The Dallas Cowboys don’t win but that doesn’t stop them getting rich

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Jerry Jones has built the Cowboys into the worlds most profitable sports club, and the teams protracted mediocrity hasnt upset the balance sheet

According to a Forbes estimate, the Dallas Cowboys are worth $4bn, making them the most valuable sports club in the world, ahead of Real Madrid.

Real, though, win things. The Cowboys last claimed the Super Bowl in 1996. They reached the playoffs in 2014-15, winning one game, after four seasons with win-loss records of 6-10, 8-8, 8-8 and 8-8. Last season they finished bottom of the NFC East, recording four victories and 12 losses.

Their new campaign starts on Sunday at home to the New York Giants, and an injury to Tony Romo means they are set to deploy a rookie fourth-round draft pick, Dak Prescott, at quarterback. Despite Prescotts impressive pre-season, Romos absence fosters uncertainty as Jason Garrett, embarking on his sixth full season as head coach, seeks to return the Cowboys to greatness.

An Arkansas oilman named Jerry Jones bought the Cowboys in 1989 for about $150m and promptly infuriated fans by firing the iconic head coach, Tom Landry. But Super Bowl triumphs followed in 1992-93, 1993-94 and 1995-96. Since, the Cowboys have reached the playoffs eight times, winning only three games.

These days the Cowboys put up some remarkable numbers linked to their balance sheet and the soaring ambition of their construction projects, rather than what they achieve on the field.

In August, six months after he was instrumental in the St Louis Rams relocation to Los Angeles, Jones was named as a finalist to be elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

The 73-year-olds knack for brand-building and wealth generation has helped shape the modern NFL, with its monstrous television ratings and broadcast contracts and monetised year-round appeal despite a regular season that lasts only four months. A league so robust that its biggest team thrives independently of its results, the businesss influence and prosperity undimmed by something so trivial as a near-total recent absence of sporting success.

Though the rise of the New England Patriots (second in the NFL on the Forbes value list) shows how winning can grow a franchise, the Cowboys are an indication that the importance of losing is overrated.

Of course, many fans are upset at the teams protracted mediocrity, as is the owner/president/general manager. But Dallas have led the league in attendance every year since moving in 2009 to the canted glass grandeur of AT&T Stadium, with its retractable roof and intractable impression that an alien spacecraft primed for conquest has landed on the edge of a north Texas industrial estate. Despite the dire performances, last seasons average of 91,459 fans was an improvement on the previous year.

Yet until the thrilling wild-card win over the Detroit Lions in January last year, the Cowboys had not participated in the most notable events at their own home: Super Bowl XLV, the 2010 NBA All-Star Game, Wrestlemania 32, a George Strait concert. Still, win or lose, fans can enjoy the concourse art collection and savour the size and image quality of the colossal video screens.

Just as it is possible to separate the success of Jerry Jones the owner from the failure of Jerry Jones the general manager, who seemingly lacks the sharp talent judgment required in a salary cap league, it is possible to draw a distinction between the grandiose entity that is the Dallas Cowboys franchise from the sporting outfit that has won 12 fewer regular-season games over the past five seasons than the Cincinnati Bengals.

Perhaps Prescott will do for the Cowboys this year what Robert Griffin III did for Washington in 2012-13 (though Vegas ranks them as 25-1 shots for the Super Bowl in Houston next February).

Regardless of what happens on the turf it is a banner year for the franchise, which has just moved into perhaps the worlds most opulent, expansive and ambitious training ground. To give the place its proper name: The Star, the Dallas Cowboys World Headquarters.

It is classic Jones a visionary, pricy merger of marketing and megalomania. The entire project is estimated to cost over $1.5bn, according to the Dallas Morning News more than the teams stadium, built for $1.2bn and dubbed Jerry World.
This sister planets Big Bang came about through a partnership with Frisco, a fast-growing, affluent satellite city nearly 30 miles north of downtown Dallas that, like other ambitious Texas suburbs, sees sports as a way to boost its profile and visitor numbers.

The MLS side FC Dallas play in Frisco, as do affiliates of baseballs Texas Rangers and basketballs Dallas Mavericks, while the NHLs Dallas Stars practice there.

When completed, the News reports, The Stars 91-acre site will boast a retail area, an hotel and sports medicine and education facilities. Though its more than 40 miles from the new training facility to the stadium in Arlington, the Dallas metroplex traffic is not a problem now that Jones has a Cowboys-branded helicopter.

All 800 Cowboys Club memberships that include access to a gym, rooftop pool, bar, lounge, restaurant and terrace, valet parking and the chance to watch training, sold out in February, even though a family membership costs a reported initial $4,500 and then $350 per month.

The centrepiece is the Ford Center at The Star, a 12,000-capacity indoor stadium used by the Cowboys for practices and the local school district for high school games.

What weve done with our stadium and this project creates a cachet that also reflects in [television] rights fees and lot of other things, Jones told ESPN earlier this year. People want to deal with successful and progressive entities. Thats who they want to partner with.

Revenue, community engagement, prestige and brand-burnishing: The Star adds to Jones accomplishments at the helm of Americas Team. Not Americas best team, not for a while and probably not this season. Still, there is comfort in the knowledge that in the NFL landscape that Jones did so much to create, its possible to have a winning spectacle without a winning scoreline.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/sep/11/dallas-cowboys-nfl-rich-profitable

Don’t judge Ben-Hur by the 2016 version

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In the past century the epic story has been blessed by a pope, weighed by the US supreme court, and is now the biggest disappointment in 2016 Hollywood

Please dont call it Has-Ben.

The big-screen remake of Ben-Hur is the 2016 blockbuster seasons biggest disappointment, with losses projected to reach $120m. The film had a $100m production budget, and studios usually dole out at least half production for marketing and often more in the case of would-be hits like Ben-Hur. Its a bad moment to be an accountant at MGM.

It wasnt always thus: Ben-Hur was once one of Hollywoods most reliable chariot-pullers, with no fewer than five adaptations since 1907 two are preserved in the US Library of Congress. The 1880 novel, written by civil war general Lew Wallace, has been adapted into a four-hour TV miniseries by ABC, a Broadway play of similar length, and no fewer than four theatrical films, including the 1959 classic with its notoriously dangerous chariot races.

Wallaces book was the first work of fiction to be blessed by a pope, Leo XIII, and Wallace decided that for religious reasons no one should adapt it. After nine years of promises that they would do it justice, enterprising theater producers turned his head. With an initial, immensely popular stage production, the novel was off to the races, as it were.

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Ben-Hur on Broadway. Photograph: Strobridge Lithography Company: Cincinnati and New York/Wikimedia commons

Ben Hur (1907)

Director: Sidney Olcott
Production budget: $500, adjusted to $12,851 in 2016
Eventual court settlement: $25,000, adjusted to $642,589 in 2016

At 15 minutes long, the film is certainly the shortest adaptation of the novels hundreds of pages; in terms of film history, though, it might be even more significant than the 1959 classic because it created the concept of movie rights.

An elaborate play version had been a success in 1899, possibly because the spectacle had included horses on treadmills and the producing Kalem Company worked hard to replicate it, even featuring actors from the 1890 cast of the play. Wallace had died two years before the films release, but his publisher, Harper & Brothers, still held the rights to the book. The company sued the film-makers, who had simply shot their favorite scenes from the book.

Box office records for the film werent available, but the films success made an impression: the resulting infringement suit went to the supreme court. The result, a landmark 1911 ruling, created contemporary copyright standards when the justices said that film-makers needed permission to adapt works under copyright. Films werent taken particularly seriously at the time, but the justices said that the films advertisement had relied on the books success and its makers were wrong to have hitched a ride on Wallaces coattails.

Kalem had to pay Harper a hefty $25,000, according to Kevin Brownlows history of silent film, The Parades Gone By. Director Sidney Olcott went on to film the worlds first five-reel movie, From the Manger to the Cross, in Palestine the next year.

Appropriately, both the 1907 film and novel are now in the public domain.

The original film version of Ben Hur from 1911 directed by Sidney Olcott, hosted at Archive.org

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925)

Production budget: $3m, adjusted to $41.2m in 2016
Box office gross: $9m, adjusted to $123.8m in 2016

William Youngs six-act stage adaptation of Ben-Hur finally wore out its welcome in 1917, with a sixth and final run on Broadway. It played at Oscar Hammersteins Manhattan Opera House, which is now a Quiznos.

A scant eight years later, MGM released a 143-minute film version starring Mexican American Ramon Novarro, who played opposite Francis X Bushman as Messala. The film was the second-highest grossing feature of the year behind King Vidors The Big Parade. The film-makers paid $600,000 for the rights this time around, in addition to fees to build some 30 ships for the pitched naval battle sequences.

The film shot in Rome under its Hollywood-friendly ruler, Benito Mussolini. The fascist leader extended every courtesy and they returned the favor Mussolini was much admired in Hollywood, Brownlow writes until the dictator learned of the vast discrepancy between pay rates for Hollywood stagehands and his countrys own carpenters. He then declined to intervene in labor strikes.

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, released on 30 December 1925, courtesy of a Warner Bros. YouTube page

Ben-Hur (1959)

Production budget: $15.75m ($130.25m)
Box office gross: $146.9m worldwide ($1.2bn)

At the time the most expensive film ever made, William Wylers 1959 film ran 212 minutes from a screenplay whipped into shape by the novelist Gore Vidal.

The film began inauspiciously in 1952, with a script so hacky that Wyler, who had worked as an assistant director on the 1925 film, initially turned it down. It then saw years of setbacks: the dangerous chariot-race sequence alone cost $150,000, and in 1958 producer Sam Zimbalist died on set, aged 57.

But the finished product, with Charlton Heston as the lead and Vidals script still pored over today for the way he dodged Hollywood censors, is an enduring piece of movie history. Its box office receipts would make it the 14th-highest-grossing film ever, adjusted for inflation, with $70m domestically and more than twice that across the globe.

1959,
Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur in 1959s William Wyler classic. Photograph: Allstar/MGM

Ben-Hur (2016)

Production budget: $100m
Box office gross (to date): $42.9m

Directed by Kazakh-Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, the most recent remake bears the distinct stamp of two producers: Mark Burnett, an evangelical Christian entertainment mastermind, and his wife Roma Downey, who also produced Sarah Palins reality show and The Bible miniseries.

Its ambitions were grand: the films producers had wanted to shoot chariot race scenes in the actual Circus Maximus until Italian officials called it off.

Ultimately, critics pounced on bad editing, poor computer effects, and a dearth of ideas.

A few others

No property in the public domain is immune to bargain-hunting producers, and Ben-Hur has strayed a long way from its original papal endorsement.

Theres a 2009 monutainment stage spectacle , a 2003 DVD cartoon version the final film of Hestons long career and a Game of Thrones-esque version called The Legend of Ben-Hur from the Asylum, the tongue-in-cheek mockbuster studio behind the cable Sharknado series.

But the most interesting Ben-Hur-ish film is probably the Coen brothers screwball comedy Hail, Caesar!, an art-house film with one foot in the Busby Berkeley musical craze and the other in the intrigue of LA noir. The film follows a real-life studio fixer named Eddie Mannix, far more sympathetic on film than in life, through a series of fictional films, including a Biblical epic. Hail, Caesar! has everything up to and including Vidals gay subtext subplot, as well as some nuanced ideas about socialism and religion.

It out-grossed Bekmambetovs remake by $20m.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/sep/10/ben-hur-film-failure-2016-version

This year’s offensive 9/11 ads: Walmart 911 display, Twin Towers mattress sale

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(CNN)Memo to businesses:

9/11 is NOT a holiday. You can’t have 9/11 sales. You can’t use it for crass marketing gimmicks. You can’t put out insensitive tweets.
    Just don’t.
    While that may seem a completely obvious concept for the rest of us to grasp, for some advertisers? Not so much.
    And that’s why, every year around the anniversary of the attacks, we are left dumbfounded over and over again by the sheer boneheaded-ness, the utter tone-deafness of some commercials.
    Below is this year’s crop, starting with one that is jaw-droppingly thoughtless because clearly no one was thinking.

    ‘The Twin Towers’ sale

    By now, you’ve most definitely seen this in your Facebook feed – the most misguided marketing EVER.
    Something possessed Miracle Mattress in San Antonio, Texas, to have a “Twin Towers sale” and to promote it with a commercial making light of the September 11 attacks.
    In the ad, mattresses are stacked side by side in two vertical columns to resemble the World Trade Center towers while a woman announces a sale on all mattresses for a “twin price.”
    Two men who are standing behind her then crash into the mattresses, toppling them. The woman feigns shock, then turns to the camera and says, “We’ll never forget.”
    Yes, really.
    Obviously, in the face of immediate backlash, store owner Mike Bonanno issued an apology that did little to temper the outrage.
    “I say this unequivocally, with sincere regret: the video is tasteless and an affront to the men and women who lost their lives on 9/11,” he wrote.
    “I am disgusted such a video would have been conceived as a promotional tool. And even more incensed it was created and posted on any social media site that represents Miracle Mattress.”
    On Friday, Bonanno took things a step further, saying on the company Facebook page that the Miracle Mattress store will close “indefinitely.”
    “There is very little we can do to take away the hurt we have caused, but we can begin with silence through the Anniversary and then do our best to follow up with actions that reflect the seriousness of our mistake,” Bonanno said.

    The 9/11 Coke can display

    Next up: Two mammoth marketers, one giant blunder.
    Someone should have told this Walmart in Panama City Beach that Coke Zero and Ground Zero should not be equated.
    The store put up a display that used Coke and Sprite boxes to create an American flag backdrop. In front of it, Coke Zero packages were stacked to resemble the towers. A banner above read, “We will never forget.”
    Shoppers were — surprise! — not amused. And the display was quickly taken down.
    Walmart said it didn’t mean any disrespect. It told Orlando Weekly that Coke approaches Walmart with display ideas and the supermarket had approved the display.

    Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/09/us/911-offensive-commercials-trnd/index.html