Fej on Snakes on a Plane

I guess, just as marketers spend a lot of time coming up with ideas, products and technologies that will make you buy more stuff than you need, writers, too, spend a lot of time pondering and writing about potential doomsday scenarios. (As a writer and a marketer I'm guilty on both fronts).

Take the recent furor around Snakes on a Plane. Some would have you think this is the end of the world. Esquire and Salon just for starters.

This Samuel L. Jackson-starring movie caught fire this last winter, partially because one of the rewrite-script scribes is also an avid blogger. A few other things made this really take off in the blogosphere world.
* The 70s-era disaster-film feeling of the title was perfect
* Samuel L. Is a quality actor, who appeared to be attached to a hokey film
* Snakes on a Plane just sounds quirky

It has been widely reported that after the Internet brouhaha grew to an audible crescendo, the cast was called back for five more days of shooting. My assumption for this is the producers realized they might have something here, but with a few nagging question marks in the back of their minds.

My first assumption: the script had been through several writers, and the movie was potentially on the verge of having the directing credit heaped on good ol' Alan Smithee.

My second assumption: the last script writer missed the obvious opportunity to have Samuel L. say "There's mother f**kin snakes on this mother f**kin plane." A line of this sort can be attributed to Samuel L. in just about every movie he has been in - except for maybe Star Wars (though I thought I heard him mutter something about the "mother f**kin Siths" in Attack of the Clones)

My third assumption: the producers decided they wanted to try and make the movie better, befitting of an Internet craze. Keep in mind though, five more days of re-shoots is not the route to perfection. I'm sure they were planning on shining up the turd a bit.

Not delving into the origin of the title (I imagine a perfectly befitting and descriptive working title), Snakes on a Plane is not a test of the blogospheres movie making ability. It is not a sign of Hollywood's demise. It is a cheesy disaster/horror film that will give you exactly what you expect.

For me, I love what Samuel L. said about the simple title: "What are you doing here? It's not Gone with the Wind. It's not On the Waterfront. It's Snakes on a Plane!"

The title tells you exactly what you're going to get. There won't be anything to make you go home and contemplate the moral consequences surrounding incarceration and false rehabilitation, but you will get snakes on a plane.