Last night I went to the Shed Warming at the Arts Festival, where I had a few drinks and decided I liked Kristy Edmunds, if only because of the Artist Card policy, which encourages artists to come to the festival at a slightly discounted price. This is obviously a good idea for the festival, because artists are going to want to go to the festival and they're not necessarily going to be able to afford it. So make them go to more stuff, make them bring more friends, and there's your (satisfied) audience.

Which brings me to the question of how come rich people get stuff for free?

I've never understood why people with money get invited to stuff for free and that's supposed to make the rest of us want to go. When I worked in radio, I got everything for free. Movies, CDs, concert tickets. Now that I have a wonky income? I pay full price for everything. I know it's about power and influence and fame and so on, but are they serious? They seriously think that if they can get, say, John Travolta to turn up for five minutes before the opening night screening of Swordfish, that's going to make anyone in that audience tell their friends to go and see the worst movie of 2001 all because John Travolta turned up, looked embarrassed, and then got on a plane to L.A? I'll tell you what they're going to do. They're going to do what Stitzy and I did, which is hang out eating the free food and drinking the booze and saying how turd the movie was.

People aren't stupid. It even works the other way. Bad marketing can't stop something genuinely good from working. Look at Kenny, the Australian comedy feature (and haven't we learned to love those words) released several months ago. I personally think that the marketing concepts for Kenny were terrible. I mean, it got a lot of pre-publicity, and the website is slick and everything, but they were marketing the wrong thing. Anyone with a healthy fear of dumb-Aussie-bloke-orientated films (and I don't think I'm on my own here) was not going to be enraptured by a poster featuring a dim-looking chap with a dunny brush surrounded by toilet paper.

But Kenny is a gorgeous film. It's not really about poo, or dumb blokes, or loveable idiots with hearts of gold. It's not even about comedy, really. You never once feel like you're being fed a gag, you're just getting to know a character. So what made me go from heart-sinking disappointment at the sight of the poster, to paying good money to see the film?

Two things: word of mouth, and Kenny. I was watching TV at gym one time and Kenny came on. Completely ad libbing in some mindless TV interview, it was hardly the environment in which anyone can shine. But shine he did, and I had to slow down the treadmill while I watched him sensitively describing the flushing mechanism on a toilet.

So, look, my point is, audiences are going to work it out. Kenny shouldn't have been marketed like that. I still know women who won't see it because "it looks terrible" or they're not interested in "toilet humour", and I think that's bad because women are actually who a lot of it is aimed at. So they got it wrong. But after two weeks, everyone had two friends telling them they had to see this new Aussie film called Kenny.

So dear distributors and production companies, please stop giving free tickets to people who never pay for anything anyway and who own three houses and two boats. Give the free tickets to the people who can't afford them and watch your audiences grow with the good films and sink with the lousy ones. It's really not that complicated.

I know, I know. I should really be running the country.

By the way, if you're going to see Kenny, here's some advice: see it in a HUGE cinema. Think of the biggest cinema you've been to and see it there. Do NOT see it in a teensy weensy cinema where the hand-held camera is so bad that several of you have to leave the movie and go outside and spew. There is a sign up at the Nova in Carlton warning people prone to motion sickness to sit up the back. Sit as far back as Fitzroy North would be my advice.