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The J . P. Morgan Miami event was a a banking conference on Alternative Investment.What on earth they were doing there, I have no idea nor why Prince Harry’s speech was apparently (again) about his mental health/emotional problems and how badly he and Meghan have been treated.None of that has anything to do with banking and investment and if that is going to be the standard speech and all he can talk about, he’ll find invitations to speak rapidly dry up.I also have no idea why Buckingham Palace announced the attendance as it wasn’t an official royal visit and it seems they were paid as well as being flown to Miami and back again in a J. P. Morgan jet.So as well as having daddy fund them to the tune of several millions a year (despite the fact that they are collectively worth £30 - £ 40 million), they get the use of the royal press release department as well.Interesting take on “financial independence”.

Ever look at fighter jets and realize that despite being produced by Russia, China, France or Japan, there’s a convergent evolution of design options. Sure, a pro will tell them apart, but damn if I look at some of the newer fighters from Russia, China and a few others and they all sort of look the same. That’s because those jets are an evolutionary process that have to handle not only the physics of the environment but the demands pilots put on them.Movie trailers are like that. They are competing against every other adversary out there and have a huge job to do: attract the kind of people who like watching trailers, advertise the film, build excitement for it and build the franchise brand. To do that, they have to serve multiple different masters all demanding something that might be contrary to what another master wants. All of them have mostly settled into a pattern: X months out you get a teaser (very short video, some music, maybe a snappy scene). Y months out you get a teaser-trailer (no plot, maybe 30 seconds). Z months out, you get a few “final trailers” that have a story and paint a picture of what the tail is about.Now, you might try the standard human reply, “But I hate that.” Well, know what I hate? People who think their anecdotal values matter much. They don’t. Movies have to attract millions and for some, billions of people. None of us individually matters. All that matters is: asses in seats. You do whatever it takes to get the most asses in their seats. Advertising campaigns that are run anemically (like, Birds of Prey) have been criticized for not building excitement and for not telling audiences what to expect. Then when a trailer plays enough to get the core audiences excited, people complain that it’s too much.When it comes to movie tastes, it’s hard to nail it. You follow a tried and true formula that has been proven: snippets of a film are sent to specialty trailer houses to produce and publish. When “Avengers: Endgame” was being produced, they took the clips they wanted released, sent them to a trailer house and then gave them the broad strokes. That trailer house made it and Disney’s marketing department published it. Nobody knows precisely what formula works perfectly for all movies, but despite the complaints (sort of like people bitching about lack of comfortable seats and amenities on coach fares on airlines), the numbers don’t lie. When you follow the trailer program, movies make more money. If it didn’t, then it wouldn’t be used. Too much money and too many livelihoods are on the line NOT to.

For me it was a movie I had never heard of.It was 1977. I was a new employee at a film studio in Burbank, California. One lunch-hour, a bunch of people I knew started walking rapidly out of the main building toward the studio gates. I asked a couple of them where they were going; they said a movie that was opening over the hill on Hollywood Boulevard.“So what’s this movie about?”“Outer space. The movie’s brand new. You going?”I thought to myself, “If all these people are leaving to see some flick, I’m leaving too,” and said “sure”. I then followed along to somebody’s car, where I climbed in the back and sat watching the flow of automobiles until the one I was riding in parked near Mann’s (formerly Grauman’s) Chinese Theater, and we got out.There was a long line of people snaking along the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard, but nobody was looking at the stars’ cement footprints and signatures in front of the theater. I still had no clear idea what the movie was actually about. I looked at a poster and pictures near the box office.“Oh. Some sort of sci fi thing. ‘Star Wars’?? What the hell is ‘Star Wars’?”We paid our money, shuffled our way inside. The lights went down. A narrative in large yellow letters crawled upward on the screen. There was a camera tilt down to the edge of a planet and the appearance of a spaceship that got a ripple of applause. And then …… a ship the size of a small planet that kept going … and going … and GOING.The whole packed theater erupted in cheers. Frenzied clapping. Sustained yelling.“This is like freaking ‘2001: a Space Odyssey’ on freaking steroids!” my inner voice said. “Unfreaking, believable!”And the rest of the film unspooled.It was the opening day of the first Star Wars. The day that Part II of the way “big” motion pictures get distributed and released came to pass. (Jaws, from two years before, was more or less Part I): instead of a creeping national rollout with a couple hundred prints, the standard became many prints in theaters, saturation advertising, and a huge opening weekend.I’ve been awed and bowled over by various movies over the years — the monumental Atlanta train station pull-back in Gone With the Wind, the match-flame to sunrise shot in Lawrence of Arabia — but for pure, visceral, adrenaline-laced excitement, I’ve never experienced anything close to what I felt that 1977 afternoon in a darkened Chinese theater on Star Wars’ first day.