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The Creation of "Fan" Sites
jmoore writes "Nothing new that movie makers will do anything to make money from their movies. However, what about making false fan sites to boost a movies image? I couldn't belive it, but sadly it dosen't suprise me much. how depressing." The hype Blair Witch got, as the article points out made the movie industry understand how powerful "grass roots" really is. Reminds me of the Levi jeans pages modeled on the "I kiss you!" guy that people thought were real as well. Ah, marketing.
Regardless of whether it's a fan site or the New York Times, too many folks accept information without question. Having been on the journalist side of things, it's scary to know just how easy it is to mold the facts to support just about any view. Just find an expert or two that agree with your supposition and suddenly you have news. Of course that's only when you aren't regurgitating the endless stream of PR/marketing crapola that gets thrown at you to 'inform' you of what's newsworthy.
Real fan sites depress me. Why would a rational human being devote dozens of hours to fawning over a piece of commercial entertainment? Does knowing what the stars ate from the craft-services table make the movie better? No. Does Jennifer Lopez sound better when you know who she's dating? No. Will knowing the exact date and hour of the premiere of the next Star Wars movie make it suck any less? No.
A plea to the fawning fanboys - get a life! Direct your energies to something useful. If your skill is in documenting minutia, apply it to an educational or reference site. If you like writing fan-fiction, try creating your own characters and settings for once. If you're good with image/video editing, or with 3d software, work on an original indie creation (or go pro), instead of reenacting the Phantom Menace with South Park characters.
There's a place for sampling existing works and distorting them, but the final product should be original. Think Negativland instead of Pat Boone or Puff Daddy.
Enough ranting for now,
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Back in 1997, we made fan sites and protest sites, for and against "Cyberdiversion" for Heat.net. The fact that we were doing it got more press than the sites themselves ever did...
The funny thing is that one of the sites, "Mothers Against Cyberdiversion" has since been quoted and incorporated into culture several years later by people who had no idea that it was nothing more than a reverse-psychology guerilla marketing effort.
A few years later I was the webmaster for levi.com and its associated domains. While at that time we didn't do any direct misdirection, we would create one-off rough-cut promo sites, including one for redline, designed by the folks at superbad. I left before the age of Mahir, and so didn't have anything to do with those...
Kevin Fox
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Kevin Fox
Salon had an article on astro-turf fan sites, with a particular focus on Blair Witch. It was here. It talks about web buzz and Ain't it Cool News and how that stuff impacts movies.
In part it reads:
"The "Blair Witch Project" fan sites deploy similarly suspicious language. The creators of The Blair Witch Project Fanatic's Guide, for example, tell site visitors, "We're just very dedicated fans," and until recently offered suggestions on how other fans might help promote the movie: "Buy TBWP Stock at the Hollywood Stock Exchange! Rank TBWP at the Internet Movie Database! Rank TBWP at Ain't It Cool News!"
But the creators of the site, Abigail Marceluk and Eric Alan Ivins, seem to be more than average fans. They appeared in the Sci-Fi Channel special "Curse of the Blair Witch," and the Rough Cut site links them to the film's back story: "A bit of trivia: Abigail and Eric are the two anthropology students who discover the three film students' 'lost' footage."
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
Well I agree whole-heartedly, but most people probably think I'm a little to extreme in my reasons. See, personally, I find it appalling that businesses are even allowed to take this sort of aggressive stance. It ticks me off just to see commercials that are directly targetting children in a manipulative 'buy-me-to-fit-in-at-school' sort of way. I don't believe that corporations are people, and I don't believe they have rights that people have. The people who comprise those companies, of course, have every right that anyone else does. Even the founding fathers understood this. Before the early 1900's, and before commercialization became the norm, it was illegal for corporations to give any money to politicians. I don't have a quote offhand, but all the way back to the 1700's Benjamin Franklin himself would talk about how restrictions on money, and restrictions on ownership of media (that existed before the Telecommunications Act of 1996), were paramount to preserving a democracy. Otherwise a business like his own newspaper could manipulate the government and monopolize the only medium through which people could ever hear about it.
/vent
But that's what what we have now, and it got that way through compromise after compromise, supposedly in the name of freedom and capitalism. The problem is that the public can't compete with the mechanized efficiency of big business. Microsoft lobbyists are formed up on capitol hill pushing UCITA while most Americans are at home watching MicroSoft NBC's latest incitefull coverage of some tear-jerking tale of loss and eventual triumph over something or other.
Enough already. These multinational corporations do business in places where the constitution means nothing, and human rights are non-existent. They're not our friends, they're not human beings with common sense, or even morals. Obviously they've proven my point; a business is operated by individuals, but it has no conscience, it acts as a machine would to achieve maximum efficiency. Anyone who's familiar with the term 'soft money' or 'corporate welfare' should understand what we're dealing with these days. The 'American People' and 'Corporate America' can't exist as equals, when the second of the two is dominant in it's very nature. Corporate America has to take the subserviant role, and not because the bill of rights is subjective -- but because when they don't, the rights of the public and the rights of the same people at the helm of Corporate America, get squelched.