Every so often, you will hear about an actor or director who launches into an unforgiving and scathing critique of test audiences and their effect on the industry as a whole. This generally happens as said actor or director’s latest passion project is meeting with horrific marketing problems or release delays at the hands of uneasy studio executives who don’t like the way the film is testing.
I was once part of one of these studio test audiences, for the film Sleepless in Seattle. I sat entirely too close to the screen and was in physical pain by the halfway point of the movie, despite the fact that I asked to move. Twice. Suffice it to say, I did not give the film many positive comments. With this in mind, I can understand the viewpoints of a lot of directors who can’t figure out how the opinions of a random grouping of people in the suburbs (or Bakersfield) play such a heavy part on how their art is, uh, massaged by the studios and producers.
It’s not a matter I ever spent much time thinking about. It is what it is. A movie’s test audience displays a middle-American ethos and the people who stand to profit from the film’s release try to tailor their product to that. It made sense to me, even if I didn’t like the blatant lack of artistry to it. Never particularly close to the testing process or the comment cards the test audiences fill out, I just figured that the people in the test audiences were a simpler folk and left it at that. I didn’t quite grasp how insanely stupid the members of this pre-release demographic are—and they definitively are—until this last week when I read an interview with Liv Tyler as she was promoting her new film, The Strangers.
Attempting to play up the horror of her movie, Tyler recounted how during The Strangers’ testing phase one of the film’s producers called her up and informed her that the test audiences were “freaked out because they thought it was [really] a snuff film”.
Tyler wasn’t asked about the mental capacity of test audiences per se and she wasn’t attempting to denigrate her producers with this statement, she was merely telling a story to sell her movie.
I want you to understand what this means: if we are to believe Tyler’s statement, this means that a grouping of supposedly random people in a supposedly random location showed up to a movie theater with the express purpose of watching a film that starred noted thespians Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman and came out of the experience worried that the film’s producers had actually killed the actors… and that the results of this murder were going to be released to theaters for entertainment purposes.
This is the group of people to whom studio executives turn to make sure that the movie that is coming out for your entertainment is up to par. People who leave the theater worried that the on-screen actors are dead. Imagine what might have happened if they'd screened Iron Man! On the other hand, this could explain a lot about Steven Tyler’s recent trip back to rehab… but that’s a story for another time.
A Minor Thing about Barry Levinson’s The Natural
For about five years in the ‘80s, before Bull Durham and Field of Dreams were released, director Barry Levinson’s The Natural was viewed as one of the most quintessential baseball movies in Hollywood history. And yet, The Natural is so peppered with baseball inaccuracies, it makes it hard for me to enjoy the film on its own merits. It’d be one thing if these mistakes were ancillary to the movie’s plot–in the original Naked Gun, four runners can be seen crossing second base after a grand slam, but since nothing remotely important hinged on that event, I can ignore the miscue–but one of the major thematic arcs of Levinson’s film is based on something that could never happen in the game of baseball.
Is it really too much to ask that if you’re making a sports movie (of any kind) that you at least kind of respect the rules of the game? Just as Hollywood shouldn’t have a movie about the NBA decided by a four point shot at the buzzer, Levinson shouldn’t have made the following mistake:
Playing a game against the Chicago Cubs in Wrigley Field, the NY Knights and their superstar Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) are down a couple of runs and batting in the bottom of the ninth. Hobbs swings weakly at a couple of pitches and steps out of the batter’s box. He looks up into the stands and sees a 30-something blonde woman in a white hat standing. The sunlight highlights the woman’s hat and something about this image inspires Hobbs. He nails the next pitch out of the park and the Knights win the game. Suddenly, everyone wants to know, who is this mystery woman who helped Hobbs win the game and come out of his slump?
One problem though. If the Knights were the visiting team, which they definitely would be if they were playing the Cubs in Wrigley, they would never be batting in the bottom of the ninth. Hobbs’ walk-off homerun could never occur. Ever. A visiting team just can’t hit a walk-off homer.
An Even More Minor Thing:
Jack Marucci, president of the Marucci Bat Company, estimates that most current major leaguers go through six or seven dozen bats in a given season; that’s 72-84 bats a year, or roughly one every two games… given that there are 162 in a baseball season. Assuming that bat technology has gotten substantially better over the course of the last 68 years, that means that bats would probably break even more frequently that they did in 1939, when The Natural was set. And yet, Hobbs manages to make it through more than 20 years of on-again, off-again baseball with his one special bat, using it to not only play games but also to take batting practice. There’s no doubt in my mind that this is the true reason that the bat is called "Wonderboy".
Sooner or later--it's looking more and more like later--I'm going to have to learn that I can't engage publicists in conversation. This is a conversation I carried on with a publicist at a very major PR firm last year, just before Thanksgiving:
PUBLICIST: I'm not in my office right now. I will be in next week though.
ME: Oh. Next week's Thanksgiving, right?
PUBLICIST: Yeah. You doing anything special?
ME: Just heading up to my parents' place. You?
PUBLICIST: Me too.
ME: Are you from LA originally?
PUBLICIST: What? Yeah, I'm from this area. Well, New Jersey actually.
ME: Uh—What?
PUBLICIST: My parents live in Pasadena, so yeah.
ME: I'm sorry, I just have to ask, how does that work?
PUBLICIST: What?
ME: You're from LA, but you're from New Jersey?
PUBLICIST: Yeah...
ME: And how does that work?
PUBLICIST: Well, all my family is out here.
ME: So you're—
PUBLICIST: We all hang out on the holidays.
ME: But the part about you being from Jersey...
PUBLICIST: Sometimes we do it there, it's warmer out here, you know. No one likes the cold if they can help it.
ME: Yes, but—
PUBLICIST: Well, my entire family followed me out here.
ME: Oh, so you grew up in Jersey and then moved out to LA.
PUBLICIST: No, I'm originally from around LA.
ME: Where did you go to high school?
PUBLICIST: New Jersey, but I like to tell people I'm from LA.
ME: Didn't you say you grew up around LA?
PUBLICIST: No, I just moved here about two years ago.
