E "Eddy"Edwards
Joe moves toward the covered corpse, inching quietly closer, closer, closer, the tension mounting. Suddenly, a lifeless hand falls below the edge of the shroud, revealing the body to be that of . . . a chimpanzee.
And so begins the story of Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder's vision of selling one's soul to Hollywood and the beginning of the end of Joe Gillis.
Which has little to do with the themed entertainment design and development racket (except maybe the "selling one's soul" part, but that's a matter for another time). Where this is going has to do with the story of how the scene itself, the monkey's funeral, was photographed. The story goes that the cinematographer on the movie, John F. Seitz, asked Wilder how he wanted this very atmospheric, very strange scene to be shot.
"Just the usual monkey funeral shot," Wilder said.
And the result was just that. The first monkey funeral shot in the history of the movies? Don't know, but it's certainly right for then and there in that movie.
Seitz didn't have to invent anything new to shoot that scene, no new equipment, no new techniques. He called upon his experiences and knowledge of his tools to create what was to his mind the right look and feel. Was there some other way he could have done what he did? Maybe, maybe not. Is it the same way the scene would have looked for Sam Peckinpah? Lina Wertmüller? Ed Wood? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps there is only one way in the world to get "the usual monkey funeral shot." But I tend to doubt it.
As is known by anyone who has delved into any sort of themed design and development, be it at the cruel bidding of themed entertainment (AKA "exit through retail"), themed retail (AKA "enter through retail"), museum, educational center, family entertainment center, or themed restaurant, it is almost a given that there will be much blood, sweat, tears, and corporate coffee spilled trying to figure out how to do whatever is the assigned task at hand.
From creating a multi-billion dollar themed entertainment complex to something really difficult like designing a visitor center that people actually want to visit, there will be "experts" aplenty to whisper into the client's ear about "the one and only right way" to do something, about the hard and fast rules of themed design and development: how to sell more / better / faster, the ways people experience out-of-home entertainment, how much text copy a museum visitor will read, and so on and so on and so on. "Hard and fast rules!" these charlatans will say, "break them and perish!"
By and large, however, such pronouncements are crap, except, of course, when it's you who make them. Then it's simply attempting to help the clients to make the right choices based upon our wealth of experiences.
What we do to make them big, big bucks is set up the usual monkey funeral shot. Little of what we do when we do what we do is the same old same old and the adherence to hard and fast rules has little to do with actually getting the work done. They are really much more (at best) about interpreting and using your wealth of experiences wisely ("here's what I've found works for me") and (at the way-worst) egregious self-promotion that muddies the waters for anyone else ("bend to my pompous rhetoric and cookie cutter approach to design, loser!").
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