Chasing Viewers Away
Some creative people get so successful they start showing contempt for the people who made them rich.
I can't say I'm impressed by David Chase's comments about Sopranos' viewers. Maybe he was just in a bad mood.
He seems to be unhappy that fans actually cared about his finale. "There WAS a war going on that week, and attempted terror attacks in London, but these people were talking about onion rings." Sorry, Dave. Why don't we just ignore your next project and read the news instead?
As for Tony Soprano himself, "The pathetic thing--to me--was how much they wanted HIS blood, after cheering him on for eight years." So you know both that fans approved of everything he did, and then wanted this fictional character dead. How faithless of them.
Chase wants to make it clear he wasn't yanking anyone's chain. "Why would we want to do that? Why would we entertain people for eight years only to give them the finger?" Gee, his fans are so stupid they can't even see how great he's been to them.
posted by LAGuy @ 1:32 AM
4 Comments:
I don't know- he just seems like a grumpy guy. He confounded expectations (in an unsatisfying undramatic way) and is probably tired of the complaints. On the other hand, I prefer his constipated audience-bashing over the JK Rowling outing of Dumbledore. At this point, the text ought to speak for itself- it is disheartening to think that the author is going to swoop in and deliver "definitive" extra-textual information is disheartening- She could have at least couched it as "I'd always imagined Dumbledore as... or "I suspect Dumbledore is..."
Sure Dumbledore- like many older academic bachelor characters might be gay (I thought of him more as asexual) but do we really need this after the fact stuff- if she wasn't brave enough to put in the book, she shouldn't wait until after she cashed her check to start parachuting in new plot lines.
It would have been much cooler if she'd said Dumbledore, or maybe Hagrid, is a pedophile. That would have given people a lot more to chew on. (And been more consistent with the books.)
I'm pretty sure she did so in the context of making sure the movie adaptation script didn't add something she considered wholly inconsistent with the character she had created. Not that there would be anything wrong with the movie making a character different than the writer had wanted (see Shining, The), but the scriptwriters have the right to know what she thinks, too.
OK I understand not wanting the movie to go off in new direction on her book- but to drop a big and new concept seems a little like overkill- what she trying to stop in the movie- a romance with Ms. McGonagle (she's got a past-her-prime of Miss Jean Brodie allure)? That Dumbledore was Christian Conservative?
Unless she is going to rewrite and reissue the books, I don't buy it and view it impermissible as authentic authorial intent.
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