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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Monday, February 7th, 2011 - Comments Off on Super Bowl Ads: And Now for a Word from Our Sponsors …
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Super Bowl Ads: And Now for a Word from Our Sponsors …

I took my 11-year-old son over to my dad’s yesterday for some family bonding time over football and the excitement of the big Super Bowl ad spots. Jaxon was more interested in the game, even though our Seahawks weren’t playing. We weren’t particularly invested either way in who won, so we considered just flipping a coin to decide who to cheer for. We ended up rooting for Green Bay because their fans wear cheese hunks on their head (Jaxon’s call) and because their quarterback is hotter (my call). My dad is a Raiders guy and has no interest in the relative hotness of quarterbacks, so he didn’t really care either way.

I had an interesting time explaining to Jaxon why there are so many ads during the Super Bowl. I looked up the cost per ad spot (roughly $3 million for a 30-second spot, holy crap) and then we figured out about how much the network makes off selling the Super Bowl ad spots (a lot).

I realize that everyone and their brother on the Internets last night and today is all a-Tweeting about the spot for Super-8, JJ Abrams latest super-secret marketing effort, er movie. And sure, okay, the 30 second spot was fine, and yeah, it was mildly reminiscent of the Amblin films and their suburban utopia and maybe there are clues buried in there that you can dissect frame-by-frame, but honestly, why would you want to? The movie will come out eventually, and either it will be good or it will not be good. All the hype in the world won’t make it any better or worse than what it is.

The new 30-second spot, while it still retains the tone of menace we saw with the 90-second spot from last May, does add a layer of wonder ala E.T. and Close Encounters, whereas the first was all BOOM BOOM BOOM, “Let me outta here so I can kill you and eat you,” but I don’t have a strong sense yet of what the movie’s heart is, assuming it has one. You can compare both trailers over on Apple and see what you think.

Just for comparison’s sake, I dug out this trailer for Close Encounters of the Third Kind on YouTube … it says it’s the theatrical trailer, but really? It clocks in at over four minutes long, and check out how it touts Spielberg as “the director who just had a success with Jaws” and even the producers and special effects guy and the presence of Truffaut in the film, which kind of cracked me up.

I mean, can you imagine a trailer for Transformers or Super 8 or Cowboys and Aliens, assuming one of those had an artsy French director or two making an appearance in them, making a big deal out of that in the trailer as if the fan base would care? “Transformers 3 … starring acclaimed French directors Agnes Varda and Arnaud Desplechin!”

You would just never see a trailer like this these days, it plays like an infomercial. There are so many visuals in that film that could have been called out in a trailer, but of course that’s also speaking from the hindsight of seeing and loving that movie for many years and feeling connected to things like a pile of mashed potatoes sculpted like Devil’s Tower.

On the other hand, the trailer for E.T., made four years later, post-Close Encounters and post-Raiders of the Lost Ark, while still talking up The Spielberg Factor, encapsulates the story arc of the entire film in a series of two-word sentences and slivers of visuals.

It reminded me of why my family waited endlessly in line to take my 7-year-old brother to see E.T., more than once (he’s 35 now, and one of his Christmas gifts from me this year was an E.T. stuffed doll … ). It made me feel that sense of wonder I felt seeing it the first time — and that sense of warm and happy that I still get seeing E.T. even now. It made me want to go home, curl up under a quilt with all the kids piled on the bed, and watch E.T. again, and cry at the end again, because I always do.

Somehow, I just don’t get the sense from the Super 8 trailer that nearly 30 years from now, going back and watching the trailer for Super 8 will immediately evoke those emotions, or make me want to see it again and again and again. I could be wrong though. It could be awesome.

What do you think?

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon