A stranger walks in off the street, pays for a ticket and sits down in a dark room with other strangers to watch still other strangers cavort up there on the silver screen. Every week tens of millions of people around the world do this. Don’t they have something better to do with their time? Yes. Is there something else they’d rather do with their time? Not really. Lots of people simply love going to the movies.

For most folk, everyday life becomes fairly predictable. It’s one of the main reasons people enjoy being surprised in the relative safety, comfort and anonymity of the cinematic experience. They love the plot twists and turns, the latest thrills and spills, if we’re really good at our jobs, they empathize with our heroes and heroines, temporarily suspend their disbelief and actually root for them to succeed. Sometimes, it’s a life-altering experience.

We have become masters of manipulation. The music builds as the lone survivor of an impossibly difficult journey walks down the dusty road towards the old homestead. The long-suffering spouse looks out the window, her eyes widen in recognition and she runs to embrace the conquering hero. We get a lump in our throats. Just like coming home after another hard day at work, right? Sure it is.

It’s a dark and stormy night and something wicked this way comes. An innocent (or three) is thrust in the path of evil and we fear for their safety. Out of the dark, a hand shoots out and lands on someone’s shoulder. Adrenaline races through our body. They turn the corner or open a creaky door as we’re silently yelling at them not to - only to find their favorite cat (aunt, butler, missing boyfriend) in some horrifically gruesome position. We jump out of our seats faster than Pavlov’s dog.

A plain-faced comedian does or says something so blatantly stupid that we can’t help but crack up. There is no cinematic experience more cathartic than to be in a room with a couple of hundred people who all burst out laughing at the same sight gag. It’s like getting an instant tune up discovering that we are still in sync with all these other strangers. Laughter is Drano for the soul. Big laughs cause endorphin chemicals to be released into our body as we are enveloped in a feeling of wellbeing.

A boy cradles his best friends (fathers’, mothers’, sisters’, dogs’) dead or broken body and looks up into camera with tear-filled eyes and vows revenge to the heavens. We’ve all been wronged somewhere along the line and want to see the bastard who did this get their comeuppance. It doesn’t really matter to us if the actors involved in this memorable moment ever speak to each other again or send each other Christmas cards because this tearful scene has been captured for posterity and will stir audiences for years to come.

The audience is right there with the actors riding shotgun. We want the same things they want, the power over their own destiny, the righting of wrongs, finding a soul mate, going on great adventures, etc. That’s the beauty of what we do for a living. When we do it well, millions of people are transported to another time and place, made to care about people they will never know and enjoy sights and sounds they might never ever otherwise experience.

Unfortunately, too many of these collective cinematic collaborations turn out like cubist artwork. Seen by few, understood and appreciated by fewer. We can’t ever forget we’re dealing with a mass audience out there. Old, young, stupid, smart, black, white, yellow, brown, rich, poor, ugly, beautiful, caring and uncaring, they turn to us, depend on us, to help put this world in perspective for them. It’s an awesome responsibility and so few of us consistently get to do it well.

Pandering to the lowest common denominator in search of the quickest return on investment is the myopic corporate credo. Too many filmmakers simply acquiesce or have been forced by the committee to embrace the underlying “built-in obsolescence” philosophy of our disposable culture. “Cheaper goods at higher prices!” It is how the corporations make their living out there in the real world. Since they moved into Hollywood and bought up the old studios, why should mass entertainment be any different?

It is the difference between fine dining that you’ll always remember and a quick trip to the drive-thru. It’s the difference between a great painting hanging in a museum for a few centuries and a calendar on the wall from Earl’s Tires. When we, life’s storytellers, get our chances, part of our task is to elevate the audiences’ sights and encourage them to shoot for the stars. Get them out of that market-research-comfort-zone and make them think, care and feel for those strangers up there on the silver screen. We should always try to rediscover where the edge is and take it one step farther.

It has long been demonstrated that we actually have the ability to influence peoples’ attitudes about how they think, what they buy, and even how they feel about all kinds of strangers they encounter once they emerge from that darkened room (womb?) We create new ways for folk to look at and interpret this world we all live in. If our images are continuously filled with hate and disrespect for our fellow man, we have no right to be surprised when we reap a crop of violent, anti-social types. We have to fight the myopic vision that is blindly in pursuit of profits and figure out better ways, less harmful ways to tell our stories.

We have the power to influence not only what people want, how they talk and what they wear, but also to plant little ideas in their fertile imaginations that can sometimes become very important ideas. We allow the audience to plug into a dream state while they are awake. Powerful sights and sounds jump over the natural boundaries everyone has erected to protect themselves. Music can reach into our souls and excite us, inflame us, scare us, ennoble us. When combined with startlingly beautiful imagery, the experience can stir us like nothing else in the world.

We play with people’s heads. Unfortunately, these days, too many of the decision makers just think it’s a cool way to make big money and meet chicks.