Thursday 28 February 2008

wouldn't it be great it...

Imagine you were a director working on a worthy drama, tackling an important social issue in a heartfelt, compassionate manner, and that you had the skill to pull this off in an aesthetically assured and impeccably crafted way. In short, imagine you are making a film that would sweep the Academy Awards, the Palme d'Or, the Golden Bear, and whatever other award can be thrown at it.

Now imagine that you film an alternate ending where, say, one of the main characters turns out to be a monstrous alien witch-doctor in disguise, who slaughters the entire cast before raising their corpses as an army of zombies and taking over the world. This is only an example, but you get my drift.

Next, imagine that you distribute the film with the proper, normal ending, but that you put the alternate ending onto one in every, say, two or three hundred prints that goes out to theatres. When you eventually release the film on DVD, you do the same thing with the same proportion of DVDs.

Finally, sit back and wait for people to start wondering why the HELL no-one else seemed to notice that ridiculous ending...and then start to wonder if they imagined seeing that ending when they watch the film again somewhere else and find an entirely different ending...

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