Erroll Morris, the director of Oscar winning documentary ‘The Fog of War,’ is getting some negative attention for his new picture ‘Standard Operating Procedure.’ The film maker admitted he had paid for several interviews in the movie about abuse and torture at the Abu Ghraib prison.

“I paid the ‘bad apples’ because they asked to be paid, and they would not have been interviewed otherwise,” he said. But not everybody in the community seemed to agree this is standard procedure. Some say it diminishes the credibility of the interviews, while others say it’s “not all that uncommon, it’s just something most people don’t talk about.”

“Sometimes, you’re paying subjects who have nothing,” Diane Weyermann, executive vice president of the company that made the documentary, said. “You’re making a film about them, and you don’t want to exploit them.”

Apparently this is a taboo nobody ever talked about. It’s pretty natural to question an answer when somebody paid for it. Didn’t you ever bribe your little sister in telling your parents you were at home the night before? Now I ask you. Which is more exploiting. When you give her nothing and she doesn’t have to tell anything. Or when you bribe her to tell your parents what you want?

China is a hot topic in today’s day and age, so here’s a look at what’s happening at the film front. At the Beijing Student Film Festival the deputy head of the film bureau said China is looking to further its commercialization of Chinese movies.

“… after China adopted the policy to commercialize its film industry in 2003, the box office takings of Chinese films have risen by 20% annually,” Zhang said. To create more commercially successful film companies, he said to allow movies to be sold on the market, break down monopolies and help to raise funds outside of China.

With 402 movies last year, the box office total was only $434 million. That’s an incredible low ratio and lags far behind countries like South Korea or Japan. The main problem was the lack of a clear investment, production and marketing plan for the movies.

With the impact of the Chinese economy on the world, I’m surprised the film industry is lagging this much. I understand the lack of potential for overseas distribution, but with over a billion people, you would expect a more mature industry. Compared to India’s Bollywood, the Chinese film industry is kinda nonexistent.

If you are currently working on a movie in Los Angeles, how did you find the time to read this post? According to an agency that tracks on-location filming, production in LA is up 11%. Every company is in a hurry to get their movies made before the potential actors’ strike in July, because stopping production would be a ‘very expensive proposition.’

The Screen Actors Guild has been very tightlipped about the outcome of the current negotiations. Some sources say it isn’t looking good and the studios want to move on, to talk to the AFTRA (TV and radio). In a way, daring the actors to strike.

You have to question if the boost is actually because of the potential strike. Or is it because the lack of production during the earlier writers’ strike?