I got a call from my lawyer a few days ago. She was calling about a writing contract we were negotiating, but it was hard to hear her over the background noise.
“I can barely understand you,” I said. “Can you get to a quieter place?”
“I wish I could,” she answered. “But I’m in the middle of this big event. So much noise and crazy people in costumes and chaos. This is the quietest place I could find.”
She is an entertainment industry attorney, and I assumed that she was in San Diego at the annual comic book convention called Comic-Con. The event started years ago as a way for comic book fans – nerds and shut-ins, mostly – to get together and dress up as their favourite characters, trade comic books and memorabilia, and in general create a safe space away from the kind of people (like me) who think this sort of thing is a giant waste of time.
Over the years, Comic-Con has evolved into a major gathering. Movie studios premiere their superhero pictures there, hold sneak previews of upcoming projects, and drum up buzz among the diehard superhero and comic book fans. Television shows hold cast autograph sessions, panel discussions, costume contests – whatever the marketing and promotion departments can dream up. Thousands of fans throng the main hall and the convention centre is ringed with weirdos in costumes expressing their fealty to what is now called, with a straight face, their specific “fandom”.
My attitude about these things, I admit, is out of step. Comic-Con is an important part of the entertainment industry promotion machine. These days, to be featured at the convention doesn’t even require that a project be in the superhero or fantasy realm – family sitcoms, political dramas and even romantic comedies have held sessions at Comic-Con. What makes the event so tantalising to studio and network marketing departments is the very thing that makes it so off-putting to me: it’s a gathering of passionate, neurotically obsessed fans of entertainment in general. This shouldn’t be something that I instinctively recoil from. I am, after all, in the entertainment business, and if I want to stay in the entertainment business I need to learn to love Comic-Con.
To be successful in the age of multichannel television and always-on video streaming, a project needs to attract a red-hot molten core of enthusiastic fans, people who will share, like and post about a movie or television show without a trace of embarrassment of self-consciousness. In other words, if you want to have a hit, you have to win over the nerds and the geeks. You have to identify which specific fandom your project appeals to – superhero freaks, fantasy or science fiction nuts, animation addicts, detective movie buffs, whatever – and the marketing department needs to identify them at the event by their fandom uniforms and shower them with attention and insider information and promotional gift items.
“What fandoms do you belong to?” is a question that Comic-Con attendees, and studio salespeople, ask a lot.
My lawyer was there, I guessed, in her professional capacity, because she represents some projects and people at the event. That was my hope, anyway. It would be disconcerting to discover that my attorney – who I always assumed was a no-nonsense, emotionless automaton like all effective legal advocates – was traipsing around the San Diego Convention Center dressed like Princess Leia, collecting studio swag and trading Star Wars memorabilia.
Nobody likes being called a weirdo or a nerd, especially weirdos and nerds. So if there’s one thing I’ve learnt about the people who go to Comic-Con because they want to, as opposed to those who go because they have a movie or television show to promote, is that the former group can get awfully touchy and insulted if you strike the wrong tone of voice when you ask: “Why on Earth are you at Comic-Con?”
Like, for instance, you shouldn’t say: “Why on Earth ...” You should just say: “So, Comic-Con, huh? Sounds like fun.”
“So, Comic-Con, huh? Sounds like fun,” I said to my lawyer.
“What?” She said. “I’m not at Comic-Con.”
“But you said there were crazy people there, in costumes? Lots of noise? Chaos?”
“I’m at the Democratic National Convention,” she said. “I’m finalising the contracts for some of the musical performers.”
The truth is, those two venues aren’t all that different. The key to both of them is to gather the true believers under one roof, get them excited about a (probably mediocre) product, and hope that they spread their enthusiastic devotion far and wide.
Politics and entertainment, sadly, in the contemporary United States requires a fair amount of hucksterism and salesmanship. To succeed – at the box office or at the polling place – you have to win over the weirdos.
Rob Long is a writer and producer in Los Angeles
On Twitter: @rcbl