Marketing Goes to the Movies: Barton Fink
Barton Fink is a serious author, and therein lies his problem. In this 1991 film by the Coen brothers, Barton (John Turturro) has just made his first big splash as a New York playwright. It’s 1941, and Barton has a burning desire to write meaningful plays about “the common man.” He has high ideals, so it’s no wonder that he hesitates over an offer to write screenplays for Capitol Pictures in Hollywood. When he shows up at the studio’s gates, the manic, overbearing head of the studio, Jack Lipnick, immediately assigns him to a wrestling picture for actor Wallace Beery. The premise: “Big men — in tights!”
In the course of the film, alongside a series of bizarre, surrealistic events that I wouldn’t think of spoiling for you, Barton takes it on himself to bring a little “common man” nobility to the wrestling-picture genre, crafting a literate, sensitive story of the wrestler’s inner struggle — a man “wrestling with his soul.” He delivers the finished script to the studio as the finest thing he’s ever done.
And of course Lipnick hates it. “It’s a wrestling picture. The audience wants to see WRESTLING, and lots of it!” He all but fires Barton, keeping him on the payroll on the odd chance he can be molded into the kind of writer the studio can use — one that makes the product he’s asked to make.
And you know what? Lipnick is right. He’s right because he understands that his audience is right.
We have to give audiences what they want, not what we think they need — or what we think is profound or brilliant or funny. Playwright George S. Kaufman once recalled being furious with an audience for never laughing at a “hilarious” line, until it finally dawned on him that maybe it would be easier to fix the line than to fix the audience. He ended up doing all right for himself.
If the writing gets the desired result, then it’s right. If it doesn’t, then it’s wrong. This simple rule holds true for playwriting, for screenwriting — and for copywriting.
Heck, it’s even true for wrestling. They use writers too, you know.
