New Trailer for Saturday Night – Better but Still Old School

A new and somewhat better trailer for Saturday Night is better than the first one. It showcases some of what is good about the movie. It takes a while to wind itself up and then ends with a bang. Maybe they want people to actually buy tickets to see it, I don’t know. Hollywood isn’t so good at selling movies lately and maybe that’s because they are stuck in the old model of advertising them:

It’s probably easier for me to criticize the awards game now that I’ve been ousted from it. The irony is that I was ousted for a joke I made on Twitter, and this is an industry that is pretending to stand on the side of free expression and great comedy. They don’t.  They also don’t care about loyalty. Over 25 years of selling their movies, advocating for awards wins goes out the window when their status is at stake. That doesn’t make them heroic. It means they’re buying into the new Black Lists, and that is largely what has led to paralysis of Hollywood.

Everyone I know in the awards game feels happy when they see their name as a blurb. Now that a publicist said my name could no longer be used it’s hard for me to look at them the same way ever again. And that made me wonder if they are even necessary. They’re what, decades in use by now? My daughter isn’t going to care who said what about a movie, especially not some of the names you see — no offense to them. They play the game and they play it well.

The people who drive excitement for movies are outside of the teeny tiny bubble Hollywood has become. YouTubers with large platforms. Influencers on TikTok. They’re slightly harder to control, of course. They don’t care if you stop using their names as blurbs or stop inviting them to parties or screenings. The Oscar game is a small pond with a lot of big fish. It’s like the Royal Court of King Louis IX just before the revolution.

I played the game for a long, long time. I needed the money. I still need the money, but not enough to live in fear that what I might say, write, or think would end my 25-year career. We’ve all been conditioned to accept this as the new normal. But there is nothing normal about it. This climate of fear, this authoritarian censorship of “high-profile” big fish, is what has destroyed Hollywood. And unfortunately, too many people  keep their heads down, or worse, participate in something that is morally wrong and always has been.

That’s why content is bland across all or most platforms that rely on Hollywood money. It was so much better once upon a time when there was freedom of voice. That freedom exists, just not inside the insular world of publicists, bloggers and the shrinking awards race.

Quite frankly, Saturday Night deserves better. It deserves a slightly different kind of rollout. Sold like this, via channels that are dead to people like my daughter and her entire generation, I fear it will not make a dime. And it deserves to be seen.

True, they have Kaia Gerber, which might attract some Gen-Z eyeballs. And maybe money isn’t the end goal here anyway. Maybe they just want to qualify for a theatrical run and drop the film into the content churn to be discovered in the years to come. Is that the new model?

Twitter might seem loud, but it isn’t. Its reach is small, and the reach for the Penske empire is small, too. It’s big, by awards standards, of course, but it’s like the air in the First Class section of the airplane—it just keeps recycling through for the same people.

If it’s me, I show the movie to Critical Drinker on YouTube and get his early review. A single blurb by him would push the movie much higher at the box office. If awards are the end-game, and their reach is only inside the tiny world of the Oscars, then it’s a good trailer. But if you want to make money, you have to join the modern world.

Just my two cents as a canceled witch in Salem.