Try and Adjust Archives - Page 3 of 6

The Ending Test Audiences Rejected

In the original ending of Fatal Attraction (1987), Glenn Close’s character kills herself, and Michael Douglas’s character is arrested for her murder. Test audiences did not like that she escaped punishment. Director Adrian Lyne reshot the ending.

Close said later: “Six months after we finished shooting, I got a call that we had to reshoot the ending.” She fought it for weeks. The new ending became a hit, and the film was one of the highest-grossing films of 1987. Lyne has said the change “was an emotional and dramatic choice, not a financial one.”

Away We Go!

The musical Oklahoma! first opened under another title, Away We Go! It played out-of-town tryouts at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven from March 11, 1943, and then in Boston. Audiences were enthusiastic, and the reviews were only fair. Before Broadway, the creators restaged the big number “Oklahoma” and renamed the show after it. It opened on Broadway on March 31, 1943.

The Shubert in New Haven has hosted more than 600 pre-Broadway tryouts.

The Pilot Episode

An American television series usually begins as a pilot, a single episode made to sell the show to a network. In the traditional cycle, each network hears about 500 pitches every summer, orders about 20 pilots, and chooses four to eight of them as series. By one estimate in Variety, only a little over a quarter of all pilots made for American television go on to become series.

The first pilot of Star Trek, “The Cage,” did not sell. NBC agreed to a second pilot, and that one became the series.

The OODA loop

John Boyd, a US Air Force colonel, built a model of decision-making out of his experience of air combat: observe, orient, decide, act, then repeat. His central claim was about speed — that cycling through the loop faster than your opponent is what wins, because it leaves them reacting to a situation that has already changed. As a Weapons School instructor he was nicknamed Forty Second Boyd, for his standing bet that starting from a position of tactical disadvantage he could defeat any student pilot within forty seconds.

The model spread from the Air Force into American business and sports coaching. It is a formal argument that acting quickly beats acting correctly.

Ready, aim, fire

The correct sequence exists in English and is used mainly to mock people who follow it too literally. Analysis paralysis names the failure state, paralysis by analysis is the older form, and both treat thinking as a thing that can go on too long and become a disease.

Bias toward action

Named as a virtue and used in hiring and promotion. Amazon lists it among its leadership principles: speed matters in business, and many decisions are reversible and do not need extensive study. The word bias is chosen deliberately — it concedes that the tendency is not neutral, and recommends it anyway.

The 80 percent solution

American military and business usage: a good plan executed now beats a perfect plan executed later. The claim is not that 80 percent is acceptable, but that the remaining 20 percent costs more in delay than it returns in quality.

Paralysis

Analysis paralysis. Overthinking it. Navel-gazing. Spinning your wheels. Stuck in the weeds. American English has an unusually large vocabulary for the failure of thinking too long, and no comparable vocabulary for the failure of acting too soon. The second failure is described, when it happens, in ordinary words.

A/B testing

Show half your users one version, half the other, and let the numbers decide. No argument, no theory, no meeting. The disagreement is resolved by running both and reading the result.

Prototype

American design practice builds rough physical versions early, specifically in order to find out what is wrong with them. The prototype is not a draft of the product. It is an instrument for generating objections.