| Original Message |
gilberto (no login)
Posted Dec 30, 2005 2:53 PM
People don’t often realize this, but a lot of the splashier quotes you hear on movie ads were not written by the ad people at all. They’re overly complimentary clips from “critics” who declare a movie “hip & scary” or “a non-stop thrill-ride that will leave you on the edge of your seat” because they like to get quoted in commercials. Haven’t you ever noticed that whenever a movie ad sports a sinfully sycophantic quote from some film critic, it’s always Jake Wiggins of the Chuckwater Creek Gazette or some equally obscure publication or web site (I have a web site, for Christ’s sake, but nobody’s asking what I think about “Narnia”), that usually just leads you to wonder “Who the hell is Jake Wiggins?” and “Where the hell is Chuckwater Creek?” or, more pointedly, “who gives a shit what Jasco Buchanan of funflix.com thinks about anything?” Certainly not a major film studio, if he weren’t so gently stroking them.
Editor’s Note: I had to do research on the internet to decide on a web site name I could use as an example, because the first one I made up turned out to be an actual stupid movie site. So if you currently own the funflix.com domain name, I just thought that up off the top of my head, but now you know it’s a stupid name.
They’re called blurbsters, or as I like to call them, blurb whores, because they’ll say whatever you want just to get their names in print. This practice became so routine that one film company just skipped them and invented their own fake movie critic to say nice things about their movies. I guess that was easier than skimming the Entertainment section of the Hobbs’ End Tribune to find a favorable turn of phrase.
But this is nothing new. The alarming new trend (which has been going on forever, but seems to be getting more popular by the minute) is for celebrities to engage in the same shameless shilling of other people’s work as a form of ancillary self-promotion. The particularly obnoxious cases are the celebrity product endorsements. Not when Eric Estrada is on a local car dealer ad or Margot Kidder has an info-mercial for skin cream (or whatever), because that’s different. Whatever their reasons, these are not people at the height of their careers. Let them get whatever work they can get. No one faulted Suzanne Somers for the Thighmaster. What I’m talking about is Catherine Zeta-Jones selling cell phones! Okay, you are a big time multi-million dollar (per picture) movie star, you’re married to Michael Douglas, and you’re doing cell phone commercials? I can’t wrap my head around it no matter how tight a ball I roll it into. I mean, she’s not an actress, she is a movie star, one of the biggest movie stars in the world! She could not be more famous. And she is made of money, literally, the lady bleeds green! If you shake her she jingles like a piggy bank! She had her skeletal system lined with platinum! Her teeth are actually two rows of perfectly cut diamonds! She had her real hair removed and then replaced one strand at a time with a synthetic made up of reconstituted fibers from shredded thousand dollar bills! MTV Cribs wanted to show her house, but they couldn’t afford to charter a space shuttle to get there! You catch what I’m saying here? She is wealthy. She doesn’t need to do commercials to be famous, and she certainly doesn’t need the money, so one might be led to suspect that she is doing this because she wants us all to see her on TV every 30 seconds of every day of our lives.
I make fun, I know, and it may seem like I’m singling her out, but she is far from alone. I remember a time when you couldn’t pick up a freakin’ restaurant menu without it having a quote from Stephen King on the cover. His name was on every publication that saw print. And as more people invited him to comment, his comments became less inspired. “Probably the best work to be published in a popular format in the last ten years,” he’d rave (the quotes are figurative; he never actually said that verbatim). That’s the problem with announcing everything to be the best at something: You have to riddle it with meaningless qualifiers. It was bad enough with the gimmick serial novels and the horrendous screen adaptations he was writing of his own books, then he had to retire, and then he’s writing an editorial column for Entertainment Weekly. And you know how I hate entertainment editorial columnists! Especially internet entertainment editorial columnists. They’re the worst.
And the new generation of blurb whores is being harvested from the previous generation’s failing crop of film school dropouts and wunderkinds. There are two horror movies out right now with Quentin Tarantino’s name on them, neither of which is a movie he made. It seems fun when people are quoting you because it makes it look like your opinion matters, but Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez were going to turn the film industry on its ear ten years ago. What happened? In the aftermath of “Pulp Fiction”, Tarantino has mostly just illustrated his talent for paying homage to other people’s movies. Rodriguez managed to recover his indie cred with “Sin City”, but Tarantino’s “guest director” credit only helps to illustrate my point. He’s getting to be that guy you always see hanging out at other people’s houses, but you’re not sure where he actually lives. “Quentin Tarantino presents Hostel” is a perfect example. Presenting someone else’s movie is just a way of putting your name on someone else’s work, and even though that name might help them get it sold, that’s not the point. Turning your name into a brand name comes from the same seemingly harmless self-indulgence that prompted you to personally appear in so many of your own movies. And while that level of exposure helps to propel you into the mainstream and keep you there, it does yield one fairly disastrous down side. You become kind of a caricature, a parody of yourself. And I don’t say this to criticize, really I don’t, I say this as a warning: When you have to slap your name on someone else’s work just to keep it in print, it’s an indication that your own work is no longer relevant. Like people who name their children after themselves, so their name can live on through someone else’s accomplishments.
So tread lightly. We all want to live vicariously through someone else to some degree, otherwise there’d be no celebrities in the first place. But if you’re so worried that the world will forget you that you’ll do anything to stay in people’s thoughts, you should put more effort into producing good work. People remember good work. Even if you could make them remember you in the absence of good work by wearing a duck suit and being shot out of a cannon by a unicycle-riding monkey in a fez hat, is that really what you’d want to be remembered for?
I mean, I would, but that’s just me…
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