Two bad examples we ought not follow
Two Lost Markets
In ‘How to Pick Your Readers’ I mentioned two industries of talespinning that had shut themselves off from the general audiences, and in the process entered into what seems like a permanent death-spiral of ever-dwindling audiences. Let’s look at them more closely to see if there are any lessons we can draw as to how to appeal to ever-growing audiences.
The two industries are American comic books, and erotic movies.
American Comics
In the 1940s comics were read by adults and kids alike, and young kids and older kids, and boys and girls. But the comic-book witch-hunts of the early 50s almost destroyed the industry. Such witch-hunts are a recurring feature of the American Puritan history. Comics came back in the pop 1960s, and managed to appeal to the baby boom generation kids who graduated high school and continued to read comics in college; as a result some comics dealt with more mature storylines. Active adults fans of comics began to attend conventions and to appreciate the comics as an art form, and this led to small-press prozines and fanzines and ‘underground’ or counter-culture comics. These small press comics were not distributed in the general stores, drugstores, and grocery stores where comics were sold; there were only a few distributors and limited shelf space. So there began to appear specialty shops that sold comics, all kinds of comics from all countries, all publishers — and nothing but comics and comics-related materials (such as posters and some other sundries that appealed to the counter-culture). In time the general stores, selling fewer comics, cut off distribution for them, and the industry came to depend on conventions, mail order, and comics shops almost entirely.
This resulted in a subculture of comics, cut off from the general public of readers.
Over the past 25 years this situation has improved only in a small way. Some comics were bound into book form and achieved mainstream critical notice. Art Spiegelman’s Maus is the best known example. The mainstream comics publishers, who had come to rely almost wholly on costumed hero stories with supernatural or science-fantasy backgrounds, were bought by larger corporations with movie studios, and a new cycle of big-budget comic-book movies began with Superman in the late 1970s. These publishers also rebound back issues to sell in book stores, which brought the true comics back to the public in at least a small way.
All the same, when we look at mainstream comics (as opposed to their high brow cousins the ‘graphic novels’) we find much less variety in the genres and kinds of stories they choose to tell, compared to the comics of the 1940s. Costumed heroes predominate now, and most comics appeal to comics fans and are not pitched to the general public.
Erotic Movies
American censorship of movies, brought in during 1933 to give teeth to prior laws and industry rules in response to a wave of sex films, gangster films, and potentially revolutionary films with political messages that challenged the old order in the Great Depression. Sex was the biggest thing to be pulled (along with all references to narcotics). These censorship rules were undermined in the 1950s, thanks to some producer-directors with greater authority, declining ticket sales, and an inflow of foreign films that were made outside Hollywood Censorship office rules, and marketed to urbane sophisticates. In addition a small subculture of ‘sexy movies’ long on titillation and short on graphic delivery, became more popular and entered the mainstream (or came close to it). Challenged with television (whose advertisers and heavy government regulatory boards demanded even more bland and inoffensive content), the movies began to offer racier content as an alternative television programs could not provide.
Beginning in the late 1960s hard-core ‘stag’ films were made feature length, with bigger budgets. (I believe Mona was the first of these, soon followed by the Mitchell Brothers’ San Francisco productions, and above all Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones which became causes célèbres as well as hugely profitable.)
In the middle 1970s however, these ‘hardcore’ films began to be shown only in certain dedicated theaters, usually the rundown movie palaces in downtown venues that the public had begun to abandon in the rush to suburbia starting in the early 1950s. These theater owners faced constant threats of legal action by the local police as well as federal agents, which bigger theaters dared not contemplate; the downtown theaters had no alternative but show sex films, kung fu films, ‘blaxploitation’ films, or shut down.
When the sex films were confined to this one block of theaters, they appealed only to one section of the general audience, and lost the others. In the 1980s direct videocassette sales added to theater receipts and brought in a minor boom in profits, leading to bigger budgets, literate scripts, and more ambitious directors and more beautiful and talented performers. This boom lasted only a few years, and videocassette sales soon made the theaters go out of business; a boom in building made the properties more valuable to be torn down and rebuilt as office buildings. This made the industry wholly dependent on the sales and rentals of videocassettes, and it is notable here that the country’s largest tape rental chain, Blockbuster Video refused to rent x-rated tapes at all.
The market was further reduced and specialized, and the experience of watching the sex videos changed from a group of people in a theater watching en masse to a solitary viewer, a couple, or a few friends in a living room. These fans of the industry increasingly rented more-specialized tapes, and the big budgets, the literate scripts, and more ambitious creators could only produce a few such ‘couples’ tapes’ a year. The rest of the market turned into ‘wall to wall’ sex tapes with almost no storylines, and specialty tapes appealing to a small sub-market of the broader erotic industry.
Lessons
Both these industries moved as industries into artistic ghettos, becoming available only to their fans and those who sought them out. Both isolated themselves from what we could call the ‘general audience’ and this removed many parts of the general audience from the readership, along with those people’s sensibilities and tastes.
On the whole we can say that the broader the audience, the more tastes and sensibilities will show up. In order to appeal to the most readers within the broadest audience of all, the ‘general audience,’ a talesman must offend as few as possible (ideally none) and offer some treats to each sub-group. A bit for the men, a bit for the women, something for the kids, something for the old, something for any race or creed (or at least nothing to drive away the members of any race or creed), something sad, something funny, some suspense, some love, and so on.
(Composed on keyboard Sunday, March 9, 2008)
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