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The contrary argument, that a creator has the right to destroy their creation, is made in the Gary Cooper movie "The Fountainhead" (1949).
by delichon 3y ago
The contrary argument, that a creator has the right to destroy their creation, is made in the Gary Cooper movie "The Fountainhead" (1949).
- kevingadd 3y agoAre any of the people responsible for this phenomenon actually creators? Isn't it usually investors and accountants doing it for a tax writeoff?
- aquova 3y agoEven then it's not quite an apples to apples comparison. From what I understand, everyone directly involved in the making of this film is proud of the work and wants it to be released, it's just the bean counters and executives (who I would not consider the "creators" of the film) who want to destroy the creation for ego and tax reasons.
- denkmoon 3y agoWhy bring ego into it? It's just bottom line thinking, that's all. Is there any good reason to think ego is a part of it?
- aquova 3y agoThe article itself puts it forward. > The offer to sell the film was, to put it mildly, not undertaken in good faith. It appears that the company would rather take less money by writing off the movie than sell it for even a few dollars more than that, because they might risk having a rival turn it into a success, which would further embarrass them for never even having tried to market it themselves If it was really bottom line thinking, they'd accept the $70M, more than double what they'd get in tax benefits, and have another distributor release the film. Instead, they'd rather trash the film than risk looking like fools if they allowed another company to reap the benefits for releasing a hit.
- feedforward 3y agoYou're right, it's just part of the absurdity of Rand's vision. In the real world people do work and create something, but some bean counters figure out the heirs who own the majority stake of a company can make a few more bucks by destroying the thing, so it is done.
- jowea 3y agoWhich is also part of the argument on TFA, bringing what in part of Europe is known as "moral rights of artists".
- Waterluvian 3y agoYeah. The problem arises when there’s many creators and they disagree. Or when a creation has already been duplicated and given to the world and they think they have any right to claw that back.
- nyc_data_geek 3y agoSure, that sounds fine, but the taxpayer ought to not be responsible for footing the bill in any way. The studios do this for the tax writeoff, which is tantamount to robbing the people paying taxes (eg:us) blind.
- gruez 3y agoIt's not "robbing the people paying taxes" because the money was never theirs to begin with. Taxes are paid on profits, and if profits are not made they're not owed. Suppose I make a painting worth $1000. If I had sold that, I would have been required to pay taxes on that at the marginal rate, say 40% so $400 worth of taxes. Instead of doing that, I set it on fire. Does that mean I just robed taxpayers of $400?
- blowski 3y agoI bet the owners of the film studio had a really hard Christmas that year, with no profits. The issue is that the studio takes the profit if it succeeds, the taxpayers take the losses if it doesn’t.
- muricula 3y agoIt's not setting the fire which causes taxpayers to lose money, it's writing off the loss against taxes you would have otherwise paid on profits made from other movies.
- gruez 3y agoNot an accountant, but tax write-offs aren't some sort of no tax glitch that you make them seem. You can only deduct losses that you've actually suffered, not imaginary losses. If you spent $10M into making a movie, you can't value the movie at $80M and then use that against all your other revenues to pay less taxes. If this were true every company would be making fake movies to destroy and pay less taxes, not destroy actual movies that they spent millions on.
- derivative7 3y agoTaxing people on income they didn't make but the government imagined they could have made in some situation that didn't happen sounds like a slippery slope to be standing on.
- BobaFloutist 3y agoAh, the work of fiction based on an Ayn Rand novel? Considering I'm operating from a very different set of values than she was, I doubt I would find the movie particularly persuasive.
- kuratkull 3y agoI'm of the opposite opinion... now what?
- BobaFloutist 3y agoNow you're welcome to find it persuasive?
- tzs 3y agoMovies are often as much or more the work of their director as they are the work of the author whose book they are based upon. In this case, a reviewer said this: > King Vidor turned Ayn Rand's preposterous 'philosophical' novel into one of his finest and most personal films, mainly by pushing the phallic imagery so hard that it surpasses Rand's rightist diatribes