Oh no! I forgot the most important part of my plan to save cinema! Let me introduce you to The Tea Tour.

I made this whole todo and then I forgot the best bit.

I mean there's substantial things I forgot also, stuff about how films are made such as you could save cinema by paying a little more respect to screenwriters.

Examples of this include: I'm not saying studios shouldn't buy good spec scripts and then instead of making them into movies hand them over to directors who don't like them and put them through so many rounds of rewrites that the end film has absolutely no resemblance to the original script. I'm just saying that, if they do that, the rights to the original script should revert to the original writer so the movie it was supposed to be might one day exist.

Or: certain directors should recognise that they are not writers and should stop trying to write their own films. I think the term filmmaker has done a lot of damage here. As has the veneration of auteur films. Directing and writing are simply similar but different skill sets and some people are good at both but most are only really good at one and that's fine! If you view writing a script as an obstacle to be overcome in order to make a film then just get someone else to write the script!

(I've been listening to a lot of Going Rogue recently, the only good film podcast.)

But that's all beside the point. The point is this, my biggest idea to save cinema is, maybe counterintuitively, more promotion.

I know, I know, film promotion is a full nightmare zone right now. Everyone is everywhere trying to cover as much podcast/youtube ground as the can in the hope that a non-zero amount of clipped up content goes viral. No one has any confidence that any of this translates to actual ticket sales but it's somehow all we've got now, and we're going to keep doing it, over-exposing our actors until people who were once beloved become viscerally hated.

And I'm here to suggest we do more of that? Insane. And yet. Hear me out.

I call it: the Tea Tour.