Too often movies as "entertainment" is dismissed as merely "entertainment" by critics and too often dumbed down as "entertainment" by Hollywood.

The term I use is that movies have to engage you. They have to make you want to keep watching. They can do this on their own terms. A comedy is engaging when it's funny, a drama when it moves you, an educational documentary when it gets you involved with the subject, etc. To engage an audience I think you have to put yourself in the place of the audience.

I heard Craig McKay talk once about editing Silence of the Lambs and he said they weren't afraid to stay ahead of their audience. They cut out a lot of stuff just to keep the story moving along. (If you remember that movie keeps jumping along at the beginning.) They had faith that the audience would keep up . But also that if you are doing that you have to let the audience catch up as well or then you lose them. It's not about the audience being smart or dumb, it's about clear storytelling. I also think that if you have a good visual strategy, you can work on many levels simultaneously and let different audiences catch up to you at different times. You can do this organically without the underlining and indicating that bad films do.

I actually think you can learn quite a lot from telling stories to a four-year-old. Try telling a three-year old the following story. There was a little girl named Katie. She has a dog named Lucky. Then she went to school. The End. They will argue with you and tell you got it wrong.

I have a friend who has a good sense of humor but she is a horrible joketeller because her sense of joke-telling is
A
B
C
G
and she doesn't understand why people don't laugh and the reason is she told it badly and didn't give her listeners enough information.


Personally I don't see myself as a parasite so much as a clam. You don't notice me much, but I contribute my small part to making the ocean cleaner, by filtering the water as I feed.