Wil Wheaton's Geek in Review: One Big Focus Group

My train ride to Comic-Con from Los Angeles was filled with Hollywood fucks, talking too loudly on their cell phones, bitching out their assistants, and trying to impress each other with how many scripts they had brought along to read.

Oh man, I thought, is this what Comic-Con is going to be like? A bunch of industry douchebags who think we're just a big focus group of nerds?

My fears appeared to be realized when I opened up McPaper, and read a story on page one of the Life section all about how Hollywood executives come down to Comic-Con to use the largest gathering of Nerds this side of Mos Eisley Spaceport as a giant focus group.

The article mentioned something about a movie called Watchmen, which was about "a slain superhero."

Oh for fuck's sake. Why not just call Star Wars a movie about "a captured princess"?

I read my book (the 2007 Nebula Awards Showcase, for those of you scoring at home), turned on my noise canceling headphones, and did my best to lose myself in Dark Side of the Moon and the planet Mars. Hrm, come to think of it, that's what people have been doing with Dark Side of the Moon since it was released in 1973.

Once I arrived at Comic-Con, my fears were put entirely to rest. My fellow geeks were everywhere: guys with ponytails and trench coats, mostly-naked women and the men who think they have a chance to score with them, and some of the most elaborate and awesome Transformers costumes I've ever seen. After suffering through the highest concentration of Hollywood fuckery I've seen in a decade, it felt good to be back among my people, even if the Hollywood fucks just thought of us all as a giant focus group and invaded our party as a result.

This makes me wonder something: if we actually are a huge focus group, wouldn't they, you know, listen to us? We're not just a huge market with a lot of disposable income for you to exploit; we actually care about this stuff, and if you keep fucking it up, we're going to stop buying it. Think I’m bluffing? Go talk to anyone associated with Elektra. Or Captain America. Or Fantastic Four. Or Ghostrider. Or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Or Daredevil.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Lord of the Rings proved that it’s possible to please the geeks and the mainstream audiences by simply serving the story that’s endured for decades, not making it “fresh” or “new” or “dumbed down by an industry fuck because he’s too stupid to understand it.”

Now, it’s not entirely Hollywood's fault. It’s not that they don’t want to understand us, it’s that they’re incapable of understanding us. A studio fuck who wants to bury his face in a mountain of blow while two whores he picked up at the Rainbow Room spit on each other doesn’t live in the same world as a comic book geek who wants to bury his face in the collected works of Neil Gaiman while his girlfriend gets dressed up as slave girl Leia.

For those executives, I present a very brief, very simple primer in understanding geeks: We want this stuff to be done right because we’ve lived it for our entire lives and know it better than any of you ever will. We’ve played with the action figures and written the fan fiction and crammed fifteen of our friends into the hotel room so we could afford to go to the conventions where we buy T-shirts that say HAN SHOT FIRST because, goddammit, this stuff is our lives. Before we could talk to girls, there was Princess Leia. Before we had cars, there was the Batmobile. Before we could find escape from the horrors of modren life in a bottle, we escaped into the pages of comic books and science fiction magazines.

These stories that you buy and put on the big screen may just be numbers on a yearly accounting to you, but they are more than that to us. To us, they are something that brings us together and makes us part of an exclusive (and frequently stinky, unfortunately) club.

For example, while I walked down the middle aisle of the convention hall on Thursday, I passed a huge Lucasfilm booth. A scene from Star Wars played on a giant LCD screen: Darth Vader tells Grand Moff Tarkin that he senses something he hasn’t sensed in a long time. Without even thinking about it, I spoke along with Vader as he said, “Obi-Wan is here. The Force is with him!” There were about two dozen Star Wars Geeks watching the scene. All of us unselfconsciously spoke the quote aloud, and then immediately grinned at the shared experience.

How many of us do you think were really excited to find out that the Force is a fuckin’ virus?

Batman Begins, Sin City, and V for Vendetta worked because the actors never overwhelmed the characters, and the screenplays were all true to the source material that made the comics worth optioning in the first place.

Hollywood faces its greatest challenge in the history of adapting comic books to movies with Watchmen. Many executives won’t understand what it’s about. Neither will their young, allegedly hip assistants they hired out of Harvard Business School.

If Hollywood really wants to do this right, and really doesn’t want to fuck it up, my advice is to listen to the focus group at Comic-Con. I mean, really listen, because if Hollywood fucks up Watchmen, there’s going to be a nerd riot so terrifying, it will be like a thousand studio executives cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Wil Wheaton went to school with 27 Jennifers.