As a company focused on entertainment, the most natural place to find investors would be from one of the major media conglomerates like News Corp. or Time Warner. Our competitor Maker Studios has certainly gone that route already, raising about 30 million dollars by doing so.
But that is not the path I am taking Martell Brothers and I’ll tell you why:
The world is too small.
When a handful of companies own practically everything, that doesn’t give a lot of air time for ideas their executive boards don’t agree with. And because the people on these boards are corporate suits, the decisions they make are going to be laser-focused on appealing shareholders in the short term, rather than on what is going to be in the company’s long term interests.
As an example, Turner Broadcast decided to censor Golden Age cartoons that contained any scenes of the characters smoking cigars. Sure, the times they are a changin’, but considering these cartoons were originally created as theatrical shorts for both adults and children, it just doesn’t make a lot of logical sense. No consideration is being made to preserving the films for the enjoyment of cartoon aficionados. And even despite the edits, the cartoons will continue to show the characters beating the ever living crap out of one another. I don’t understand the logic in censoring one type of destructive behavior while leaving all the other forms intact. Besides, it ruins the artistic integrity of the film. Right or wrong, someone labored to dream up and animate those gags.
Worse, editing 1,500 cartoon masters costs a bunch of money. There are probably a few thousand people involved in every step of that process, from identification of the scenes to the actual editing of the scenes, and all the organization involved in it. Turner will probably waste a couple hundred thousand at the bare minimum.
And all this triggered by a single complaint.
I don’t want to run a company that bends in the wind to every booming voice. I want to be able to hold my ground against the vocal minority, and make the decisions that are best for long term goals.
Beyond that, I also just don’t like certain conglomerates. I am not a fan of Rupert Murdoch. I think Fox News and his newspapers are stupifying our country. I intend to compete against News Corp. to provide a more balanced point of view in regards to world affairs. Politically, I am a Centrist. I am a member of no political party. My personal support will go to who I think is the best candidate for the job. I supported George W. Bush, and then I supported Barack Obama. That doesn’t mean I completely agree with every decision they make; it means I think out of the two choices, they were the optimal ones.
One of my primary goals with my network is to purchase the rights to as many film properties as possible to liberate them from the other conglomerates. I want to release uncensored versions of what has been dumbed down, and I want to make some of the forgotten gems be remembered again. If successful, Martell Brothers will end up becoming a conglomerate of its own, which might seem contradictory but it’s not:
It’s not that I hate media conglomerates.
It’s that I don’t like the other media conglomerates.
