The Minearverse 3: The Network Is a Harsh Mistress
[NAFDA] "There will be an occasional happy, so that it might be crushed under the boot of the writer." From Zorro to Angel (including Wonderfalls and The Inside), this is where Buffistas come to anoint themselves in the bloodbath.
Well, product placement, true. But I think habitual lateness tends to protect me from the prior advertising most of the time—I'm lucky if I catch any previews in the theatre.
At any rate, I was probably speaking more to the issue of what studios are trying to sell, rather than the theaters. Which makes it less of a one-to-one comparison to TV, I guess.
I'm lucky if I catch any previews in the theatre.
!! Wha!! previews are the bestest.
msbelle speaks the truth. I'm really irritated by what the theater we usually go to (since it actually has student tickets) does.
They intersperse the slideshow with the trailers.
Seriously. There will be those ads for a few minutes, and then a trailer. And then more ads, and another trailer. So you have to watch the trailers
with the lights on. And the sound not cranked up to superstereo.
And they lose all the trailer momentum since you keep coming back to the fucking jumbles and quizzes. They do show one or two trailers after the lights go off and the sound's in place, but gah.
Does that happen after the movie's advertised start time?
AMC here shows slides, then ads, and then when the start time rolls round we get previews, and then the keep quiet stuff, and then movie.
UA/Regal theatres also now have "The Twenty," which is a 20-minute ad/trailer package that runs before the scheduled start time of the movie (instead of slides informing me where I can eat after the movie, and that the rock garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens is in bloom). So by the time the movie starts, if you've gotten to the theatre early enough, you've seen 30-40 minutes of ads and trailers. It's exhausting.
I have no Nielsen box.
Which reminds me, they contacted us the other day. Mr. H wants to do it, but I can't imagine the weird data they'll get from us during the summer. It'll be The Inside, Dallas, Melrose Place, Knots Landing, NOW, Lehrer NH, mixed with reruns of my very favorites- mostly Lost and VM to pick up pieces of their mysteries I may have missed.
Heather, I will bake you cookies every week for the entire run of the show.
What's your fave?
Does that happen after the movie's advertised start time?
AMC here shows slides, then ads, and then when the start time rolls round we get previews, and then the keep quiet stuff, and then movie.
The ad/preview stuff is before the movie's advertised start time, yeah. So another thing is I end up missing a bunch of trailers since they start showing them however many minutes before the movie's supposed to start. But at the start time-ish, yeah, the lights go dark and we get some trailers the way they're meant to be seen before the movie.
Heather, I will bake you cookies every week for the entire run of the show.
Aww. Don't worry; both Mr. H and I will be watching I'm sure at least the first four or five even if we aren't crazy about the first one- so they'll know we watch it. I'm more worried that they'll think "Ah-ha! People who like cheesy 80's primetime soaps also like disturbing complex procedural dramas (when actually, I'm less concerned about the
type
of show and more concerned with whether I find the writing, acting and direction good.) Little do they know we only watch Dallas to say "Poor dumb Bobby.", watch Sue Ellen's Trembling Lip 'O Doom (TM), and make fun of Donna Krebs "Ra-ay!"
The more elusive they get, the more they can charge, like truffles, and the masses are just ground meat.
So you're saying I AM chopped liver.