During a recent conversation with Don Kennedy, Kathleen Kennedy’s father, he asked if I knew why Redding has such a difficult time attracting movies like “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” the film his daughter produced and premiered at a special event just for Redding.
I didn’t know the answer; but he did.
Don said film companies judge a community’s level of sophistication by its number of fast-food restaurants.
If this is true, this explains a lot.
Perhaps film companies assume that more fast-food restaurants means more poor people, and more poor people means more uneducated people, and more uneducated people means a less sophisticated population, and a less sophisticated population wouldn’t be interested in films of substance.
Mr. Kennedy explained that the higher the number of fast-food restaurants per capita, the less likely film folks will release their most sophisticated films into that community’s theaters.
Surely we’d get extra credit for having more Starbucks.
This conversation got me wondering whether such corporate department store chains as Macy’s, Gottschalks and even Target decide what to sell here based upon Shasta County’s proliferation of fast-food places.
I seem to recall this topic discussed just before Gottschalks’ much-anticipated arrival, something to the effect that the Redding store’s merchandise would be specially selected with the north state “market” in mind.
At the time I wondered in a column if that was just wink-wink retail code talk for racks of polyester duds adorned with country fringe, and sweatshirts decorated with chubby-whubby bears with outstretched arms and the embroidered message, “I wuv U dis much!”
This subject is quite timely, since I happened to shop in a Long Beach Target a few weeks ago, and was blown away at the women’s clothes. They were really cute and trendy. Not to diss our Redding Target, but I don’t recall seeing those quantities of jazzy outfits here.
But back to movies. Were it not for the Kennedy family’s kindness and influence, Redding area movie audiences would never have seen some compelling, rich films that were scheduled to zoom right past Redding without even stopping for gas. Case in point, of course, was the most recent, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” where the Kennedys were certainly our French film connection.
This explains why Redding-area theaters are steeped with movies that lack intelligent plot and dialogue, but are packed with shoot-’em-ups, car-chases, gratuitous sex, violence and sophmoric humor.
No wonder we can watch the Academy Awards and feel dumb and dumber because we’ve never seen many of the films nominated by Academy members as the very best. We never saw them, because they never saw Redding.
Yet one more reason why fast food isn’t good for us. Who knew that every new fast food restaurant was yet another nail in the north state’s cultural coffin?
What is one to do when one lives in a region that loves food places like Las Vegas loves light bulbs?
Pass the Kleenex. Hold the popcorn.
