Why Hollywood Needs To Save Newspapers
posted by Sarah Waldeck
To prepare for a trip to Harry Potter: The Exhibition (now at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry), my daughter and I had a Harry Potter movie marathon. It left me wondering: if newspapers really do die, how are filmmakers going to quickly summarize events and move on to the next part of the plot? Those images of the Daily Prophet would lose all their punch if they were scrolling across a computer. Kind of like what would have happened to Raiders of the Lost Ark if Spielberg had to use MapQuest to show us where Indy was heading next . . . .
June 16, 2009 at 11:46 am
Posted in: Culture
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Responses (4)
anon - June 16, 2009 at 8:11 pm
See, e.g., Twilight, in which Bella discovers the dangerous truth about her beloved by googling something like “Vampires AND myths” and then scrolls through the results. Thrilling.
A.J. Sutter - June 17, 2009 at 3:10 am
How to replace the twirling front page that always comes to a halt top-side up? With an hourglass cursor?
Frank - June 17, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Yes, even something as simultaneously advanced and decadent as Lady Gaga’s Paparazzi video uses the spinning paper trope repeatedly, to ingenious effect. The newspaper is decadent on two levels. Most provide a mere simulacrum of a public sphere. And when they go gossipy, they’re usually creating the very conditions they purport merely to describe.
A.J. Sutter - June 18, 2009 at 12:52 am
… though I think a filmmaker could have fun with the Internet newspaper trope at least once: e.g. a kind of running gag through the movie with one time waiting for the page to load, another time scrolling down the page with the stop-start, forward-reverse rhythm as if scrolling manually on a mouse wheel, etc., another time a fake pop-up ad or “random selection” survey, etc. (Cf. the postmodern spirit of the subtitle scene in Goldmember.) It might wear thin in a second movie, though.
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