New Direction

Alright, so I've decided to sort of work this into a pseudo-decent publication. By that, I mean publishing somewhat daily articles and even webcomics. Anyways, I had a great idea last night while in bed and, like most ideas, almost got away had I not had paper next to me. So here goes, my first entry:

The entertainment industry has relied on clever gimmicks to attract readers/listeners/viewers. Quite possibly the first one that was well known, and set a high bar for everything afterward, was Orson Welles' mass-trolling of millions of listeners during a War of the Worlds narrated broadcast.

The setup went something like this: Regular music was played, as per the broadcast schedule. They would intermittently play bits of Orson and the Mercury theater's newest highlights. And then, the strike. "Breaking news, a strange spacecraft appeared to have landed in the English countryside."

Because many listeners shifted between the Charlie McCarthy program and the Mercury Broadcast, late listeners became confused of an actual Martian invasion. Numbers who were confused by this were estimated in the millions. In fact, it was so well known that Adolf Hitler even mentioned it in a speech a few weeks later. This began a downhill tumble of impressive marketing for many media events to come.

Recently, a big trend has happened in Hollywood: Viral marketing. The idea is to focus on short, wild videos/photos/gimmicks in order to hook the attention of the potential audience into seeing the film. Notable examples are Eagle Eye's Free Fall, in which the viewer is contacted on their mobile device and guided through a series of events similar to the movie's plot. Most recently, as many of you may have seen on television, are commercials for the Institute for Human Continuity (more info here). The premise behind this being that since the world is ending in 2012 (part of the plot of the upcoming Roland Emmerich film of the same name) that you should register for a lottery (actually a mailing list to get more information about the film) to secure a place to survive in the post-2012 world. An even more/lesser known event was the lead-up to the release of the JJ Abrahms film Cloverfield. The picture had a non-descript JJ Abrahms-style trailer screened before a pre-release of the first Transformers movie. Then it started with the 1-18-08 website, full of non-descript pictures that came out every so often showing things such as a dead whale, military sonar images of the coast of Manhattan, etc. The movie was a terrible let-down for many people, who expected it to be better than a "Blair-Witch-esque disaster flick". Don't get me wrong, it was a decent plotline, but the film-style is kind of nausea inducing and ends abruptly

The major flaw in these viral marketing schemes is that they become more and more desperate to try and attract viewers. They prey on popular trends (the world ending). There's an industry term for this sort of thing, and I'm pretty sure it's called "gay". It's something you do maybe once a decade, not several times a year. When Orson Welles did it, it was visionary. When Hollywood does it today, it's just same old same old. Hollywood has a great history of tiring out the good things about the entertainment industry. Michael Bay did it with both Transformers AND special effects.

So here's my proposal to Hollywood: Stop using old ideas until they're dead and beaten. It makes moviegoers see films for the first few times, sure, but after that, in case you haven't realized, makes people hate the industry more. Look at the length of time a film is viewed before attendance drops off sharply: In 2006, a bad film could have at least 2 weeks before being pulled or shoved to the back reels. In 2009, the same film couldn't last a weekend release. Audiences have become more attuned to shitty film making, and its time you wised up too.