[/caption]I stumbled upon this from The Australian's Arts section and its a great exposé on the rise of television as the new dominant medium for creative expression. The article proposes many interesting theories about the rise of television and its subsequent effect on everyone's new attraction to the ol' "talking box." Entertainingly, the reporter writes "There was a time when Marty would have laughed you out of town for suggesting he'd do television," says a collaborator of Scorsese. "Today he sees it's where the action's at." The new attitude we are seeing from the movie studios towards television drama production and television's capacity to provide a new platform for distribution is attributed by the article's writer to the fact that over the years, our box office attendance ratings have been the highest for the studios' sequel releases. The article says:
"The biggest earning film of this year has been Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. The fourth instalment of a Disney franchise, it has made more than $US400m worldwide. The surprise hit has been Fast Five, the fifth film in the Fast and the Furious series, which has made more than $US360m. Last weekend two more sequels battled it out: The Hangover: Part II and Kung Fu Panda 2. In Australia, the Hangover sequel has topped the box office after its first week, taking $11.3m in its opening weekend, while Pirates of the Caribbean has taken $17.3m since it opened two weeks ago."
It's a great idea and one which definitely could be said to hold up in many circumstances. The article's downfall is the writer avoidance of why sequels are such an attractive option for audiences but I'm going to give it a go. It's a stretch but I believe that because we are so immersed in this high-tech, fast-paced world, we no longer have the time anymore to devote ourselves to new experiences. Sounds contradictory doesn't it? What I mean is that even when we make that commitment to go see a movie, it is generally not with the intention of watching the film in the way film as originally meant to be shown. We will be thinking about the dishwasher, the bills, the cat and its veterinary appointment, the kids and their schoolwork (for you parents out there), and the last post we made on Davo's wall (for you Gen Y'ers.) Our brain's have managed to achieve an even smaller attention span than witnessed when television was first released. Now, we can't do anything without fidgeting, reaching for the nearest handheld device, and trying to do 3 things at once. Our brains are so overstimulated, when thrust into a new environment which requires their single, undivided attention, they go crazy. I believe this is what happens when people watch new films with new narratives, new characters, and new faces. Going to watch a sequel such as the Pirates of the Caribbean is much easier because half the work has already been done for us by the brain's memory recall center. Knowing half the story, or at least a back-story, means we don't have to focus so much attention on the film itself and can allow our brains to wander (which is what we want them to do. Its a self-preservation thing to know you did put out the bins, deflating the potential future conflict with the ol' ball and chain.)
Taking all of this into account, we can now turn our ATTENTION! (that's right, focus now), to the role of TV in these shenanigans. TV has always been associated with the idea of a limited attention span. It's why we have adverts. It's why we have remote controls. By producing TV shows, the American studios are tapping back into the audience that abandoned them at the box office, instead financing the same quality of production for a different medium with some astounding results. Already this year we have seen and heard of some amazing new shows, either heading our way or hopefully soon to be (This I shall discuss in another post.)
My final thought on the article? The point made about the fact that TV is not watched so much on the set itself but rather online is the concluding, and most important, reason I believe audiences are staying home. The American studio system has not embraced the concept of video-on-demand as well as their Televisual counterparts and thus, it is much more accessible (and easy) to watch a show than to watch a movie. This is why we can see a decline in box office numbers. This is why more people are watching TV. And its why, more than ever, studios (TV and film alike) need to start reinventing their traditional ideas of drama production to save themselves.
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