Dot Matrix

I’ve had a private theory about Hollywood and how it works behind the scenes for quite some time now, and recently I thought about it using a design pattern approach, and noticed it fits nicely.
Lets start with the theory itself:
I noticed that sometimes I’ll meet people and think “this guy/girl look a bit like Hollywood actor X or Y”. This happened quite a bit. Sometimes its very subtle, and sometimes its very obvious. Some actors have many ‘lookalikes’ and some very few. And as the exception to the rule, a small number of people seem to be absolutely unique look wise.

I always thought that human look can be classified. I don’t mean it in a ‘cattle herding’ way. I mean that we all know someone who looks like this or that person etc. When we think about why they look like that other person, its usually “because they have a similar shape of mouth, or similar shape of cheekbone structure” etc. Some people are unclassifiable, which to me is another type of classification.

It appeared to me that consciously or not, Hollywood raise actors to glory based on their look-class. Since we attract to things that feel somewhat ‘similar’ or ‘familiar’, by covering as many look-classes they generate larger following in bulk, thus larger revenues etc.

Let me give two examples I find more obvious than others: Take Cameron Diaz. I’ve seen and met quite a few girls that look like Ms Diaz. I don’t mean they are spitting images of her, but they do bear a resemblance. Now take whatshername from Spiderman… hmm… Whatever, you know who I mean – I’ve seen and met quite a few girls that look like her. Maybe “like her” is not accurate, but at least they looked like her “look class”. They had similar shape mouth, or similar shape of head etc. A movie that stars those two actors will potentially attract people who are in it for the movie, but also those who get that worm familiar fuzzy feeling when they see Ms Diaz or Ms Whatshername-from-Spiderman. They would feel they can ‘relate’ to those actresses or actors.
What Hollywood is doing here is coding to interfaces. They have created an Actor interface over the years. Polished it till it sparkled like a super nova. They even used Real Actors (TM) to do the R&D for this interface. That was before the millennium. Some say before the 90s. Some say before the 80s. Then they started implementing the interface using different Look & Feel implementations, being the currently ‘hot’ actor. Each implementation covered a different look class. So we got our Cameroon Diazes and our Whatshernames-from-Spiderman, and our Sandra’s Bollocks, and of course, our many many uncategorized look-like-him/her-self. Of course occasionally a new interface is being created to serve as the template for future generations. And we take those concrete classes of look&feels actors and consume them till we’re blue in the face. Then we cast them away once a new concrete implementation is released and so on, ad nauseum.
Gotta love show bussiness…