Julie Taymor on Social Media: “Shakespeare Would Have Been Appalled”

Julie Taymor took aim at the blogosphere when referencing the criticism she received during the development of Broadway’s Spiderman. Taymor explained the difficulty of making a show in today’s landscape, when the audience basically steers your product. According to Taymor, “Shakespeare would have been appalled.” Because I’m a blogger, I’m obviously biased on this one. Having admitted that, I’d like to say I completely disagree with her. For years, big movie studios have test screened their product, and Broadway does the same. The blogosphere provides a way to speed up the entire process. The only issue is that the entire world finds out about your crappy product before you have a chance to correct it, which means it’s difficult to recover from the bad press. Perhaps Shakespeare would have been grateful for the criticism. I’m sure he asked his friends for advice — now he would just have millions of them.

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