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Wired on Hollywood's Elite Message Boards
superflippy writes " Wired journalist Ben Mezrich gets the scoop on the online forums that film producers and other Hollywood heavyweights use to "track" the buzz on spec scripts, actors, writers, etc. "The tracking boards are the herd mentality gone digital," says one tracker. This helps explain how dreck like Kangaroo Jack makes it to theaters."
I can appreciate your quote of Jay and Silent Bob strikes back, a guilty pleasure that movie was. Pure crap, but funny as hell.
On the other hand, your sig contained one of my favorite lines from Donnie Darko. What a spectacular movie Donnie Darko was.
Funny how these same hollywood dumb asses that spend their time trolling elite message boards, pumped millions in production and advertising to push a piece of crap like Jay and Silent Bob, but did very very little to promote a gem like Donnie Darko.
Subsequently, Jay and Silent Bob made a fortune at the box office, donnie darko did not do well at all.
Sounds like you could pick up some very interesting projects by being a contrarian; ie, getting the stuff that's getting poo-pooed on the boards and actually READING it; then picking it up for less than the project would've gotten if it were universally lauded.
Remember, these people formerly made all of their business decisions at parties and in hot tubs. Mostly this is a crowd that confuses their ability to make money with being truly significant. They all operate under the same set of deluded assumptions about themselves, they're drawn to this type of community for the insulation from reality it provides.
This doesn't make them bad people, some of them are exceedingly decent human beings in terms of their personal habits, but the "creative" community in Hollywood is really dominated anti-creative forces and incredibly self-absorbed people. It's truly amazing we ever get any good movies at all.
The best way to do is to be.
Uhhh, doesnt sound like crap to me. You laughed, you found it pleasureable. It entertained people, it has done what it set uot to do in the first place.
What then constitutes crap? If crap means a ridiculous and incoherent story, then most of my favorite movies are crap (that includes JaSB:SB). Of course, if you mean that crap = not entertaining, then it is quite obvious that it wasn't crap.
Now i was argueing with a friend that Vertigo was a crappy movie. I found no entertainment in that movie what-so-ever. By my definition that makes it crap. However, it did have a deep and intrigual plot (supposably), and that would make it... not crap? of course, she finds the movie entertaining, and therefore, not crappy to her. But you say its funny as hell and entertaining, but then you say it's crap. (uhuh)
DEFINE CRAP
looks up crap : v - To defecate (dictionary.com)....
hmmm, nope, the movie did not defecate on me, therefore, it is not crap.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
Just because a company has bought a hyped-up idea, it doesn't nessecarily mean that they will shoot a film of it. I remember a guy who worked as a trainee in Hollywood talking in a newspaper about what he did there. He was one of those hapless people who had to read the freshly-written scripts and then give an evaluation of how good they were. This guy said that only a small number of scripts actually make it to production, the others are trash. He also said, though, that these rules don't count for big stars - if a script is good enough for Arnoid, it's good enough for his fans, too... This was about three years ago, so things may have changed over the time.
(Or maybe I just underestimate the stupidity of people)
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
That comment about Kangaroo Jack wasn't fair.
Don't blame the internet or even hollywood. Blame the people who went to see it. That movie was a success (as much as it might scare some of us), because for one reason or another lots of people bought tickets.
There have always been people making crap movies (and tv shows) and people who have what most of us would consider poor taste going out to watch them.
Hollywood isn't bringing down movie quality by only making crap like "The Core". Viewers are bringing down movie quality by watching crap like "The Core". Entertainment is an industry, they produce what sells.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
This came to be a good idea.
True. Have you noticed "fun for the whole family" now means "anyone over 10 will hate this"?
Guess not in LA.
Personally, I thought it was a great article that really shows just how rapidly the internet has changed the way we think/act/say/do in a converstational or consensual manner.
In fact I think it's fairly obvious that we can expect to see even more of this mode of consensual decision making as communication devices continue to permeate our culture.
For example: I have a G4 tiBook, it has rendezvous which in turn is supported by an app called Hydra that allows multiple users to edit a single document real-time. And that is a fairly obvious and straight forward model. I believe that within 2-3 years the notion of 1 user/computer will be old hat and many tasks will be done as part of a consensus.
Imagine a team of genetic research scientists in the year 2007. They run Linux workstations and perform calculations to create a designer genome for the creation of a bacteria to use as an eco-friendly solvent. While they work, their CPU/HD and memory are all shared via the net and they are able to operate asynchronously on the same problem via this distributed architecture. Of course any distributed architecture amongst real-time users would require chat. So this small team could also allow in research fellows and peers to help guide and assist them in their work. And now we see an environment just like the one written up. But here, a chat user could influence the course of R&D, by trolling accordingly, they could cause the scientists to follow their friends research while shunning other research by those they do not favor personally.
And as such, would likely follow a similar killing floor for college research papers to be applied and praised or ignored out right WITHOUT even being read.
As you can see today hyper-communication causes people to act without doing any research and as technology progresses it won't get better. In fact far worse in the respect of it's cultural permeation and impact but hopefully better if tools made available to quantify and qualify data may be equally as ubiquitous in the coming age.
Dude, Where's My Car?
The simple fact is, Dude, Where's My Car may have been stupid, but it was fun. And enough people agreed with me that it made enough money to justify a sequel. It's easy to mock movies, but if they sell, they have succeeded in their goal, no matter how stupid and worthless you may think it is.
- They allow one company to control all the boards.
- They know people manipulate the boards, but trust them anyway.
- From the sound of it, they use them as their sole source of information in many cases.
Not smart. Not smart at all.Free Hans!
It's either "mainstream", "indy" or "foreign" with you guys.
How 'bout rooting for some "good" films?
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
The whole point of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was that is WAS a shitty movie. They know this, it was on purpose.
"Any movie with Jay and Silent Bob will lick balls"
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?