. And so I enlisted my filmmaking buddy Mark Linthicum and we downloaded eve-rything, put it on movie editing software, and then we cut a trailer that night. The next dayI put it on John Carter Files but said, this is a draft trailer, we’re doing a poll, here’s the official trailer here’s the draft trailer. We didn’t say where it came from or express any preference of our own, and we let the poll run for two days. And the poll came back 86% for the new trailer, and 14% for the official trailer. So then we sent that to Disney, and said maybe, you know, could there be something here that you might want to consider? (laughter)

Of course we didn’t hear anything back.

So two weeks later we decided to go ahead and publish it on YouTube, publicly,and we did, and at that point, by now I was talking to some members of the film crew, and some people inside Disney, so I sent it around, and it got forwarded up the chain, and it landed with Andrew Stanton, who liked it and then he tweeted about it.

So it was a Sunday night, and I was feeling just .... everything is going wrong, and all of a sudden emails start popping in, and people start texting me -- oh, Andrew Stanton pimped you, he tweeted about you, and I looked -- and sure enough, he had said, “Great fan trailer! They get it!”, and then a link to the trailer.

Well, this is where the viral thing can be really amazing. The director tweeted about it and the en-tertainment sites all keep and eye on his feed -- then , well immediately Ain’t it Cool News, Col-lider, Slashfilm, a lot of the hot movie sites picked it up and they replayed it -- you can embed it (the trailer) -- it went on about ten of them the first day, and it was eventually on four hundred movie sites, and had a good little viral buzz, and it was being talked about -- and then LA Times called and wanted to do an article on it, and CNN did an interview on it, and things like that, so we were kind of -- all of a sudden it felt like hey, maybe we can actually have an impact. And there was-- in social media you could see a little bit of an impact being had. Then Stanton wrote me an email -- he was coming down on the 27th -- this was the 21st -- he was coming down on the 27th to the Hero Complex Screening in Burbank, and he said, “I’d like to meet you, do you have any more of these?”

And so it was cool . . . I thought, “I’m a member of the team,” my dream self was getting fired up again. But in reality, the way that the whole buzz thing works, is you’ve got to do it early. You’ve got to do it months earlier when the only people following it are the influencer media, at that stage this kind of thing could make a difference because at that stage you can effect the actual founda-tion of the buzz, but now, it’s 12 days til the release with negativity swirling everywhere, you know -- a few hundred thousand people see the fan trailer and commenting about it aren’t going to offset

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but meanwhile millions and millions are seeing the regular stuff that’s going out from Disney and and reading the negative articles in the mainstream media that was now covering the release in its final days. So it caused a ripple that seemed like a wave to those of us really immersed in it . . . . but it wasn’t a game changer, it was too late for that.

THE RELEASE AND THE AFTERMATH

You all know the rest of what happened as far as how the release turned out. It was brutal but right away there were fans who loved the movie and felt it was being given a very bad rap. Three days after the movie was released, one of the filmmakers started the Back to Barsoom Group on Face-book. He sent me an email about thirty minutes after he started it -- there were fifty members at that time, he said all fifty are Pixar employees, and he said I want to announce this and let people know that it’s here. So I announced it on John Carter Files, and he was announcing it, and it got to like 3,000 people in two days.

Just . . . put it in perspective. Prince of Persia, when somebody tried to do this for Prince of Persia they got 175 people and it petered out. I mean, it was significant, the numbers don’t sound that huge, but remember these are people that can be influencers, and so it grew to 5,000 in a couple of days, and then it started gradually slowing down, but continuing to grow. And at the same time that was happening, we were hearing from the filmmakers that they really wanted to see the films continue on. Meanwhile, ten days into it, Rich Ross makes the announcement that they are writ-ing down $200m, making John Carter the biggest flop in the history of cinema, when only about 40% of the theatrical income had come in, and the reasons -- they give the reasons, eventually, they gave their explanation, which was that it was a disclosure requirement, but they had never had to disclose something like that before-- they put it in their quarterly financials normally. It was a unique announcement.

ORIGINS OF THE BOOK

So I wrote an article called “John Carter, the Flop that Wasn’t a Turkey”, it was actually a series, and some people started suggesting that, you know, maybe there’s a book in there. And I thought about it and went well . . . maybe.

But I had a problem. I didn’t really want to just do, sort of a crash investigation. You know this is sort of like if Titanic hit the iceberg -- why? I’m not Bob Woodward and I don’t have the stature to do that. Moreover, it’s just more negativity, and there is already so much negativity already associ-ated with the situation, I don’t want to just pile on to that.

I thought about it and I thought, what would be my objective in such a book -- and eventually came to the conclusion that my objective is to make the case to not give up on John Carter.

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Regardless of how you feel about the perfection or imperfection of the adaptation, a worldwide gross of $285M works out to more or less 28 to 30 million people who saw John Carter in theaters and 80% of those claimed they loved it and would recommend it, so there are fans out there. And I know in certain quarters there is skepticism about whether or not we are getting new readers of the books but we are -- I know chapter and verse among the people, now the 12,000 or 11,000 on Facebook, there are a lot of people who have discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs because of the movie and have gone from the movie to Edgar Rice Burroughs. And they will continue to discover it, even if there is no sequel. But it will be so much better if there is a sequel.

So I decided I would write the book and this would be the approach: I wanted to cover the follow-ing things....before anything else I had to acknowledge that I’m an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan, die-hard, true and true, and therefore what I write has to be read with that as an understood frame-work.

With that as a framework, I then wanted to show people why the underlying literary property is so special. There is a perception out there -- yeah, Edgar Rice Burroughs, pulp writer, blah blah blah, you know, been picked over, the thing has been “strip mined” is the term that they use, and it’s not fresh, and this and that and the other. And I think that there’s so much more than that, so I wanted to deal with that a little bit.

I wanted to address the history of this property, a property that was created in 1912, we all know the story of how many times Hollywood had tried, and how much interest there had been over so many years and how it had inspired -- obviously, we all know, George Lucas and James Cameron, but also the whole Flash Gordon piece, Superman, all having roots in John Carter and to help people understand that there is something special there, but also to try to drill down a little bit into what was Burroughs magic, what was the elixir there -- what made him different, what made him be the most widely read author on the face of the planet in 1950 when he died, translated into 58 languages, obviously a global appeal. There’s something there that hasn’t been fully mined. So that was number one.

So the first part was the Burroughs magic; the second was the history of Hollywood’s efforts with the material.

Number three was to look at the Stanton adaptation -- look at the production and the decisions that were made, and how those decisions might have affected the performance of the movie. This was important in part because there were certain people who expected me to say it was all about the marketing. It’s not all about the marketing. It’s largely about the marketing, but there were is-sues in the adaptation and I wanted to drill down into that and analyze what he did and show the process by which they had made the decisions that they did, and what the impact might have been.

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The next piece was the ones that the fans, the unhappy fans, were sort of clamoring for, and that was -- what the hell happened with the marketing? And how did it unfold the way that it did? And so I wanted to look at that.

I want to stress, though, that the purpose of looking at that is not to savage Disney, but to show in concrete terms how, for a sequel, it would be much better, that the marketing would work. I felt like I had at least some credibility in that because of the success of the fan trailer -- and there was another fan trailer we made that did well too. By the way, the number of likes for every dislike on YouTube for the official trailer is 13 likes per dislike. Our fan trailer had 93 likes per dislike and it turns out that the closest any official trailer comes to that is the Avengers with 51 likes per dislike. Anyway, I felt there was some credibility flowing from that.

The next part is the fans, because the fans rose up spontaneously and began to do something that doesn’t happen with every movie, it just doesn’t. And they are out there now. And if you look at the fan approval rating, the fact is that 75-79 percent of people who saw the movie said they would recommend it, and you know how many people saw the movie, and if you work the numbers on that, there’s about 20 million fans around the world who would be ready to go see another film, and would be ready to recommend it, and of course you have a smaller core group who are really active trying to make things happen and trying to shape the story. And it was that fan story, int he age of social media, what can fans do? We all know Star Trek, we all know some of the things that can happen, now is there a stronger voice, can fans use their voice and be heard, moreso than in the past, and if so, what does that mean for the prospects of a sequel?

And then finally, the hardest part, was the pitch - the case for a sequel to John Carter. I kind of rolled up my sleeves at the end of this and I put it in there and I worked the numbers and it’s not a spoiler to say that if the budget can come down, the only real thing stopping a sequel is the stigma that’s attached to the movie now. You know that Prometheus did $310M and it’s got a sequel. Well, it was $140M to produce. That’s the formula -- get John Carter into a reasonable budget package and a sequel makes sense. Can that be done?

WHAT I HOPE TO ACCOMPLISH

So that’s part of -- at the end of this whole thing, what do I hope to accomplish?

I hope that the takeaway -- if one person reads this and that person happens to be Alan Horn or another studio chief and his takeaway is, you know, maybe Iger doesn’t really have it right, maybe there is something here, let’s just look at it. It’s weird to write a book which in the end may be for one person, but that sort of thing comes into play. And other than that, it’s been a great thera-peutic exercise . . . (laughter).

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So that is sort of the outline of how I approached the book, what’s in there, and I want to then say -- what did I learn? Obviously I want you to be motivated to read the book, so I’m not going to say everything -- but a few things real quickly that came out.

WHAT DID I LEARN ABOUT WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?

My process started with building a giant timeline and the way the timeline goes, I’m gonna go through it kind of fast and maybe a little confusingly here because we’re running out of time, but we can talk about it a bit more, is that, first - Paramount gave up the property at the end of 2006. In early 2007 Dick Cook called Andrew Stanton, who was at that point two years from finishing Wall-E, and he was just doing a check-in call. Cook is a talent oriented studio head, loves talent, gets along with them, he was just massaging his talent, and Stanton, who’d been a Burroughs fan, said, you know -- Princess of Mars is back on the market, you guys should get it, and if I don’t turn out to be a one-hit wonder, (he was referring to Finding Nemo which had done $867M and was the biggest animated film ever) I would love to direct it. Well, John Lasseter of Pixar got in there and also talked to Cook, and a few months later Cook calls Stanton back and says they have the property and would like him to direct it.

From 2007 to 2009 it was all about screenwriting, Mark Andrews and Andrew Stanton, and the story starts getting a little bit interesting in the spring of 2009. In the spring of 2009, the screen-play is not done, Michael Chabon is brought on to do another draft, that means that without a final draft screenplay, they don’t really have a firm budget, and yet they are casting and moving forward with production. And one of the most crucial thngs in this whole equation was - how did the budget get to be $250m? When they cast Taylor Kitsch on June 15, 2009, they announced it and in the announcement they announced the budget at $150M. At that point they were still talk-ing about 150 and it appears that the real final budget meeting hadn’t happened because they are waiting for the Chabon rewrite to come in because you can’t have a real budget without a final screenplay to break down, it’s like you can’t build a house without a blueprint.

So, they cast the people that they cast, and over that summer of 2009 two or three things happen that are really crucial. One is that studio head Dick Cook comes under fire from Disney Chair-man Robert Iger. Iger starts criticizing Cook publicly in May of 2009, so he knows he’s on his way out. Meanwhile Iger’s big project at that point was acquiring Marvel. So, over that summer -- they get Marvel, and Marvel solves their whole problem. Disney is known to have a “boy franchise” problem. They’re good with princesses, not so good with the boys. So this gives them exactly what they want. They suddenly have more of this than they know what to do with, and now the cham-pion of the John Carter project, Dick Cook, is under fire, and on September 18th, Dick Cook is fired.

So at that point, John Carter, which was scheduled to go into production in November 2009, no longer has a champion in Dick Cook; and Iger has landed Marvel; and all of a sudden John Carter starts looking like . . . . baggage. Right? They always knew it was going to be hard to market but

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Cook was a “grown your own” old school studio head trying to spawn a new franchise. Whereas Iger’s vision was like George Steinbrenner and the Yankees used to be -- go out and buy up the free agents and load up that way.

So John Carter became a bit of an orphan. To some degree it had always been a concession to Pixar, because Disney had acquired Pixar, Pixar had brought in a lot of money, and Stanton had brought in a lot of money, and Lasseter felt Disney owed him the opportunity to try this. And so gradually -- and the book goes into it in a lot more detail and gives you the whole chain of events -- but it gets pushed off to the side. Iger puts in his man, Rich Ross, who replaces Dick Cook. Ross would like to have canceled the project but it was too late, because it was already fully mounted, all the contracts were there. He did cancel Captain Nemo, which was the next big $250m film. That was going to go into production in March 2010, he came in in October, and he canceled that one.

John Carter was allowed to go forward, but they kind of strangled it. Not production wise -- they gave Stanton the money he needed to make the movie and never challenged that. They strangled it on the marketing side. They decided right then that they wouldn’t do merchandising, licensing, all the things that you need to do, and yet here’s this film that’s got a $250m budget, it’s going to need to make 500-600m to be considered a success, and yet you make a conscious decision to not give it the full scale promotion.

From there it just goes on, other things happen, new people are hired, MT Carney - many of you have heard about -- who was the marketing head who was brought in by Rich Ross, there’s a whole storyline there, about what happened with them.

There’s the timer! (reaches over and checks the timer).

SUMMING UP

In the end, just a couple of points that I think are important.

One, I didn’t want this to read like a Nikki Finke Deadline Hollywood article. If you ever read those -- you know, a “rival studio executives”, insider sources, no attribution. It’s great for day to day chatter about Hollywood -- but a book like this needs to have more weight than that, and three needs to be attribution of sources whenever possible. I was able to get people to talk to me, but there was a challenge about attribution because everybody at Disney is under a Non-Disclosure Agreement, everybody who worked on the film is under a Non-Disclosure Agreement. So if they talk, they can’t be quoted. But what I found was that in almost all cases, when the sources who couldn’t be quoted gave me information, if I followed up on it I was almost always able to find a source that could be quoted that made the point that needed to be made. So there’s very little of this sort of -- trust what I’m telling you, even though I can’t tell you the source. 95% of the time there’s a footnote and a source.

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I also want to point out that the work that I’m engaged in, and the fans are engaged in, is not just about a sequel -- there is a stigma attached to John Carter, we all know it. The work is designed to gradually have that stigma removed, to the benefit of both the movie and Edgar Rice Burroughs.There are other movies that started out this way. Blade Runner is a good example, even 2001 got exactly the same kind of mixed reviews down the middle. If you read the critics response to 2001, it was 50/50, and it was very hostile from the ones that didn’t like it. These things can be changed over time. And the day to day work that fans are doing can help it. And even if there is never a sequel, from an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan point of view, that’s important because that burnishes the legacy. We kind of got a black eye, but the future is brighter than if none of this had ever hap-pened -- as long as that stigma can be removed. It’ll take time, but even if I know the fans feel it’s all about he sequel, but it may end up being a reboot ten years from now. But that work is accru-ing to the benefit of Edgar Rice Burroughs legacy, and that, I think, is really very important.

I’ll stop there. If there are questions?

QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION

Q: What do you think it’s going to take to turn Disney around, because I think part of the stigma is coming from the fact that you have all of these journalists out there who are kind of cheat sheet-ing, copying off of the other articles -- they’ll keep yelling $250M and $200M writedown and all that other stuff because they got that from somebody else.

A: Well, this [questioner] by the way is Daria Brooks, very famous person . . .(laughter). Daria saw the movie 38 times in theaters. (applause) The question was, what is it going to take to turn Dis-ney around? I have to be realistic. I think the problem is going to be that they’re going to reach -- they’ve got the rights for a few more years, and they are not interested in this while Robert Iger is the chief of Disney. And he’s leaving in 2015. He may leave sooner - there are a lot of rumors that he might leave sooner. If Iger were to leave, there are champions within Disney who might want to give it another try, but Iger won’t hear of it. Alan Horne, the new studio chief who replaced Rich Ross, is sort of noncommittal, but he’s a sane person, he’s not somebody with a big agenda, and so there’s some possibility, but I think it’s going to be . . .I hate to say this when people think there may be an announcement of a sequel coming in six months -- it’s not. It’s a long road. But tell you what - if Disney lets the rights go, there’s a good case to be made for somebody else to do some-thing. It’s not over, but it’s going to be a long haul.

Q: The first two Narnia movies were from one studio, and third was from another. Can that hap-pen?

A: It happens. And one of the things I think is that well before the rights revert back to ERB Inc, there is the opportunity for discussions with other studios because it takes time to get things going and if Disney is looking like they are not going to move on it, there’s an opportunity there. It all comes back to the budget thing. I think if you can make a credible case for a budget that isn’t

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so high -- you have $300M as a baseline for global theatrical gross ... imagine you have $300m in worldwide gross and that’s with the worst marketing campaign in cinema history. I mean really -- that’s what people call it. So how much is that worth? $50M, $100M? So maybe the true baseline with an adjustment for the horrible marketing is $350m or $400m. Any first film in a potential franchise series with $400m gross would normally command respectful consideration of a sequel.

Q: I want to add to that a lot of the things that had to be created as prototypes are set -- all the things they had to create for the first one that they don’t have to create again for a sequel. So that would keep the cost of a sequel down too.

A: Actually there is a weird accounting thing that happens. It reduces the budget on sequels sort of, but it also reduces the budget on the original movie too. Because what happens is that if they do sequels, they are now going to amortize all of those one-time costs over the whole franchise, not just the first movie. So if you’ll notice, Avatar got its budget reduced by $30M when they decided to make sequels. It loads up the sequels with a portion of that cost, but it releases the first film from having to bear all that. The sequels do have a lesser load than a one-off -- but they bear some of the load. Hollywood accounting.

Q: Bonnie and Clyde didn’t do well when it was first released, and they gave it another shot. Is that possible with John Carter?

A: You know, there are a couple of examples, where people talk about that, 2001 had a re-release that did better than the first one, sort of, but there’s no appetite for that at Disney - they’re not gonna do that. And it is really a longshot. The number one maxim in theatrical marketing is that there are no do-overs. You get one chance and that’s all you get. That ship has sailed, I’m afraid.

Q: Why was it so popular in Russia and China?

A: This is one of those movies that Hollywood can do better than anyone else. Nowadays what’s happened is that the indigenous film industry in each country is doing better and better, they’re thriving -- fifteen years ago it wasn’t like that. But the one thing that they can’t generally do is something on this scale, and this sort of fantasy other world thing, and so there were a lot of peo-ple going into it who flet that it would do well overseas, and that this kind of film is a pretty good get overseas. The same people were saying it was tough in the US. It was tough, and the marketing made it worse.

Q: Are the DVD sales going well?

A: They are, they’re going well compared to ... let’s put it this way. A film that did $80M theatri-cally in the US would be expected to do about $20M in DVD sales and maybe 25-35M overall, with Blu-ray and DVD, and it’s doing better than that. It’s outperforming what you would expect of a movie at that level. But it is not Spiderman - that’s the all time biggest at 200M in DVD sales.

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It’s not doing like that. But it’s doing respectably. And it did really well at the beginning because everyone under-ordered, the stores didn’t anticipate, and so the demand exceeded--they flew off the shelves but they hadn’t ordered that deeply. So it’s doing okay, and it hows a good trend, but it’s not enough to save the day.

Q: Do you think it was accurately reported -- the amount of money that Russia and China made?

A: The conventional wisdom is that Russia is accurate, China is probably not. It’s probably un-derstated. China also has restrictions on how much the foreign owner can make. So you make relatively less. A dollar in China generates 20 cents for Disney whereas a dollar in Russia or Eng-land will generate more like 35 cents. So there’s that too. But China does not. Box Office Mojo, who is sort of the bible for box office reporting, considers China unreliable.

Q: What is your opinion on the adaptation itself and the changes that were made?

A: I love talking about that! But we don’t have enough time! Real quickly: Number one, the sin-gle most common complaint from reviewers was that it was confusing and unengaging. And that was based on the fact that it was very confusing at the beginning. Right? You’re throwing a lot at the audience. What did Edgar Rice Burroughs do? This gets to what Stan was talking about this morning. By using the first person narrative, ERB drip feeds the exposition so the audience ab-sorbs it little by little--that was part of his genius. We learn about Barsoom as John Carter learns about it. John Carter arrives and he’s naked in a desert. He knows he’s on Mars. Then he meets the Tharks. And then he spends time among the Tharks learning their culture, doesn’t even know that Red Martians exist until “Fair Captive From the Sky” Dejah Thoris comes down, she’s hu-man, and now we start learning about Zodanga and Helium. All of that rolls out little by little in the books but in the movie it’s all dumped right at the beginning. . . .

One of the things that happened was that Stanton did a screening, it’s called the “Braintrust Screening” among the PIxar Braintrust. This was in December of 2010, a 170 minute version of the movie in work-in-progress. And one of the first notes that came back to him was, the begin-ning is too confusing, maybe you should consider having the audience experience Barsoom as John Carter does. They said that without knowing that’s what Burroughs did. And Andrew did not want to do that. He said no, that’s “lazy”. That’s his term. He said we’ve got to get it out of the way at the beginning, it’s not important . . . he says the only takeaway you’ve got to have on the piece on Barsoom is that there are these people , and these people, and they’re fighting each other, and there’s a third party bringing a power to one side and that’s all you need to know.

And you know, audiences sort of accepted it that way, pretty much -- but the critics did not. The critics wanted to understand everything and when they got confused, they got irritated, and when they got irritate, they became “unengaged” and that affected their view of everything else in the movie. They never bought in to the movie and it all started with the confusing beginning.

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Stanton’s response to the criticism from the Braintrust people was to redo the opening and make it shorter because originally there was a scene that had a lot more going on than just the narration piece that’s there now. But that didn’t really solve the problem. And because of that, the film gets off on what many critics considered to be a bad foot, and I think decision had the most impact on the negative critical response.

But it was the change to John Carter’s character that was the most aggravating to we “ERBophiles” because it was like, why did you have to do that? It turned John Carter into the kind of damaged goods hero we’ve seen a hundred times and that’s not who John Carter was. But while it both-ered the core ERB fans, it didn’t really bother the critics and it didn’t really bother the audiences and the people who came to the movie without knowing the books. Almost all of the non-ERB book-reading crowd found the choices for the John Carter character to be just fine.

The only other thing I would say is that there are so many moments that are missed, it’s like they have a two hour and twelve minute movie that needs to be two hours and forty five minutes. You don’t get a chance to absorb . . . that’s one of the reasons that people see it so many times and get so much more out of it, is there are all these little moments that you don’t get the first time through. Even the second time or third time.

And for me as a Burroughs fan, it took five times through for me to leave “A Princess of Mars” be-hind and just take Stanton’s ride. And at that point I enjoyed the movie a lot more. The first times I’m looking at it and I’m thinking -- well, why is it that way -- it was hard.

Q: What about the Therns, why did they change them?

A: You know -- we’re out of time, they’re telling me we’ve gotta go. That one is bar talk. I mean -- why the Therns? There are a lot of people who don’t like what happened with the Therns. I think Stanton would say be patient -- it pays off in the second, third movie.

He felt that he needed a single central villain that would extend over all three movies. And the structure of the original didn’t quite allow that, and so he felt that that was important but ....I didn’t. What I really hated was the floating . . . . it really felt like a Star Wars kind of a thing.

I gotta go -- thank you guys!

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Author Photo - Color

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Downloadable Link

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Author Photo - Black and White

www.thejohncarterfiles.com

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Endotes and Links

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1<https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2010-featured-story-archive/colonel-ryszard-kuklinski.html>2 <https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol47no3/article02.html>3 <http://mdsauthor.thejohncarterfiles.com/cia-career/>4 <http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0783365/>5 <http://mdsauthor.thejohncarterfiles.com/films-3/>6 <http://www.erbzine.com/mag31/3159.html>7 Robin Roberts, “Friday Night Lights Star Taylor Kitsch Shows Official Trailer for John Carter” Youtube “ABC News” Channel, 30 Nov 2011, Web accessed 2 Sep 2012 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Swf9pVGVW30>. Comment: The trailer was variously reported in the media as being from a low of 42 seconds to a high of 49 seconds long. On the ABC News link provided, the trailer begins at 1:01 with the zoom-in to the Times Square giant screen. At 1:12 it cuts to the continuation of the trailer. The trailer ends at 1:46. The correct figure is 45 seconds. 8 Jordan Roup, “Full Second Trailer For John Carter,” The Film Stage, 1 Dec 2011, 3 Jun 2012 <http://thefilmstage.com/trailer/full-length-second-trailer-for-john-carter/>.9 Brendan Bettinger, “Full Trailer For John Carter Starring Taylor Kitsch,” Collider.com, 30 Nov 2011, 3 Jun 2012 <http://collider.com/john-carter-movie-trailer-2/129710/>.10 Internet Movie Data Base Pro, (IMDB Pro), “John Carter (2012).” 30 Nov 2012, 30 Nov 2012 <http://pro.imdb.com/title/tt0401729/>.11 IMDB Pro, “The Hunger Games (2012),” 30 Nov 2012, 30 Nov 2012, <http://pro.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/>.12 IMDB Pro, “The Avengers (2012),” 30 Nov 2012, 30 Nov 2012, <http://pro.imdb.com/title/tt0848228/>.13 IMDB Pro, “John Carter (2012) MovieMeter: Data Table View,” accessed 2 Sep 2012 <http://pro.imdb.com/title/tt0401729/graph-data> ; IMDB Pro, “The Avengers (2012) MovieMeter: Data Table View,” accessed 2 Sep 2012 <http://pro.imdb.com/title/tt0848228/graph>; IMDB Pro, “The Hunger Games (2012) MovieMeter: Data Table View,” accessed 2 Sep 2012 <http://pro.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/graph-data>. The IMDB Pro MovieMeter, Data Table View, is avail-able for each film released, and contains a table with links to a comprehensive list of articles on a given movie updated weekly. In maintaining this database, the IMDB monitors all of the major recognized US media outlets reporting regularly on movies, as well as a large and representative selection of international media outlets regularly reporting on movies. Unless otherwise stated, all compari-sons between the publicity output for John Carter and other movies’ publicity are based on information derived from the IMDB Pro MovieMeter Data Table for each film.