Kitchen Hamlet, brought to you by...

I keep a Google alert set up for Kitchen Hamlet, so I can find out when people write about the movie, or when the trailer or images show up places. It doesn't get constant action, but things do appear. Sometimes, for reasons I don't understand, it brings up a page that has actually been out there for a while already.

Recently, an alert came up, so I followed the link. It led to IMDb, where there's a page for the movie, along with a trailer. I realized it was about to show the trailer, so I was preparing to leave the page, when an announcement appeared in the video screen, saying, "Video begins after advertisement." "Advertisement?" I wondered. "What advertisement?"

Sure enough, within seconds I was looking at car crashes, enormous flames, bodies in floods, and Simon Baker, in an ad for the tv show, The Mentalist. The commercial plaid out, the screen went dark, and then there was Pat Shaw as Hamlet, looking at me, about to speak.

I'm trying to sort out what was so odd about this experience. At one level, it was quite strange to see this commercial, any commercial, before Kitchen Hamlet. The film is about as uncommercial as it can be, perhaps intentionally, so there was a discontinuity between the two things. (I've also seen a car ad come up, I think, though I can't remember which; this was an even odder disjunction.) I have no doubt I agreed to something, in the process of posting the trailer, that gives IMDb permission to put up an ad before the trailer, so I'm not complaining that they snuck this in. I think I was most thrown by the commodification, or more accurately the commercial utilization, of the trailer and, by extension, of the movie. I have had thoughts about how we might sell the movie; I had certainly never thought about how the movie might be used to sell something else.

On the other hand, I was also secretly (well, not so secretly now) thrilled. There was something so pathetically validating about the feeling that anyone would bother to throw an ad in front of the trailer. I have proudly made an enormously non-commercial product, only to find myself excited to see it used for commercial means, and sitting cheek by jowl with commercial product. I was pleased, in essence, to have sold out, though the price was zero.

What conclusions? What nugget of wisdom from this dual response? None, I'm afraid. Just a musing on the allure of commercial validation. We've got the submissions going now. We've had a couple of rejections, and some encouragement. I hope I'll have more to share soon. Meanwhile, I find myself thinking about the secret truth that even when we want to hid our light beneath a bushel, we're hoping the light is neon, and the bushel at least a little translucent.

IMDb listing

Is there any process on earth less intuitive than posting or editing a listing on IMDb? I doubt it. Our IMDb listing is up now, and though it has repetitions, omissions, and errors to spare, it still feels like an accomplishment to have gotten it up at all.

At first, I submitted information through Withoutabox (the online service for submitting to film festivals), which is owned by IMDb. The Withoutabox site made all sorts of wonderful claims about how the easiest way to get your listing clear on IMDb was simply to transfer information already entered for film submissions. So I did. Oops. The result was a listing with about six names, half of them wrong.

No problem, I thought. I'll go over to IMDb itself and correct them. That's where the fun really started. There are these astonishing forms to fill out, none of which seems to give you the opportunity to correct earlier errors, and none of which made much sense on its own. So fine. I filled out the forms as best I could. And I waited.

Now IMDb makes clear they're going to take a while to process this information. What they don't make clear is that they're going to process it in random dribs and drabs, so that things get worse long before they get better. (Here, I will admit that all of my work on this issue may have had something to do with the fact that my own name did not yet appear anywhere in the listing.) Eventually, most of the information I sent in made it onto the site, though as I said, still with a number of goofs. I've submitted some more wonderful forms, and am hoping to correct some of those as well.

Next up, trying to get our trailer up on the site. Meanwhile, visit our IMDb page if you like, though I hope it will get more accurate, and more interesting, soon. Also, keep an eye out on our Kitchen Hamlet site for some stills and other pictures that we'll be adding soon.