Medellin: From Fake Movie Trailers Come Fake Online Film Sites
If you’re a fan of HBO’s Entourage, you know how important Medellin – a Scarface-like biopic about Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar – has been to the storyline for star-within-the-show Vincent Chase, his manager and best friend E, and the rest of his LA crew.
After the conclusion of last night’s episode, HBO presented the full trailer as though it were a real film starring real person Vincent Chase (as opposed to actor Adrian Grenier) and real film director Billy Walsh.
This isn’t the first time that HBO has blurred the line between fiction and reality for entertainment value. During the final season of The Sopranos, a short “making of” featurette for Cleaver, a film-within-the-show financed and coerced by character Christopher Moltisanti, aired with amusing results.
The blurred line has also been extended over into the online world. The Medellin trailer advertises MedellinTheFilm.com, which is a pretty sweet looking if barebones site that also advertises the film as though it were real.
Lost is another television show that has made extensive use of the Internet to extend the fictional realm of its storytelling, including a website for Oceanic Airlines (the airline that helpfully and forcefully strands the Lost kids on a mysterious island) that hilariously and creepily declares that all flights have been cancelled.
The truth is that the online world has just begun to be tapped in terms of extending film and television and literary storylines, providing original content, and exhibiting marketing and advertising power for entertainment companies. In fact, we’re at the dawn of an age where storylines will be driven by the online world, with extensions into the “real” one.
And who knows, it’s entirely possible that the “fake” world can spin around and become real based upon popular demand. For example, there was some chatter a year or so ago that Aquaman, a big-budget vehicle for Entourage‘s Vincent Chase and directed by James Cameron within the show, could become a real movie directed by James Cameron. A full-page ad for the as yet fake film taken out in Variety no doubt fueled the speculation! Perhaps a sign that in Hollywood the line between fake and real can at times be tenuous.
