Hollywood studios have always tried to please the public by making the kind of movies they think we want to see. Over the years, they have fine-tuned audience appeal by screen-testing films to measure their mass potential. Now the internet has moved the process on to another level by giving the public the opportunity to co-write a movie with its creators.
Is this the future of film-making or the end of creativity? ”We’re genuinely trying to encourage creativity,” insists Simon Rose, producer of Running Time. Billed as the ”the world’s first interactive movie”, it’s presented in twice-weekly, five-minute episodes. Although Simon Beaufoy, the writer of The Full Monty, has drawn up the characters – the lead is ”pretty, feisty bike courier KJ” – viewers decide how the story line progresses, through on-line voting and chatroom suggestions. Should the heroine jump out of the window, or just call her mum? Wiggle your mouse and decide. As the cliff-hanger slogan says: ”it’s your move, it’s your movie”.
The film will be completed in August, but it won’t be coming to a cinema near you anytime soon. So what’s the point? Basically it’s a game, but the signs are that people like playing director. The site (www.itsyourmovie.com) had half a million hits in the first few days, which is not really surprising: Running Time gives the public exactly what it wants, by dumbing down and appealing to the lowest common denominator.
The bottom line is that Running Time is a clever marketing gimmick that will soon be financed using product placements. If you assumed boo.com calling in the receivers was the death-knell for internet retailing, think again: eventually you’ll be able to download information on the characters’ bikes/jackets/garden furniture and choose the soundtrack (think The Box meets Tomb Raider meets, er, Freemans catalogue).
If that sounds cynical, bear in mind the writing was on the box-office wall ages ago. From the moment the audience fled in terror during the showing of Louis Lumiere’s 1896 film The Arrival Of A Train At A Station, it was obvious that audience feedback was going to be helpful. In the Seventies Steven Spielberg and George Lucas found the perfect mass-appeal movie formula, and Lucas declared: ”The studio system is over… the power is with the people now.”
Lucas was confirming a trend that pollster George Gallup had spotted when conducting the first audience surveys 30 years earlier – namely that the majority of cinema-goers were male, teenage and in low-income groups, so appealing to the masses meant making lowbrow star vehicles. Suddenly movie-making was about commerce rather than art. Now, if the audience wants more Rupert Everett in My Best Friend’s Wedding, they get it. Likewise, they picked the ending of Fatal Attraction from two alternatives.
Naturally, Hollywood’s creatives hate screenings. George Lucas voiced every director’s pet peeve: ”Previews always mean recutting.” Spielberg was so nervous before his Jaws test screening he took Valium to get through it. Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid director George Roy Hill took more evasive action; sneaking into one of his own test screenings and forging dozens of preview questionnaires. He has since refused to let his films be test-screened, in case anyone else pulls the same stunt.
Word of mouth from screenings can seriously damage a film. Often the films are still rough-cut versions. In Dallas, a film critic sneaked into an early test-screening of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, then panned the film so badly in his column that cinemas which had booked the film panicked and the price of Columbia’s stock dropped.
Yet studios ignore audience reaction at their peril. George Lucas’s preview for American Graffiti should have been a dream screening: the audience were on their feet cheering and clapping, but the studio executives present declared the film unreleasable, thinking the response was so extreme the cinema must be full of the director’s friends. Lucas’s mentor, director Francis Ford Coppola, got out his cheque book and offered to buy the film from Universal. The studio wisely refused; American Graffiti went on to become one of the most profitable films of all time.
Sometimes, though, the makers get it wrong despite the feedback. Following a successful showing of Star!, producer Richard Zanuck sent a telegraph to his father Daryl: ”We’re home. Better than Sound Of Music.” Sound Of Music became the most popular movie in history, but Star! sank without trace.
During the preview for Rolling Thunder, the audience was so disappointed with the ending that they leapt to their feet and tried to assault the studio personnel present. Screenwriter William Goldman recalls a similar reaction to a death scene in the Robert Redford stunt pilot movie Waldo Pepper: ”The audience were furious. They felt tricked, they felt betrayed, and they hated us… They just sat, sullen. For the first hour of the movie, they were in love with us, and in that instant when the girl went off the wing, the affair ended.”
Not surprising, then, that Warners were too afraid of audience reaction to preview The Exorcist. When it was finally released, audiences collapsed, vomited and broke into hysterics. However, it was also a smash hit. Steven Spielberg discovered during the 1975 preview for Jaws that a little projectile vomiting goes a long way. When a man ran out of the cinema, threw up in the foyer, then returned to his seat, the director recalled: ”That’s when I knew we had a hit.”
By 1991, Tarantino was smart enough to pay someone to throw up in the test-screening of Reservoir Dogs. But it was Mel Brooks who took the preview-as-PR stunt to its ultimate conclusion in 1974, putting on a special test screening of Blazing Saddles for horses, complete with ”horsepitality bar” and oats in popcorn buckets.
Whether Running Time is more than just a cute PR stunt remains to be seen. Can the general public create a better movie than the experts? You may think so, but watch tourists videoing Big Ben on their camcorders for a while and you’ll start to have doubts. Sometimes the amateurs miss the point just as ineptly as the professionals. ”Everybody loved The Full Monty,” says Simon Beaufoy, ”although at one of the US test-screenings someone asked, Which one’s Monty?’ If you’re not careful, that’s who you’re responding to. You’re putting the entire destiny of film with people who don’t know anything about movie-making.” Maybe, but one thing is certain. At least if you don’t like Running Time when it’s completed, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself. – The Guardian