I sometimes wonder if studios ever film extremely rough/test cuts of movies to preview them. As in, hire a few unknown actors, reserve a small, bare black stage with minimal props, and just act out the script, then fill out the rough cut with stock establishing shots, etc. If there's an action sequence, they could include storyboards/minimally animated storyboards, animatics, or even clips from other movies, if the scene is generic enough (as in, say, a simple car chase). It'd basically be a glorified table read, costing a few thousand bucks, and for that modest investment, they'd be able to watch a preview of sorts of the whole movie, and get a sense of its pacing, dramatic interest, etc.
Or, if studios themselves wouldn't bother to do that, I wonder if aspiring directors would. Say you've got a script for a legal drama or romantic comedy or what-not, but aren't getting much traction from the script itself. Could such a rough draft of the movie itself help win execs over?
Of course, there are two obvious reasons why this isn't an actual practice (so far as I know, anyway): one, studio execs and others figure they're smart enough to tell a script's quality purely from the page, or maybe from an audio table read recording, or two (the more depressing possibility), scripts themselves aren't considered important enough to be worth such effort. But, given how cheaply and easily such cuts could be thrown together, I'm surprised there hasn't been
some well-known instance of something like this happening by now. (Obviously, I'm not counting YouTube stuff like disgraced
Chronicle screenwriter Max Landis'
feature-length pitch for a
kewl, extr
eeeme DC team-up blockbuster. I'm thinking of these rough cuts as being a tool for the studios, not a means of viral marketing.)
As the father of fraternal twins, it’s always funny to me how many people don’t know exactly what twins are. Even my brother-in-law, who has a twin sister, gets asked often if they are identical. 
