Monday, October 20, 2008

Q&A : Andrew Bellware and MILLENNIUM CRISIS

Andrew answered my question from the last post on how having the key art earlier on in the filmmaking process would have affected the outcome of his movie MILLENNIUM CRISIS:

"When we were originally writing the movie we became concerned that the lead character was too passive -- her wants were not as clear as they should be (we had help from Paul Cooper at Hollywood Working Writer) and we did a rewrite that worked well literarily, gave the character a good arc, and really helped the story. But if we'd thought of her as that rockin' character in the Japanese art I think we would have gone even further in making her even more active and... well... cool.

And we keep hunting for that thing in a movie -- that thrill you get from looking at the DVD cover -- and actually making that movie."

Read the rest here.

This is a key point and goes to building your business in film. That is, when you are doing these kinds of entertainments you would do better to make the movie the audience wants to see rather than something else.

AIP used to present theater booking agents with their ad campaigns and solicit feedback. Sometimes the booker for a theater circuit would ask,"Does it have a pretty girl in it?"

Arkoff's answer was always, "Well, it does now!"

Just because you're delivering on audience expectation doesn't mean you can't surprise them along the way. It doesn't mean you can't try and bring some originality to it. It means that your marketing materials incite a level of expectation in the audience and the buyers. It's in your best interest to try and live up to that as much as possible. It doesn't always happen that way, but it's where the bar is set.

Let's also take a lesson from the pulp publishers who would get their best artists to stretch their imaginations...THEN have a writer pen a story to suit the artwork. This happened to Walter Gibson's first SHADOW novel, THE LIVING SHADOW when all the publisher had for art was a shot of a chinese man in fear and a shadow falling over him. The problem was there was no Chinese character in the story!

Gibson took the story back and wove in a Chinatown subplot and it went to press. The issue sold out and Street & Smith had a hit on their hands.

No comments: