Today is Geek Pride Day, and I am at the mall shopping. It doesn’t feel like a geek thing to me, but it’s nice to see all the teenagers going nutso over the Avengers ads and life-size character stands. It reminds me a lot of being a young fan: the shows seem newer every next ad popped on TV, and the movies seemed to never suck. It was nice.
Nowadays, being a Playwright-Producer, every story seems to be exactly the same. I remember being told that there were only four real original stories in the world. Watching every movie in my past gives me a pretty good perception of what they were. But the point isn’t in the stories, but with its audience, without their reaction any story is pointless.
Watching the Avengers thrive everywhere I go makes me believe that you really have to sell to the gullable and desperate masses to really make a good sale. Otherwise, you’ll have to cater to geeks and the youth alone. The reason why I say this is because mom’s buy things for their children and single people pay only when there’s a discount. Apart from women and gay men, can we really trust everyone else to be a consumer? Especially in entertainment?
Ticket sales and paraphernalia may account for the majority of the industry’s revenue, but the main thing that always and never fails to tempt customers to pay is hype. Or what we call “promotions”… Once you give this liberty of making your customers believe that it is something attracting and need, the will to buy because they have “the buying power” will come all too natural.
I know this sounds evil to manipulate people to buy things, but understand we don’t really need most of the stuff we have already. We have gas, power, water, food, clothes, transportation, and public benefits (ie. Bus, Medicare, Unemployment cheques, etc.). We don’t need to subscribe to things, we don’t need electronics, and we don’t need movies. Not really, it’s all just luxury! If anything you really need, it would be the love of friends and family.
But the game of consumerism is the choice of distributing your money to give you some kind of comfort and convenience. And entertainment is just that, and knowing that perhaps the statistics of consumers will forever have a young audience to support my productions, if marketed properly, gives me some hope in being a Producer. People love stories, and even videogames can’t deny it.
As a writer/storyteller, do you think there will ever come a time when stories will become unfashionable? Do you believe there is no job left for creative talents, like us in this modern century? Let me know your thoughts, and comment below 
Tags: story, Blog, theatre, food, edocena, film, movie, plays, entertainment, hollywood, tv, storytelling, geek, Averngers
