Chris Fenton’s book “Feeding the Dragon” explains ways to appropriate the expertise and talents of other people and claim them for oneself

I was reading a book entitled Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, and American Business by Chris Fenton and it produced me curious how issues have changed within the past several years. The time frame from the tail end in the 20th century to present day brought us unbelievable advances in every thing we could picture, telecom and medicine being two shining examples. However it also ushered inside the inevitable downsides of such advances – rapid off shoring of jobs, mega online retailers crushing local mom and pop shops. Get extra facts about Feeding the Dragon

Possibly one in the least noticed but most pernicious trends may be the rise on the Super Middlemen. They’re the “experts”, devoid of whom practically nothing appears to obtain carried out. They have turn into a whole market, peopled with “professionals” that add nothing for the equation aside from perpetually drive the want for other people to work with their services.

Such would be the tale woven by author Chris Fenton in Feeding the Dragon, a posterboy for appropriations of other peoples work. It’s a book set against the backdrop with the extraordinarily lucrative business of cultural exchange involving Hollywood and China. It can be this expertise that Fenton purports to have that is definitely the basis for the book – a particular know-how that few people realize. It is actually special information he somehow gleaned although not speaking the language or spending important amounts of time in China.

As such, super middlemen’s sole objective appears to be using the status as “expert” to grow to be gatekeepers to a whole business or at the least, parts of an industry. The very best instance of those new super middlemen can loosely be called the “Hollywood Agent”, who can become movie producers with out performing anything far more than lunch.

The job of a Hollywood agent is always to introduce producers to studios or actors to directors – that form of issue. In the past, it was restricted to just that – introductions. Now, they invariably get in to the middle with the process, taking an active part in either the business or inventive process or each, adding a lot more layers to a deal that may be ordinarily currently a complicated process.

So, how is this attainable? Agents do not build an original notion for any film or tv show. They do not create scripts. They do not direct or create the film, they don’t finance something and they are undoubtedly not actors, at the very least not ones you see around the screen. They are in a special position simply because the agent is representing an individual or a thing that producers or studios want – an actor, director, script, intellectual property rights, and so forth. And this is specifically exactly where they apply pressure and insert themselves into the process. They know they will slow or perhaps stop the intended project, siphoning off money with out generating a thing or helping anybody besides themselves. In short, they proper others’ talent and labor to pay themselves.

Indeed, when you pay consideration to credits on films you may have already been wondering why there are actually numerous much more producers than there had been twenty years ago. The answer in one word, despite the fact that possibly somewhat oversimplified is: agents. They basically insert themselves in to the deal and viola, just like magic, a run in the mill agent has turn out to be a producer, in spite of they brought nothing inventive or financial to the project. Hat, meet rabbit. That is maybe the purpose more than the past handful of decades we have seen the number of producers on films jump from possibly 3 or four to ten, fifteen even twenty.

But back to the book that triggered these observations. Released in 2020 and entitled, Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, and American Business by Hollywood agent, Chris Fenton is really a prime instance of an agent so lost in his personal inflated story that he actually chronicled it within a book.

The book is supposed to be concerning the US film studios and their dilemma with China when it comes to releasing American films there. Really, it is a 270 page egotistical journey, chronicling the author’s maneuvering to insert himself in to the film making process. But his story is about a lot more than that; he implies all the way by means of and in just about every circumstance that he was the guiding force behind each of the good results the varying companies enjoyed.

The fantastic people over at Terrible Book Club have study the book and have come to related opinions, observing that the author “starts attempting to tie himself to greater people and events” at just about every opportunity. The term they use is “starfu**er”. They go on to say, “it seems like he only survived by becoming close to the people who basically make the deals….”

Now, to be specific, he provides himself an out just before the book even gets began. He says before chapter one:

Though I used substantial notes and also other supply supplies to detail events from long ago, particular inventive freedoms did come into play, possibly resulting in some inaccuracies. My profession has focused largely inside the movie business, exactly where “showing” as an alternative to “telling” is definitely the norm. The quoted dialogue from real people throughout the book was inspired by my recollection of every single event and shouldn’t be taken as verbatim.

And just like that, he lets himself in the hook for each and every misstatement, exaggeration or full fabrication.

For those who choose to study the book, read it very carefully due to the fact there’s plenty of double speak where he maneuvers the reader to assume quite a few things inside the pages. One example is, he implies he created the dual release technique for the Bruce Willis film Looper, with one version for China and a further for general world release. He does not definitely say he did it, and he most undoubtedly didn’t do it, but he definitely wants to leave the reader with that impression.

And Impressions seem to be what this book is about. To be able to reinforce his specialist credentials, he liberally lifts paragraphs from other published performs, which typically leave the reader baffled. To once again quote Terrible Book Club: “I do not ought to study 3 paragraphs of an report about how cool that you are within a book you’re writing about how cool you might be.”