Welcome to the first installment of Hollywood Hackery. We’re going to run you through the basics of making a completely inartistic pile of garbage that the general public will have no choice but to throw their money at. Best of all, you’ll be learning the craft of making a straight-to-video movie, so you may even be able to put these methods to use in your own basement.

Many Hollywood films start with a script. Fuck that. We’re making a hack-job sex comedy, so you’ll want to start with the cover and build up from there. Remember, the cover is what gets the movie in the consumer’s hand. Being “good” will factor little into the equation here, because

1. you won’t be investing a lot of money into this venture, so this will pay for itself in a few thousand units sold, and
2. the audience you want to attract isn’t thinking critically and will be willing to risk a few paltry dollars on the promises you will make and likely fail to deliver with the cover.

A. Cover Layout

A proven formula in the past couple years has been the “guys looking at you from between a woman’s legs” layout. Since this is a proven formula, it’s the one you’re going to use. Why gamble with originality? We’re here to fatten our wallets, not make art.

Check out some samples:

I bet a lot of people expect nudity from this movie. Hahaha. Bet. I am so witty.	Harold and Kumar go to Beavertown?
One of the looser examples of the design, Dorm Daze’s cover still manages to objectify its cover woman to the nth degree by not showing her face. Your imagination still has a bit of work to do, especially since you can’t tell cup size from this angle.	There are copies of this DVD without the twin doofuses looking through the legs. I think the box loses a lot of funny without them, and becomes rather sad. A stripper with nobody to dance for–it’s like watching a sad clown.
In a rare turn of events, several young ladies are staring through those legs in addition to the token horny male. This suggests the possibility of hot girl-on-girl action.	This guy barely failed the audition for “Geico caveman.” As such, he is perfect for this cover, which is all about the more primitive instincts.
I have to assume that the tiny highway patrolmen are objectifying the lass, so this cover qualifies…barely.

B. Strippers or Cheerleaders

To really sell your movie, you want the sex-starved male audience to know that they’re going to see strippers or cheerleaders in this movie, which (let’s be honest) are pretty much the same thing. Either way, the viewer must be assured that attractive young women will indeed “shake it” frequently throughout the movie.

C. This asshole

D. The ratings box

On the back of most DVDs is a ratings box that tells you not only the movie’s rating, but why it received that rating. You want the little box to say “R for nudity and sexual situations.” Sure, you can skip the ratings board and put that titillating “UNRATED!” stamp on the cover, but get serious. They made unrated versions of Charlie’s Angels 2, Mr & Mrs Smith, and Dodgeball. “Unrated” doesn’t even guarantee “wet T-shirt” anymore, let alone nudity.

The ratings box is really the thing that brings the movie home to the consumer. You can pick up Ball and Chain. You can look at it. You can say, “This has the major ingredients that the primitive mind is looking for in a crappy sex comedy. It has objectified half-naked women, and Kal Penn having a wacky adventure that may involve a slut.” In the end, however, you’ll flip it over for that confirmation you’ve been seeking, only to find a PG-13 rating for “crude sexual content.”

The winning cover from the group above is Bachelor Party Vegas. It has all the prime ingredients needed to sell itself based on the consumer’s impossibly high expectations. Pattern your cover after this movie’s cover and you’ll be raking in the dough faster than you can say, “Dude, I’m so high right now.”

It should be noted that Bachelor Party Vegas sucked ass. Your movie will, too.