9UNP0446SD_Jonathan_Gray

- Norman Gilliland: Welcome to University Place. I'm Norman Gilliland. 100 years ago or so, when movies first burst into the entertainment industry, there were only so many ways of calling attention to them. Today, there are so many ways that the film itself is neither the beginning nor the end of the story, as our guest can tell us. He's Jonathan Gray, professor with the department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the author of various books, including this one, "Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and other Media Paratexts." Jonathan, many years ago I was reading the San Francisco Chronicle. There was a classified ad, I happened to see this, that said "Pray for Rosemary's baby." I thought, what's that all about? And during the course of the week I kept seeing the same classified ad. It turned out, of course, it was a promo for upcoming film. That's kind of an old-fashioned way, I suppose, though it was effective. But today there seems to be just an ever-expanding array of ways of promoting films.

- Jonathan Gray: I think we're probably at a point where, if you watch a movie for two, two and a half hours, you've probably watched a good 20 times that amount outside of the movie before you've gotten into the cinema. And then if you like it, you're going to engage many more hundreds of hours afterwards. The movie is really just a small part of the experience these days, as with TV shows and pretty much all media.

- Sometimes these ancillary aspects of a film take on lives of their own. We're at the point where it's actually even been satired.

- Yeah, it's a brilliant way of showing the importance of these. There was a great clip The Onion ran a while back with the original "Iron Man" movie. 

- Reporter: "Iron Man" was one of the most popular trailers of last summer, but controversy is sweeping the fan community today following the announcement that Paramount Pictures is planning to adapt the beloved trailer into a feature-length motion picture. Here to discuss the details is Entertainment Weekly writer Rory Cubby. Rory, good to see you again. I take it there's some mixed reaction to this news.

- Rory: You bet. The "Iron Man" trailer is near and dear to a lot of fans' hearts, so you can imagine how worried people are about this news. Apparently the plan is to expand that fast montage of very short shots seen in the trailer into full-length distinct scenes. And in between those scenes, they plan to add additional scenes that weren't in the trailer.

- Well, it's satire, but it's so close to the truth, isn't it, that you could easily be fooled by it, at least for a while.

- Yeah, the "Iron Man" trailer was absolutely spectacular and did sort of really set a formidable bar that the movie had to try and live up to. It had a built-in fan response before the movie even existed.

- And all of this is sort of via internet and various kinds of afterglow, and even, of course, there's the phenomenon of the pirated preview of films that you can get online.

- And the Red Band preview and all of this. One of things I find interesting is, as much as we often talk about YouTube as being a sort of site for amateur creativity, if you actually look at the things that get the most viewership on YouTube, it's quite often trailers. The "Iron Man" trailer was played multiple millions of times. You go on and find Star Wars kid or the Chinese Backstreet Boys, or other great YouTube amateur sensations. Sometimes they struggle to even get the numbers that trailers do.

- And these trailers are put on there by the producers?

- Often by the producers and by a bunch of fans. You can often get 40 different versions of them that all look the same. Everyone has just uploaded it. It's both organic and part of the PR, yeah.

- It's like one of those '50s sci-fi monsters, the blob, it just keeps growing, nothing can stop it.

- It keeps coming. That's the idea. With so many TV channels, with so many movies on and with 20 different things that you can watch on any given screen, any given multiplex, you walk in and you need to know what to watch. And so, it's no longer enough, if it ever was, just to say, "Hey, you might want to watch this movie." You really have to, as a PR department, scream and shout. Indeed, most movies these days have up to two thirds of their budget put into the advertising and promotion. So quite often the movie is literally the least important part relative to the marketing and promotion.

- Is it my imagination, or are film producers and distributors investing less in newspaper advertising? The ads used to be huge for something like "Cleopatra" or something, maybe a quarter of a page, but now you're lucky if you can even read some of them.

- Maybe I'm showing my generation, but my first response is, "I don't know, 'cause I don't read the paper." 

(laughs)

 But no, I think we are seeing a lot more money going into sort of innovative forms of advertising. I think there's so many ways that advertisers can get hold of you outside of things like newspapers and outside of spot ads. And they're realizing that they need to try and be creative. And so there are a large number of companies sort of growing that specialize in getting your attention in all sorts of interesting ways. I think there's a lot more faith in those, or at least speculative faith, from the industry than some of the sort of old formats, which aren't perhaps hitting the youth audience.

- Speaking of old formats, Jonathan, is there still room for something as quaint as a poster?

- Oh yeah, I still think a good poster is one of the most important parts of a movie. I think a trailer and a poster, if neither of those are good, the movie will fail.

- No kidding.

- We could look at a pretty prominent example, of "Jaws." Which, for me, still stands out as a really important poster. Autobiographically, I still have problems swimming in the ocean, not because of that movie, but because of that poster. It's that idea that you could just be swimming along, completely oblivious to the fact that there's this massive great beast that's just about to come up and gobble you up. And when I look at that poster, it strikes fear into me. And so what it does is, the horror of the film begins at the point of the poster. I look at the poster and it's very obvious as the repetition of the idea of terrifying. And there's the idea of something sort of coming up and getting you unaware. It really does, I think, a brilliant job of creating the emotion so that you're not just waiting until the lights go dark and the movie begins. You see this poster and you know exactly what you're getting, and it begins. The horror has started. It's a great way of the poster saying, this movie going to live up to it, and it's so good, we're going to show you some of it now. We'll give you the horror now.

- It seems to me that would be a relatively easy thing to pull off, horror in a poster. But something more subtle, where again, it's a situation where the character that you're depicting might look weird for one reason or another, but you want to indicate that this isn't an unfriendly character, necessarily.

- A great example would be ET, which is another sort of great poster, I think, for multiple reasons. One of the things ET has that's a bit of a struggle is that the central character is an alien.

- And a reasonably weird looking alien.

- And prior to this we had been told, "we" including adults there, had been told, "Aliens are fearful, you've got to watch out for them." And now what Spielberg and his marketing team wanted to do is sell this idea of an acceptable alien, in fact, something that's kind of a cute alien. Usually you see a movie poster with an alien and you start to worry. So here's the question, then. How, as a marketing team, do you convince adults to take their children to this movie? And what you see in the ET poster is a wonderful answer to that question, so that, for instance, at the bottom, the words pose him almost as a puppy dog and suggest that he's millions of miles from home and he's lost. And he's all alone. And so all of a sudden, this fearful thing becomes something kind of interesting. And then as another way of saying it to the children themselves, you've got that promise of connection with a life form. You see the little boy's hand reaching out in the sort of mockup of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. But you notice the boy's hand isn't tense. It doesn't look like he's being grabbed at.

- A gesture of friendship of some kind.

- And so what we have is the suggestion of sort of adventurousness and the promise of friendship. And then the sort of grandiose suggestion on top of this from the marketing team that this will be another great moment of connection, that if the Sistine Chapel shows us God and man, now we're seeing alien. But it's not man, it's boy. And so I think that's a key part of what a lot of sort of Spielberg's movies directed toward kids do, is sell this as "boy" at the center of it. As childhood as sort of being the space where all these great adventures happen, not adulthood. And so an incredible amount was done in that poster to sell it both to the adults and to the kids. It's quite a wonderful poster.

- That picture being worth 1,000 words. Well, speaking of kids, and in this case comedy, that could also be hard to pull off in a single image.

- Yeah, another one that we could think of is "Home Alone," which is, Macauley Culkin doing that, is still one of the more iconic images in film history, at least poster history. Again, we have a very interesting example. The premise of this movie would seemingly be horrifying. The kid has been left at home alone.

- Could easily be horrifying with these invasive characters breaking in.

- Oh yeah, we could imagine how this could be a horror film. And it poses the question, what child would want to watch this movie? And yet, again, a lot of the little details in the poster do a wonderful job of marketing it both to the kid and the parents. To the parents, there's a suggestion of, "but don't worry." "He cooks, he cleans, he kicks some butt," I think the words go.

- And the image, too, is it deliberately echoing "The Scream" of Edvard Munch?

- Yeah, and very playfully. And even the two figures over his shoulder don't look really like they're about to kill someone.

- They're kind of incompetent.

- Exactly, they look like the characters that they are. And so the whole thing is sort of framed to adults as, don't worry, this is a family film. Indeed, the wording sort of underlines this point. And at the same time, I think it sells it brilliantly to kids, along the same way that ET does. That this will be an adventure for kids. And it gives you the promise to the child of a potentially fearful situational premise, but one that the child is in control of. So you can imagine that a child who is used to always being given orders and always being at the bottom end of power hierarchies could look at this poster and say, hey, I can identify, I like this. This is a sort of character I could see myself in, or who I'd like to project myself onto, someone who can take control of such a fearful scene. And so once again, you have a poster that does a brilliant job of navigating pretty testy waters, to sell it to the adults and the children.

- Would it be different marketing in one country than another with a poster? Of course, with "Jaws, I'm thinking "Mandibola," which I'm thinking would look a little less terrifying in text. But culturally, differences require different kinds of poster art?

- Definitely, and so it's one of the things you find interesting, is how often you get multiple posters, even within some countries. You get movie posters that are clearly aimed at one segment or one demographic, and then others that are aimed at another demographic. So some will play up the fact that this star, whom it's assumed you know, is in it. Whereas others may think, that demographic don't know about that star. What they really want to know is, it's from the people who brought you this. And then as you said, when you go internationally, you can start to get some really profound differences between how one thing is marketed in one country, one thing is marketed in another country. It's these sort of things I've found fascinating because what it does is, it creates a different film. It gives a very different framing to the film. You think of, if I were to say, "Would you like to go out to dinner? The place I'm going to take you to is this casual, friendly little bistro." Or, let's re-do that and instead I say, "This is the best place you'll ever eat." Now, your experience is going to change depending on what frame I give you, and so movie posters, like trailers, like all sort of other forms of promotion, do a really interesting job of setting the terms upon which you're going to enjoy something. So that "Jaws" tells you, this will be a horrifying movie. "Home Alone" and "ET" tell you, this will be a movie that gives power to kids. And so right form the beginning, you're invited to go in with that. And so it's interesting to ask when you move in different countries what different people are asked. I brought a couple of examples for you from "The Sweet Hereafter," which is a Canadian movie. It's an excellent movie and I'd highly recommend your viewers watch it. I brought it in assuming that many of them won't so that we can sort of play the game of watching the trailer.

- So it's a tragic film, but apparently promoted differently in Canada versus the United States.

- Yeah, so what we could do is, we could start by looking at the American trailer, and get a sense of what's being promised there and then we'll look at the Canadian one after.

- "The Sweet Hereafter," the American trailer. 

- Girl: It's dull in our town since my playmates left. I can't forget that I am bereft of all the pleasant sites they see, which the piper also promised me. 

- In a town where no one is a stranger. In a place where everyone feels like family... Something has happened that will change their lives forever. 

(ominous music)

- Man: I'm really sorry to come over and announce like this, but it is important that we talk. I'm a lawyer.

- You're here about the accident?

- As far as I'm concerned, there is no such thing as an accident.

- Oh, jeez.

- Now, one man must find the truth.

- We must begin our investigation quickly. Things get covered up, people lie.

- Man: We're not country bumpkins, you can put the big city hustle on.

- You're angry, Mister. All I'm saying is, let me direct your rage.

- But who can you trust when everyone has a secret?

- Girl: No matter what I'm asked, I'll tell the truth.

- It's not going to be easy, Nicole.

- I won't lie.

- Who can you blame when no one is innocent?

- There's people pointing fingers, making side deals. We used to help each other, 'cause this was a community. 

- My God, I'm scared.

- You leave the people in this town alone. You can't help.

- You can help each other. 

- Girl: And the piper advanced, and the children followed. They were all citizens of a different town now, a town of people living in the sweet hereafter.

- From acclaimed director Atom Egoyan, "The Sweet Hereafter."

- Spellbinding, astonishing. It's a little hard to know what to expect from that, but from the audio and certainly the images, you have this sense of a community coming together after a great tragedy.

- Yeah, and what's interesting is, it doesn't really tell you what the tragedy is, which I think is where part of the problem gets created. Because I think maybe to give you a better sense of it, we could play the Canadian trailer and then we can talk about some of the differences.

- Here's the contrast.

- Yeah.  

(mysterious music)

(breathing heavily)

- Oh, Jesus. 

- Who are you?

- I'm a lawyer. I realize this is an awful time, but it's important that we talk.

- Why do I need a lawyer?

- You leave the people in this town alone.

- I won't lie.

- I don't want you to lie. 

- So you think someone else caused the accident, Mr. Stevens?

- I promise that I will pursue and reveal who is responsible for this tragedy.

- Would you likely to sue me if I was to beat you right now?

- All I'm saying is, let me direct your rage.

- What is it that you want me to do for you, Mr. Stevens?

- We must make them pay.

- You remember this?

- I do now. 

- From Atom Egoyan, the director of "Exotica," and based on the novel by Russell Banks, comes a haunting journey into "The Sweet Hereafter."

- The Canadian version, I have to say, Jonathan, I find more compelling. It's mysterious, rather than vague, which I would characterize the American trailer as being. You get the sense of something impending rather than something that's already happened, in a way.

- Yeah. What I find really interesting is, first the Canadian one I think actually shows its cards a little more. Just in case it wasn't clear to viewers what's happened at the beginning of the movie, and don't worry, this isn't a spoiler, because it happens right at the beginning, is that a school bus carrying all the children in the town but one is crashed, killing them all. But what's interesting is, the American trailer doesn't really tell you that. Indeed, when I showed a class of 250 students that trailer and asked them, what do you think this movie's about? A lot of them actually thought there was something supernatural. They thought this was a sort of "Wickerman" or "Children of the Corn" thing, where there was perhaps some kind of ritualistic killing in this town and the town all seemed to be binding together to thwart this one lone detective, the Ian Holm character. Mitchell is the character's name, who's come to this town to kind of cut through all this junk and get to the bottom of it. And certainly the voice, the classic "In a world where..." fashion invites us to, there's truth to be found and that somebody needs to get to the bottom of this. Well, what an interesting contrast, then, to the Canadian version, which, instead of having that voiceover, they have title cards. And the title cards give the exact opposite. They say that there is no truth to be found, that there is no answer. Instead, what we get is the sense of real loss, a loss that can't be sort of recovered. And the Ian Holm character's mission is now reframed from being the lone detective figure in a sort of film noir, perhaps with the snow, a film blanc, kind of one man against system, to being this guy who's just sort of flailing wildly for meaning when there is none to be found. So I think it's quite a profoundly different set of interpretations. One of the reasons for that, I'd say, is that Atom Egoyan, the director, is a known quantity in Canada. And he's known for doing odd movies. And so to Canadians you can say, "an Atom Egoyan movie," and that immediately signifies quality, we don't know what the genre is, but hey, let's just go along for the ride. Whereas Atom Egoyan wasn't enough of a known quantity in America, and so understandably, the people making the trailers had to try and put a genre onto this film, which is very genre-less. I mean, loss and destruction is not a title that you see in Blockbuster or Netflix.

- That's interesting. So, actually, from a marketing standpoint, you either have to market the artist or the genre.

- Yeah. Or, often, the third part that's key to that is, well, the artist could include the star, but then the other way to do it is to offer a "world where," and that's why so often we have the voiceover that says, "In a world where..." or "In a town where..."

- The voiceovers are so evocative of something, whether they necessarily match the film or not.

- Exactly. What's interesting is, I read this wonderful New Yorker article once, talking to a guy who works for Lionsgate, which is a small boutique filmmaker. And first it talked about the fact that they put a large proportion of their budget for any film into the marketing. And this guy who sort of leads their marketing has to do an incredible amount of work to get it out there against some of the other big studio competition. And I looked at the work he was doing on "W," the film about George W Bush, and it noted that the way in which he marketed it really angered Oliver Stone, because Oliver Stone said, "This is not my movie. " Oliver Stone was actually painting something of, what he thought, a sort of tragic picture.

- Right, that last clueless look that we see.

- Exactly. Whereas the way that it was marketed was sort of as Michael Moore-esque. This would be the takedown. Very sort of critical. There was one image, I think, of Bush sitting on a toilet doing "The Thinker." They really tried to be irreverent. But what's interesting is the marketer was sort of very clear in saying, "Look, you can have your film as a director, but if no one goes to watch it, who cares? So I need to create the film that's going to get people in there."

- It's like push-pull between art and marketing.

- Exactly. And I think what it also shows is the degree to which sometimes marketing becomes so much the film. There's another example I talk about briefly in the book of the film "Crash," not the American one, but the one by David Cronenberg. And it's a bizarre film. It has a bunch of characters in it who get sexually turned on by people in car crashes, so it's a bizarre film. And when that premise got released to the British press, there was this furor over it, and there was this campaigning to ban the film from being shown in England. And what it meant was that by the time anyone got into the cinema, it was impossible for them to watch the film as anything other than, is this movie disgusting? Is it perverted?

- A controversy, lacking anything else to do with it.

- You could think of "Passion of the Christ," there was a very similar thing there. There were these two narratives that surrounded it. One, was it anti-Semitic or not? Two, was it a devotional film or not? And you really couldn't just go in and say, "Oh, I'm interested in Jim Caviezel. I think he's a great actor, I want to see the next thing he's doing." You weren't allowed to take that interpretation in. So the word "paratext" that I use in the title of the book comes from a French theorist who talks about the paratext being the thing that surrounds books, he's talking about. And he says they form the thresholds of interpretation. It's sort of a way station that you must go through on your way to the book.

- The jacket flap, the back cover.

- Yeah, don't judge the book by its cover. Well, why do we need to say that? Well, because most people do judge the book by its cover. And so what Jeanette was talking about and what I'm interested in is, the degree to which all these things sort of provide this hard circumference around the film or TV show or whatever the product is, that we can't get through without picking up ideas of what the meaning of this text is, what the value of this text is. So all these things are being created for us before we've even gotten to the thing itself.

- I'm reminded of a film, definitely a low-budget film, called "Big Bang," that came out some years ago. And it actually starts with the producer of the film trying to pitch the idea to a potential funder at lunch and trying to explain, well, is this film a comedy? Well, no, is it a drama, what is it? What kind of characters? Well, it doesn't have characters exactly. Well, how are you going to sell this thing? And this is all part of the film.

- Yeah, and it's amazing how often we're seeing these promotional discourses become part of the films or the TV shows themselves. With things like "30 Rock" on TV or "Studio 60," even though it was canceled. Playing with how important the promotional is to this, realizing that the promotional is so often not just peripheral, not secondary, but absolutely primary.

- Sometimes I suppose if you have some action figures you want to write a movie to go with them.

- Oh, yeah. After the success of "Star Wars" action figures, there was this big wave in the '80s of what they called "host selling," where the point of the show was not really for you to watch the show, but for you to think, wow, I want those toys. And so things like Transformers and My Little Pony and GI Joe, there was this explosion of these that existed for the toys. Now, on one level we could get really angry about that, and we should, as cultural critics, say, "Hey, shouldn't we have meaning that perhaps is free of some kind of necessary promotion around it?" But on the other hand, what I was interested in with this book is exploring all the ways in which meaning is created for the fans. So even those My Little Pony, GI Joe, Transformers examples, there was a whole generation of children who grew up loving those things, and finding not so much of a problematic distinction between how they appeared in the ads and how they appeared in the TV show, and then "Transformers" becomes a big-budget movie franchise now.

- So they, in effect, can write their own story with the action figures anyway.

- Exactly. That's one of the things that invited them in, and one of the reasons we see some of these forms of peripherals and paratexts forming is, it's a way for you to personalize the text. You know, when you were given the "Star Wars" toys and you were given three years between movies, no less, the first one came out in '77, the next one '80, the next one '83. So three long years. I invite you to tell a kid, "I'm going to give you something that you think is really neat and then I'll give you the next part in three years." It doesn't work. What you needed to do is fill that space, and the toys filled the space, and so the kids got to feel as though they were part of it. They could add narratives themselves. They could perhaps take some of these secondary figures, and there are many of them that were given to you as toys, and give them a whole storyline so that when the story comes back, they feel that they've done something to create part of it. And I think that's one of the sort of interesting games that some producers and directors are trying to do now, is see if there are ways in which they can seed parts of the narrative to the viewers.

- Is there a danger, though, with spoiling the suspense or the surprise when you have so many, in effect, kind of leaks in the control of it?

- Well, yeah, inevitably for some viewers that turns them off. What I find interesting is, for some years they get into that. I did a study on people watching "Lost," and reading the spoilers. And it seemed that the whole point of "Lost" was not knowing what was happening and waiting to get the sort of slow release, albeit painful. And I wondered, why would people read the spoilers? And what I realized is that sometimes people were reading the spoilers so that they could engage with "Lost" on their terms. They actually thought that it was much more of a character drama, and if the knew what was coming in tonight's episode...

- They could concentrate on the characters.

- They could concentrate on the characters. You could think of, in high school, the sort of Coles or Cliff Notes to "Hamlet." You're reading it and you're struggling and all the stuff's happening. You don't know who this person is. And a lot of people felt that way with "Lost." And so the spoilers worked as the sort of Cliff Notes. Next week, this is what's going to happen. Okay, now I can sit back and enjoy it.

- I suppose something like "Twin Peaks" could benefit from something like some explanation along the way.

- Now you get the even, there was one channel that was playing reruns of "Lost" with little pop-ups explaining things, which was annoying the heck out of me, but perhaps some viewers could really use that, I'm not sure.

- On the more cynical side, I saw one film, I forget which, you can probably tell me, Jonathan, that actually had a running casualty count. Oh, it was that recent, oh... Liam Neeson film, where he goes to rescue his daughter.

- Oh yeah.

- From being kidnapped by these terrible slave merchants. And there's actually a version of that where, every time he kills somebody or injures somebody, there's a running count on your screen.

- Fans have always found these ways to create their own things that surround the text. It's not just what producers do. Take something as banal as, like, a drinking game, where the point is that every time, I don't know, a character gives a specific catchphrase or makes a really bad acting gesture, you're meant to drink. And again, it's a way of perhaps turning a movie or TV show that has a sort of camp quality or that you love because it's bad, it's a way of celebrating that badness rather than being asked to care about any kind of goodness.

- That film that I always get the name wrong of, "Rocky Motion Picture Horror Show."

- Oh yeah, the "Rocky Horror Picture Show." 

(both laugh)

- Was sort of the master at the interactive audience.

- Yeah, and as much as I show things, and we were looking at the official trailers, what's fascinating is, if you go online, you start to find all sorts of trailers and opening credit sequences and all sorts of things that get created by the fans themselves. I had this odd experience once. For class, I wanted to show the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" opening credit sequence, because it's so fast-paced and they're introducing so many characters. And I wanted to give it to my class as an example of opening credit sequences. And I couldn't find it. But instead what I found was about 50 fan-created versions, where they changed the music or they put less images of Buffy and more images of another character in, or they'd done other little changes just to change the genre of it. I mean, one of the things that it did was, it really showed how important those credit sequences can be.

- I know for example, you've mentioned "Dexter" as an example of an effective opening credit.

- Yeah, we talked about "Jaws" creating the horror. I think "Dexter's" opening credit sequence does a wonderful job of, I mean, it's really only introducing you to one character, but in such an unnerving way. Everything about it comes together to put the viewer on edge.  

(music ends)

- Everybody's feel-good show, right?

- Exactly. 

(both laugh)

 But you can't say that you didn't know what you were getting when you see that opening credit sequence.

- Very clear, some little references to Hitchcock, I would think, in the juxtaposition between people and food and one form of consumption and another.

- And you can do so much with a close reading of this. You can see that first, the fact that we don't get introduced to any other characters shows that this is a show that really is interested in one person and one person's psyche. And all these close ups again are suggesting that we're really going to get close into it, and uncomfortable close ups. Everything in there is unnerving. And the perpetual presence or threat of violence, both in the music with the sort of roaring of the horns in the background, and then also of the damage that he's doing to himself. There is a real suggestion of looming, impending violence and something very disturbing that gives you a very clear sense of what you're about to get.

- It starts out kind of like a Schick commercial that goes bad. 

(both laugh)

- Yeah.

- Don't buy this razor. 

(laughter)

- Yeah, and what I found interesting with opening credit sequences, too, is, as opposed to trailers where it's assumed you'll probably see them before you see the movie, but after the movie, there's probably no reason for you to come back to them, the opening credit sequence, it's just like the orchestra tuning their instruments before you watch a show.

- The overture kind of gets you into the mood of what you're about to experience.

- Exactly. And so trailers try to promise "a world in which." Opening credit sequences try to shift you back into that space. And that's probably important for something like "Dexter," where Dexter is not only an oddity of forms, relative to real life, hopefully not many of us know serial killers.

- The premise is that Dexter, he's the protagonist, and he is a "good guy," if you will, except that he has this hobby of knocking off these killers who have escaped justice otherwise.

- Yeah, he has a very dark history and he's a blood splatter specialist for Miami Homicide. And when people get through and can't get picked up by the powers of the law, then he becomes the power and he kills them quite ritualistically. And so it's a show that is very different from much of what else is on TV. So it all the more needs that opening credit sequence to sort of remind you, transport you to the world in which you're going, remind you of the difference in tone and sort of shift that. It serves a very important ritualistic function, I think. As do a lot of opening credit sequences. They can be more peppy, they can be more upbeat, they can be downbeat, whatever. They sort of shift the tone.

- Sure, "The Simpsons" is a good example. You get like a whole little novella in the opening credits.

- Yeah, "The Simpsons" is one where you're introduced to almost all the characters, particularly now that they have the high def version, which adds even more characters. They redid the opening credit sequences when they went to high def TV, and it introduces you to all of the characters and the sort of relationships between them. It sets that this isn't a world in which everything is realistic. For instance, you see Homer get a nuclear -- that gets stuck in his shirt and then he just throws it out. So clearly we know that the laws of physics are going to be suspended a bit, and so all of that is set up before you even get into the show itself.

- I'm always reminded a little bit, too, of the "Dick Van Dyke Show" from the early '60s, that actually had two different opening credit sequences. The one, and I don't know if it began with this one or not for the first couple of seasons, where he's coming into his living room to greet his wife and friends, and he trips over a hassock and does a little pratfall and kind of comes up smiling. And then all of a sudden, there was this alternative version where he skirts it very deliberately and comes in. So it's playing on their own joke from before.

- Yeah, I talked earlier about the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" opening credits. There's one episode where a spell has been cast by a character on the show called Jonathan, who's a local geek, that makes him a superstar. The episode is called "Superstar." And so they re-shoot the entire opening credit sequence with him doing all the things that Buffy usually does. So again, playing with that. The other thing that we see is, of course, from season to season on shows, the opening credit sequences will change. So sometimes they give us a sense of what's changed. One of the more famous bits, one of the more famous lyrics in television opening credit sequence history is the one from the "Mary Tyler Moore Show," the "you're gonna make it after all." Well, in the first season it was, "You might just make it after all." And then the first season you see Mary looking quite tentative as she walks around Minneapolis. She clearly doesn't quite belong, and there is very much a question of whether she will land on her feet. Of course, by the subsequent seasons, she really has and she's taken charge. So we then see more images of her sort of really owning the city and belonging in the city, and being sort of at one with the city. And meanwhile, the lyrics changed to the more positive and declarative, "You're gonna make it after all." And so we quite often see that in opening credit sequences. They sort of walk us through shifts that have happened with the characters or how they've grown in different ways.

- Well, something that would not sound so promising is a show called "Pushing Daisies." What kind of promise does that offer?

- Yeah, I just realized I brought you some pretty dark clips today, right? We had "The Sweet Hereafter," which is all about death, we had "Dexter," which is all about a serial killer, and then "Pushing Daisies." But "Pushing Daisies" is actually quite a charming TV show, or it was before it was canceled. The premise was the character who had this power to touch a dead body and bring the person back to life. And so he had a sort of detective gig going on where he could bring them back to life for a minute, ask them questions about who killed them, and then they could go off and solve the murder.

- So every week they'd do this?

- Yeah, no, there you go. Maybe that's why it ended. But it was in a very magic realist style. Quite beautiful visually. And one of the clips I brought is from the DVD bonus materials, which is another form of these things. A lot of the examples we've talked about up until now are things that you encounter before you watch the film or before you watch the TV show. What's interesting with the DVD bonus material is, it's assumed that you will have seen the TV show or at least some episodes of it. But they can still do an interesting job of repurposing how we make sense of things, as the DVD bonus materials that I brought from "Pushing Daisies" should show.

- "Pushing Daisies." 

- Man: Barry's visual style is so distinct and so aggressive, and really controlled at the same time, so it gives you those fairy tale book tableaus and also gives you a certain movement and elegance.

- It really sort of looks more like a feature film than television. We move the camera a lot, we use a lot of cranes. One of the things we tried to do is, when I read the script, I thought there should be a lot of shots that were from, like, God's point of view. So I probably used more cranes and high angle shots in the pilot of "Pushing Daisies" than in the entire career of myself as a cinematographer and a director.

- It's a little bit like the author at the end of a book saying, "Well, you know, in case you didn't get the subplot, here it is and let me explain." Actually, you see books do that sometimes now, but usually in an interview format.

- Yeah, and of course, prefaces often did the same thing even before you started. Telling you that you should look out for this and so forth. DVD bonus materials, we're seeing so many of them these days that tell us what we need to look for. A good analogy would be the audio tours that you get when you go to some museums. You're standing in front of a great work of art and you have some scholar or some person who's meant to be authoritative telling you, "You really should look for this, and on the bottom left this happens" and so forth. I have another example of the same thing, actually, also from "Pushing Daisies." This one about set design.

- Michael Wiley, our production designer, he spins straw into gold every week.

- Bitter much?

- He and his team are just miracle workers that they're able to achieve the look that they achieve and build the sets that they build week after week, that are so inventive and colorful and spectacular.

- The great thing about this show, and I've said it from the day I started, is that we, if you've been a production designer for a while, you've had a fantasy of, "Oh God, I wish somebody would let me do...this."

- Set design is not something that gets a lot of attention, is it?

- No, and I mean, that's one of the things that's interesting with bonus materials is, they quite often draw our attention to all sorts of aspects of the creative process that usually we're not invited, in the first instance, to pay attention to. And so one of the things they're doing is, they're giving us a sense of all these other authors or all these other creative geniuses who supposedly took part in the production of something. One of the more interesting example of this that I discuss in the book is the "Lord of the Rings" DVDs. Where Peter Jackson filled these DVDs with endless hours of extra stuff, and you hear interviews with pretty much everyone who worked on the film. So by the end, not only do you know what everyone does on a film set, so that henceforth when you look at the credits at the end of the film...

- Now you know what that head grip is doing.

- And you know what the best boy was, and you know all of this stuff, -- artists. But you also have a sense of knowing what makes it good or bad, and so all these other creative figures are added to the mix. There's something, we could look at this cynically, quite often what they try to do is distinguish themselves from other movies or TV shows by sort of suggesting there's this boring brand of other film or TV show, but look, we've just filled our production crew with all these great geniuses.

- Jonathan, how does that actually work as a marketing device? The bottom line is, you want to get people to either go to the theater and see the film again, or rent it multiple times, or perhaps buy it on video. How do those paratexts, particularly something like a blurb on set design, actually market the film?

- I think one of the things they do is, they might work to try and pick up on strands that the audience might already have that this is a good movie or that this is great art. And then they give you seemingly all this evidence to support that idea and to stoke your fandom. So one of the things that we could see them as doing is trying to stoke that fandom to the point that you'll then go and buy other things related to it, so that when, you've just bought the platinum DVD, when the super-platinum edition DVD comes out with an extra five minutes, you'll buy that. When it gets re-released, you'll buy that. If there are other collectibles, you might buy those. So there's a sense of keeping this tradition of upping the ante and asking people to engage more and more and on more and more platforms.

- So there actually is a market for multiple versions of the same film?

- Yeah. You see this actually particularly with music, re-releases are a common way that money is made by labels in quiet hours. They just clean out their back catalog and sometimes it's stuff that everyone would accept as great, and they just want the chance to buy it for cheap at Wal-Mart now. Sometimes it's stuff that they have to put some work in and tell you, this is the sort of forgotten genius behind whatever. So they'll find some musician who says, "I owe my entire career to the time that I listened to this obscure CD, and you too can listen to this CD." So there's a real sort of tradition going a long way back in music and I think film and TV and other media are starting to realize that they can do it there, too.

- And the director's commentaries, too. People follow those closely?

- Director's commentaries can be fascinating, right, because they also suggest the degree to which maybe the version of the movie that you saw before isn't the full version. "Lord of the Rings" is a classic example there, where we were trained by the DVDs not only long after the fact, but even before the subsequent movies in the trilogy came out, to know that the DVD would give you the real answer. So by the time that you're watching "Return of the King," the third one, in the cinema, you're being told that an extra hour of the film existed out there, but you're only going to get to see it when the DVD comes out.

- Now, is it possible, did I actually read somewhere that a film is being retroactively turned into a 3D film? Is that even possible?

- I've heard about that. I'm not sure how that's done technically, I'm not much of a tech-head, but I know all these things get redone. You can think about what George Lucas did with the "Star Wars" films, where he went back and redid the original three, adding a few scenes, changing a few things, getting some fans very angry in the process. There's this infamous incident where Han Solo and Greedo face off against each other and in one version, one of them shoots first and in the other, the other one shoots first. And fans really didn't like it. So all these little changes you can make that change quite a lot. Or you could think of, more famously, the "Blade Runner" director's cut, which all of a sudden suggested that maybe Deckard, the central character in the film, was a replica, was sort of a machine himself, where the original hadn't suggested that.

- So I guess people do want to know, in some sense, where reality is. They want a story that's the way it is.

- Yeah, exactly. And you can always promise that there is another version that they didn't see. Indeed, I just gave you the example of the "Blade Runner" one. What was interesting is, although it was called the "director's cut," it was widely known that it wasn't Ridley Scott's cut. And so fans held out for 20 years for a version that would give the definitive answer. And I find that kind of fascinating, the idea that you have these fans of a product that they themselves think isn't complete, and that they can stick with it for 20 years until finally that complete version is offered. It shows that there are all sorts of ways that we engage with films and TV that we need to sort of flesh out with more detail.

- Well, more than ever the film belongs to the fan, doesn't it?

- Yeah, I mean, that said, the copyright law is trying to stop that from happening. You know, there was a point in time at which you could tell a story and I could just rip it off and I could start playing with it. Now I would be sued for it. There's some sort of odd irony in the fact that Disney made itself famous on the backs of taking Hans Christian Andersen stories, and now they're one of the first ones to come around and sue a fan as soon as a fan wants to sort of do something, write a story in which they interact with a Disney character. Time Warner has done the same, where they've sent cease-and-desist letters to 8- or 9-year-olds writing Harry Potter fan fiction. So there is a war, I think, going on, of a form between fans and producers. And we're getting all sorts of conflicting messages. On one hand, producers say, "Here are the toys, play with them. Here are all these other things, play with them. We invite you into our world." But then there are clear examples where they say, "No, sorry, you can't play." And so I think going forward, it will be interesting to see how this war pans out legally, too. What it means for what we're allowed to do with texts.

- Jonathan Gray, it's been an engaging conversation, as always.

- Thanks, Norman.

- And we invite you into our world next time on University Station. I'm Norman Gilliland, I hope you can be with me for that on Wisconsin Public Television.