A Quote by Sam Wanamaker

It's very difficult to know exactly what a major audience is going to respond to. 'We know they respond to certain personalities. That has been proven by the success of certain people in television who have gone from show to show and carried an audience with them. Apart from that, it's very hard to say what formula works.
Ratings to me are a little like the Chinese Government. I don't fully understand what makes a rating go. I don't know what makes the American television audience respond to one person and not t another. There very seldom are great differences between many television personalities.
Usually it's just material that resonates with me and I never know exactly what that's gonna be. And there's obviously a certain persuasion, if you will. It's dependent upon the fact that I'm known for certain genres. So, that influences my decision making as well. I mean I'd love to, for example, do an action thriller but there are a lot of very talented people doing that and so it would be very difficult for me to switch over to that genre. So, I do look for things that I know (will resonate with) my audience.
My show is an anti-show and the audience have to want to listen. I'm sitting down, there's only one of me, I don't talk much to the audience and it is very quiet. I wouldn't be able to do that kind of show if people didn't know me and my material.
When the theater is gothic it matches the sensibility of the show. It's also very intimate. The audience is very close to the performers. The show is scary and the scary stuff always works best with an intimacy with the audience. And the show is erotic, and I think erotic always works best when it's close to the audience, as well.
People say that you can't change people's minds with a movie or book, but how do they get formed in the first place? They get formed by what we see and read. In a certain way, movies are ahead of their times. People make them and don't really know if the audience will respond to them. Once in a while, they do.
Failure turns into success. It looks like it happens overnight to other people, but it's just one person's determination to get past a certain goal. Everybody thinks it's an overnight success, but it's not. It's something someone has been working very, very hard on, and more than likely, has been too embarrassed to tell anybody. No one really wants to show other people their failures. They want to show their success.
Once I'm performing the show, I think that hour show has a certain intimacy with our audience. And that intimacy is through the lens and the live audience is a witness to that, whereas the audience at home is actually the object of my efforts.
Kids know what's going on. They always respond to The Beatles, for instance. Doesn't matter when they were born, they always seem to respond. Show me a kid who innately doesn't like The Beatles, and I'll show you a bad seed.
The Broadway audiences are very vocal and seem very engaged. For certain shows, especially with a show like 'The Heiress,' the audience's reactions sound like 'The Jerry Springer Show' sometimes. That seems to be a very New York thing. Oh, there's also the entrance round of applause here, which we don't get too much in London.
If you test Iron Man and that audience doesn't respond well, you can be damn sure that there is something wrong with the movie that you have to address. Because they're expecting a certain amount of action, right? They want a hero. There are certain things that have to be compatible with the way the audience is thinking about it. If you take some other film, like No Country for Old Men, you can end up with all kinds of crazy reactions.
You turn the computer into the storyteller and the player into the audience, like in the old days when the storyteller would actually respond to the audience, rather than just having the audience respond to the storyteller. I had an enormous amount of fun, actually, working on that.
You have to realize that people who bother to log on to anything and talk about a television show is a very specific fraction of the audience. It's not the general audience, so you can't get too crazy listening to just that. That's not representative, but they are the most dedicated.
Well, I think tone is very important with this show [Masters of Sex] because there are certain elements or certain aspects to the show that may be reminiscent of other shows. But, it really is a very new kind of show, in terms of the subject matter and the way it's being dealt with, and the fact that it's about real people and real events.
What's most important is to create an atmosphere that's real, providing characters the audience can root for. Once they become emotionally attached, that's the secret in building a show. The audience can see themselves in these characters, and they respond to the stories.
If you create something that is asking for people to respond as they're going to respond, you have to allow them to respond as they're going to respond. Some of the people are going to be uninterested and some people are going to be mad for some reason, which is their business. That's just the way the world is.
I've always been switching around the show to accommodate the audience, and you know it really makes it a lot more fun for me and keeps it fresh so that I'm not complacent with the same show every night and with every audience.
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