Anyone who grew up prior to the 1990s may recall that it was once possible to see a new film without having already heard every zinger in the screenplay and every song on the soundtrack. You could enter the cinema in glorious ignorance, not having been briefed in advance about the key plot points, or seen every stunt in each action set-piece. It sounds far-fetched, I know, but there really was a time when the element of surprise was as routine a part of cinema-going as popcorn and fizzy drinks. These days, going to the cinema more strongly resembles opening a tin of Quality Street only to find that there is nothing but wrappers inside.
Some might blame the modern trailer, a once-alluring art form now reduced to the cinematic equivalent of a Reader's Digest abridged classic, for spoiling the fun. Others may point to the internet, that insatiable monster who demands constant sustenance in the form of updates and revelations. Then there is the No 1 suspect: the nerds, the geeks, those superfans who have exceeded their station, mutating from supporters of escapist cinema into some kind of hybrid of cannibals and paymasters. With the rise of the blog, and the dominance of the film website, the studios have granted nerds an increasingly powerful role in the shaping of new movies. If it's true that each man kills the thing he loves, then the nerds may well be on course to fulfilling their end of that bargain.
Well, that's one perspective. The other is that the nerds – or geeks, as they prefer to call themselves – are in fact nurturing projects that might never have been greenlit without their enthusiasm.
Michael Sheen, who plays the villain in Tron: Legacy, has witnessed this sort of thing before. "What I've experienced working on Twilight, Underworld or Alice in Wonderland, is that when you're publicising those films, if there's another one of those kind of films up ahead, everyone loses interest in the one you're publicising – they just want you to tell them about the next one. There's this constant hunger for new information, yet at the same time it can potentially ruin the whole experience."
Inception aside, most marketing campaigns are modelled on the principle of saturation bombing. What's more, the internet movie geeks who once served the films they loved, and represented the interests of fellow fans, are now frequently the puppets and playthings of the Hollywood studios. The ultimate cautionary tale is that of Harry Knowles, the fanboy who launched the movie website Ain't It Cool News in 1996, only to be courted and buttered up by the studios he once pledged to hold to account. Widely publicised controversies surrounding Knowles's rave reviews of Godzilla and Armageddon, which coincided with perks and jollies bestowed on him by the film-makers, put the tin lid on any pretence of impartiality.
Kevin Coll, founder and executive editor of the website FusedFilm.com, believes that the studios' manipulation of influential geeks such as Knowles is now widespread. "Studios recognise the old wine-and-dine tricks work on bloggers and nerds because it's that fantasy they are tapping into," he says. "Harry Knowles is a genre nerd so sending him to screenings, set visits and making him an insider caters to the fan in him, so he is more likely to sign off on a film like, say, The Expendables. Nerds are in the studios' pockets for sure. I think the same goes for all connected bloggers and journalists: if they are inside and treated right, then more positive things will come out of that. People are afraid to be negative because they may not get the next exclusive."
Nerd culture encourages the proliferation of advance material that can be as detrimental as any spoiler, while many film nerds themselves can now rarely be trusted to represent any interests other than their own. But they don't always get it wrong. "A great example of nerds doing something positive is the Star Trek franchise," says Coll. "They took a mediocre genre show from the 1960s and turned into a mega-franchise simply by fighting for it and creating a culture and cult following around it. Now we have the JJ Abrams reboot, which is the first time Trekkies and mainstream fans have come together, and that's made the franchise even bigger. Where nerds hurt Hollywood would be when a film-maker sacrifices so much of a story to please fans, which is what happened with Spider-Man 3."
Despite his qualms, Sheen believes movie nerds have been a force for good rather than ill. "I would say the nerds and geeks, of which I count myself one, are giving a kind of energy and passion to the film industry that can be lacking. I've always had a massive passion for films, but it can be a dry and clinical pursuit a lot of the time. I don't think the enthusiasm of people who are more interested in what you'd call genre films can be said to be killing cinema. Quite the opposite. They're helping keep it alive."
Edited from: guardian.co.uk, 29/7/10
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