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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.

Sometimes the most magical films are the ones with no magic in them — at least not “magic” in the storybook sense. The Japanese animated film Whisper of the Heart contains no magic spells, wizards, witches, demons or gods, and with the exception of one fanciful dream sequence it remains rooted in the real world of a few middle-class kids and adults in 1990s Tokyo. And yet there is magic here — the magic of people deciding what they want to be when they grow up and then transcending themselves to make it happen.

Shizuku loves books. While her classmates occasionally hit the school library to do their homework or prepare for their high-school entrance exams, she’s there every day reading story after story. She also enjoys writing poems and song lyrics for her friends, and they seem impressed by her skill. But that’s as far as it goes, until one day she realizes that someone named Amasawa has already checked out all the books she’s currently reading.

Intrigued by this mysterious stranger with similar literary tastes, she decides to find out who he is. Seiji Amasawa turns out to be a classmate she’s never even talked to before, except to trade the occasional insult. The real surprise occurs when she learns that this “typical teenager” builds violins — and he’s serious enough about it to apply to a school in Cremona, Italy, the Mecca of violin making. As she slowly falls for this ambitious boy, she realizes that she’s reached a crossroads in her life. He has a dream — does she? He’s going halfway across the world for 10 years’ hard study to become a violin maker — is she ready to get serious about becoming a writer?

Shizuku makes a decision to push herself by writing her first full-length story in the two months that Seiji is visiting Italy for his initial evaluation as an apprentice. Anyone who has ever pushed themselves into uncharted territory will recognize the image of the girl slumped over her desk 24 hours a day, pen in hand, neglecting her schoolwork, not eating, not (intentionally) sleeping, and scared to death she doesn’t have it in her after all. She doesn’t know what she’s doing, she hates the story’s second half, she’s ready to burst into tears when she hands the manuscript to Seiji’s kindly old grandpa to read — but she’s done it. She’s a writer.

At some point, this movie seems to say, we have to take that first step forward into the danger zone of What Am I without waiting for the bright light of certainty to illuminate our path. I believe that’s true. It’s true for writers, violin makers, entrepreneurs, or anyone else who seeks to transform his or her life.

This movie reminded me of how scary it can be to write that first story or attempt that new thing, whatever it may be. Writing is frightening. Going for what we want is frightening. Living is frightening — if we’re doing it right.

“Hi, honey. Look what I got free at the checkout. It’s a Chef’s Pal! It’s a dicer-grater-peeler all in one! Never needs sharpening, dishwasher safe!”

If that line sounds like an ad, well, it is. It’s also part of a real-life conversation — or so it seems to Truman.

In the film The Truman Show, Jim Carrey plays a man whose life is completely enmeshed in television. The school he attended, the woman he married, the job he goes to every day, the friends he’s hung around with since childhood — they’re all faked. The truth, hidden from him since birth, is that Truman’s life is a reality-TV show. His entire hometown is a collection of sets, props, actors and extras, all covered by armies of unseen cameras. Even the sky overhead is nothing but a blue dome.

Truman suspects something is up — literally, in the case of a lamp-powered “star” that accidentally drops from the “sky” and almost decapitates him. He wants answers, but of course the actors paid to be his wife and best friend aren’t helping — at least not until he notices an odd trait in his wife’s behavior. She seems determined to soothe his worries with various foods, drinks, or consumer products, blurting out excited pitches for these products almost at random. Carrey finally can’t take it anymore and yells, “Who are you talking to??”

These odd little inserted sales pitches take their cue from the old live commercials of TV’s Golden Age, when ads for the show’s sponsor were cleverly (or not-so-cleverly) worked into the scripts: “Bob, I know your wife’s death has got you down. Here, have a cigarette. You’ll really like these new Salems — they’re filter-tipped for a smoother, more satisfying smoke.”

Believe it or not, people still use this ham-handed marketing technique. How many times have you gotten interested in an informational article, only to realize before the end that it’s just a sales pitch for a product or service? Ever feel gratified to the author for that little walk down the primrose path? Or were you more likely to want that last few minutes of your life back?

Context matters in marketing. So does honesty. If you’re selling something, sell it, and make it clear to us that you’re selling it. Otherwise, any good will you’ve bought from us toward the beginning of that “special report” or “informative study” will just turn to hard feelings by the end when we realize we’ve been had. Sure, you’ll catch a few enthralled buyers, but keep in mind that bad impressions make more waves than good ones.

Don’t make your readers feel the betrayal, hurt, and anger Truman feels when he touches the sky and realizes it’s a backdrop.

1954 was Benjy Stone’s favorite year, as Benjy (Mark Linn-Baker) informs us in the opening narration of this film. A rookie writer for King Kaiser’s live comedy/variety show, he gets an assignment to watch over the latest weekly guest, former big-screen swashbuckler and ladies’ man Alan Swann (Peter O’Toole), to ensure that the besotted star can make it through the week of rehearsals sober enough to manage the live broadcast.

This is easier said than done, but not entirely for the expected reasons. Of course Alan Swann misbehaves predictably, leading Benjy through a boozy roller-coaster week, but underneath the bravado lurk crippling fears and insecurities. For one thing, he isn’t “Alan Swann” at all — he’s Clarence Duffy, a working-class boy who got a few lucky breaks and assumed a persona to perpetuate the hoax into fame and fortune. The glittering lifestyle swept him away, alienating him from his family to the point where he’s afraid to even speak to his daughter.

In light of this character crisis, we shouldn’t be too surprised when he begs off the performance. He can’t be Alan Swann to those millions of viewers watching live. He can’t make the lie work away from the forgiving atmosphere of a movie studio. “I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star!” he screams in terror.

But he’s forgotten something. To those millions of people who idolized him on those movie screens for so many years, he is Alan Swann, whether he himself believes it or not. Actor or not, he has created a living, breathing character, literally giving the performance of a lifetime in the process. As Benjy reminds him, “Nobody’s that good an actor!”

So when paid ruffians interrupt the live performance to beat up King Kaiser in mid-skit, who should come to the rescue but Alan Swann, swinging in on a cable like the movie swashbuckler of old. Perception hasn’t become reality, because it always was the reality, as Swann now understands.

That’s true you and your brand as well. Your audience knows only what it perceives. When you create a brand and project it to a mass audience, you open a window into a new little sliver of reality. Never mind that you’re secretly sweating bullets about whether your latest product will tank — as far as your readers are concerned, it’s the most exciting thing since the proverbial sliced bread.

But perception can also work against you. If you communicate your marketing message like an amateur, then that’s the persona you’ve created for all the world to see. If your website is slapdash, your marketing copy dry or weak, your brand identity confusing or nonexistent, then you’ve identified yourself as Clarence Duffy, not Alan Swann. And there’s no virtue in that level of “truth,” because you’re Alan Swann too!

Put your best self into your marketing — and have your own favorite year.

It may seem that I’ve been watching a lot of creepy movies lately, but I haven’t really morphed into the the Crypt Keeper; I’m just behind on my scheduled Halloween film viewing. Too bad none of my selections featured a marauding killer turkey — I’d be ready to celebrate Thanksgiving early.

The movie I just watched is the 1978 thriller Coma, directed by Michael Crichton from the novel by medical-suspense writer Robin Cook. In it, a doctor (Genevieve Bujold) suspects that her hospital is artificially inducing permanent brain death in certain patients for some mysterious purpose. She learns that these patients are being transferred to a place called the Jefferson Institute, so she decides to pay a visit and snoop further.

Bujold joins a medical tour group as a nurse leads them through the Institute. The first stop is a very ordinary-looking room with a couple of beds, the usual electronic monitors, cheery wallpaper, and warm lighting. The nurse explains that the coma victims are relocated here temporarily for loved ones’ visits because the real patient area would be “too much of a shock” for the visitors. And shocking it is — a gigantic room filled with unconscious human beings suspended from the ceiling at varying heights, horizontally, on long wires. It’s an eerie visual impression, somewhere between a morgue and a meat locker.

But the impression is false, says the nurse. The patients in this room receive state-of-the-art care and monitoring, despite the inhuman appearances — better care, in fact, than they’d receive in that charming little “traditional” hospital room.

The difference? Tone. Regardless of what’s actually best for the patients, the visitors need to see a comforting, homey environment, because that’s the tone they respond positively to.

And yes, that is our marketing moral for the day — tone matters. Whatever we’re presenting to our audience, the tone we set must be:

Professionally appropriate. We can’t sell a children’s hospital with a bunch of tech talk, and we can’t sell a high-tech engineering firm with clowns and balloons.

Emotionally appealing. What does your audience want to feel as a result of your product or service? Relief? Joy? Peace? Enthusiasm?

Vividly presented. Good marketing captures the imagination. Images, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings — these sense-memories are your tools for evoking strong, specific emotions in your audience.

So much for tone. In fact, now that my Halloween viewing queue in empty, I could use a change of tone myself. So break out the clowns and balloons….

Tangent Alert: The following movie summary gets around to the subject of marketing in pretty much the most roundabout way possible.

Having delivered that warning, I wish to report on a movie I watched a few days ago, a 1968 George Pal oddity entitled The Power. In it, a scientist played by George Hamilton (I told you it was an oddity) is wanted for murder after members of his research team begin dying in all manner of eccentric ways. It seems that one anonymous member of the team registered extremely high on some sort of psychic-power test, and George suspects this mystery person of bumping the others off telepathically. (Meanwhile, certain others on the team suspect George of the same thing.) I won’t give away the ending, but there’s another wrinkle in the plot that George discovers while he’s on the run — a mysterious guy named Adam Hart, who seems to be manipulating events from the shadows.

Our psychic murderer can do more than kill; he can alter people’s feelings and erase memories. Hamilton’s character finds the widow of one of the murdered scientists blissfully drinking at home only a few days after the tragedy. She comments that not only did her feelings of grief suddenly disappear overnight, but she’s puzzled that she can barely remember what her late husband even looked like….

Okay, now I can go on to the marketing stuff. Or as Bill Cosby used to say, “I told you that story to tell you this one.”

When our target audience reads our marketing copy, we can have no way of knowing what state of mind that person is in at that moment. Angry, sad, distracted, cheerful — we have no clue where we’re treading. So we have to launch into our spiel by commanding that the reader engage in the emotion of our choice. “Hey, you know that bill payment you were fretting over just now? I order you to forget. You will now stop being fearful and depressed and become excited and happy.” You have to lead off with a statement so strong, so fortified with the emotion you wish to evoke, that it shakes the reader out of whatever other state he may be in.

Hypnotists refer to this technique as a pattern interrupt, but you don’t have to be a hypnotist to use it. We interrupt our own patterns every day. You might be whistling a happy tune one second, then struck with sudden fear as you realize you’ve missed a big appointment. One emotional state gets slapped out of place by another.

That’s what good marketing does — it takes control of the reader’s inner conversation immediately and creates its own emotional state. Yes, a gentle, reasonable argument might persuade your audience eventually, but only if the reader is already in an ideally receptive state of mind. If you don’t want to take that chance, you’d better hit the pattern-interrupt button with your first phrase or sentence.

There. I did warn you.

Blake Edwards’ The Party (1968) is a very funny film, and not only for Peter Sellers’ slapstick abilities. The movie makes some caustic statements about Hollywood and the the importance of identity in a town where you’re nobody if you’re not “Somebody.”

Sellers plays Hrundi V. Bakshi, an unknown Indian actor playing a bit part in his first Hollywood film — until he accidentally blows up a gigantic location set, which gets him fired on the spot. The head of the studio, furious at hearing of this incident, writes Bakshi’s name down with the intention of blacklisting him. The only trouble is, he’s accidentally written the name down on an invitation list for his own high-society party that evening.

Bakshi arrives at the party, as mystified by his invitation as everyone else is by his presence. No one recognizes him, not even the producer who was there on the set to witness his catastrophic goof. The guests treat him with a mixture of bland politeness and indifference, even when his accident-prone nature causes him to all but demolish their home during the course of the party. Why? Because this is Hollywood, where only the people “worth noticing” get noticed. Never mind that one of your party guests is destroying the plumbing, or causing the automated bar to send everyone’s drinks crashing to the floor, or baby-talking to the parrot over the house intercom. No matter how incompetent he is, he’s unknown, anonymous, and therefore invisible.

We’ve all heard that bad word of mouth carries even faster and farther than good word of mouth. No company sets out to generate negative buzz. What, then, about the company that generates no buzz at all?

If you haven’t established yourself as a “leading brand” in your field, then for all practical purposes you’re invisible. While the recognized big boys are drawing both good and bad press, you’re a non-player. My advice? Get noticed. Make a statement — as loud a statement as possible. Create a brand identity and distribute it consistently across as many media channels as possible. Don’t wait for perfection, either; if the message is a little off-center or doesn’t get the desired response, then fix it. But until you put that message out there to get some kind of response, you don’t know what to adjust.

Once you’ve established your image as an expert in your field or an industry leader, your statements will carry enough weight that people will actually seek out your opinions and advice. You’ll be a guest of honor at the party and not a neutral interloper.

Until then, be as incompetent as you like — no one’s paying attention anyway!

“Monsters, John — monsters from the id!”

So gasps Lieutenant “Doc” Osroe (Warren Stevens) as he expires, his mind boiling over from the massive injection of too much knowledge for it to handle, in Forbidden Planet, an old favorite film of mine and an acknowledged sci-fi classic.

The story, based loosely on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, concerns a spaceship assigned to discover the fate of a long-lost expedition to the planet Altair IV. The only survivors they find there are the brilliant but secretive Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis). They also meet Robby, a robot somehow created by Morbius using the incredible technology of the planet’s extinct race, the Krell. The Krell had found a way a boost their intelligence to achieve almost godlike levels of power, only to find themselves destroyed by an element of their own psyche they’d all but forgotten — the animal passions of the id.

The “id,” as you may know, is one of the three levels of human consciousness described by Freud and company as id, ego, and superego. The ego is our daily level of get-through-the-day consciousness, the part of us that we’re aware of as “us.” The superego is the higher, altruistic self that concerns itself with the common good, charitable works, the better of society, and so on. It’s the angel on your shoulder, pure intellect, untarnished by lust or greed.

Then there’s the id.

The id is that lizard brain I mentioned in my most recent post. It’s the part of us that never evolved — the animal that pursues its needs and wants with no other thought than “Gimme.” It’s the part of us that would murder, steal, or worse to get what it wants, when it wants it. In the Krell’s laudable desire to boost their brainpower to allow creation from pure thought, they inadvertently fed that same power to this hidden part of their minds. The resulting rampaging ids of an entire population led to just what you’d expect — the extinction of the race. “My poor Krell!” exclaims Morbius. “After a million years of shining sanity, they could hardly have understood what power was destroying them.”

Is the id “evil?” No. The id is simply the pleasure-seeking part of the brain, and pleasure can come from simply feeling loved or safe or excited or fed. It’s these feelings we mean to stimulate when we write marketing copy, because they are such powerful motivators of human behavior. We can deliberate the pros and cons of taking an action, but ultimately it’s our desire for gratification that makes us act.

But while appealing directly to the id will certainly get results, the most effective marketing, in my opinion, is that one-two punch of id and superego that has the reader yelling “Leggo my ego!” (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) For example: “Whizzo Organic Cleanser not only make cleaning easier, so you have more time to relax and have fun (id) — it’s also safe for humans and good for the environment (superego).” My ego is now free to buy Whizzo without guilt over my desire to work less and play more, because hey, it’s the socially responsible thing to do, right? I’m OBLIGATED to have more fun.

Of course there’s a great loophole to all this. When you appease your superego by doing “the right thing” — does it feel good? Sure it does! (Here, id, have a cookie. Now run along.) So when your marketing stimulates both the higher and lower parts of your readers’ brains, that middle part will feel no conflict about taking action. “What’s not to love about this?” they’ll say. “It’s good and good for you!”

And for YOU.

One of the most visually stunning films you’re ever likely to see is director/cinematographer Ron Fricke’s “spiritual travelogue” Baraka. This quasi-documentary, filmed in multiple countries over the course of a year, depicts Man’s relationship to nature and his attempt to communicate with the infinite. The glorious 70-millimeter widescreen photography depicts various human activities, from religious ceremonies and dances to the hectic flow of modern industrial life, comparing and contrasting these experiences with the titanic forces of the natural world. It is a powerful, enlightening, occasionally profound experience.

And there’s not a word of dialogue or narration in it.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so they say, and Fricke’s work certainly demonstrates that. But what do we do when we’re stuck with mere words to convey our corporate mission? Words can have impact when strung together just so, but ultimately we’re still just saying it, right? How do we show it instead?

We use the words to paint pictures.

I did this with a travel agent’s print marketing. I could’ve talked about the great discounts she offered, the special rates you could get if you subscribed to her annual service, and so on. I could have tried to appeal to the rational, thinking brain all day — and the rational, thinking brain, unemotional spoilsport that it is, would have devised rebuttal after rebuttal to thwart my efforts.

So instead of appealing to rationality, I went for the primitive lizard brain, that ancient hunk of cortex way deep down, the brain that WANTS things. The lizard brain doesn’t respond to reason, but it loves sensations. So I evoked images of white sands, crystalline waters, white gulls floating in a deep blue sky. I forced the readers to place themselves in this idyllic dream. And then I said, “Yes, you CAN have this,” and gave them the number to call. And call they did.

Images evoke emotions. You don’t have to be a brilliant painter or photographer to paint compelling pictures. You don’t need a 70-millimeter camera. You don’t even need a paintbrush. All you need is the infinite canvas of your reader’s imagination.

Quiz Show is a dramatic retelling of the famous brouhaha over the TV show 21 in the late 1950s, when a Congressional investigation found that the quiz show had been elevating certain contestants by feeding them the correct answers in advance, then asking them to “take a dive” by deliberately giving wrong answers once their popularity had begun to wane.

The film depicts the famous case of 21‘s producers elbowing contestant Herbert Stempel (played by John Turturro) off the show to make room for the more photogenic and charismatic Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes). A disgruntled Stempel spills the beans about his experience, ultimately forcing Van Doren and other contestants to testify that the show is fixed. Future television shows would avoid the quiz format for many years in favor of a softer “game show” approach, and Van Doren’s teaching and TV careers were thoroughly derailed.

In defense of their actions, the producers themselves raise an important and undeniable point — quiz shows are entertainment. They may be displayed as reality, but so, to a lesser degree, are Westerns, soaps, and most other TV dramas and comedies. The fact that we viewers know we’re watching an enhanced depiction of how the world really works is significant, and certainly 21 made no effort to clarify its methods, but the fact remains that real life, by itself, consists largely of boredom. In fact, the first episode of 21 was unscripted. It was also so stupendously dull that the fix was in from that point forward.

Consider today’s “reality shows,” which are so heavily edited as to barely resemble the actual events as they unfolded before the camera. We play along when we watch these shows, suspending just enough disbelief to buy what we’re seeing for the moment but fully aware that footage can be shuffled and participants prompted. Even local and national news programs take frequent flack for putting its own journalistic spin on events. If we watch a story about a two-hour high-speed chase, we’re not going to see two hours of cars driving around — we’re going to see the most exciting few seconds of the story. That’s just how drama works.

It’s the same situation when you’re selling your products or services. You can’t just feed us information; you have to entertain us with the most compelling few points about why we MUST call now or order today. By all means, remain ethical about it, but remember to entertain! Too many businesses lard their marketing with endless laundry lists of specifications, features and benefits, bludgeoning us with completeness in the name of full disclosure. But in marketing, you have to cut to the chase. Make us go “Wow,” and then we’ll want to hear the rest of story. Otherwise, you’ll have a magnificently detailed show that no one wants to watch.