Dave Millar - anti doping hero

[fmk_RoI]

That was it! Hate to see the ROI ratio on this movie. Might bomb as badly as Walsh’s epic disaster

Like many films, it could politely be described as a tax scam:

Having identified and engaged with their investors largely using social networking, Henrici and Pretsell’s production company Cycling Films took the equally pioneering decision to register as an Enterprise Investment Scheme, an HMRC initiative offering tax relief to investors in smaller businesses and ventures, in order to mitigate some of the risk.

 

[fmk_RoI]

So. David Millar's film. Cumulative UK box office take? £67,399 and dead after six weeks (it reached eleven cinemas in its second week, was down to five the next, and limped on in one until its demise).

Still, it's on streaming now, and there's peeps round here think that's a world where gold flows through the fibre-optic cables. Will it be enough, though, to pay back the film's investors?

(The LA docu, Gibney's one, took about half a million dollars in total.)

 

[samhocking]

Like most films of this budget and type, they won't be funded in a way that's expecting to turn any fast returns at the box office. It'll be no different than Hell On Wheels, The Flying Scotsman, Overcoming etc. They are niche films about a minority sport.

 

[MartinGT]

What figures did Chasing Legends get?

 

[fmk_RoI]

Re: Re:

So. David Millar's film. Cumulative UK box office take? £67,399 and dead after six weeks (it reached eleven cinemas in its second week, was down to five the next, and limped on in one until its demise)

That is kind of substandard 'coz you would have thought the film would have a bigger audience amongst British MAMILs. Thanks for the links to the reviews

I'm sure the reviews didn't help, the only good ones came from the usual suspects, and the word of mouth on it has been atrocious. I'm sure in time he'll rationalise the poor performance and say a cinema release was never the objective and that six thousand punters paying to see it at the cinema was actually more than he hoped for.

Wasn't Millar a consulant on the David Walsh biopic, The Program?

 

[fmk_RoI]

Like most films of this budget and type, they won't be funded in a way that's expecting to turn any fast returns at the box office. It'll be no different than Hell On Wheels, The Flying Scotsman, Overcoming etc. They are niche films about a minority sport.

Let's take the film about a local hero, with a bent for time trialling prowess. The Flying Scotsman's cumulative worldwide box office take was north of a million and a quarter dollars. It took £60k in the UK in its opening week. It opened on 71 screens. It managed an eleven week initial run. Its UK box office gross was about £185k.

In comparison, Millar's film had a run about half as long and took about a third of the gross. And it only reached seven screens.

 

[samhocking]

I don't think you understand the point i'm making.
The Flying Scotsman was a box office flop too. It had a budget of $11 million with MGM distribution and took just $1.26 million at the box office world-wide. It's a niche subject within a minority sport, so it won't be expected to make any profit from the box office. Besides, Time Trial doesn't even have a distributor, so perhaps not even comparable.

 

[fmk_RoI]

Besides, Time Trial doesn't even have a distributor, so perhaps not even comparable.

And yet you made the comparison, not me...

 

[Parker]

Like most films of this budget and type, they won't be funded in a way that's expecting to turn any fast returns at the box office. It'll be no different than Hell On Wheels, The Flying Scotsman, Overcoming etc. They are niche films about a minority sport.

Let's take the film about a local hero, with a bent for time trialling prowess. The Flying Scotsman's cumulative worldwide box office take was north of a million and a quarter dollars. It took £60k in the UK in its opening week. It opened on 71 screens. It managed an eleven week initial run. Its UK box office gross was about £185k.

In comparison, Millar's film had a run about half as long and took about a third of the gross. And it only reached seven screens.

I'm not sure how much you think documentaries make at the UK box office. It's very little.

Here's some figures (from the BFI's 2016 report).
117 documentaries were released. Between them they grossed £8.3M. That's an average of £70k per film.
However:
Just one of those films (Amy) made £3.8M on it's own. Excluding that the other 116 averaged a gross of £39k.


By all means think it's crap vanity project (I'll probably never watch it), but £67k is quite respectable.

 

[samhocking]

I've watched it both cinema and youtube and I can see what it could have been had Wegelius selected Millar for his last Tour, so it did kind of become a bit of a vanity/pity me project in terms of the storyline instead of about simply a rider racing his last dream which was the same as his first despite everything that happened to him. Like all films like this though, it's the cinematography that makes it. Overcoming was great because of the footage with the riders dialogue, not the story really and Time Trial is similar.

 

[TourOfSardinia]

Nice diplomat exchange between
ex-Cofidis stable mates
Lance & our David
http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/lance-armstrong-says-david-millar-is-the-last-person-who-should-lead-cpa/

 

[lartiste]

I do not get hypocrits like he is. He did nearly nothing to be elected and now he wants to go to court. http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/bugno-defeats-millar-to-be-re-elected-cpa-president/

I do not understand him, it only means that he does not know how to behave when he lost the elections. If he wants to be elected he must start his new campaign now and not to complain like little chick. OMG

 

[TourOfSardinia]

Re:

I do not get hypocrits like he is. He did nearly nothing to be elected and now he wants to go to court. http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/bugno-defeats-millar-to-be-re-elected-cpa-president/

I do not understand him, it only means that he does not know how to behave when he lost the elections. If he wants to be elected he must start his new campaign now and not to complain like little chick. OMG

Throws a tantrum like the bike toss in the Giro
https://youtu.be/ZacgTUYZ498?t=7

 

[Benotti69]

Re:

I do not get hypocrits like he is. He did nearly nothing to be elected and now he wants to go to court. http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/bugno-defeats-millar-to-be-re-elected-cpa-president/

I do not understand him, it only means that he does not know how to behave when he lost the elections. If he wants to be elected he must start his new campaign now and not to complain like little chick. OMG

Millar was doing this for other reasons.

He is putting his name out there for other reasons. He had no chance for CPA president, but it was an opportunity for him and his 'backers' to test waters.

 

[fmk_RoI]

"Millar is probably the last person that would come to mind for this role,” don't know what Lance means by that, although Lance did see firsthand what a mess Millar was with the alcoholism and recreational drugs, and may be kind of hard to ever take seriously again someone so debauched and theatrical. Or maybe some grudge between the two of them, because Millar was allowed back into the mainstream industry whereas Armstrong was not. Lance is kind of a dissolute guy in his own right, but doesn't forget grudges

Possibly this has some influence on it:

At a post Tour party in Paris, Millar confronted Lance Armstrong, former team-mate, friend and father figure ("I felt he could have done more and should have done more against doping; he was in a position to make a difference and to help his sport, but I never saw any evidence of that.") The previous year, he'd emailed Armstrong to take him to task over Discovery's signing of Ivan Basso ("Basso was still at the centre of the Operación Puerto storm and, due to the tacit agreement between most teams not to sign or race those under investigation, their pursuit of Basso had seemed deliberately provocative. I believed that to be particularly irresponsible and of no help to the state of cycling at the time.").

 

[fmk_RoI]

Allowing electronic voting in itself would not matter, because there are not enough votes scattered across "the rest of the world" to outweigh the big European voting blocs. And even if there is remote electronic voting, and the votes were not cast in blocks, it would be mostly along the lines of the cycling unions from each former CPA bloc, so it's not clear that an individualized system would change the outcome.

I'm presuming that the intention is for the latter: one man, one vote.

The problem with e-voting though is that it is something that comes from digital utopians who believe that simply doing it electronically is better. I think there was a study done on Estonia, where e-voting was introduced, and there was no evidence of it actually improving turnout. We don't live in Utopia.

Specifically WRT to making the CPA's elections electronic, riders would have to register somehow to vote and then would actually have to remember to vote. Personally I would expect a substantial proportion of the members to simply not bother: to find the process too much of a bother, to have no interest (the case heretofore) or to just forget (even if reminded). If we look at Trades Unions, members are generally so little interested in participating in postal ballots that rules were introduced requiring a minimum turnout (50%, I think) in order for a vote to be valid.

 

[samhocking]

The peloton actually started petitioning Bugno in March 2018 to remove the arcane block voting system. 31 nations requested CPA use one rider one vote. CPA refused and ignored the petition and Dutch Pro Cyclists Association withdrew from CPA, following on from Belgium Federation who had already left CPA iirc.

In 2017, Bugno told CPA Committee that he would not stand for presidency for another 4 years and he would step down. Millar who had his seat within CPA already because he was the one who helped guide the Extreme Weather Protocol through UCI for CPA said he was willing to replace Bugno. As far as we know, no other candidates for presidency put their hand up and Millar said he had a full show of hands that everyone agreed to Millar taking over. Basically, when there is one candidate, there is no vote other than internally, so essentially just an agreement of who becomes new president.

At some point after Bugno internally stepping down and Millar being internally agreed to take over in 2018, Lappartient met with Bugno and persuaded him not to step down and run for another 4 years instead.

On August 20th, according to CPA rules, Millar submitted his candidacy, but the CPA had no rules or procedures for two candidates as it had never happened before. Bugno simply took over after Cédric Vasseur stepped down.

To add those rules took UCI & CPA from 20th August to 18th September, but the cut-off date for Millar was 26th because his request to change the voting rules, needed to be accepted 30 days before the voting. The problem was, the voting had no rules yet which is why Bugno says Millar only added his Candidacy 2 weeks before Innsbruck. He actually submitted it long before however and of course attempting to change the voting began in March 2018 from the peloton anyway.

Obviously the block voting remained fand it was impossible to vote anyway for most riders, so since Lappartient stepped in, everything was put in Bugno's favour either intentionally or otherwise, you decide?