"Keep that flame burning!"
I've learned a lot recently about the concept of viral. And something about the fascination with movie stars, and how this phenomenon might be worth studying. Here's what happened.
Tom Cruise came to watch my two children’s taekwondo lesson the other day. So yes, that's me with him in the picture above (Tom to the left, in case you wondered).
The background is this: Tom was in town to promote his latest movie, and as the gym owner is a very talented actor, whose career has recently taken him to Hollywood to work with Cruise, the star came to visit his friend and colleague. That he would stay for the entire lesson and enthusiastically cheer the nine-year-olds' round kick attempts, was probably not anticipated.
Anyway, when I finally approached Tom to tell him how great a fan I am (he's one of the greatest American actors of our time, if you ask me), I thought I needed to qualify this by telling him what I do. He asked me politely what the Foundation did, and when I told him, he was genuinely interested in how we're working on securing Bergman's heritage.
As he then voiced his concern about how the rapid digitisation of the film medium is a major threat to film history, and how he used to discuss this with Scorsese and Spielberg, my admiration grew to worshipping. (It's a topic dear to me, to say the least – I wrote a freaking book on the subject.) As a word of farewell, he told me to 'keep that flame burning.'
Well, if all this wasn't enough, what happened afterwards was a rather interesting experience as well. Obviously I posted the picture above on Facebook, and obviously it received about fifty times more likes than my updates usually do. What I had not expected was for people to share this, and that these shares would snowball into more shares at Ebola speed, and that people I don't even know would find the energy to hit the like button to this photo of a stranger meeting a star.
I was even more surprised when the good people of the Swedish film journal FLM wanted to interview me about my great achievement of having met Tom Cruise. But it was certainly fun, and why not take the opportunity to spread our important message? Besides, an unexpected bonus was that I received the epithet of "Taekwondo dad", which will do wonders for my street cred. Take that, hockey moms!
When then the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter called about a notice in today's movie section, I realised that in spite of all my ground-breaking books and articles, my revolutionary blog updates and remarkable efforts in securing the heritage of Ingmar Bergman, nothing of what I've done has been even remotely as important as when I met and talked with Tom Cruise for fifteen minutes.
Following these insights, we have now taken action. As from now, we stop all cataloguing and registration efforts. The archive won't admit any more researchers. We will immediately cease all licensing of Bergman scripts to theatres around the globe. Instead, we're allocating all our resources to a new photo blog. It will be called starstruck.wordpress.com or possibly horse_smile.tumblr.com. From the proceeds, we'll start a new foundation with the sole purpose of scientifically scrutinising everything concerning celebrity culture, provenance and such metaphysical baloney. We already have two pictures.
