January 17, 2009
A longish but exceedingly frank profile of movie marketing (from the New Yorker) has plenty of gossip style goodness about the rules of making and selling movies to the public. If you ever wonder who all these crappy movies are being marketed to (and why) this article lays it out pretty bare. It is often said in Hollywood that no one sets out to make a bad movie, but the truth is that people cheerfully set out to make bad movies all the time. It is more accurate to say that no one sets out to make a movie without having a particular audience in mind.
um, now that I'm over thirty are you calling me an "older woman" ??? And for the record, this "older woman" thinks Nicholas Sparks should be shot and burned.
Yes but as you've also pointed out you're the world's only living heart resection patient.
The cockles of my heart became infect around age 12 and I was force to have radical surgery to have them removed. Since then I have failed to enjoy the trite, sappy, "tear jerking" drivel that is the bread and butter of today's movie industry. You may call my cynical, but really, it is a serious medical problem.
I have a feeling you're really not going to enjoy this line then:
Paul Brooks wanted the trailer [for a Renée Zellweger "big city girl's cold heart warms up to small town values" movie] to be primarily comedic, but Palen felt that it needed an emotional through-line, “the stuff that tugs on the ovary.”
Scrolling back through I was reminded of the exchange about the cold calculated decision on whether to include Spider-Pig (the "best joke" in The Simpsons Movie) in the trailer or to reserve it for the film. It answers why you always feel like you saw the best parts of the movie for free when you saw the trailer...
i second beckto's comment. and i am still with cockle or cocklefull.
cock full of what?
what amazed me about the spider-pig thing is that it seems to me that really successful movies are so dependent on word of mouth these days. I guess you do have the problem of wide release, but if you have a bunch of disappointed audiences, it just seems like you're going to have problems.
And it's not like there weren't going to be a lot of people in the stands for the Simpsons, anyway. Why not reserve the best joke, and use it to blow the audience away, and get more repeat viewings, and more people saying 'see it, it was great'?
Though then again, most advertising isn't aimed at me. When I see a media blitz for a movie, I pretty much take it as the advertisers telegraphing that it sucks, and hoping that that initial weekend will defray the disaster that it is.
And, for the record, I found the comment about the reviews to be the funny part, not the comment about Nicholas Sparks.
« Older A Way Forward to being Wayback | Death of memes Newer »
To post comments to a thread you must login or create a profile.
Thank you for this. Fantastic read. My favorite snippet:
posted by Valatan at 01:40PM CST on January 18