Influencing Hollywood

The other day, I went to see Lost in Translation with a
friend at the Bellevue
Galleria cinemas. It's a very good movie, by the way, but I'm not really
going to talk about that. Upon entering the theatre, my friend and I were
waived down by someone who was doing research into trailers for upcoming
movies. We were running a bit late, but I really wanted to do it (I watch a lot
of movies) so we promised to come back after the show and fill out the survey.

So, making good on our promise,
we stopped by the booth after the show and took the survey (we weren't allowed
to take it together, or to cheat on each other's answers - sigh). I won't
reveal what the movie she was researching was, or anything like that, but the
lady asked a few intro questions about how many movies I'd seen in the last few
months (I was stuck until she listed the categories -- I definitely fit into
the "6 or more" bucket!) and whether I'd heard of a list of 4 upcoming
movie titles (I'd heard of and seen trailers for them all).

Then she showed me a trailer of
the movie, and asked a whole bunch of questions about what I thought of the trailer
(is it exciting? Romantic? unimaginative? etc.), whether I'd be likely to see
the movie (sure, why not?) what would make me want to see the movie, what would
make me not want to see the movie, etc. etc.

One of the things I said about
what would make me want to see the movie more (or perhaps less ;-) ) was if
they said who the director was; this information was lacking from the trailer
and I had no idea who it might be.

Anyway, I went to see School of Rock yesterday (very
funny) and lo and behold there was a modified trailer for the movie I'd been
interviewed about, including the
director's name! Now of course they wouldn't have done that just because I
said so, but it's a nice thought to have. And although I didn't recognise the
guy's name off the top of my head, I looked it up on IMDB and now I'm much more likely to see the
film. (Yeah, I could have just looked up the movie in the first place, without
the trailer mentioning the director's name, but it actually gave me some
impetus to do so).

Incidentally, my friend and I
compared notes after doing the interview and whilst I had categorised the potential
of the film into just about every possible bucket (good effects, funny,
exciting, action-packed, unbelievable <g>, fun, etc.) she had just put it
into the negative categories (boring, unoriginal, etc). Guess it's not a chick
flick then, eh? ;-)

(This was supposed to be a very short post. I
don't know why it took so many words to basically say "I got interviewed
about a movie trailer and after I said 'you should put the director's name in
it' they re-edited the trailer and now it has his name on it."