Art and test screenings

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orangerie20060516.jpg

Ed Alcock for The New York Times
While the Orangerie museum was rebuilt around them for six years, Monet's waterlily paintings, too large to move, had to remain in place in the oval rooms built for them in 1927.


While reading about the renovated Musée de l'Orangerie and its Monet works in the New York Times today (yes we consume the dead tree version in our household), I spotted this in an adjacent column, regarding some movie about code and a certain renaissance painter:

To limit exposure in the age of blogs and constant leaks, both Sony and Mr. Grazer's company, Imagine Entertainment, decided to forgo test screenings, a form of market research usually considered critical to fine-tuning a picture.

In the past, Mr. Howard has said he would be loath to release a film without it. In a 1998 interview with CNN about test screenings, he said: "What I would hate to do is put the movie out there, find out that the audience is confused about something or upset about something that you could have fixed, and go, 'God, I had no idea they'd respond that way.' "

I find this a brilliant example of the difference between Hollywood movies and art.

[image from the New York Times website]

1 Comment

The photograph reminds me of 2001: A Space Odyssey somehow, except in the film Kubrick would have had the two figures jogging on the waterlillies...

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This page contains a single entry by published on May 16, 2006 12:44 PM.

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