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Comment by teepo | Hacker News Reader

Watched this with the family on Saturday after reading the piece in Vulture. I honestly was expecting a trainwreck of a film, but really enjoyed it.

The key take a away from the Vulture article for me was the Fulmer quote: "I met a very nice woman on a plane once coming back from New York, where we’d recorded Sting. She was like, “Oh, you work at Disney. What are you doing?” Blah, blah, blah. “Oh, my. So, what the movie’s about.” I feel like I talked until we got to Los Angeles, trying to explain it all. And I realized, Okay, this is not good. There’s too much here."

I think that applies to any product. If you can't tell the story in a concise manner, nobody is going to be interested.

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>I think that applies to any product. If you can't tell the story in a concise manner, nobody is going to be interested.

I think this does not often apply in general to cultural productions - movies, paintings, literature, music.

It's really difficult to do that in a mass market (widest appeal) 'kids' film. Generally the core of a single film or episode for TV fits inside of an elevator pitch and everything else is an embellishment detail. An entertaining decoration on a well known recipe. Though deeper plot can make for re-watch-ability across a larger series, such as character development within the MCU.

well, sure and there are only a limited number of plots in the world and everything is an embellishment detail, and it is the embellishment details that make things interesting. You might get interested to make a movie based on its elevator pitch, but you probably won't be that interested in seeing it - unless you already know a lot about it, for example you might want to see an MCU movie based on the description The Avengers fight Thanos! But that's not because it's a concise description - in fact there's hardly any description at all, the sale is made by relying on a mind embellishing it themselves.

Right, but if you can't even give an elevator pitch, because the project is too unfocused, then that's a bad sign.

if you can't give an elevator pitch because project is too unfocused, yes that's a bad sign.

If you can't give an elevator pitch because the project is too rich. Then that might imply greatness.

so often an elevator pitch for those productions of the human mind generally referred to as works of art is useless.

What's the elevator pitch for A Tale of Two Cities?

> What's the elevator pitch for A Tale of Two Cities?

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times." London and Paris through the revolution.

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