In search of the perfect tag line...
In New York tonight, the city is almost as cold as the Front Range of Colorado was when I left at 7:30 a.m. this morning. The only way to describe it is that MY FACE IS BREAKING in two places at once (Boulder and Manhattan).
But there is always a warmth to NYC that I am lucky enough to have experienced all throughout my adult life. In the old days, when I was an underground writer and ran my own bicycle courier business, the warmth of the people always came out in conversation. The Yids would call it "kibbitzing" - and Woody Allen has been known to turn the comedic version of this "verbal trading" into some of the funniest lines in film history.
Speaking of film, I had dinner tonight with a former V.P. of Marketing at Miramax films. Over organic gourmet cuisine in the East Village, we started to kibbitz. Soon, our discussion turned toward my current film project, tentatively entitled My Autoerotic Muse. I suggested that we try and come up with a "tag line" for the movie and in so doing invited her to intersubjectively jam with me so that we could improvisationally generate some useful metadata to help categorize this very uncategorizeable work of art. The general idea was for us to locate the perfect line that would help us establish an easy to remember meme that would appropriately reflect the very dense and complex philosophical issues the film addresses as it tears the Hollywood film model to shreds. I also made it clear that, in addition to obliterating the Hollywood model, I wanted to side-step the so-called Independent model as well. Rather, I wanted to encapsulate the main tension the film brings to the viewer while watching it, that is, that we are all guilty of being voyeurs, and that some us take more pleasure in it than others.
In exactly five and half minutes, we came up with what my interlocuter referred to as "the perfect tag line." Given that she is one of the top pros in the field, I was both surprised and very thankful. The words actually came out of my own mouth, but I told her that I simply could not have done it without her conversational prodding.
"I know," she said, "that's the way we did it at Miramax too."
Metadata: art, film
But there is always a warmth to NYC that I am lucky enough to have experienced all throughout my adult life. In the old days, when I was an underground writer and ran my own bicycle courier business, the warmth of the people always came out in conversation. The Yids would call it "kibbitzing" - and Woody Allen has been known to turn the comedic version of this "verbal trading" into some of the funniest lines in film history.
Speaking of film, I had dinner tonight with a former V.P. of Marketing at Miramax films. Over organic gourmet cuisine in the East Village, we started to kibbitz. Soon, our discussion turned toward my current film project, tentatively entitled My Autoerotic Muse. I suggested that we try and come up with a "tag line" for the movie and in so doing invited her to intersubjectively jam with me so that we could improvisationally generate some useful metadata to help categorize this very uncategorizeable work of art. The general idea was for us to locate the perfect line that would help us establish an easy to remember meme that would appropriately reflect the very dense and complex philosophical issues the film addresses as it tears the Hollywood film model to shreds. I also made it clear that, in addition to obliterating the Hollywood model, I wanted to side-step the so-called Independent model as well. Rather, I wanted to encapsulate the main tension the film brings to the viewer while watching it, that is, that we are all guilty of being voyeurs, and that some us take more pleasure in it than others.
In exactly five and half minutes, we came up with what my interlocuter referred to as "the perfect tag line." Given that she is one of the top pros in the field, I was both surprised and very thankful. The words actually came out of my own mouth, but I told her that I simply could not have done it without her conversational prodding.
"I know," she said, "that's the way we did it at Miramax too."
Metadata: art, film
posted by Professor VJ at 9:23 PM
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