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Selling the Grim
  Posted: November 24, 2003
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The Sunday NY Times piece on how Hollywood sells grim and depressing movies to a mass audience felt like deja-vu all over again. In a nutshell, the article explored the challenge of selling difficult movies with a potential for larger audiences:

For moviegoers, dark films raise a basic question: Why subject yourself to death, devastation and anguish when you can see "Elf" instead? That is the kind of question marketers hate to see in print. For them the issue is: How can you entice viewers to an emotionally grueling movie, short of handing out anti-depressants at the door?

The short answer, according to the specialists quoted in the article, is smoke and mirrors. Never say 'grim' and 'depressing', but focus on 'mystery' and 'intrigue'. Push the news angle about the film's author, or emphasize the Grammy potential of the acting. The ideal combo is to allow a dark but hazy sense of something bad happening, and then garner the positive reviews, news buzz, and water-cooler chatter to get a larger audience to pay for the downer experience.

The deja-vu comes from recent weblogs, exploring the challenge of Nutcracker ballet productions across the country, in competition with the Rockettes' holiday spectacular stage show. Said one ballet company artistic director:

'What we have to do, sadly, is advertise our show as a great spectacle, a great show, and great family entertainment...We will not use the word ballet.'

The wordplay also recalls posts on Terry Teachout's blog about why we don't call certain musical/theatrical works 'operas,' but rather 'musicals' or 'serious chamber musicals'. The answer, as other blogger Greg Sandow suggested, is that composers would like to be paid, would like their works performed more than once, and fewer people will buy a ticket to an opera than a musical.

It's all a matter of semantics, of course, but that's what marketing is. It just seems that somewhere in the spin and wordplay, we may eventually lose sight of the actual selling proposition of non-mainstream cultural experiences...they are rarified, clarified experiences of the highest calibre of human expression. That's worth a few bucks, I think.

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