POP-CULTURE COLUMN: This Column is Based on an Incredible True Story
By Dan Brown Based on a true story. Inspired by real events. Based on the incredible true life story. When it comes to marketing movies, phrases like these matter a lot. How do I know? Because no studio marketing team in Hollywood history has ever passed up a chance to use them in their ad campaigns, even if the film in question bears only a passing resemblance to the truth. But my purpose today isn’t to argue movies inspired by real-life events aren’t all that real or true. It’s to try to understand why these phrases keep popping up on movie posters and in trailers. So here’s the thing: When a motion picture is marketed as a true story, it lands differently. In the minds of movie fans, it’s not in the same category as fictional stories. It’s more compelling. In 1976, the film version of All the President’s Men debuted. It was based on the reporting of Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who were real journalists whose Watergate stories helped to force Richard Nixon, an actual U.S. president, to resign. About a year later, a George Lucas movie called Star Wars was released. It featured actors playing aliens, starship dogfights in space, laser swords, and a mystical power called the Force. None of that stuff is real. These two studio productions were received by audiences in radically different ways, and no discerning movie fan would put them in the same category. All the President’s Men horrified audiences because it told a story that everyone had lived through in real life. Even if Star Wars enthusiasts loved wookies or droids or Jedi Knights, no one expected to bump into them on the street. All the President’s Men appealed to a different part of an audience member’s brain, the part that detects BS. As I’ve noted in this space before, I work with young adults in both of my day jobs. And the word I hear the most from university students these days is “authenticity.” They are starved for it. They distrust its opposite – the fake, the plastic, the constructed. If a product is perceived as authentic, they will want to try it. If a celebrity is suspected of being a different person from how they outwardly present themselves, they are repelled. They distrust slick, surface representations. They want the real deal. And the big brains who work in the marketing departments in Tinseltown are aware of this, and they use this knowledge to their advantage. That’s why you still see films being sold on the fact they are true stories. That is, they are authentic. Which is why another 1970s release, The Amityville Horror, had the tagline “The terrifying truth behind a real-life haunted house.” The 1993 UFO-abduction flick Fire in the Sky had a similar advertising prompt: “Based on a true story. White Mountains, Arizona . . . Six workmen entered the forest. One didn’t come out. What really happened?” And it’s never going to stop. Even decades from now, when hologram technology has been perfected, or the studios invent a way to beam movies directly into the human brain, you can bet future marketing professionals will be making the same claims. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
Pop-Culture Column: Tom Cruise Isn’t The Only One Who Can’t Open A Movie
By Dan Brown There are no more A-list celebrities. Not if you define the term as an actor whose appeal is so broad, they can put enough bums in seats to ensure their new motion picture debuts in the top slot at the box office on its opening weekend. According to this definition, guess who’s not on the A-list? Some big names. Tom Cruise. Brad Pitt. Anne Hathaway. You may have heard how Cruise, the performer known for starring in the Mission Impossible and Top Gun franchises, came out with a new movie a couple weeks ago. Known for marketing the hell out of his work, Cruise’s megawatt smile and fetish for doing his own stunts couldn’t compel enough moviegoers to march to movie theatres earlier this month for a No. 1 debut. His environmental satire Digger pulled in just $8 million when it opened in theatres on the weekend of Oct. 2. You read that right – not $80 million, but $8 million. That amount made it the No. 4 movie that weekend. It’s expected, according to such news sources as Variety and Forbes, Digger will lose $245 million, making it one of the biggest flops in Hollywood history. And Cruise isn’t the only celeb who has been kicked off the A-list in recent weeks. Pitt’s Heart of the Beast, in which he co-stars with a German Shepherd, earned the third slot with $20 million when it opened on the weekend of Sept. 25. That may seem like a solid number, but consider this: The re-released Avengers: Endgame pulled in $26 million to win that weekend – and it’s a movie from 2019. There were signs Heart of the Beast was in trouble when the marketing campaign began to focus on Pitt’s canine co-star. That’s right: The cute dog was featured more prominently than Pitt himself. That’s how little confidence the film’s makers had in the laconic actor’s ability to draw an audience. Oh, and did you know Anne Hathaway had a movie out earlier this year? Not Verity or the Devil Wears Prada sequel or The End of Oak Street, but Mother Mary, which premiered the weekend of April 24. You likely aren’t the only person who hasn’t heard of it. Mother Mary was rejected by movie fans, coming in ninth that weekend with a total of $1.3 million. Hathaway probably owns houses worth more than that. The through line here is how having a big star in your motion picture isn’t a guarantee when it comes to performing well at the box office. We are conditioned to think such celebrities as Tom Cruise are sure bets when it comes to drawing a crowd, but it ain’t so. Their gravitational pull isn’t all that reliable. This is happening in the same year when feature films without big names – think Backrooms and Obsession – became wildly profitable after being marketed on the strength of their “concept” (Hollywood’s buzzword for a film’s genre), and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in box-office revenue. The unavoidable conclusion: Star power isn’t working at the multiplex right now. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
POP CULTURE: The Oscars Recognize Drew Struzan
By Dan Brown Drew Struzan’s name cropped up at the Oscars on Sunday. He’s a guy who never got a nomination in his 78 years, but surely deserved an award for his lifetime of service to Hollywood. Struzan – who was mentioned during the ever-expanding In Memoriam segment – defined movie imagery for a generation of film fans like me, even though he never made or appeared in a motion picture himself. He died last October in Pasadena. We may never see another cinema artist who has as vast an influence as Struzan did. If you grew up geeky in the 1970s or 1980s, you knew his work — even if you had never met him or didn’t know what he looked like. He was billed at the Academy Awards telecast as a poster artist, which doesn’t sit well with diehard movie enthusiasts who considered him a visionary genius. As a kid, I thought the right word to describe his work was “photorealistic,” but his trademark style was actually the result of airbrushing, which was much in vogue in the 1970s. Especially if you owned a Chevy van. Perhaps the first work of his I came across wasn’t on a poster, but the cover of a paperback edition of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The publisher took Struzan art from Blade Runner and used it as the front, since the Dick novel was the source material for Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi feature. I remember looking at that cover, eyeing the likeness of Harrison Ford closely, and thinking, “This can’t be a drawing or a painting, it’s too detailed. This must be a photo.” That was my first awareness of Drew Struzan. I was 13 years old. I was already in love with movies, and movie posters. Struzan began his career with one-sheets for such drive-in fare as Empire of the Ants and Food of the Gods, then caught a lucky break helping a fellow artist with a poster to announce the re-release in 1978 of Star Wars. The result of their collaboration was a meta-poster: The painted composition looks like an old circus poster plastered on the plywood fence around a construction site. It was also the beginning of his long partnership with George Lucas. Even after Struzan ended his career, he would come out of retirement to help the Star Wars creator with art for such movies as The Phantom Menace. His other posters included E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Risky Business, Coming to America, the Goonies and the Muppet Movie. He could produce intricately crafted images, and he could so on a tight deadline: He painted the poster for John Carpenter’s The Thing remake literally overnight. For a generation of geeks like yours truly, Struzan’s posters defined the look of motion pictures. He brought aliens, adventurers, weirdos, muppets and Tom Cruise to life when young people weren’t sitting in a theatre. To understand his influence, you have to remember the context he was working in: VCRs were scarce back then, so you could see movies only in theatres, or occasionally on network TV. Posters were the main representation in the public’s mind of any given film because trailers weren’t as omnipresent as they are now. We had no YouTube to watch them on. Believe it or not, there was a time when people decided to see one film over another based solely on the posters outside the theatre, and Struzan deserves a golden statuette simply for the fact he sold countless movie tickets in his decades-long career. (For all I know, the Oscar folks may have tried to give him an honorary Oscar, but his family turned them down; Struzan suffered from Alzheimer’s in his later years.) Drew Struzan was one of the all-time greats, and is a personal favourite of mine, along with Nick Cardy. We may never see Struzan’s like again. All these decades later, I’m amazed Hollywood is still using movie posters to advertise their products. The artistry of posters persists, but this form of art could be living on borrowed time, along with movie houses themselves. We can only hope future generations of film fans recognize the artistry that’s involved, and keep demanding posters rendered exclusively by human hands. Our responsibility is to help educate those future geeks, making sure the names of creators like Drew Struzan don’t pass entirely from the collective memory. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
But What About the Movie?
By Dan Brown Movie advertising in 2025 is about everything but the movie. What I mean is, the folks in Tinseltown who devise campaigns to advertise big-budget motion pictures, like the latest Mission: Impossible and the upcoming Superman, want the public to be aware of some important details – that have little to do with the content of each film. Why is this a problem? Because Hollywood isn’t exactly doing blockbuster business in the age of streaming. Let me make clear at the outset that I’ve never worked in marketing: This is a civilian take from someone who has never made a movie ad or trailer in his life. All I’m basing my thoughts on are my decades of experience as a moviegoer and movie fan. Let’s start with the obvious example, the publicity campaign for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, which landed in theatres last month. Whether you’ve seen it yet or not, you already know one thing about this sequel – that Tom Cruise did his own stunt work. You know this factoid because long before Cruise appeared at the Cannes Film Festival or on TV chat shows, Cruise was bragging about it in online clips that appeared while he was still on location two years ago. What he didn’t talk about while hanging off a brightly coloured biplane was the movie’s premise, or his acting in it, or the script. Or any other detail. Doing his own stunts may be a foolish thing for an actor to do, I don’t know, but I do know it’s an odd claim to make since an action star risking certain death in real life and Cruise’s character risking his on-screen life are two different things. What are we supposed to do with this knowledge? Or think of it this way: Did anyone who bought a ticket to see Final Reckoning walk out of the theatre and say to their date, “That movie was pretty mediocre, but I’m just glad knowing Tom Cruise risked life and limb to make it.” As Peter Suderman over at Reason magazine said in his review, the Mission: Impossible films are “ extravagant stunt spectacles, powered by the awe of watching an aging movie star appear to risk his life for our entertainment.” Not by the plot, or the camera work, or anything else intrinsic to the movie. Another example. As Cruise did, many movie actors appear on TV shows like The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to drum up interest in their latest work. One question that always comes up while this promoting goes on is how much fun the performers had while making the upcoming feature. This must be very important, as I have never once heard a celebrity plugging the fact they had a bad time on set. There are inevitably anecdotes about what a riot it was to work on the production, and if George Clooney is involved in any way, there will be a story about how he pulled pranks on his co-stars during shooting. Again, does this factor in anyone’s decision to see a particular film over another? Does anyone exiting the movie say, “That was a fantastic film, and knowing the cast had a fun time makes me want to see it again.” Not to be cold, but I don't care. As a moviegoer I just want to be entertained. If a movie is strong, it doesn’t matter to me whether the cast was having fun or utterly miserable. I don’t care. I just want my money’s worth of entertainment. Heck, Martin Sheen had a heart attack during the filming of Apocalypse Now, which can’t have been fun, but I don’t think that fact alone interfered with anyone’s enjoyment or non-enjoyment of the Vietnam War epic. A final example. Word has also reached my online feeds, maybe yours too, how actor David Corenswet put on a large amount of muscle while preparing to play Superman in the James Gunn-directed picture that will reset the DC cinematic universe this summer. These posts show Corenswet pumping iron. Again, I’m not sure what to do with this news nugget. It would be like, if Raging Bull was released today, the studio first released video of Robert De Niro stuffing his face in order to gain the necessary weight to play Jake LaMotta in his over-the-hill years. If publicity tactics like these come across as acts of desperation to you, then I agree. What happened to traditional trailers that tried to give you a sense of the flavour of the film, that boasted about intriguing characters, talented directors and the script’s twists and turns? All of this is another sign Hollywood is in crisis, with the big studios still hurting from the pandemic years and unable to supply a compelling answer to the rise of streaming as the dominant method of entertainment. They’ll do anything to put butts in seats. Now, I’m no marketing genius. But I do see one ploy the Hollywood big brains haven’t used yet that just might work: Try making better movies. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
