Cinema School Is Sooo Starved for Women

Imagine a place, 65% single men, largely film geeks or just simply geeks. In this place, we sell seduction - because Hollywood cinema has always been about the audience falling in love, in the dark, with strangers. It is the job of the filmmaker to seduce. So it is natural for filmmaker to crave the act of seducing...despite the general ineptitude...for if we were good at seduction, we would do it the normal way, and not spend our lives dedicated to doing it in the round about way - the way in the dark, hiding behind the camera, having others do our talking for us.

So when a pretty french girl walks into the production office, asking for help with a cute Julie Delphy-ish accent, over eager cinema students drop their all important (as of a moment ago) phone calls and emails and offer her assistance "I'll show you the student affairs office." "Oh, you're interested in cinema, are you?" "Do you need a producer?" "Can I give you some dick?"

And yes, there are women at the cinema school, but when you take the cumulative number of images that FILM students have seen, all of those images of love and seduction and you match those images against the everydayness of ordinary women and then factor in all the cinema school specific factors - overeducated, competitive, spending their money on school instead of plastic surgery, it makes it awfully difficult for cinema school men to fall in love with the average cinema school woman. We will call this the inflated expectation factor.

One might argue that these factors may be mitigated by scarcity. The 35% female population translates to essentially two men for everyone woman to choose from. Hence, men ought to choose a woman worth ½ their true value, but equal to his/her relative value. A strategic male will take what he can get.

But I think something more complicated happens - in poker terms - the pot becomes too expensive. Even if you know you have the best hand, the percentage chances of still losing the hand from later cards, sometimes is not worth the additional cost of staying in the hand. That is, if the pot is tiny and someone makes a huge bet and you have a 60% chance of winning the hand, why not give up the tiny pot and wait for another hand with similar circumstances when you have an 80% of winning? This strategy was recently used by Jesus Ferguson in the World Series of poker preliminary rounds to some degree of success.

In market terms, women are overvalued (perhaps in some ideal, utopian world there would be a balancing between the inflated expectation factor and scarcity, but that is not the case here). There is no strategic advantage for a desirable cinema school man to compete in an bubble priced environment, essentially getting half of his "true" value. In this type of environment, it becomes more strategic to take bigger risks and go for "long shots." If you are only getting ½ your value in a regular transaction, you might as well opt for the 10% chance of getting the super hot chick. Here you have a situation where you have a losing hand in poker, but the pot is so rich that in the 10% chance you might win, the payoff would be big enough to make it a rational risk.

So instead of opting for the traditional, rational value choice, the cinema school man opts for the irrational stretch. He spends his time applying for Yale and Stanford, when his grades are a better fit for UC Davis. It so happens that this strategic equation matches his psychological state the state a filmmaker's unconscience need to fall in love, in the dark. The effects are what we see - the extreme reaction to super hot women - what occurred in SPO today, (ps the guy who offered to take her to student affairs just now walked by with the same girl up to the fourth floor, apparently suspending pre-production to become a tour guide). And we also see "regular" (I know no woman wants to be considered regular, but this is an economic analysis, not a therapy session) women feel, despite being a scarce commodity, is a lack of attention. What I have outlined above is the reason for that feeling, because that feeling is true. They are the expensive pots, not worth paying to see. They are Hewlett Packard at $65 a share, they are a two bedroom condo in West Hollywood. Good stocks, nice places, but unstrategic.

The options for women are simple. Women will reap huge dividends by getting into the "super hot" category. If a girl is borderline, she should make every effort to reach that goal, an extra work out a week, a little plastic surgery, whatever, is a good investment. If this is not an option, they can become pursuers of lower-quality, more earnest, men which will require little effort on their part and at least give them partial satisfaction.

Men will continue to take the long shots, so long as so many factors favor that approach. Some men might gain satisfaction, also, by hooking up with vast numbers of lesser attractive woman who are accessible because of the low attention factor. This would be an attempt to make up in quantity what he cannot achieve in quality - winning a bunch of small hands versus going for the big pot. Outside of these two options, men are stuck playing against the casino in blackjack - losing slowly and steadily.

PS - This post is unfinished, I think there is room here for discussion of matching personalities and true love, and why these contrarian values in the cinema environoment, might be worth seeking.