Apparently a lot of the folks who were tricked into appearing in “Borat” by being told they were going to help out with a documentary are displeased with the deception. I think that’s rather understandable, for several reasons:
- Several of the folks feel they were represented poorly, in ways that could hurt their business. For example, the movie depicted roaches in a hotel that weren’t actually in the hotel, and now folks think the hotel in question has roaches.
- The movie folks did their darndest to make sure these folks didn’t figure out what was going on. It’s understandable given that they needed “realistic” reactions, but there’s no good reason why they couldn’t have gone back afterward and said, “okay, here’s what was really going on, now please sign these other papers.”
- Most of these folks got paid on the order of $150-500 for their roles, which is far less than normal for such a high-grossing movie. The least the producers could have done was gone back and made them feel appreciated, perhaps giving them a halfway decent unexpected bonus check.
There have been plenty of movies before where folks weren’t aware of the roles they were playing at the time, but the folks making the movies made it okay because they made those people feel appreciated after the fact. It seems clear the folks making “Borat” did no such thing, so I think these people have a right to feel used and angry. They were used, after all–they were given chump change and laughed at so that the producers could make millions. I’m no fan of spurious lawsuits, and I’m not sure that’s the best way to handle this, but I think it’s perfectly reasonable for these folks to feel they were wronged. It’s said that for a contract to occur there has to be a meeting of the minds–and it’s clear there was no meeting of the minds over these contracts.
Above link found on FARK.
Technorati Tags: movies, Borat
Anyway, the lack of posts over the past few days is due to a nice long weekend we took. We spent Friday in Virginia roleplaying and visiting with friends, and we spent the last couple of days enjoying ourselves. Of course now we need to catch up on chores, but it was worth it. The full set of level 70 designs have been deployed on CP:
And there are a bunch of new Adventurers’ Last Words designs as well (more to come!). Finally, after being stunned to hear that some actual media outlets thought that Bill Gates was the new secretary of defense, I hunted this bit of current events satire down for you:
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