'300' Teaches Us That Audiences Are Suckers For Nice-Looking Crap Shined Up With The Latest Turd-Polishing Technology

'300' Teaches Us That Audiences Are Suckers For Nice-Looking Crap Shined Up With The Latest Turd-Polishing Technology
As a deflated Harvey Weinstein mounts his box office jalopy on cinderblocks, considering how to most quickly rebuild it into a smooth-running, crash-resistant machine, he might want to take a cue from another recent hyperviolent release that has achieved blockbuster status. Using 300's unlikely success as a case study, as well as several other recent head-scratchers that managed to turn the usual Hollywood cowpies into gold, BusinessWeek bravely throws the old "there aren't any rules" Hollywood myth out the window, and attempts to draw some quantifiable conclusions from America's seemingly bottomless lust for depilated pecs and bullet-time blood spurts:

Lesson No. 1: Sometimes it really is about what you put on the screen, and maybe you don't need to put as much up there as you might think. As far as epic wannabes go, 300 is modest, yet audiences are eating it up.
The nonstop action came from computers, the actors were, well, wooden, and still the trailers and commercials were mesmerizing. Sometimes a great visual is worth more than heavyweight actors and a legion of writers.

We doubt the news that deeply underestimating your audience's disdain for well-executed storytelling might sometimes result in spectacular commercial results is going to cause any seismic shifts in the current system, as Hollywood has been operating on that very fundamental for quite some time now. Still, it's the advances ushered in by 300's groundbreaking ty-moving-making technology that could forever change the ty-movie-making game as we know it, ushering in the demise of the actor-screenwriter system that will be replaced by productions exclusively shot on football-stadium-sized soundstages, starring a couple of dozen homeless men dressed in green body-stockings and told to "just move around and say whatever, we'll add the rest in post."
Published 4/9/07 by


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