The movie Million Dollar Mystery was made as part of a contest, where moviegoers who saw the movie had the chance to win a million dollars. If the producers of the movie had been charged by the bad movie idea police, I am sure their plea would have been, “No contest.”
#1 by RogerBW on July 28, 2013 - 8:02 pm
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Shades of Cannonball and its imitators and sequels too — the same problem of people scrabbling for a prize and the filmmakers expecting us to find their behaviour laudable. I suspect the problem is that the audience is expected to pick one person/team and cheer for it — which means that you can’t have one obvious underdog who needs the money to rebuild an orphanage while everyone else just wants hookers and coke, because everyone who’s seen a film before will know that the underdog will win. And yet, a nice guy couldn’t be allowed to lose. So everyone involved has to be greedy…
#2 by Richard on August 1, 2013 - 1:48 pm
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I always wonder who wins these sorts of contests / sweepstakes. I recall that whenever they used to show (for example) the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes winners, it was always some nice, middle-of-the-road, middle class, “middle America” type family. You never saw anyone on the order of a single retiree living in a cheap old apartment in a poor downtown neighborhood…