Pop culture references

I found this extract from a new book by Leslie Savan pretty interesting. It seems to go a long way towards explaining why I feel satisfied when I use a pop cultural reference & why I often try to not use them, in order to think for myself. There's an interview with the author, here at Alternet.

A couple of movie related quotes:

A friend of mine who rewrites movie scripts is often told to add certain phrases to "punch them up," he says. "It's like McDonald's discovered that people have three basic tastes -- sweet, salty, and fat -- and therefore it never has to create foods for more subtle tastes." Yesss! (the spoonful of sugar in so many movies) takes care of positive, overcoming-the-odds feelings, while Hel-lo?! covers dealing with idiots, I don't think so can stop a fool in his tracks, and so on.

Dozens of ads and movie trailers, particularly, have turned on "Yessss!" Some of the movie trailer producers would tell me that they were so thankful when there was a "Yessss!" in the movie, because they knew they could produce their whole ad on that "Yessss!" They explained that it very consciously says, "Yes, I'll go see this movie." It makes you one of audience, it builds up the excitement and sort of generalizes without saying what the movie is, what the context is, what the characters are.

Filed in: film random