Written by
Japhy Grant
11.12.2006
The following comes from my friend Kevin, whose letting me post this in spite of his belief that blogs are 'inherently destructive to the fabric of human society'.:Buried in the middle of a long article about the profitability of comedies for studios in the NYT Sunday Magazine today was this alarming aside:
"One advance would use computer models to put a more accurate value on the contributions of stars (and thus adjust their salaries accordingly); another would evaluate the financial viability of scripts before approval (Eliashberg has spent the past few years creating a database and software program called the "scriptanalyzer" for just such a purpose)."The first part of that sentence is OK -- but a computer program that gives script notes? Oy. Did you ever see the episode of South Park where Cartman disguises himself as a robot called Awesome-O (for complex reasons), and ends up being purchased by a studio to generate movie ideas? And they are all "Adam Sandler... is on a desert island... and falls in love with... a coconut" or "Adam Sandler... falls in love with a girl... who's actually a golden retriever" (Excited Executives: "We'll call it 'Puppy Love'!"). I can't believe someone saw that and decided to make a real-life Awesome-O.
