pre-screening

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  • pre-screening

    Before a movie is released, it is often given a small showing to establish whether changes should be made. Could the audience follow the story? Were they satisfied with the ending? These are the sort of questions the marketers would like answered.

    What do you think about pre-screening? Are the audiences well chosen? Have you ever been involved in one?

  • #2
    Re: pre-screening

    I've been to test screenings in Los Angeles. Audience recruiters stand outside of a movie theater and ask moviegoers and people walking by to attend a screening later that week in the same theater. They have to get certain numbers of males and females from each age group.

    At the end there's a written questionnaire -- some multiple choice questions and some essay. After that, certain people are picked for a small focus group to discuss their feelings further.

    Just as there are arguments on writers' discussion groups about whether you should rely on feedback or only your own artistic vision, some populist-type filmmakers love screenings and think they're a great chance to tweak a movie so the jokes or the scares work better and the audience likes it more.

    Others resent having their artistic vision ruined by a bunch of idiots. There is a lot of pressure for the filmmaker. The studio may insist on changing something the filmmakers don't want changed -- like trade the tragic ending for a happy ending -- or the studio may even lose faith in the movie altogether.

    If the movie tests badly, the question is, was the audience right, or would the film have found a different group of people who would have loved it?

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    • #3
      Re: pre-screening

      At the studio level, people tend to not want to give bad news to their boss. The deck is stacked to make it sound like EVERYTHING IS INCREDIBLY AWESOME, OMG, from the way the questions tend to be phrased, to the fact that people talk about "the top two boxes" ("loved it!"/"liked it") as though they're one giant thumbs up from Joe Public, as opposed to the difference between "I would tell my friends to see this movie" and "I would maybe Netflix it."

      When people say that no one in movies knows anything, I think a lot of that is because most of the market research aims to support the POV of a particular high-level executive, rather than reflect how Most Of America might feel about something. It skews everyone's perspective, and when your movie opens with 15 million, you're all genuinely baffled, because you've just spent the past year and a half living in a bubble where your movie is THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER MADE.

      On the other hand, while audiences are very sophisticated in terms of knowing whether they love or hate something, they are (if the market research folks have picked the right crowd) not filmmakers or writers or storytellers: their sense of _why_ something works or doesn't, or how something should be fixed, is not as great. I think it's not necessarily very helpful for filmmakers to take the comment cards literally.

      That is just my experience; that of others may vary enormously.

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      • #4
        Re: pre-screening

        This is sort of related and its something i never thought of, but a producer here in chicago who has an indie doing the festival circuit reported that they did test screenings first in chicago. The film was shot in Chicago and they found that with the "indie complexity" of the film as well as the atmosphere shots around town, that those elements distracted viewers here.

        BUT, it screened great in NY and LA and they got it and weren't distracted by the landscape. So, go figure.
        c
        Cesahr
        www.Baggagethefilm.com
        "I could be wrong, and I probably am."

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        • #5
          Re: pre-screening

          I tend to think that test screenings are mostly pointless. I think the people working on a project have an intuitive sense whether it's working or not, but they let themselves ignore their intuition for the sake of getting the job done. After all, with crushing schedules, forced rewrites, heavy handed producers, anxious studio execs, and all the other things that make movie making so blessed difficult, there isn't always the chance to pay attention to that nagging voice that says, "our second act sucks ass." In that case, the test screening is just confirming what everyone already knew.

          Of course, having worked in marketing usually gets me bounced from things like test screenings right off the bat, so this is all hearsay.
          "The only reason most scripts are bad is because most people can't write." Leslie Dixon

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