Last night, I went to the movies. By myself. At 10pm, which is pretty much my bedtime.
First came one trailer — some Iraq war thriller with Matt Damon as a solider yelling at other soldiers and lots of explosions and jets swooping in and rapid-fire editing between more yelling and explosions and gunfire.
Then came another trailer — a horror movie about vampires in the deep south, with bloody mouths and fangs and a vampire banging his head on the door of a wood cabin, asking to be let in, while the non-vampires inside cower and transfer their fear to the audience.
And then, after about six total minutes of this adrenaline-pumping overstimulation, the screen got dark. A Bach piece on organ started playing and a barebones title card showed the name of the movie:
Солярис
… or Solaris, if you can’t read that. A three-hour-long science fiction movie from 1972. In Russian, which I don’t speak. With Spanish subtitles, which I can barely read before they disappear. The movie opens up with a five-minute sequence of a man walking next to a lake, without any dialogue.
I’ve seen Solaris twice before, years ago. A few days ago, I finished reading the science fiction novel on which it’s based. When I saw it was playing at the local old-timey movie theater, I decided I would violate my usual bedtime and go see it again, and on the big screen.
I’m not trying to sell you on Solaris. All I really want to highlight is the contrast that was so obvious between those new Hollywood trailers and the start of the 1972 Russian movie. It reminded me of something I read in William Goldman’s Adventures In The Screen Trade:
“In narrative writing of any sort, you must eventually seduce your audience. But seduce doesn’t mean rape.”
Goldman was writing in a different era. He was contrasting movie writing to TV writing.
At the beginning of a movie, Goldman said, you have some time. You can seduce. Things are different in TV land — you gotta be aggressive, right in the first few seconds. Otherwise the viewer will simply change the channel.
Things have changed since Goldman wrote the above. Today, all Hollywood movies have become like TV. That doesn’t eliminate the fact that different formats allow you to do different things, and that not every movie needs to start with a heart-pounding sequence of bloody vampires banging their heads on the door.
The bigger point is, just because you know a trick, this doesn’t require you to use it at every damn opportunity. Holding back can in fact can make the show better.
A year ago, I read a book titled Magic And Showmanship, about… magic and showmanship. The author of that book, a magician named Henning Nelms, kept coming back to a principle he called conservation.
Conservation is keeping from overselling what you’ve got, and from making yourself out to be more skilled or powerful than absolutely necessary for the effect in question.
It’s a lesson that can apply to a lot of showmanship, including showmanship in print.
Anyways, I suspect nobody will take me up on a recommendation to read Nelms’s Magic And Showmanship, but recommend it I will. In order to sell it to you, I can only say that last year, I was even thinking of taking the ideas from this book and turning them into a full-blown course or training about running email promos, because I found the ideas so transferable.
In case you’re a curious type, or in case you simply want new ideas for running email promos: