Amazon Offers Free Short Films In Holiday Push

Wall Street Journal ^ | November 9, 2004 | NICK WINGFIELD

[OESY]

...Beginning today, Amazon plans to feature one original short film each week in a prominent spot on its home page for the next five weeks -- all commissioned by Amazon and available for free downloading by the site's visitors.

The four-to-seven minute movies will star a variety of Hollywood actors in fictional stories fashioned loosely around a theme Amazon describes as "karmic balance;" characters, in essence, learn valuable life lessons....

Instead of a traditional advertising hard sell, the movies mark the escalation of an effort by Amazon to provide unique online content free of charge to its customers, some of which can be used to indirectly sell products through the site. The company is cagey about its exact plans, but says it is considering ways to feature the creative output of everyone from musicians to fiction writers to bloggers. This week it will start accepting e-mail addresses from independent filmmakers whom Amazon may contact in the future to solicit their work....

Instead of a traditional advertising hard sell, the movies mark the escalation of an effort by Amazon to provide unique online content free of charge to its customers, some of which can be used to indirectly sell products through the site. The company is cagey about its exact plans, but says.... This week it will start accepting e-mail addresses from independent filmmakers whom Amazon may contact in the future to solicit their work.

Product names or logos aren't easily identifiable within the movies, but the products are listed, along with actors' names, in the closing credits at the end of each movie. Viewers who click on a product name on the list will automatically jump to a page on Amazon that sells the product. Amazon says it didn't accept any product-placement fees....

[OESY]

Daryl Hannah stars in a short film on Amazon.

[sionnsar]

"karmic balance;"

Doesn't sound good.

[Gingersnap]

Please, no more over privileged Hollywood types handing out lessons of ANY kind - let alone "karmic".

[50sDad]

Oh, I get it...it's like those "Moment of Meditation" public service thingies that were on at odd hours on TV when I was a kid....well, except there's, like, absolutely no mention of God, or Christ, or any Western value content. And it will be produced and acted by shallow, Godless Hollywood types. To sell their stuff. For their own selfish enrichment. To put money in their pockets. And to help educate the morons in the Red states. About why they are big, rich, Hollywood entertainers, and qualified to teach us moral lessons, and about how if we don't do good stuff that they don't have to do, the Voodoo Karma will backfire on us, so we'd better. Because, hey, if they aren't qualified to teach us moral lessons, with their big houses, and cocaine, and homosexual parties, and drinking, and broken marriages, and custody battles, and whiny, pathetic arrogance, hey, who is qualified? Certainly not the Christians in the Midwest, of course, who are just a bunch of small-minded, homophobic, ignorant Bible-thumpers. Who can't be trusted to judge other people, of course, because Hollywood, which has been around a hundred years, is easily morally superior to Christianity. (Or Judaism either, except that really cool Cabala magic stuff that Madonna is messing with. Or Lilith, or whatever her name is this week.)

So other than that, just like "Moment of Meditation."

[KarlInOhio]

In the first film we see two US Senators who don't show up for their jobs most of the time, but who ask for a promotion anyway. The Karmic Balance leaves one unemployed and the other humiliated and without his hair brush.