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Current Talk '04 I / Re:Are Focus Groups An Enemy Of Art?
« on: April 29, 2004, 12:14:32 AM »I think fresh opinion is useful. Doesn't mean it's always right, but it's useful. If you're working on something and absorbed with it, you automatically have total tunnel vision... particularly on pilots, where deadlines and crucial decisions are happening all the time. It's healthy to have the concepts and ideas challenged - if the work's good enough, it stands on its own two feet unassisted, as it should.
Any mass-media product has to find an audience - the focus group is no different from an audience greeting "Dark Shadows" on their TV sets come the fall. Testing is important, but it's not a question of changing stuff fundamentally to fit an audience. It's an altogether more subtle process, and the results can easily be as much a positive contribution as a negative one.
And Stuart makes some excellent points for the other side of the argument.
However, one could argue that in the case of "Fatal Attraction," the alterred ending (which MsCriseyde did so generously provide us) did indeed substantially change the original concept. And who's to say that the original ending wasn't good and that it shouldn't have been left to stand on its own two feet, as it were. There is a clear case where the results were far from subtle and where a completely new vision/ending was obstruded to suit the mass market because of focus group/test audience reactions...