Everyone can do an American accent... at least everyone thinks they can. But how many would pass muster with a Hollywood studio? The BBC's Stephen Robb took a lesson from one of the movie industry's top accent coaches.
Any actor or actress hoping to convince in a foreign accent must have three words in the back of their mind at all times.
They won't be phrases like "shape of mouth", "position of tongue" or "placement of voice" - although all of these will be fundamental to learning and adopting an accent.
The three words haunting the performer, driving hour after hour of dialect practice, are "Dick", "Van" and "Dyke".
Everyone can do an American accent... at least everyone thinks they can. But how many would pass muster with a Hollywood studio? The BBC's Stephen Robb took a lesson from one of the movie industry's top accent coaches.
Any actor or actress hoping to convince in a foreign accent must have three words in the back of their mind at all times.
They won't be phrases like "shape of mouth", "position of tongue" or "placement of voice" - although all of these will be fundamental to learning and adopting an accent.
The three words haunting the performer, driving hour after hour of dialect practice, are "Dick", "Van" and "Dyke".
The American's "strike a light, guv'nor" Cockney caricature in Mary Poppins is widely regarded as delivering the worst film accent of all time. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, it was not.
And that's up against competition from Sean Connery playing a Spaniard, an Irishman and a Russian at stages of his career.
British dialect coach Barbara Berkery admits that a lot of actors seeking her tutelage plead at the outset: "I don't want to sound like Dick Van Dyke."
Her glittering cast of former students include Gwyneth Paltrow, whom she trained for Emma and Shakespeare in Love, and Renee Zellweger for Bridget Jones's Diary and Miss Potter.
Half-hour challenge
Paltrow won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love and Zellweger was nominated as Bridget Jones, but probably the greater tributes to their English accents were the nominations from an obviously impressed British Academy - they sounded the part.
Berkery has also coached Brad Pitt (Seven Years in Tibet), Jim Carrey (A Christmas Carol, due out next year) and Geoffrey Rush (Pirates of the Caribbean), and is currently working with Jake Gyllenhaal on his English accent for Prince of Persia.
The American's "strike a light, guv'nor" Cockney caricature in Mary Poppins is widely regarded as delivering the worst film accent of all time. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, it was not.
And that's up against competition from Sean Connery playing a Spaniard, an Irishman and a Russian at stages of his career.
British dialect coach Barbara Berkery admits that a lot of actors seeking her tutelage plead at the outset: "I don't want to sound like Dick Van Dyke."
Her glittering cast of former students include Gwyneth Paltrow, whom she trained for Emma and Shakespeare in Love, and Renee Zellweger for Bridget Jones's Diary and Miss Potter.
Half-hour challenge
Paltrow won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love and Zellweger was nominated as Bridget Jones, but probably the greater tributes to their English accents were the nominations from an obviously impressed British Academy - they sounded the part.
Berkery has also coached Brad Pitt (Seven Years in Tibet), Jim Carrey (A Christmas Carol, due out next year) and Geoffrey Rush (Pirates of the Caribbean), and is currently working with Jake Gyllenhaal on his English accent for Prince of Persia.
In other words, or for words in another accent anyway, London-based Berkery has become the English dialect coach Hollywood turns to. "It's a nice position to be in," she says.
Usually conducting her training for several weeks in the run-up to a production, and then throughout the shoot, Berkery has consistently achieved convincing results with hugely-dedicated and highly-talented actors; what she can do with me in half an hour is a different challenge altogether.
Exposure to US films and television means most people probably believe they can affect a passable American accent - myself included.
But Berkery explains that "mimicry is not the same as doing accents - if somebody is just mimicking, I think we do feel it isn't quite truthful."
Her work involves building the accent authentically by teaching the real mouth shapes and tongue positions involved - for a general American accent, she tells me, that means a wide mouth and the tongue higher up in the mouth.
She also tells me to smile, in order to place the voice towards my nasal resonator - one of the three voice resonators along with the facial and throat resonators. Berkery describes learning to do an accent as having "a mask on the face that fits perfectly".
With my lifted tongue, wide mouth, attempted smile, and the concentration involved in maintaining these as we start voice exercises, my mask resembles something like Jack Nicholson's The Joker with a lobotomised, vacant look in the eyes. I feel certain that a cinema audience would find it distracting.
Berkery takes me through some of the major vowel changes from standard English to general American - their short "ah" in bath and sample, the "aw" in cloth and Boston - and the sound that comes out of my mouth is unrecognisable to me.
It is a long way from my own south-east England accent, but not much nearer my trusted American impression. It does sound vaguely American, but like an over-the-top, slightly camp game show host with an occasional lisp - not what I had been aiming for at all.
And I find the process very unnerving. "The voice is the soul and you are moving it," says Berkery.
"People do find it very frightening - it's like being off-balance."
As we continue, moving from vowel exercises to working on consonant changes, Berkery frequently offers comments like "Make it less" and "Don't do as much".
Not only is my performance dreadful, there is clearly much too much of it; my overacting makes Dick Van Dyke's infamous turn look like a masterclass of subtlety and technique.
"You mustn't play an accent," Berkery says. "You must play a character who has an accent, but you must never play an accent."
Berkery and her students start with nothing and build an accent from its essential parts.My brief lesson hints at the phenomenal amount of work involved in reaching a point where that accent convinces on a giant screen, in surround sound and over a two-hour running time.
While Berkery suggests most actors "can have a good stab at the accent if you have enough time", she stresses that those that "get it really perfect" do so through exceptional dedication.
She had two months working with Zellweger before filming started on Bridget Jones's Diary, comprising lessons in the morning followed by afternoons out together in London when the actress was forced to keep up her accent.
Zellweger later worked undercover in a publishing house using her English accent, and also maintained it on set for the entirety of the film's shoot.
"Some people never, ever heard her own accent until we finished the film," says Berkery.
"It was a testament to her talent and hard work. It was a complete transformation; she is a girl with a very strong Texan accent and she did completely transform herself."
An authentic accent will be "second-nature" to an actor, Berkery says, likening it to fluency in a foreign language where a person doesn't have to think about the process of speaking.
"You don't want the audience to notice," she adds. "You don't really want people to think, 'That's a good accent,' because if you think that you are not thinking about the character."
On those terms, maybe my accent wasn't such a flop after all - nobody's ever going to be distracted thinking how good it was.
Showing posts with label industry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label industry. Show all posts
Monday, 28 July 2008
Saturday, 26 July 2008
Flush With Cash, More Asian Tourists Flock to Japan
SHIRETOKO NATIONAL PARK, Japan — Once prohibitively expensive, Japan is suddenly drawing soaring numbers of Asian tourists who splurge at the nation’s department stores, lounge in its hot spring resorts or explore remote corners, like this stretch of pristine mountains and forests on Japan’s northernmost tip.
While a boon for Japan’s faltering tourism industry, the new tourists are also a sign of larger economic changes in one of the world’s most dynamic regions.
Japan itself was once known for its free-spending tourists, who flocked to boutiques from Hong Kong to Fifth Avenue. But as Japan’s economy stalled for the last dozen or so years, rapid development in countries like China and South Korea raised living standards there.
Those countries are now catching up with slow-growing Japan, long the region’s dominant economic power. Indeed, Japan’s dwindling, but still potent, lead in technology is a major draw for Asian tourists, who are as likely to visit a Toyota car factory as a Zen temple.
At the same time, there has been a decline in the number of people going abroad from Japan. The number of Japanese traveling abroad has fallen 3 percent from the peak in 2000 of 17.8 million, the government-run Japan National Tourist Organization said.
The decline was particularly pronounced among Japanese in their 20s, whose trips abroad fell to 2.8 million last year, down 40 percent from a decade ago. Officials from the tourist group attributed the drop among the young Japanese to falling wages and more modest lifestyles.
By contrast, the number of visitors to Japan from South Korea, Taiwan, China and Hong Kong almost doubled last year from five years earlier, to 5.36 million, according to the tourist group. Those four regions alone accounted for nearly two-thirds of all foreign visitors to Japan last year, the organization said.
But far from being concerned about yet another sign of their nation’s declining status, many Japanese seem to embrace this change. The government helped open the gates five years ago by waiving visa requirements for tourists from Taiwan and South Korea.
Asian visitors are now regarded by a growing number of Japanese as a financial shot in the arm for Japan, whose vitality has been sapped by economic maturity and an aging population.
“Asia has closed the gap in economic power,” said Yukiko Fukagawa, an economics and politics professor at Waseda University in Tokyo. “And Japan is slowly realizing that maybe this is not such a bad thing.”
In the Ginza shopping district of Tokyo, the excitement these days is all about the large numbers of rich Asian tourists, most from China. This has pushed stores to begin hiring Chinese-speaking clerks and keep stacks of Chinese bills by cash registers.
At the marble-columned Mitsukoshi department store, one of Tokyo’s fanciest stores, wealthy Chinese buy Japanese and European-brand clothes and handbags by the dozen, and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, apparently on a whim, for a watch or painting in the store, said Shoji Saito, manager of overseas-related business.
Mr. Saito said the store had not experienced such big-spending shoppers since Japan’s own go-go era in the 1980s.
“Asian tourists are our new growth market,” he said.
Many Asian tourists interviewed said they liked to shop here because Japan has the latest fashions first, and at prices way below those in many other Asian countries, where tariffs are steep. They also said they liked visiting Japan because it was close, safe and cleaner than much of the rest of Asia.
But many also say they are drawn by a deep fascination for Japan. Now that they can afford to come, they say they want to see the country that has long been the region’s front-runner in high technology, fashion and other realms of popular culture. They said they felt envy and respect for Japan as the region’s only fully developed nation, even if they did not always see eye to eye on matters like the events of World War II.
“We feel very close to the Japanese culturally, but they are also still ahead,” said Kao Yu-jeng, a 50-year-old schoolteacher who was part of a Taiwanese tour group visiting Shiretoko park, on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. “We want to know more about what makes them tick.”
According to the Taiwanese government’s Tourism Bureau, Japan passed Macao last year to become the second-most-popular overseas destination for Taiwanese going abroad, after Hong Kong.
“Japan used to be a very distant presence,” said Hsu Ya-shan, assistant director in the Tokyo office of the Taiwan Visitors Association, a Taiwanese government-run tourism promotion agency. “Now, it feels a lot closer.”
Officials at the Japan National Tourist Organization called the surge in Asian visitors an unexpected result of their Visit Japan program, a 2003 advertising campaign whose goal was to double foreign visitors to 10 million by 2010. While they initially envisioned planeloads of arriving Westerners, it was Asians who actually showed up, officials said.
Skip to next paragraph
During the 1980s, Americans were the largest group of overseas visitors to Japan, but have now fallen to fourth behind South Korea, Taiwan and China.
“Japan always had this huge, unnatural imbalance of sending out far more tourists than it took in,” said Daisuke Tonai, a senior assistant manager at the tourist group. “The situation is finally becoming more normal.”
Mr. Tonai said surveys also showed Asian tourists came to Japan for different reasons than Westerners. While Americans said they came to see cultural attractions like temples, Asians cited shopping, followed by hot springs and nature. Visits to factories are also popular, he said.
Recently, a top draw for Asian tourists is Hokkaido, Japan’s least developed major island, with open spaces and picturesque farms reminiscent of the American Midwest.
Mr. Kao, the Taiwanese teacher, called Hokkaido’s natural beauty a welcome change from pollution-choked cities in Taiwan, and China, where he has visited.
As the group’s bus wound along Shiretoko’s rugged coastline, the tour guide, Yu Li-fang, warned the travelers of the dangers of entering a true wilderness area.
“What do you do if you see a bear?” she said.
“Run,” one voice said.
“Kill it,” said another.
“Do you know how to kill a bear?” Ms. Yu asked, only half jokingly.
While the group did not encounter a bear, many members did experience a different kind of shock at a gift store, where the prices were far higher than in Taiwan.
“Taiwan is getting closer, but Japan is still ahead when it comes to prices,” Lin Hsiao-ching, a 44-year-old homemaker, said with a laugh. “We still have to keep an eye on every bill.”
While a boon for Japan’s faltering tourism industry, the new tourists are also a sign of larger economic changes in one of the world’s most dynamic regions.
Japan itself was once known for its free-spending tourists, who flocked to boutiques from Hong Kong to Fifth Avenue. But as Japan’s economy stalled for the last dozen or so years, rapid development in countries like China and South Korea raised living standards there.
Those countries are now catching up with slow-growing Japan, long the region’s dominant economic power. Indeed, Japan’s dwindling, but still potent, lead in technology is a major draw for Asian tourists, who are as likely to visit a Toyota car factory as a Zen temple.
At the same time, there has been a decline in the number of people going abroad from Japan. The number of Japanese traveling abroad has fallen 3 percent from the peak in 2000 of 17.8 million, the government-run Japan National Tourist Organization said.
The decline was particularly pronounced among Japanese in their 20s, whose trips abroad fell to 2.8 million last year, down 40 percent from a decade ago. Officials from the tourist group attributed the drop among the young Japanese to falling wages and more modest lifestyles.
By contrast, the number of visitors to Japan from South Korea, Taiwan, China and Hong Kong almost doubled last year from five years earlier, to 5.36 million, according to the tourist group. Those four regions alone accounted for nearly two-thirds of all foreign visitors to Japan last year, the organization said.
But far from being concerned about yet another sign of their nation’s declining status, many Japanese seem to embrace this change. The government helped open the gates five years ago by waiving visa requirements for tourists from Taiwan and South Korea.
Asian visitors are now regarded by a growing number of Japanese as a financial shot in the arm for Japan, whose vitality has been sapped by economic maturity and an aging population.
“Asia has closed the gap in economic power,” said Yukiko Fukagawa, an economics and politics professor at Waseda University in Tokyo. “And Japan is slowly realizing that maybe this is not such a bad thing.”
In the Ginza shopping district of Tokyo, the excitement these days is all about the large numbers of rich Asian tourists, most from China. This has pushed stores to begin hiring Chinese-speaking clerks and keep stacks of Chinese bills by cash registers.
At the marble-columned Mitsukoshi department store, one of Tokyo’s fanciest stores, wealthy Chinese buy Japanese and European-brand clothes and handbags by the dozen, and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, apparently on a whim, for a watch or painting in the store, said Shoji Saito, manager of overseas-related business.
Mr. Saito said the store had not experienced such big-spending shoppers since Japan’s own go-go era in the 1980s.
“Asian tourists are our new growth market,” he said.
Many Asian tourists interviewed said they liked to shop here because Japan has the latest fashions first, and at prices way below those in many other Asian countries, where tariffs are steep. They also said they liked visiting Japan because it was close, safe and cleaner than much of the rest of Asia.
But many also say they are drawn by a deep fascination for Japan. Now that they can afford to come, they say they want to see the country that has long been the region’s front-runner in high technology, fashion and other realms of popular culture. They said they felt envy and respect for Japan as the region’s only fully developed nation, even if they did not always see eye to eye on matters like the events of World War II.
“We feel very close to the Japanese culturally, but they are also still ahead,” said Kao Yu-jeng, a 50-year-old schoolteacher who was part of a Taiwanese tour group visiting Shiretoko park, on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. “We want to know more about what makes them tick.”
According to the Taiwanese government’s Tourism Bureau, Japan passed Macao last year to become the second-most-popular overseas destination for Taiwanese going abroad, after Hong Kong.
“Japan used to be a very distant presence,” said Hsu Ya-shan, assistant director in the Tokyo office of the Taiwan Visitors Association, a Taiwanese government-run tourism promotion agency. “Now, it feels a lot closer.”
Officials at the Japan National Tourist Organization called the surge in Asian visitors an unexpected result of their Visit Japan program, a 2003 advertising campaign whose goal was to double foreign visitors to 10 million by 2010. While they initially envisioned planeloads of arriving Westerners, it was Asians who actually showed up, officials said.
Skip to next paragraph
During the 1980s, Americans were the largest group of overseas visitors to Japan, but have now fallen to fourth behind South Korea, Taiwan and China.
“Japan always had this huge, unnatural imbalance of sending out far more tourists than it took in,” said Daisuke Tonai, a senior assistant manager at the tourist group. “The situation is finally becoming more normal.”
Mr. Tonai said surveys also showed Asian tourists came to Japan for different reasons than Westerners. While Americans said they came to see cultural attractions like temples, Asians cited shopping, followed by hot springs and nature. Visits to factories are also popular, he said.
Recently, a top draw for Asian tourists is Hokkaido, Japan’s least developed major island, with open spaces and picturesque farms reminiscent of the American Midwest.
Mr. Kao, the Taiwanese teacher, called Hokkaido’s natural beauty a welcome change from pollution-choked cities in Taiwan, and China, where he has visited.
As the group’s bus wound along Shiretoko’s rugged coastline, the tour guide, Yu Li-fang, warned the travelers of the dangers of entering a true wilderness area.
“What do you do if you see a bear?” she said.
“Run,” one voice said.
“Kill it,” said another.
“Do you know how to kill a bear?” Ms. Yu asked, only half jokingly.
While the group did not encounter a bear, many members did experience a different kind of shock at a gift store, where the prices were far higher than in Taiwan.
“Taiwan is getting closer, but Japan is still ahead when it comes to prices,” Lin Hsiao-ching, a 44-year-old homemaker, said with a laugh. “We still have to keep an eye on every bill.”
Time to Regulate Big Tobacco
The House of Representatives is poised to vote next week on a pioneering bill that would give the Food and Drug Administration its first real power to regulate tobacco products, much as it now regulates food, drugs and medical devices. This is a critically important bill, the culmination of more than a decade of struggle to bring the renegade tobacco industry under regulatory control.
In the 1990s, the F.D.A. tried to regulate tobacco products under existing statutes, but the Supreme Court ruled that the agency had exceeded the authority granted by Congress. Now both houses are considering bills that would write the agency’s 1996 rules into law and add many other tools and powers as well. David Kessler, the former food and drug commissioner who led the regulatory battle more than a decade ago, called it “as strong a tobacco bill as we have seen in our lifetimes.”
The bill pending in the House would empower the F.D.A. to regulate both the content and marketing of tobacco products. The agency could not ban tobacco products outright or eliminate all nicotine from them, but it could reduce the levels of nicotine, eliminate other harmful ingredients and set product standards to protect the public’s health. It could also restrict advertising and promotion to the extent permitted by the First Amendment.
The Bush administration has opposed the bill on several grounds — none of them compelling. Its core objection is that the bill would heap new responsibilities on the F.D.A. at a time when the agency is struggling to enhance food safety and improve oversight of imported drugs, devices and foods. Of course, the reason the agency is struggling is that the administration, true to its animus against regulation, has failed to provide adequate resources during most of its tenure. The solution is to provide enough money and people to perform all vital tasks, not to duck a new one.
The administration further frets that user fees imposed on the tobacco industry won’t cover all costs of the regulatory effort, thus forcing the F.D.A. to cannibalize other programs to make up the difference. But the bill now clarifies that only the designated user fees and no other F.D.A. funds can be used to regulate tobacco.
The administration also contends — as do some anti-tobacco activists — that F.D.A. oversight could leave the public with the misperception that tobacco products are safe, or at least safer, with regulation. But the bill prohibits tobacco companies from implying that they have F.D.A. approval, and the agency has ample ways to remind the public that tobacco is harmful.
The bill has strong support from such organizations as The American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. It is supported by Philip Morris, but opposed by most of the tobacco industry. It has strong bipartisan support in Congress.
The legislation needs to be passed this year by veto-proof margins in both houses, lest the reform impulse dissipate next year as a new administration and new Congress grapple with a host of complicated foreign, military and domestic issues.
In the 1990s, the F.D.A. tried to regulate tobacco products under existing statutes, but the Supreme Court ruled that the agency had exceeded the authority granted by Congress. Now both houses are considering bills that would write the agency’s 1996 rules into law and add many other tools and powers as well. David Kessler, the former food and drug commissioner who led the regulatory battle more than a decade ago, called it “as strong a tobacco bill as we have seen in our lifetimes.”
The bill pending in the House would empower the F.D.A. to regulate both the content and marketing of tobacco products. The agency could not ban tobacco products outright or eliminate all nicotine from them, but it could reduce the levels of nicotine, eliminate other harmful ingredients and set product standards to protect the public’s health. It could also restrict advertising and promotion to the extent permitted by the First Amendment.
The Bush administration has opposed the bill on several grounds — none of them compelling. Its core objection is that the bill would heap new responsibilities on the F.D.A. at a time when the agency is struggling to enhance food safety and improve oversight of imported drugs, devices and foods. Of course, the reason the agency is struggling is that the administration, true to its animus against regulation, has failed to provide adequate resources during most of its tenure. The solution is to provide enough money and people to perform all vital tasks, not to duck a new one.
The administration further frets that user fees imposed on the tobacco industry won’t cover all costs of the regulatory effort, thus forcing the F.D.A. to cannibalize other programs to make up the difference. But the bill now clarifies that only the designated user fees and no other F.D.A. funds can be used to regulate tobacco.
The administration also contends — as do some anti-tobacco activists — that F.D.A. oversight could leave the public with the misperception that tobacco products are safe, or at least safer, with regulation. But the bill prohibits tobacco companies from implying that they have F.D.A. approval, and the agency has ample ways to remind the public that tobacco is harmful.
The bill has strong support from such organizations as The American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. It is supported by Philip Morris, but opposed by most of the tobacco industry. It has strong bipartisan support in Congress.
The legislation needs to be passed this year by veto-proof margins in both houses, lest the reform impulse dissipate next year as a new administration and new Congress grapple with a host of complicated foreign, military and domestic issues.
Thursday, 17 July 2008
Why Are Gas Prices So High? by Frank James
Why Are Gas Prices So High? Supply - the amount of oil we pull from the ground, and the amount we refine into gasoline - remains fairly constant. But demand is growing at an alarming rate.
Here is the short and long answer of why gas prices are so high:
Unfortunately, that situation isn’t going to change for the better. In fact, it is expected that demand will continue to rise! As a result, most experts predict that gas prices will also continue to rise.
There are three possible answers:
* We increase supply. This one isn’t particularly realistic. * We lower demand. We actually can have an impact here, but it would be very small. Most of the increasing demand comes from rapidly industrializing nations like China, India, and Brazil. * We find alternatives to oil. Yes, but still years away (however, it is possible to use the “water4gas†modifications that allow you to run your car on water and gasoline). * We improve gas mileage. This is the only real, practical, immediate solution.
Every gas mileage improvement translates into paying less money for gas at the pump. A 25% gas mileage improvement is equivalent to paying 25% less per gallon.
There are literally thousands of websites and resources available online to help you make gas mileage improvements.
Here is the short and long answer of why gas prices are so high:
Unfortunately, that situation isn’t going to change for the better. In fact, it is expected that demand will continue to rise! As a result, most experts predict that gas prices will also continue to rise.
There are three possible answers:
* We increase supply. This one isn’t particularly realistic. * We lower demand. We actually can have an impact here, but it would be very small. Most of the increasing demand comes from rapidly industrializing nations like China, India, and Brazil. * We find alternatives to oil. Yes, but still years away (however, it is possible to use the “water4gas†modifications that allow you to run your car on water and gasoline). * We improve gas mileage. This is the only real, practical, immediate solution.
Every gas mileage improvement translates into paying less money for gas at the pump. A 25% gas mileage improvement is equivalent to paying 25% less per gallon.
There are literally thousands of websites and resources available online to help you make gas mileage improvements.
Wednesday, 16 July 2008
The Box Office: Hollywood's Gage for Movie Quality?
Why Bother With the Box Office?
Every once in a while I read the box office stats. Why? To see if any movie has come close to topping Star Wars as the highest grossing movie off all time. My trust in the box office was firm adn secure until 1997 when Titanic blew everything away and became (and still is) the highest grossing box office movie of all time. What did this mean? Was my world shattered because Star Wars was defeated according to Box Office Mojo? Hardly. All it meant was that people went in huge numbers to see Leonardo DiCaprio while Star Wars continues to be the greatest cinematic experience of all time. The box office make no judgement on movies, it just tells us which movies people are going to see. But it does affect what people see. That's the catch. If a movie has a high gross at the box office people will perceive it as being good and more will go and see the movie. There are plenty of examples where this is true. the opening weekend for Spiderman 3 was huge and people continued to go see it. The film had more of a run than it should have had because the box office (although not a person) compelled people to go see it. "It must be good because it's a blockbuster!" people would say. Sadly, the movie was poor and if the box office had accurately reflected the picture's quality, the franchise would be in trouble. But the people came, so another movie is sure to follow
What Can We Really Learn from the Box Office?
Movies and the Hollywood industry continue to fascinate us (mostly North Americans but people around the world are being sucked into it's vortex) and the box office is a fun way to track what trends in film are popular. So you can see how reading the box office gross numbers could benefit enyone related to the film industry. Writers, merchandisers, set designers, for example, should keep a close eye on the box office and see what types of movies are doing well at present and what have done well in the past. So the box office can be a valuable research tool for people interested in gaging popular viewing opinions.
The website below contains more articles to help you learn a bit more about the box office. If you love movies new or old, it's always fun to go through the box office stats and see just how much money was spent at the movie theater. Sometimes it's reassuring that good movies are being seen by lots of people. Sometimes you'll be left scratching your head and wondering, "Why'd they go see that?"
http://www.boxofficefacts.com
Every once in a while I read the box office stats. Why? To see if any movie has come close to topping Star Wars as the highest grossing movie off all time. My trust in the box office was firm adn secure until 1997 when Titanic blew everything away and became (and still is) the highest grossing box office movie of all time. What did this mean? Was my world shattered because Star Wars was defeated according to Box Office Mojo? Hardly. All it meant was that people went in huge numbers to see Leonardo DiCaprio while Star Wars continues to be the greatest cinematic experience of all time. The box office make no judgement on movies, it just tells us which movies people are going to see. But it does affect what people see. That's the catch. If a movie has a high gross at the box office people will perceive it as being good and more will go and see the movie. There are plenty of examples where this is true. the opening weekend for Spiderman 3 was huge and people continued to go see it. The film had more of a run than it should have had because the box office (although not a person) compelled people to go see it. "It must be good because it's a blockbuster!" people would say. Sadly, the movie was poor and if the box office had accurately reflected the picture's quality, the franchise would be in trouble. But the people came, so another movie is sure to follow
What Can We Really Learn from the Box Office?
Movies and the Hollywood industry continue to fascinate us (mostly North Americans but people around the world are being sucked into it's vortex) and the box office is a fun way to track what trends in film are popular. So you can see how reading the box office gross numbers could benefit enyone related to the film industry. Writers, merchandisers, set designers, for example, should keep a close eye on the box office and see what types of movies are doing well at present and what have done well in the past. So the box office can be a valuable research tool for people interested in gaging popular viewing opinions.
The website below contains more articles to help you learn a bit more about the box office. If you love movies new or old, it's always fun to go through the box office stats and see just how much money was spent at the movie theater. Sometimes it's reassuring that good movies are being seen by lots of people. Sometimes you'll be left scratching your head and wondering, "Why'd they go see that?"
http://www.boxofficefacts.com
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