When John Watson and I first came to Hollywood, we decided to meet with the marketing analysis people at Universal. We asked them one question: what do audiences want in their feature films? The answer that came back was stories that were “new”, “interesting” and “different”. Although the studios themselves were always puzzled on how to sell something they’d never seen before, they also knew the power of originality. If you take Steven Spielberg, for example, there really was no movie like Jaws before Jaws, or E.T. Close Encounters was also highly original. And to this day, Spielberg still brings audiences to theaters because they know they will experience things they’ve never seen before.
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