While visiting at a friend’s recently, we passed through his house at which time I spied his daughter glued to a broadcast of a Michael Jackson concert. At several points, the crowd reaction was insane: countless fans were screaming and crying and blubbering to the point of hysteria–all conveniently recorded by the camera crew–and some were actually reaching out toward Jacko in a desperate pleading gesture as though he were the messiah. Nuts! I thought the whole thing was an orchestrated gag.
I’ve seen similar gushing of emotion for various bands on Leno and Letterman. I’m not talking about robust applauding or mild cheering. I’m talking about people going ape and girls screaming like maniacs. All of this makes me wonder: are these people actually hired by celebrity flacks, or–perish the thought–are there really people this nutty?
Feel free to support your argument with amusing anecdotes.
in my experience, it is legitimate. having recently been a teenager, i’ve been to a few pop concerts, and i have even seen people i know inexplicably transmogrify into flailing cultists.
my theory: music has as yet unexplained effects on human psychology and physiology. to put it bluntly, we aren’t quite sure why we like music. this results in music having a connection to our “souls” (definition: parts of our minds that modern science can’t yet poke with a stick) that we can’t explain, but nonetheless is very powerful. fans who listen to certain music a lot come to feel that the artist who creates it does everything intentionally, often adding that (s)he does it especially for the benefit of that specific fan. like a god, the artist can simultaneously please each fan exactly how they need to be pleased. in short, it comes from giving the artist more credit than they deserve.
the phenomenon is enhanced with women; in fact it is nearly exclusive to them. the farthest it goes with a man is when he screams the artist’s name at the top of his lungs over and over again (i have witnessed this). i suspect it is because men are conditioned to contain their emotions, but it could also be due to the difference in the way the sexes feel love. there is a secondary drive, however, to collect memorabilia and create tributes, and this is at least as strong in men as in women.
secondly, it always seems to be focused on an individual. you don’t see girls screaming “the beatles!!!” but you do see “john!!!” and “ringo!!!” (that is, if you are watching a recording of a beatles concert). this leads me to believe that the nature of this is more sexual than spiritual.
if you want to see it in action, pick a hugely popular artist, then find an online message board devoted to them. it can be quite disquieting.
on the other hand, i would not be surprised if some artists did hire professional fans to enhance the appearance of their devotional crowd. in most cases, it wouldn’t be necessary. people travel hundreds of miles to scream at their favorites.
Perhaps it is a similar unholy pact: Scream and blubber like a woman once blind but now can see, and the concert promoters will place you in the very best seats in the house.
The crowd enthusiasm scenes on battlebots are all staged. They take a group of photogenic and ethusiastic spectators, arrange them on an empty set of bleachers, and tell them to yell. My friend was once in such a group, but he wasn’t excited enough, so they moved him out. On that episode you can see shots of the same thing (a bunch of guys with words painted on their chests chanting) both with and without my friend in the front row.
Not actually about Hollywood, but I remember reading an article about a small company where you could hire pretend diehard friends, even if you weren’t famous at all. This might have been in Australia or the US - I can’t remember.
IIRC, their services were usually used as gag gifts - a husband would hire them to shriek and ask his wife for autographs, etc. I think one aspiring actress hired them to take photographs and scream while she was having lunch with her agent in order to make a good impression.
Ha , I’m not sure about Hollywood but the BBC sure does fake the audience how do i know this?. Because I have been on the audience of several TV shows . They start with someguy asking you to jeer and boo,then record it , they then do another scene of you guys going nuts and record it.
The real show is done and the audience shots edited in , sometimes they do the audience thing and then tell the fake audience to leave the studio.Its not paid which is bad and some shows have nerve to ask you to pay for it and then tell you to go away after the star of the show comes in .
This is an old, old idea that predates Hollywood and modern media. It used to be much exploited in the theater and especially opera houses. Egotistical actors and divas used to buy seats up near the front for impoverished students to attend, on the condition they pay tribute with loud applause for their patroness.
They weren’t doing this any of the times I’ve been there. They do occasionally point the camera at the audience and ask them to scream and cheer when there’s nothing going on, but they also take footage of the crowd during the actual fights.
Now, at Robot Wars and Robotica, there are entire days of filming of crowd reaction shots in which no robot even gets near to the arena.
Having been to several filmings of pilot episodes of sitcoms, writers and producers always bring in friends who are seated near the overhanging microphones to laugh loudly at the lamest of jokes.
I also know that companies that supply extras for shows often supply audience members to shows like “America’s Funniest Home Videos” “Bloopers” and other such claptrap. So when you see the audience guffawing and rolling in convulsions at the un-amusing clip of a baby spitting up, they are getting paid $50 a day to do so.
Laugh tracks have also taken over to “enhance” the audience reactions.
For that matter, Michael Flattley’s (sp?) Lord Of The Dance show here in the Las Vegas NYNY Casino show also use tapes to “enhance” the sound of the tap dancing shoes on stage…so anybody with palsey in their arms and no rythmn can be a dancer in that show.
Ain’t showbiz great!
And you were right!
The only time I attended a concert where the crowd was in a frenzy similar to what I think the OP describes was when I went to a Beach Boys concert with my then-14 year old older sister and some of her friends.
Nobody did anything special to whip the crowd up, and they were maxed from the moment they entered the Music Hall. You could smell it.
I never heard the band, as they were completely masked by the cacophony of teenage female squeals. All in earnest, AFAICT. Some crowd behavior phenomenon in action.
This has nothing to do with the staged audience frenzies some mention. I suspect a lot of what is broadcast is of the manufactured frenzy flavor, but the “crowd goes nuts” thing does happen.
I’ve been accumulating most of the Seinfeld episodes, and after watching several hours of the stuff, you can definately start to sense “fake” laughter. It almost seems like they have some big sample box with hundreds of audience laughter scenarios to choose from and they just que up a fitting one, complete with distinguishable trail-off cackling from some gal or guy…
…this is of course pure speculation, and I still love Seinfeld…
Is there some Hollywood terminology for such people? Does the producer call someone up and say, “I need twenty laughers with no taste for Tuesday’s taping?” Or can you pick up starlets in Hollywood bars by saying, “I’m working now as an ‘obnoxious whooper’ on Married With Children?”
I think the special term most use for those people is “obnoxious”.
However, in case you are interested:
They get their jobs through casting companies that specialize in casting extras for movies and tv series. They get you in, take a couple of photos, charge you a fee (that you will get back eventually if you go on some calls) and then you call in every day, several times a day, to hear what is available.
“we need 30 basketball player types who have their own basketballs…we need 20 men and woman who can do ballroom dancing…we need 60 people to sit in the audience for the taping of a medical surgical bloopers show…”
You press a few buttons, get the address and hours to be there and that’s it.
Sometimes you get more money for oddball things…I once got an extra $20 because I had a blue car and they wanted it in the back scene. I had free parking for the day, and they washed the car after the scene was done (it was covered in fake snow during an Ally McBeal shoot).
Some people make a living doing that…granted, not a great living, but hey…some sitcoms use a steady roster of regulars in the coffee shop scenes, or the bar scenes. Watch closely and you will notice the same people are in the background over and over…just like at your local bar!
I’ve heard that some super-pretentious shows, like the Academy Awards, will hire people to sit in any empty seats that occur. If you get up to go to the bathroom, someone will come and sit in your seat so that, when the cameras pan by your row, they won’t see an empty seat. Presumably, you get your seat back when you return.
It sounds like that TRL thing with shout outs comes from radio. Many times when you hear a “request” from someone on the radio it is bogus. The person calls up to hear song Y by group B. They tell him/her “if you say you wanted to hear song X by group A, we will put you on the air.” Because they were going to play song X anyway - but they make it sound like a real request when it was totally bogus.
