We just saw a pre-screening of Hostage, the new Bruce Willis flick. The movie house picks out a couple hundred people matching their target demographic and offers them free tickets, on the understanding that the audience will fill out a survey afterwards, and perhaps participate in a live discussion. The audience’s answers help determine how the movie is marketed. Perhaps, if audience response is strong enough, it can even have an effect on the movie itself, if all that’s required is a quick splice job to remove a redundant scene or retrieve some vital scene from the edit room floor, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
This was our second pre-screening – the first was for Kill Bill – and I enjoy them very much. Watching a movie for free is nice, but the real reward, for me, is the opportunity to critique. The two-page survey isn’t much to work with; about half is taken up with multiple choice reponses: “How was the movie length (too long, just right, too short)?” or “Which age groups would you recommend this movie for (mark all that apply).” Questions requiring short answers provide no more than two or three lines for response; that’s sufficient for brief praise or criticism, but not enough for a considered analysis. Which, I suppose, is what the marketers want. It’s a lot easier to reason “Six hundred eighty-four out of eight hundred twelve viewers complained that the shower scene was too long. Cut twenty seconds,” than to process eight hundred twelve different reasons as to why the shower scene should be altered, and how, and what else might be done to make the existing length more appropriate. Still, it’s fun to imagine that your voice represents a hundred thousand people, and that you could have a real impact on a movie’s success.
The live discussion of the movie is much more interesting. We were fortunate enough to be picked for the Kill Bill session, and could offer more than two-sentence answers. Even better, we could offer opinions not directly addressed in the survey. I had to work to suppress a tendency to focus on the negative; constructive criticism naturally seeks to correct the problems, rather than preserve the successes. A pity that giving everyone a chance meant that no individual could really make more than one or two coherent statements, but the opinions were generally well-considered and clearly expressed. I wanted to continue the discussion somewhere afterwards.
The only part I didn’t enjoy about the live discussion was the representative leading it. While he was willing to seek details behind complaints, he could barely suppress a sort of cheerleading urge. Questions were always framed positively: “What most caused you to identify with the heroine,” rather than “Did you identify strongly with the heroine,” and accompanied by a lot of eyebrow-raised nodding. It made me feel like I was watching a motivational speaker, or a kid listening to Officer Friendly telling a class to look both ways before crossing the street.
Market surveyors must have it rough. Directors perpetually critique themselves and their cast and crew. Producers need to weigh the market with a discerning eye. Marketers must perpetually desire and ask for honest answers, yet they also fervently desire and perpetually signal that the honest answer should be “yes.” Living in that shadow zone where things are true because you wish them to be so would gradually push me into neurosis.