Ha. Ha ha. Oooh, that title must be a typo. It should say, “Jordan Lapp is Watching Almost Famous”. Wish fulfilment much?

Anyways, “Almost Famous”, the movie by Cameron Crowe, is making me think of the state of movies today. I can’t mention this movie to friends without someone telling me how awesome it is. I suppose I was in a weird place the first time I watched it, but it really left an impression on me. Every time it’s playing anywhere, I just have to watch it.

It’s an amazing film, and even when it was released it got great reviews (it currently enjoys an 88% rating on Rotten Tomatoes). I was going to write about how the studio system today wouldn’t know how to market this movie.  I was going to write about the fact that it had no A-list stars and no special effects, and wasn’t 3D, thus would fall between the cracks. Unfortunately, it turns out that it didn’t even break even at the time. The budget was a stunning 60 million dollars, and it made back 47 million, so maybe even the studio system back then had no idea what to do with it. Maybe the budget was way too high in the first place. Today, this movie would either star Justin Bieber or have a budget close to 4 million and be released direct to DVD.

It’s discouraging when movies like Almost Famous fail to break even while lesser offerings make back four times their budget. I was trying to figure out what this says about the mentality of the movie going public, but I suppose it says more about the state of marketing these days. Every movie has a few good lines of dialogue, and if you splice them in with enough shiny special effects you can fool anyone into paying to see a movie once. Every time I see this trailer I take three steps towards the video store, even though everyone on Earth thinks it’s like two and a half hours of flushing your head down the toilet.

So, moral of this post, for my movie, tentatively entitled “Deeper”, I’m going to try and cut a damn good trailer.