That's your lot. (+ David Mamet)

[cron]

That's your lot

David Mamet
Friday January 2, 2004


The Prisoner's Dilemma is a favourite of academics of all stripes - it is a problem in logic, a staple of game theory, and a paradigm for actual and aspirant capitalists. Two folks are arrested on suspicion of having colluded in commission of a crime. They are interrogated separately. The police have no evidence, and require a confession in order to convict.
The suspects, in fact guilty, must independently decide whether to keep silent, or to gain a lenient sentence by accusing the partner.

If both keep silent, both go free; the one who peaches gets clemency, the one who does not gets the shaft.

I believe this sordid and instructive problem is all of Hollywood writ small.

For we have here two distinct societies, one that builds the pyramids, and one that decries the workers' lack of real dedication.

The last standing Western Street set, at Warner Brothers, was torn down a month ago. Countless films and television shows had been shot there. It stood for 45 years.

It was removed, a studio press release said, to make room for production offices.

The set was built in 1958. That year Hollywood produced approximately 2,000 films, which listed in their credits approximately 2,300 producers. In 2003, Hollywood produced approximately 240 films, and we find almost 1,200 producers acknowledged in their credits.

What do these folk, what do these producers in offices making better use of the Western Street real estate, what do they do?

Well, there are two answers. The worker, of which I am one, knows the response: damn little to nothing at all; the member of above-the-line, also myself, responds "they fight over the pie".

"Above-the-line" is that über-world between the worker (make-up artist, actor, scenic designer, electrician), and the producer.

The workers (as above) consider the producers seriously misguided, unmanly, and immoral swine. The producers do not consider the workers at all.

The above-the-line are those workers to whom are extended the status of Honorary Human Being. That is, these folk have something the money people need - they are single-source vendors (of talent, or fame, or connections), and so get a cloth napkin and a tablecloth.

From this privileged position, one can observe: "Aft the more honour, forward the better Man." One can also have a great deal of rather unfortunately expensive entertainment as one is close enough to observe the producers.

Tolstoy wrote that one can get a lot of diversion out of boring people if one will just keep one's head. The same is true of the antics of producers.

For these cunning little monkeys are forever engaged in cutting each other's throats. What do they do all day, on that once-Western Street? They ponder the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Virginia Woolf cautioned never to write while angry - good advice, but if everyone followed it we would never have had The Terminator, let alone the bounty it inspired.

Speaking of politics, it has occurred to me that American foreign policy is just professional wrestling writ large; and once again, my country's most famous export is diversion. (And you, Europe, land of cheese and chocolate, can get a lot of entertainment out of America, if you will just keep your head.)

But enough love-making. It is time to talk about recurring images. I have just read a review of a new film, Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star. The eponym, now in his 30s, is parking cars. A break is offered in an upcoming film by Rob Reiner. Here's the catch: the role is a "regular guy", and Dickie Roberts has no experience of "real life". He must therefore enrol a family and learn how actual human beings act.

This is the third script I have read or heard of with the dead-bang same premise.

I am fairly certain there was no cross-pollination, as it were; that is, that the premise arose independently in the minds of three writers.

How can I be sure? I spent some time, in my happy-go-lucky middle age, whoring around television studios, trying to sell various ideas for a series. However far-fetched, original, bizarre, macabre, or what-have-you my idea, I was usually told: "We've got three in development."

What Price Hollywood? and A Star Is Born are essentially (as per story and plot) the same film; as are Hollywood Cavalcade and Singin' in the Rain. It's a Wonderful Life is pretty much the same story as Happy Land - as previously noted (watch the scenes in the pharmacy) - and both are, essentially, A Christmas Carol. We find the same obligatory scenes in They Gave Him a Gun, and Heroes for Sale, and, indeed, in Johnny Got His Gun, and, curiously, in Garp.

The getaway car in The Blue Lamp almost ploughs into a group of schoolchildren in the crossing, just as it does in Robbery. None of this is plagiarism, but, as the scientists say, "independent discovery".

Well, why not? We tend to understand the actions of our species symbolically: feet up on the desk, arms crossed, chin out, head bent, jacket-slung-over-the-shoulder, foot up to be kissed, head bowed in submission. We automatically create and destroy symbols. We are no different from our brother animals in this. We differ only in our understanding that symbols can be manipulated, and rearranged for new meaning (art), or for gain (advertising, politics, and crime).

Coercive, manipulative attempts to recur to the symbolic (to enlist the unconscious mind) end in dead formalism, like bad adolescent prose and most modern poetry. Virginity is depicted as coyness, masculine strength as a propensity for brooding; revelation as slow-motion arms-out revolving on a beach, sex as necking in the waves (archaic), the tragedy of war as the orphan child clutching its teddy bear, homoeroticism as the two GIs, in love with the same girl, having a fist fight.

Cinematic genius - that inspired force beyond the tendentious - creates a new vocabulary that both the viewer and the less gifted accept not only as inevitable, but (of course) inviolable; which vocabulary becomes the new formalism and of use to no one other than a producer.

Eisenstein's baby carriage, Kurosawa's slow-motion combat, Joe Sternberg's Dietrich stripping off her high-heeled shoes to follow Gary Cooper across the desert, Kubrick's space shuttle docking to the Blue Danube, Coppola's gangster armageddon played out to the sound of baptismal liturgy - these inspirations are true art, and the highest art of the cinema: the creation of a new, organic, undeniable symbolism.

The talented, the less-talented, the gifted, and the deluded all must confront (both as Art and Commerce) the mysterious nature of symbols, the essence of myth. A movie like Whale Rider is worth any number of cop cars pursuing a villain down an alley and crashing into conveniently placed garbage cans.

That's why we go to the movies and, in the absence of this rare great art, we'll be happy to take Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, eat our popcorn and wait.

© David Mamet 2003

[GodDamnImDaMan]

I didnt read a word of that previous post...


but i decided to post anyway..

i'm a bad bad man...

[cine]

Three words: Everything Else Cinema.

[Pubrick]

Three words: Everything Else Cinema.

two words: now what?

[cine]

Three words: Everything Else Cinema.

two words: now what?

I don't know but I hate seeing stuff like this in Idle Chatter.

[molly]

The talented, the less-talented, the gifted, and the deluded all must confront (both as Art and Commerce) the mysterious nature of symbols, the essence of myth. A movie like Whale Rider is worth any number of cop cars pursuing a villain down an alley and crashing into conveniently placed garbage cans.

That's why we go to the movies and, in the absence of this rare great art, we'll be happy to take Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, eat our popcorn and wait.

i guess that's the way things function.
Also, i wouldn't like to watch von Trier's films every day. That dude has something against women

[Ghostboy]

That was a fantastic article -- if you like Mamet's writing style. Stephen King wrote a slightly similar article for EW recently that was woefully pointless. Mamet may not have anything particularly new to say in this piece, but his writing is so erudite and the sentences so well constructed that it's a joy to read nonetheless. Whenever he writes something like that, you get the sense that he dashed it off in half an hour or so, just because he could.

[godardian]

That was a fantastic article -- if you like Mamet's writing style. Stephen King wrote a slightly similar article for EW recently that was woefully pointless. Mamet may not have anything particularly new to say in this piece, but his writing is so erudite and the sentences so well constructed that it's a joy to read nonetheless. Whenever he writes something like that, you get the sense that he dashed it off in half an hour or so, just because he could.

I completely second this. King's piece came off whiny and misinformed- clearly the work of someone who doesn't love cinema or pay too much attention to it. Mamet's piece might also be aptly described as that, but he is, unlike King, a consummately thoughtful writer- an articulator, a cogent convincer.

[cron]

Root for the hero

David Mamet examines the dramatic techniques that engage audiences with the trials and tribulations of the hero

Friday February 13, 2004

Dr Parkhurst was a late-Victorian reformer. Like many who preceded, and many who followed, his stock-in-trade was low-cost prurience. He haunted the dens of vice of Victorian New York City, and wrote, at length, of their appalling, nay, demonic conditions.
The good-willed people of that time, much like you and I, might read his words shaking their heads as they discovered the hoped-for mention of this or that preferred vice.

"Tsk tsk," they, or you, or I, might say, as our eyes grew wide, our heart began to beat more insistently.

For the newspaper, whatever its flag of convenience, exists to sell sex, gore, and outrage. Much like the movies. In each, the moralistic tone is very much likely to enfold, and, indeed, to allow the sale of that denied to the high-minded. Most anti-war films succeed through the power of this engine. We viewers are titillated by images we have ostensibly come to decry.

Not a Love Story, the 1981 Canadian documentary, passed as an exposé of the smut industry, but I suggest that, absent its odour of sanctity, it was powered by sexually explicit images and enjoyed by those who thought it good to watch the same.

The Green Mile, while purporting to be an indictment of capital punishment, was a pictorial, inventive, extensive, and very graphic description of the same.

Can these subjects be treated in a truly moral way? Of course; I will suggest, as per prostitution, Silvana Mangano, in De Sica's Gold of Naples; and, as for capital punishment, Kubrick's Paths of Glory, or Daniel Mann's I'll Cry Tomorrow.

Each of these takes an essentially sad tale, and investigates it with dignity. Now, Not a Love Story and The Green Mile differ in degree. The second, a straightforward mercantile venture, adopts or accepts any degree of license offered by sanctimony. Why not? The first, Not a Love Story, sells flesh, while it sails under the banner of exposé toute entiere, to which a critic more moralistic than myself might respond "shame on you".

But which of us is without sin? And I mention the next term in my homily reluctantly. I very much enjoyed The Station Agent. I thought it well directed; and its four leads acted the heck out of it. But I find it falls afoul of the above-mentioned guidelines against hypocrisy.

The film's hero is a dwarf. The role is played by Peter Dinklage, who is himself a dwarf. So far so good. The film's dramatic engine, however, its premise (for it lacks a plot, and, so, the premise is its sole motive force) is that it is difficult to be a dwarf in a world full of full-sized others. This is certainly a legitimate theme. The film, however, while presenting itself as a compassionate treatment, exploits for dramatic purposes the prurient interests of the audience.

How would a dwarf woo and copulate with a full-sized other; defend himself against a full-sized other; how would he deal with the untempered curiosity of children, the misguided helpfulness of the good-willed? In just about every scene in the film we are shown the hero disappointed, insulted, saddened and mistreated.

The film-makers legitimately desire to side with, and desire that the audience side with, the hero; and we may, indeed, side with him, but are induced to do so by witnessing his degradation. Apart from his mistreatment there is nothing to side with him about, as he has, in the film, has no stated or implied goal. There is nothing he wants, other than to continue in what we are to understand is his accommodation with the circumstances of his birth.

Socrates reminds us that no evil can come to a good man either in this life or after death, and Aristotle that that which is neither good nor evil - that which is not the product of choice - is not a fit subject of drama.

The hero, therefore, not having made a choice, is held up to scrutiny merely because of the circumstances of his birth; and the authors cannot (in their fiction) avail themselves of these circumstances for professional (or, indeed artistic) purposes, and decry others who amuse themselves at the expense of the hero and those like him.

Let us discuss "aesthetic distance". It is the goal of the dramatist to involve the audience in the working-out of a hermetic syllogism. The goal of the hero is stated, the impediments to that goal are revealed. The audience, then, engages its intellectual fantasies attempting to anticipate the hero's possible solutions. This is called "getting involved". Because the creators have invested time and effort, they, the audience, become emotionally involved. They root for the hero, exult at his successes, are anxious for his triumph, and suffer at his reversals. They are permitted to do so in the degree that the syllogism is plausible, solvable, simple, and clear.

Hamlet wants to find out who killed the king, all right, we'll play along. If Ringo can't get the Sacred Ring of Kali off his finger, he will be sacrificed. Ditto.

As we have signed on for what, in Hollywood, is known as "the ride", we identify with the hero (this is what the term means: that, for the length of the drama, our interests are one).

The hero becomes an object of love, and we want to know more about him. The untutored (studio executives, and so on) mistake effect for cause. (Their logical fantasy, that in the successful drama we want to know more about the hero; therefore a drama can be made successful by telling the audience more about him.)

Now, the more the audience is told about the hero, the more their legitimate, indeed, induced desire is gratified, the less they care. For they have signed on to follow his journey (the plot), in anticipation, glee, and dread. When the author indulges his ability to frolic away from the described path (the path, the sole path to which the audience has vouchsafed its interest), the less interested the audience becomes.

(Canny test-marketers hold "focus groups" at test-screenings, and quiz the audience on the film they've just seen. "What scenes did you like least?" [Those in which the hero was in danger.] "What character/s did you like least?" [The villain.]) Oh, sigh.

To return: the reductio-ad-absurdum of "we want to know more about him" is recourse to actual physical or biographical aspects of the actor. (Eg, let's show his or her genitals, physical deformity, tattoo, etc; let's make reference to events in the actor's life which might excite interest.)

This, while, perhaps, exciting audience interest in general does so at the expense of audience interest in the plot. (Again, the author has thought it good to detour from that service for which we, the audience, have paid, and pledged our attention.) This is called violating the aesthetic distance.

Steven Schachter's Door to Door (2002) stars William H Macy as a man deformed by cerebral palsy. His goal is to become a door-to-door salesman. The audience follows him in his goal and does not quit this most excellent film thinking the hero a poor man, but a hero.

© David Mamet 2004.

[cron]

What do producers do?

They can play golf, fiddle the expenses, ruin perfectly good film ideas ... who says producers are useless?

David Mamet
Friday April 9, 2004

You may recall Ingrid Bergman, in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), asking: "Where do the noses go?"
My consternation equals her own. I differ but in subject: what do producers do?

Just as we have been instructed that we may safely elect any politician who decries causes we espouse as, on election, he will as sure as sin be forced to embrace them, similarly, I say, producers, perhaps, are those who "make" nothing.

Would it be too precieux to suggest that they are thus named like the fat boy known to all as "skinny"; or, are they, perhaps, so-called as an earlier age referred to "Jews" as "those of Hebrew persuasion", thus saving the supposed feelings of all?

Or is their general title but a catch-all for deluded practitioners and onlookers loathe to speak plainly and, thus, by naming, reveal the folly of the obvious?

And how many sail beneath this flag? Do we not find, in the ever-lengthening head credits of the film, producers, toute-entière, co-, executive, co-executive, associate, consulting, etc?

What on earth do these people do?

A few are entrepreneurs, raising money for a project under their control; a few are what the old Jewish village knew as "schtadlans", that is, intermediaries between the powerless (in this case, the film-maker), and the State (or Studio); the rest are clerks or clerk-sycophants.

For it has been said that "associate producer" is the title given to a secretary instead of a raise. (Cf State and Main, 2000.)

And we have the sycophants full stop. For the powerful producer who can drive but one Mercedes himself may employ or cause to be employed many to drive "their own" Mercedes in his livery.

Otherwise than expending that accrued leisure the great are insufficiently long-lived to display, what do producers "do"?

But as some Greek said, or should have said: "If it exists, it probably has a cause."

So let us assume somebody's brother-in-law showed up one day in the palmy pre-sound days of Hollywood, and his brother-in-law, a power on the lot or on the set, said: "People, this is Bob, and he is a producer." Bob was then entitled, under the family flag, to all the sex, drugs, booze and fun he could wrangle.

Time went by, and Bob stayed on. He, or another of his ilk, caught, stole, or otherwise achieved power in some niche in the industry, and, having learned a good trick, and thrived in its practice, he one day appointed footmen of his own.

These folk, in the manner of functionaries down through time, schemed to increase and consolidate power.

The film-makers were busy on the lot or on location, but our producers, like Jacob, stayed in the tents, free to wheedle, convince and extort position from and in the studio system. Soon all films had a producer, then two, and, today, count 'em, an average of seven in the head titles. Just as another entertainment industry has Keepers of the Keys, Gentlemen of the Bedchamber and so on, our American charade has co-, consulting, associate and supervising producers.

And, just as with you and your royalty, our ceremonial positions screen from the uninitiated gaze the empty throne. Thus placed they fight like blue blazes to justify and buttress their positions. What do they do between golf and shopping?

They watch while the lowly make bricks and suggest, at regular intervals, that the brick-makers begin to gather their own straw.

And they propound heresy.

They sell all parts of the pig but the squeal. And then they sell the squeal.

I have, with my own eyes, seen the following: a sign on the craft service (snack) table, near the end of filming, "Gum is for Principal Cast Members Only."

I have seen producers bill the movie salaries for their mistresses, their absent yes-man, for travel and lodging never used, for services never proffered, for inedible cast and crew meals charged off as gourmet fare, and so on, and so on.

I've seen, as have we all, theft, fraud, intimidation, malversation - and seen it with such regularity that its absence provokes not comment but mute wonder.

My favourite offence against the gods, however, is curiously benign, and is propounded not by the savage producer, but by the obtuse. To wit: "We are going about this the wrong way. Why don't we just go in a room, and analyse the most successful movies of all time, and then make that?"

This, to the film-maker, is heresy. It is enormity on the order of the resident of Munich suggesting that he thought they were summer camps.

What, the film-maker wonders, did or do you think we were doing all of these years, while you stole us blind - can you not have seen that we, the workers, were "working" like mad to solve, film by film, shot by shot, line by line, the problem you suggest a rational person could vanquish by simply "going in a room"?

Can it be, the film-makers whisper in awe, that These People have literally no idea what is going on on the set, in the writer's hovel, in the designer's workshop?

Is there no one home?

It is not that the inmates have taken over the asylum but that we have not done so, and that those with an exclusively mercantile bent have usurped, in their savagery, anything not riveted down; and, then, in their ignorance, the very prerogatives of the Gods.

For this desire to "go in a room" is, to the artist, heresy indeed. It is the reductio ad absurdum of "reality" programming: having determined that it's not necessary to pay either actors or writers, the producers additionally discover that it is not necessary even to fee the Gods - that insight, idiosyncrasy, inspiration and effort are the concerns of the weak and misguided craftsperson and artist.

Life on the set is pervaded by what the uninvolved might well view as superstition. It could also be called awe.

The presence of both the light and dark forces are felt constantly, and one's life and work are always felt beneath their thrall: the weather, illness, inspiration, traffic are understood in the full force of their capacity for caprice, and only the most fresh-minted neophyte would dare to mention these forces, let alone allude to their potential endorsement.

Time after time we have seen the high brought low by impertinence; and, having seen, have understood. Into this religious atmosphere, then, come our friends the Producers. They engage, in our enthused setting, in operations of a low, quotidian order (their name for it is "business"), and the various malfeasances listed above are seen as unfortunate but sadly inevitable incursions from a less-clean world.

But the exhortation to "go in a room" is not mere crime, but blasphemy. It is not sufficient to shake one's head, one must lower the eyes.

© David Mamet 2004.

[cron]

Begging for a date

Lonely, eager-to-please screenplay seeks audience. Any age, any race - as long as they like me, says David Mamet.
Friday May 7, 2004
The Guardian

The language of the modern screenplay is one with that of the personals column. The descriptions of the protagonist and the lovelorn aspirant are one: beautiful, smart, funny, likes long walks and dogs; I will be: affectionate kind, honest, sexy.
This is, essentially, a begging letter, that is: See how I paint myself in the best and most general of terms and beg that someone will recognise my abasement and meet my very human but, unfortunately, mutually exclusive needs. I beg, in effect, to be recognised for my worthlessness, and to be given love.

Note that a more potentially successful strategy might include a personal approach - an obscure reference to the literary (if one wants to entrap a reader), to the stock market (to attract a financier), or to the Bible (to collar a person of similar beliefs).

Such references are not found in the personals, as, I believe, the writers might think (correctly) that to specify actual desires or attributes might limit the applicant pool of potential responders.

The correct place to find a perfect physique is in the gym; a religious person in shul or church; a book-lover at the library.

But the writer of the personal ads appeals, in extremity, to the populace at large, throwing him- or herself on its mercy and begging for a date, with this unstated reservation: "I will figure it out later - just get me on the playing field." This appeal is addressed to the similarly hopeful and desperate: "Let us indulge in co-dependent behaviour - we will, at the very least, have that to share. We each know the other is far from perfect, sexy, fun, brilliant, talented, soulful and kind; and we each agree that protestations of these are the magical incantations necessary to establish goodwill."

The problem lies in this: they establish little else; and any actual date must not necessarily end, but must in fact begin with a measure of disappointment. So with the screenplay.

We are told that the heroine is various things which one might find attractive in a heroine, but the writer, his words put upon the screen, is found wanting, for his descriptions do not and cannot measure up to the performance. We find what in practice proves non-specific and non-implementable language to be nothing but the desire of the writer to please.

What is wrong with trying to please?

Nothing much. But the writer of the Lazy Sunday Mornings gobbledegook has worked not to please the audience, but the executive (his co-dependent, desired Other).

This writer strives neither to please nor to learn the crafts necessary to please the audience. He toils only to learn to placate that coterie he has elected as his betters, the executives.

Just as the personal ad is written not to attract anyone specifically, but only to avoid rejection, the screenplay strives to appeal to all - or to those who think it might appeal to all.

In this it resembles a political speech, written to lull, and, by its soporific cadence and vocabulary, to allow the listener to intuit whatever the hell she wants.

"Smash, bash, crash: the world became a steel cauldron of Pain." Yes, says the young script-reader. Yes. Hot stuff indeed. Boss? This is Hot Stuff. This person knows how to Write Action.

"Loves hazy afternoons. This well-educated beauty finds beauty all around her. Perhaps you do, too ...?"

Do we then pin our hopes for love not upon character, personality and appearance, but on the ability to grind out non-offensive meaningless garbage?

Is that, in fact, the way to choose a mate? For it is most certainly the way in which executives choose a script.

© 2004 David Mamet

[cron]

Bum barometer

Audience research doesn't work - otherwise there would be no flops. Real film-makers listen to their ass

David Mamet
Friday August 20, 2004
The Guardian

Harry Cohn famously commented that he knew when a film was doing well by the feeling in his ass.
I'm with him. For, finally, the decision to greenlight a film, or to pass on it, is made by some man or woman sitting where the buck stops, and guessing.

Napoleon frowned on councils of war, as he vowed never "to take counsel of his fears".

Executives, coming now, as they do, in the main from the ranks of business people rather than show people, have never had the opportunity to learn, and so to enjoy, relying on their instincts.

So the film business is currently plagued by audience research.

What is wrong with audience research? It doesn't work. If it worked, there would be no flops.

But wait, is it not common sense to ask a potential viewer if she would see such-and-such a film, to ask a preview viewer what he would like to change?

It may be common sense, but it is useless. Why?

Consider the difference between the barbershop and the jury room.

In the barbershop, beauty parlour, subway and so on, we gossip. There is much enjoyment in knowing better than the principals, in realising the error of the prosecution, the defence, the defence department, the indicted captains of industry and their mouthpieces. We form and express our vehement opinions, based on information that is incomplete and most probably skewed, or indeed manufactured.

Why not? That is the purpose and the joy of gossip - to strengthen community norms through essentially dramatic discourse.

In the jury room, however, we are sworn. We struggle, individually and as a group, to put aside prejudice, to put aside the pleasures of gossip; the proxy exercise of power, vicarious revenge etc, and act according to a set of rules.

The jury is continually taught and admonished to use reason, as the stakes - the fate or condition of another human being - demand it.

In audience testing, the situation is reversed. Appreciation of drama, an endeavour which has been correctly and necessarily consecrated to a form of gossip, has been degraded into a mock trial. The tester insists that we put aside our not only personal but necessarily inchoate reactions to a drama, and apply an idealised norm of human behaviour.

This norm is idealised both in the projection of a putative imaginary viewer (over whom we are to exercise responsible control), and in our self-idealisation. For the questioned viewer asks himself not only "Is this the sort of movie I like?", but "Is this the sort of movie 'someone like me' might like," and, most corrosively, "Is this the sort of movie someone like me would proclaim he liked?"

At this point any subjective experience of the film is banished by reason. What remains? The power to teach or admonish - both of which are death to any art.

The filmgoer has been turned into Babbitt, "responsible" for the film rather than being a member of the audience. As a newly responsible member of a jury he will, of course, take the safest course.

What is the safest course? To, rationally, exclude that which may not be explained.

This is much the wisest course for the surveyed, which is why the executive has enlisted him.

His refusal to be moved by a film, his characterisation of the disturbing, or unusual as anathema, has relieved, from the troubled mind of the studio bureaucrat, the responsibility of taste, which is to say, of choice.

To succeed, a film must treat the audience member as an audience member, not as a Commissar of Culture. The commissar gets her thrill not from the film, but from the power to admonish. (That's why moviegoers fill out cards after a screening, engaging in a process which would be recognised as an imposition, were it not for the honour of the thing.)

But the real film-makers have to listen to the lessons of their ass.

Will they fail? Certainly. Both artistically, and commercially. But a) they have no other choice, and b) realising that their final choices must be essentially subjective, they may learn to trust their instincts. Also c) they'll have more fun.

Is it not necessary to gauge the audience? Sure thing. The way to do it is to sit in the back of the theatre while the film is being screened, and watch their reactions when their attention is off of themselves; that's the way to see if the film, and any section of it, works or fails.

For that is the state the eventual viewer of the films will be in: disbelief suspended, attention on the screen - wanting to be thrilled, pleased, and diverted, hoping along with the hero, and fearing the villain; and to lead the moviegoer to that state, one may not ask, but must pay attention.

© 2004 David Mamet.