Parallel Synchronized Randomness*

The delightful blog PhotoshopDisasters has a post on the abysmal one-sheet for the upcoming rom-com crapfest "The Accidental Husband". I posted a comment, but I am not sure why I didn't write about a similar event here. Maybe the pain of thinking about it was just to great and I had purged it from memory. Freshly reminded, alas, I am here now to correct that oversight.

Months ago at the cinema, we received a one-sheet for "The Accidental Husband". The poster case wasn't even closed and locked, yet my mockery of the poster started.

"Good lord!" I exclaimed to my concessionists. "His hands are enormous!" I was pointing to Colin Firth on the right.

Some of the Stand people scurried over to give it a closer inspection. "They are enormous! They're huge." Employees starting gazing at the palms of their hands for perspective.

"Yeah," I moaned, "those are some serious 'Science of Sleep' hands."

Everyone was standing around gawking at their own hands, looking at the poster, back at their hands, just to see, just to be sure.

I shook my head and gestured with my hand at the poster. "Promise me if I should ever be falling from the sky in a wedding dress, that, uh, maybe you look a little bit more like you may be in a position to catch me. Neither of them are underneath her."

I could drone on, but over the next ten days or so we mocked the inconsistencies on the poster. It was nice; it brought us together as a team. A true bonding experience. Then, the enormous Ode to Corrugated Cardboard Lobby Display arrived, which we assembled. Discussions over the size of the hands were non-stop, as the near life-sized OtCCLD for the film truly accentuated this design flaw.

With the display, I removed the one-sheet from the display case. I walked upstairs to the employee breakroom. I pinned it to the wall and left a few magic markers on the table. It didn't take long before tired, hungry and hateful staffers truly turned the poster for "The Accidental Husband" into a true work of modern art. Priceless. Here we were, months later, still bonding as management and staff over the genius of this poster. I was going to take a photo of it someday before someone took it home (without permission).

As I pointed out in my brief comment on the PhotoshopDisasters blog, I simply cannot comprehend how movie studios and producers will spend $30 million, $40 million, $90 million dollars on a film, then obviously scrimp-and-save on the advertising artwork. I can just hear the executive producer of the film saying, "Hey, I bought Photoshop 2.0 off of eBay for my kid's Mac. Let's have him design the poster so I can write off that software purchase on my taxes."

C'mon. If Samuel Z. Arkoff (of American International fame) had it right: design the poster/advertising first, then the screenplay, then make and release your shitty movie. Hey, it worked and got me to spend some hard-earned babysitting monies on seeing "FROGS" back in the day; it certainly could work to put some rumps in our seats for a romantic comedy crapfest like this.




*The post title refers to PSR (Parallel Synchronzied Randomness), which is fully explained in Michel Gondry's extraordinary film "The Science of Sleep".