Show Sold Separately - Jonathan Gray

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responses to, and evaluations of this world will always rely upon paratexts too. Hence, since my book argues that a film or program is never the entire sum of the text, I will not conflate “film” or “program” with “text.” When I call for an “off-screen studies,” I call for a screen studies that focuses on paratexts’ constitutive role in creating textuality, rather than simply consigning paratexts to the also-ran category or considering their importance only in promotional and monetary terms.

      Nevertheless, the money trail might guide our initial foray into an off-screen studies, as an invigorated study of paratexts could address an odd paradox of media and cultural studies: while the industry pumps millions of dollars and labor hours into carefully crafting its paratexts and then saturates our lived environments with them, media and cultural studies often deal with them only in passing. How important are they? By late 2008, major studios were spending, on average, $36 million per film on marketing—a full third of the average film budget—while blockbusters could require considerably more. Smaller companies such as Lionsgate habitually spend up to two-thirds of their budget on marketing.5 Meanwhile, DVD sales and rentals handily eclipse Hollywood’s box office revenues, with, for instance, 2004 seeing $7.4 billion in rentals to theaters, yet $21 billion from home video.6 Even blockbusters and box office giants are seeing vigorous “competition” from DVDs; New Line’s $305.4 million of revenue for DVD sales of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) in 2003, for example, fell just shy of the film’s huge yield at the box office.7 And cineplexes are also being rivaled by the videogame industry—some of whose biggest hits are film and/or television spinoffs.8 In the world of television, as Amanda Lotz records, American networks and cable channels devote substantial advertising space to hyping their own programs. Network television alone, for instance, foregoes an estimated $4 billion worth of ad time in order to advertise its programs, airing over 30,000 promos a year. In 2002, the old WB network accepted more ads from parent company AOL Time Warner than from any other advertiser, suggesting how one of the great economic benefits of conglomeration has been the ability to advertise on commonly owned channels.9 Add to this the potentially colossal sums that media corporations can earn from merchandising, licensing, and franchising (in addition to Lord of the Rings, think Disney, Star Wars [1977], or The Simpsons [1989–]), and paratextuality is not only big business, but often much bigger than film or television themselves. Janet Wasko cites estimates that the licensed children’s products market is valued at $132 billion, that licensed products in general generate more than $73 billion a year, and that movie-based games earned the major studios as much as $1.4 billion in 2001.10

      And yet media, film, television, and cultural studies frequently stick solely to the films and television programs with a loyalty born out of habit. John Caldwell notes the film and television industries’ widespread devaluation of “below the line” workers as lesser than the “above the line” directors, producers, writers, and actors.11 Media studies, too, often risk a similar devaluation of those whose labor and creativity can be just as constitutive of the text as that of the above-the-liners. While this move is evident in the relative dearth of materials studying or even theorizing “below the line” work on films and television shows, it is similarly evident in the relative lack of attention paid to the semiotic and aesthetic value of the “below the line” paratext, or to its creators. Synergy is seen in terms of profits, but too rarely in terms of textuality, as something that creates sense and meaning, that is engaged with and interpreted as is the filmic or televisual referent, and that can ultimately create meaning for and on behalf of this referent. A key starting point for this book, then, is that if the film and television industries invest so heavily in previews, bonus materials, merchandise, and their ilk, so should we as analysts. It is time to examine the paratexts.

       The Movie of the Trailer

      Illustrating the power of paratexts with a playfully parodic nod was a brief video released in spring 2008 by the online satirical news outlet The Onion. “Iron Man,” the Onion News Network’s faux anchor announced, “was one of the most popular trailers of last summer, but controversy is sweeping the fan community today, following the announcement that Paramount Pictures is planning to adapt the beloved trailer into a feature-length motion picture” (fig. I.1). He then cut to a supposed entertainment reporter, who noted mixed reaction to the controversial plan to make a movie of the trailer:

      

      The Iron Man trailer is near and dear to a lot of fans’ hearts, so you can imagine how worried people are about this news. Apparently, the plan is to expand that fast montage of very short shots seen in the trailer into full-length, distinct scenes, and in between those scenes, they plan to add additional scenes that weren’t in the trailer.

      She also speculated on the prospects of the studio taking the fan favorite Gwyneth Paltrow, whose “notable” appearance in the trailer they clocked at three-quarters of a second, and placing her at the center of a “tedious romantic subplot that [is] twenty or thirty minutes long.” Both “reporters” react with mock incredulity at the notion that Paramount would jeopardize “the integrity of the trailer” and risk “alienating the trailer’s core fan base” with such a move, but the entertainment reporter reassures viewers that at least Paramount has announced that they will keep everything that audiences loved, “right down to actual lines from the trailer,” and have even brought Robert Downey, Jr., back to “reprise” his role from the trailer, and that they will release the film with eight “entirely new entertainment-packed trailers. So, even if the movie is no good, hopefully the trip to the theater will be worth it anyway.”

      The item plays with many anxieties of consuming media in a hype-, synergy-, and franchise-filled era, in particular the concern that the ads can prove better than the product itself, and that adaptations risk killing the core elements of the original. In doing so, it points to how complex our interactions with media are, and to how contingent they are on anticipation and expectation, on networks of paratexts, and on previous relationships to a story, character, actor, or genre. The parodic clip suggests the degree to which many if not all people going to watch the Iron Man film (2008) will already have started the process of making sense of it. Those who have read Iron Man comics, or perhaps played Marvel videogames, will have a sense of what lies ahead, as will (in different ways) those with a past knowledge of Downey’s, Paltrow’s, or director Jon Favreau’s work. And many will have seen the trailer, which was indeed spectacular, thereby creating the groundwork for the Onion News Network’s parodic story. Others will have seen posters, visited the website, read reviews, and heard or read interviews with Downey, Paltrow, or Favreau. Some viewers will have had expectations created simply due to the cinema in which the movie was playing, or due to the friends who invited them to come see it. Meanwhile, of course, thousands will have avoided the film, whether due to its genre, cast, or any of the above-mentioned instances of hype and synergy. In short, then, if we really wanted to make sense of the “moment” of interaction between film and audience, we would need to explore all those things that preceded the film, set the frames through which audience members would make sense of it, and set the stage for the kind of movie-going experience they would have. As categorically absurd as The Onion’s suggestion that the trailer has “integrity” to uphold might seem, the trailer would play a key role in determining how audiences came to the cinema, and what they came expecting. The film would have begun in earnest, then, with the trailer, or with the comics, the videogames, the interviews, the reviews, the ads, and so forth. The text, the essence, of Iron Man began long before the film hit theaters, so that when the film finally arrived, yes, it could radically revise that text, but it would not be working with a blank slate; rather, it would need to work through, with, and/or in spite of the multiple meanings that had already begun to form in audiences’ minds.

      However, this book is not simply arguing

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