Reading comp PrepTest 106 · Section 4 · Question 26

Topic: Humanities

Paragraph 1

• Paragraph note
  • The movie industry has developed a mutually beneficial marketing relationship with the other mass media.
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
  • Origins: Hollywood star system, in which actors were under contract to a movie studio, was a result of the public’s interest in actors’ private lives (second sentence)
    • Public relations agents informed press about stars’ lives, and press promoted movies on the basis of this information (third sentence)
    • Press benefited financially from this, because the public went to the movies based on their publicity and found that movies were created by talented storytellers (fourth sentence)
  • Author’s attitude: “pervasive and influential” (first sentence); “feed into and off of” (first sentence); “whetting the public’s appetite” (third sentence); “additional virtue” (third sentence); “art of storytelling” (third sentence); “cultural cross-fertilization” (fourth sentence)

Paragraph 2

• Paragraph note
  • Movies and mass media are interdependent and sustain themselves with the notion that there are always movies worth promoting.
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
  • Other media do most of movie promotion for the studios (third sentence)
    • Many media outlets are already promoting movies, so there is a ready-made audience already interested (fourth sentence)
    • TV, radio, magazines, product ads (third sentence)
  • Author’s attitude: “mushroomed” (first sentence), “intricately interdependent” (first sentence), “sustains itself” (second sentence); “vast portion” (third sentence); “good business” (fourth sentence)

Paragraph 3

• Paragraph note
  • Problem: mass media promotion model has made movies less emotionally satisfying
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
  • Need to generate publicity has affected creation of movies (first sentence)
    • Studio execs choose subject matter and actors instead of writers and directors (second sentence)
  • Movies are made with an eye toward publicity rather than good art (fourth sentence)
  • This trend is likely to continue because it makes more money than producing emotionally engaging movies (fifth sentence)
  • Author’s attitude: “new danger” (fourth sentence), “audience’s curiosity” (fourth sentence), “engaging experience” (fourth sentence), “on the strength of media publicity” (fifth sentence), “word of mouth” (fifth sentence), “intimate relationship” (fifth sentence), “lost” (fifth sentence), “affect audiences emotionally” (sixth sentence), “increasingly rare” (sixth sentence)

Main Point: The system by which the mass media promote movies has created incentives for the film industry to make films that are easy to publicize rather than emotionally engaging.

Paragraph 1, Sentence 4 (P1 S4) - Mass media benefits by promoting movies

P2 S2 - Mass media constantly promoting something

P3 S1 - System of mass media promotion has affected creation of films

P3 S4 - Incentives to produce easily-promotable films rather than good ones

P3 S6 - Films that affect audiences emotionally becoming rare

Importance of Subject: This passage describes why the system by which the mass media came to promote movies is important. The author describes the origins of this system in the 1920s and traces the ways in which the system has grown and shaped the film industry. According to the author, the dependence of the film industry on the mass media promotion machine, and movie studios’ focus on turning the largest profit possible, have led them to focus on creating films that generate a large publicity buzz rather than films that engage emotionally with their audience. The author sees this as a problem and implies that the quality of films has suffered over the years. Moreover, the author says, this trend will likely continue into the future..

The minor Meta-Structure of this passage is Causality. It is the monetary incentive to create films that are easily-promotable that drives the film industry, the author argues, rather than the artistic motive to create films that connect emotionally with their audiences. Back in the 1920s, when the mass media just happened to begin promoting films because people were interested in the lives of movie stars, studios were still interested in creating films that could be considered vital pieces of popular art, but now, when the film industry and the mass media are so interdependent, studios focus on creating films that get viewers into seats just based on the publicity rather than on the content of the film.

This passage is rather hard to classify, because the author clearly points out a problem, but they don’t offer any solutions. The passage traces how the problem of the film industry’s dependence on the mass media arose, and how that problem leads to lower-quality movies, but it does not offer any ways of fixing the issue. This means it can’t really be classified as a Problem/Solution passage. It is simply an explanatory passage where the author has a definite viewpoint that they support using evidence.