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06/14/2006: "The Fast and the Fizzlin'"
It must really suck sometimes being one of the little people in Hollywood. No, I'm not talking about midgets - I mean all those people tasked with making some of the crap that passes for movies these days look like something you'd like to go see.
Case in point: Remember "The Fast and the Furious"? It was a pretty basic car movie best remembered as launching Vin Diesel's "career" and paying off Michelle Rodriguez's bar tab. But it did OK at the box office, which meant the inevitable sequel - "Too Fast, Too Furious" (clever, don't you think? Me neither). It didn't do as well, since none of the original cast came back, but it did well enough to make the suits upstairs think they could squeeze one more drop of blood out of the turnip.
Imagine you're a publicist in Hollywood. The studio folks come to you and ask that you craft the ad campaign for the next chapter in the saga - something called "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift". Like me, you'd first ask what the hell is drift? With a little research you'd find it's some kind of pseudo-racing that is the flavor of the day. So you have a sport no one has heard of set in a city no one understands with a cast no one knows. How do you pitch it? Damn right - fast car, sexy babe.
This is one of the promo images released for the film. No production stills, no cast photos - just the car and the girl.
What film is this for again? Ah, who cares. As the man in the Guinness commercial says, "Brilliant!"
