I think most of the things we enjoy would be counted as guilty pleasures by someone else. You might say we’ve become guilty pleasure experts.
The other night, Garry and I watched “Paris When It Sizzles” on Netflix. Universally panned, it is generally regarded as awful. Except among movie buffs — like us — for whom it is an officially designated guilty pleasure.
We laughed all the way through it, although it isn’t supposed to be funny. It got us talking about other movies we’ve seen that were panned, but which we liked.
The one that came immediately to my mind was “Flypaper,” starring Ashley Judd and Patrick (“McDreamy”) Dempsey. It opened and closed without a single good review and made less money in its American release than I made on my last freelance job. But it cost $4,000,000 to produce.
On February 27, 2013, I reviewed it on Serendipity — FLYPAPER (2011): A PLEASANT SURPRISE. It’s been getting a slow but steady stream of hits ever since. When I looked in my stats, I saw I’d gotten a hit on that review, the source for which was Wikipedia.
Wikipedia? How could that be? I clicked. There was my review, referenced by Wikipedia. Flypaper (2011 film) has two numbered references in the reference section. Number 1 is my review. What are they referencing? The grosses.
That Flypaper made a pathetic $1100 and opened on just two screens in one theater during a single weekend. Serendipity is their source for this data.
Where did I get my information? I looked it up on IMDB (International Movie Database). Not the professional version. Just the free area anyone can access.
IMDB is, to the best of my knowledge, an accurate source. But it’s not a primary source. Clearly the financial data had to have come from somewhere else. Maybe the distributor? IMDB got the info from elsewhere, I got it from them, then Wikipedia got it from me. The beat goes on.
How in the world did I become a source? If you have ever wondered how bad information gets disseminated, this is the answer. I don’t think this information is wrong. If it is, it’s harmless.
But a lot of other stuff proffered as “fact” is gathered the same way. Supposed news outlets get information from the Internet. They access secondary, tertiary and even more unreliable sources. They assume it’s true. By proliferation, misinformation takes on a life of its own and becomes “established” fact.
Scholars, journalists, historians and others for whom truth is important should feel obliged to dig out information from primary — original — sources. A blogger, like me, who gets information from who-knows-where shouldn’t be anyone’s source for “facts” unless you’ve confirmed the information and know it’s correct.
For me to be a source for Wikipedia is hilarious, but a bit troubling. How much of what we know to be true … isn’t?
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Categories: Anecdote, Daily Prompt, film, Humor, Media, Movies, Show Business, social media
SERENDIPITY - SEEKING INTELLIGENT LIFE ON EARTH 
I just sent 20 bucks to those guys. They must know something!?
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They do. But they are definitely on more solid ground with entertainment than real history or science. They don’t “vet” their experts … especially considering that I AM one. I use them too, but never as my ONLY source.
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Yeah, I’ve some stuff on there that was glaringly incomplete – and other stuff that was false.
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The worst ones are those that have some parts accurate, with other piece that are wildly INaccurate. It’s just not good to use it as a single source. Really, if anything is important, you always need at least two sources.
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I was deeply troubled by LarBear’s reliance on Wikipedia for, ya know, anything worth knowing. It has been hard work converting him. 🙂
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Wiki is useful, but it should never be an ONLY source, is all. In any case, if you want to know something, you need to have at least two credible sources. Whether or not Wikipedia is credible is entirely dependent on who is their source for an item. Some of it is great stuff. A lot of it is someone’s opinion dressed up as fact.
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I don’t know if I should admit I saw a Summer Place when I was young and enjoyed it. Of course, as a teenager, I would have watched Troy Donahue paint a garage and didn’t we all want to be Sandra Dee? Ah, youth. 🙂
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I was 14 and thought it was the MOST romantic movie EVER. I grew up, but I still have a fondness for it and Percy Faith’s great score (which I used to play on the piano 🙂 )
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I recognised Troy Donahue instantly even though he was very young in this picture.
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He (Merle Johnson, Jr.) had a rather short, sad career. It ended when he started losing his looks and got serious about drug abuse. He died in 2001. I thought he was the hottest thing on the big screen when I was a teenage girl. 55 years ago.
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I haven’t had the honor of being a Wiki source yet, but I did get cited by an answer man on one of those “ask a question” sites in regards to old, obscure cartoons that were aired on Nickelodeon in the 80’s. I’ve gotten maybe 10 hits from that link in the year and a half since it was written, so I’m a trusted source of information for 80’s cartoon geeks everywhere!
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Doesn’t it make you feel proud? I glow in the respect and honor of my colleagues 🙂
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Wikipedia is fun to look through – I have been watching the latest series of Project Runway – I knew who had won right from the beginning – they had added the losers every week. Trouble was someone had done it in order of losers – so that the top one was the winner. Spoilsports.
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Wikipedia is good on the entertainment stuff … mostly. Except when they are not. But they are great at documenting episodes of shows that ran for 12 years so you can look up anything that ever was on TV. They can be wildly inaccurate on other things … so you have to be careful about what you believe, and what you don’t. I’ve found them good on movies, too. Lots of back stories.
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Wikipedia! I actually AM a REAL authority on Sarah Hale and Godey’s Lady’s Book. I edited the Wikipedia entry and added photos of Sarah Hale’s anti-slavery book, “Life North and South” which I OWN and which is inscribed by her cousin… My comments and the image were disputed and deleted by an “expert” — it led to a pretty ugly communication and my exercising incredible restraint in not calling her a pretentious, immature and ignorant c word.
She was probably more invested in being the “writer” of the entry than she was in presenting something interesting and accurate. I backed off thinking of all the research I’ve done for my historical novels and how much I thought I knew (proudly) that was wrong…
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There are a lot of serious inaccuracies on Wikipedia. I have no idea how they decide you are officially an expert. A friend of mine found the entry about himself and tried to correct it. They told him he wasn’t an expert. He said if he wasn’t an expert about his own life and where he worked, who was? Apparently being the person under discussion is insufficient for expert status … so you gotta wonder who you have to sleep with to be crowned with expertise.
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It’s just insane, but we turn to it anyway.
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Yeah, I just looked at the Sarah Hale entry again. They can’t even get it that Edgar Allen Poe was its literary editor for five years. It’s written in that kind of BS prose that some young people write today, sanctimonious and noxious, from having learned nothing in school but propaganda.
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We just came back from an evening with friends. He’s an English professor at UMass … and talk about stories. I am SO glad I’m neither a student or a teacher anymore. It’s really awful. What happened to students who are interested in learning? Where have they gone?
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No Child Left Behind took that all away from them. It is heart-breaking. Send my good wishes to your friend and my sympathy. 😦
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It’s a sad time for education. Everywhere in the country.
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Obama’s new bill — just signed — will be an improvement as it removes 2/3s of the standardized testing and it requires a more rounded approach and individualized education but who’s going to be teaching? the idiots I taught the last few years in the classroom. Robots. OH well.
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Things change. Maybe — just once — they will change for the better. I’m glad they passed the bill. All this standardized testing is destroying real learning.
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Very strange but true. At times it is scary that what we think is the primary source of information takes information from other sources and today anything can become established fact/truth if it is getting repeatedly hits on net though must be a great feeling to see your review as no.1 on wiki.
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I was just surprised to discover I was an expert when I most assuredly am not, nor did I ever claim I was. Someone else decided and who knows based on what?
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It is by a similar process that an article I wrote back in 2013 has now become the Internet’s most popular source on Mark Hamill’s face. Specifically the car crash he had in 1976 which urban legend holds (falsely, it seems) disfigured him. It’s now linked on Wikipedia and several other sites as a source. I did research the article and incorporated as much primary source stuff as I could (such as what Hamill himself said happened), but I completely understand where you’re coming from…if I’d decided to just throw any old thing up there heedless of its veracity, it would today be reinforced as “truth.” A good cautionary tale of how the Internet works, and doesn’t work.
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What they are using of me is, as far as I know, accurate and comes from a primary source. But I doubt Wikipedia checked ME out so it’s just luck that the information is correct. It’s so easy to make anything you want into “truth” if you simply repeat it enough on the net.
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Cool, I’m gonna try posting some dubious information to see if I can get referenced on Wiki. I might even try pulling the data from something I’ve posted elsewhere and completely made up, just for a laugh 🙂
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Keep at it and I guarantee, you WILL be. Simple rumors spread as jokes can derail presidential campaigns. People are incredibly gullible and much too lazy to check sources.
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My good old dad, now 100 years old, always judged those films as a good old reject and I am sure they were, but they are fun. A good friend of mine that has a Bestsellers forum site, just posted this link Books you’ll never brag about having read and it is quite a good list. There are a few there that I have read, and am glad I read them.
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Perhaps your site doesn’t accept html links, so here is is again
http://www.listchallenges.com/books-youll-never-brag-about-having-read
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As far as I know, this supposedly accepts everything, but since WordPress has been mucking about, a lot of things don’t work like they used to … especially various problems with HTML and pictures. I keep adapting, but for each adaptation, another restriction or bug shows up. Oy.
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I’ve read about half of the older books, hardly any of the newer ones. Back when I was young and actually working at Doubleday’s book club division, I read — got PAID to read — every junk novel that we featured in any of the book clubs. Getting paid to read junk novels was the best work I ever got and I read EVERYTHING. I do mean all of it, to the dregs. I can’t remember much of it, but I have this pile of sludge in my memories that I think is all those books all smooshed together 😉
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Someday I’ll have to post a list like that, assuming I can remember anything 🙂
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A tasty Mulligan’s Stew. A few holiday guilty pleasures Dvr’d. “I’ll Be Seeing You”, “Christmas In Connecticut”, “Holiday Affair”, “Remember The Night”, “The Bishop’s Wife”, etc. And, we have a few of those old Christmas TV variety shows including “The Andy Williams Show” and “The Judy Garland Show”. I love ’em.
I’m waiting for this year’s “NCIS” Christmas show. No guilty pleasure here. Just my source of the absolute truth. Gibbs’ gut.
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I am a source in a book that has a picture of a nude woman on the cover. It’s one of my greatest accomplishments.
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Rick, I just read the articles.
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I so envy you. To have contributed to pop culture and with a nude woman cover! What scholarship! You deserve a Pulitzer, at the least … and maybe a Nobel 🙂 Those prizes are too snobby anyhow.
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