Movie Industry's Dialogue With Itself On Variety Magazine

10 Pages 2558 Words

and its vision of the audience.
The articles pertaining to the behavior, psychosis, and analysis of motion picture audience invoke several models of the audience discussed in class. The most frequently invoked model of the audience is the “consumer,” a view of the audience as a sovereign entity as described by Webster & Phalen in Victim, Consumer, or Commodity (29). In the end, Variety articles demonstrate that the film industry accepts that the movie-goer will see whatever he feels like seeing. Sometimes the formula for success means carefully marketing to a niche, and sometimes, it’s an out-there formula that initially gets no funding because it seems like it’s doomed to fail. For example, Clint Eastwood’s movies, it was described that though they frequently misfit the Hollywood mold of movies “[are] consistently successful” (Bart 4). There’s no clear-cut way to determine the hypothetical audience sizes for a given film, as the final decision is at the audience’s discretion. This idea is also concurrent with Sidney Lumet’s view of unpredictability of the movie audiences in The Studio: Was It All for This (198-199). The less-evoked model of the consumer in Variety articles is the model of consumer as “commodity” (Webster & Phalen 31). An article that discusses the audience as a commodity in terms of merchandising, toys in this case, states as successful merchandising sales can at many times tower above box office sales (Paskin 6). This too makes sense as Philip Napoli, in Audience Economics, has written of motion picture industry as a media that is not generally advertiser-funded (196).
The two other models discussed in the earlier class readings, the audience as a “victim” and as “public,” were rarely mentioned. Audience as public, however, was discussed in two important articles, discussing the domestic audience nods to the movie ‘Vera Drake,’ and the commercial success of ‘Alexander’ overse...