According to Variety, Jack O'Connell and Odessa A'zion will star in "The End of the World as We Know It," about "a pair of star-crossed loners who meet on an epic pilgrimage to prove the earth is flat." The film is written and directed by Ross White and Tom Berkeley, the duo behind the Oscar-winning short "An Irish Goodbye," and Studiocanal is financing it with Working Title, Parkville, and Film4.*
The pipeline works exactly as designed. An Oscar-winning short film is a ticket, and the ticket opens the doors. Working Title, Studiocanal, Film4, and a flat earth belief. The British prestige machine has consumed the most contested fact in the history of science, and the byline calls it "an unlikely adventure in truth and love."
Look at the adjectives. Star-crossed loners. Epic pilgrimage. Truth and love. The release for this movie uses the same vocabulary as a Shakespeare adaptation, because the PR machine has one adjective set and it is always the one that sounds like meaning. There is no separate set for science.
The casting does the rest of the work. O'Connell is at a peak, walking the Venice carpet in a tuxedo for Danny Boyle's Ink, and A'zion just came off Marty Supreme. The algorithm for prestige indie leads is the monster movie guy plus the BAFTA-nominated tennis drifter, and the shape of the planet is a supporting actor.
Here is the mechanism. The festival circuit has never believed anything. It finds things. A belief you cannot verify is just a story found in a strange place, which is the exact sentence the press release will need when the flat pilgrimage hits its first festival.
YOUR TURN: What is the most mainstream thing you have ever seen sold as a discovery?
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