Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business (14 page)

The audience’s thoughts and confusions, and how the filmmakers, studio and marketing gurus interpret and debate those thoughts, shape postproduction and the creative direction of the rest of the movie. When David O. Selznick was doing this, the directors left the picture when production ended, so the producer was in total control, with no debates allowed. But now the interaction is mediated by a committee involving the studio chiefs along with the producer and the director. It is a “process,” as we say, often with the audience in the lead.

By the way, if we producers don’t like our score and want to preview next time in Chicago or Dallas or Newark, where we used to fly as a matter of course if we thought our movie would play better as “rural” or “urban,” the marketing people will say no. They will tell us definitively that Newark and Atlanta and Calabasas are all the same place, and they can prove it with statistics. Therefore, we are staying in the San Fernando Valley. There is no regional America anymore, they say. And none of the studio people have time to fly.

After we make agreed-upon changes, the new movie is tested again and again (if it is not being dumped because it tested in the 40s) until the numbers are up as high as the studio’s support (in the form of reshoots and additional previews) will allow for. If a studio gets a movie testing well, then later on it will
spend, spend, spend on advertising—which is why the process is so important to us producers and filmmakers. We try to be accommodating to the notes that make sense, because it is after these screenings that the studio sets the marketing budget. Carrot and stick are the tools that set the pace.

If the studio decides it supports the movie as a result of this process, it picks the release date (if it hasn’t already) and commences the campaign. Where it places its ads—and even the message of the ads—has everything to do with what it learned in the tests. Hopefully, the campaign clicks and hits the target audience (quadrants!) right in its sweet spot. If not, this is what happens:

“They are down to a science in marketing, advertising and what we call ‘materials,’ ” Vinny Bruzzese, who helps studios when their campaigns are in trouble, explained. “Once the movie enters the tracking, they measure the success of their marketing in a continuing call-and-response with the audience.

“First they test the movie’s awareness vis-à-vis other movies coming out. If the audience is not sufficiently
aware
of the movie, they need to spend more on marketing. If there is not enough ‘definite interest’ in seeing the film, maybe the
content
of their material is off, and they need to rethink the advertising content quickly. If the first-choice number is low relative to the other movies opening that week—the most critical number for box office success—we research what it would take to make the movie the first choice, and we do it. If none of this works past the first weekend, the studios are stumped. They go to outside marketing companies or their marketing departments, and they punt. They change the materials or the one-sheet if it’s early enough, redo the television spots, change the message.”

This is what we were seeing during the
Bridesmaids
campaign when there was no movement in the lower and upper female quadrants, where the movie was aimed. But an early preview created word of mouth, and the spots playing during the NBA finals
ultimately brought in guys (lower male quadrant) as was intended.
Bridesmaids
turned out to be an AppleBerry Mud Pie Super Smash.

Another fascinating thing that happened in the last minute before
Bridesmaids
opened involved a delicious concept that Vinny taught me: Definite Interest Intensity (DII). It’s a way of determining how committed viewers are to seeing a movie, whether those who’ve expressed interest in the movie feel the pressing need to get up and go out to see it when it comes out (the point, in the end, of all these metrics). I love it, because I’ve won a few weekend shoot-outs with it—when my team started as underdogs and ended up opening as a convincing number one (
Sleepless in Seattle
and
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
). As soon as it was explained to me, it clicked. OTX came up with DII while defining a “constantly changing psychographic” to a studio executive who was stumped by “the audience’s confounding craving for something different.” Vinny explained DII to me one morning as we had coffee at a Silver Lake café.

“On a given weekend,” he said, “two movies will come out, tracking at thirty percent. One will, out of the blue, outgross the other. One movie records a sudden uptick in intensity of interest through buzz, word of mouth, or hotness. This can grow, as with
Inception,
pop, as with
Bridesmaids
or emerge from a sneak, like with
How To Lose a Guy
. Suddenly, a movie reaches its target demo and it swells into a ‘have to see’ from a ‘want to see.’ ”

Why?

“We came up with a measure to try to capture that,” Vinnie explained. “DII is that measure.”

Over the past years, DII has been shown to be extremely susceptible to increasingly clever viral campaigns drawn out for months online.
The Blair Witch Project,
a tiny 1999 indie, began to show the effectiveness of the Internet in building word of mouth when it pretended to be online found footage of a group of friends who disappeared in the woods while chasing a local legend. Even
though the claim was bogus, the movie opened big through its virally created DII. As much as studios would like to create DII, it can’t be engineered. It is something that catches on—a brilliant piece of marketing, a great viral campaign, a YouTube spot, good word of mouth—like with
The Hangover.
Everyone had to see that movie from the minute the trailer came out. With
Bridesmaids,
if you hadn’t seen it on the first weekend, you were out of the loop. DII is hot stuff.

The breakout movie franchise
Twilight
—a romantic vampire love series mostly for teen girls—has phenomenal DII. Lionsgate marketing president Nancy Kirkpatrick, whom I knew when she ran publicity at Paramount, caught a jet stream of Definite Interest Intensity smack in the face before the first installment opened, and knew she had a big one: “This is really how it started—with something so silly and simple that it’s kind of embarrassing. When we were developing the
Twilight
script—I think we had just green-lit it [it was released in 2008]—Stephenie Meyer, the author, was doing a signing in Pasadena, a book signing. So it’s Saturday morning down at, you know, Vroman’s Bookstore down in Pasadena. So I drive down there, at ten a.m. on a Saturday, and there were a thousand people standing in line. Now, this is a book that had sold about a million copies. It was a hit book, but it wasn’t a
huge
hit book, you know? And I thought, Wow! Something’s going on here. And I sat, after the signing, as Stephenie did a Q and A with the audience, and the people were obsessed: The detail they knew about this book and its characters! It was unlike anything I had ever seen before, other than, like,
Star Trek.
”

“So how does marketing harness that?” I asked.

“The way that I started thinking about it was, This is girl
Star Trek.
Treat them like a fan base. Feed them the information they want. And that’s sort of how the idea of it began. And we just started fanning that flame; there were already fan sites, albeit small
ones, up on the Web, and we invited those ladies to the set and started giving them not marketing materials, but information that they wanted as fans. And to this day, we speak to them like you would speak to a friend telling them about the movie. You know, ‘I was on the set and this is what they did at dinner last night’ is not giving the fan base marketing materials, because they know what that is. It’s letting them feel like they’re on the inside and you’re sharing information with them as you would a friend.”

Twilight
opened at $69.6 million, stunning the industry but not its fans or Lionsgate or Nancy Kirkpatrick. They knew they had Definite Interest Intensity of a scale that would drown out other movies in the market that weekend (and many others to come). No one was talking about anything other than
Twilight,
even if he or she didn’t know what it was.

It happened to me on a much smaller scale when guys were targeted to go see Owen Wilson and Jackie Chan in
Shanghai Knights,
a comedy action adventure with kung fu, which came on dead even with the tracking of
How to Lose a Guy
two weeks before it opened. It turned out that the guys didn’t
have
to see their movie on the first weekend or the first night. But the AppleBerries and their dates to whom Paramount had targeted our movie had a growing
need
to see
How to Lose a Guy
because the buzz and word of mouth were starting to grow. (Believe me, it wasn’t the reviews.) It was a great campaign, and Paramount, knowing how highly we’d tested (95), held a national sneak preview the week before it opened. That sneak carried us to number one, and the girls for that weekend beat the guys. By the way, when that happens, amnesia sweeps the studio nation three weeks later. Can they come up with something to measure that, the nonchanging studio psychographic? Okay, Lynda, enough.

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink, as the cliché goes. Good marketing can lead all us equines to water. But if we don’t like the movie, the velocity of opinion travels much
faster than marketing’s ability to paper it over. In the Old Abnormal, this wasn’t true. The studios could get a full weekend in before the second-weekend drop from word of mouth kicked in.

Today, buzz is quantum. A thousand people will each tell a thousand people what they think of a movie opening in three thousand theaters simultaneously. They will BBM it, tweet it, Facebook it, and before you know it, it’s around the world in sixty seconds. No matter how many TV spots feature the three good reviews, word of mouth from your six closest friends always wins. So the efficacy of marketing stops at midnight opening night.

This is what happened with the collapse of
Hulk,
directed by Ang Lee, in 2003. He had just directed the phenomenally innovative
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
and had directed the critically acclaimed
The Ice Storm
and
Sense and Sensibility
before that. So there was great excitement for a fresh take on this tragic tale of a geneticist who suffers an accident that turns him into a raging green monster whenever he gets angry.
Hulk
opened huge. Universal’s marketing could not have done better.

Says Bruzzese, “Its DII was off the charts. It had the highest levels of ‘first choice’ ever. But most everyone who wanted to see the movie saw it between Wednesday and Friday of its first long weekend. On June twentieth,
Hulk
opened at $62.1 million! The idea of an arty director on a comic-book movie was initially attracting everyone—an exciting idea, not unlike putting Christopher Nolan on
Batman.
”

But perhaps it was too arty. Word of mouth rapidly overpowered the drumbeat of marketing, and within milliseconds it seemed that everyone heard that the movie was slow.

Vinnie said, “It dropped an astonishing seventy-seven percent after its opening weekend, leaving the entire industry slack-jawed.”

It turned out to be a four-quadrant movie for no one. The studios can aim for a huge bull’s-eye on the target, and the marketing wizards can hit it perfectly. But what the exit polls will tell you as
they continue testing on the first weekend is whether the audience will recommend it to their friends.

These exit polls indicate whether a movie will underperform, overperform or meet the standard model, just like in elections. Some movies are review-proof—the audience loves them even if the reviewers don’t. But what the exit polls ultimately reveal, in the final call-and-response with the audience, is whether the movie has
playability:
whether the audience likes it and will recommend it to friends. Sometimes that’s about whether the movie is “good”—but really it’s about whether it’s
embraced by the audience,
good or not. Good is subjective.

The thing about playability is this: No matter how churchy state has gotten, and how statey church has gotten, production makes the films, not marketing. Production picks the producers, the directors and the writers. Marketing can advise on what film to make, but not on how to make it. If the film doesn’t
play,
is a stinker or the audience rejects it, marketing looks to production, though marketing historically pays with someone getting fired. That’s because it’s really hard to open a stinker when word of mouth is so far ahead of you that marketing cannot be effective. (Or, as in the case of
Hulk,
when it is no longer effective.)

Because production is more powerful, marketing often takes the rap for a flop, and that’s how it goes. In rare circumstances, however, a great marketing whiz can open a lousy movie, and whoa, are these guys suddenly valuable!

Sony is thrilled with what Jeff Blake has been able to do with Adam Sandler’s minor opuses like
Jack and Jill,
in which Sandler plays both his character and his character’s incredibly annoying twin sister, Jill. It opened to $23 million in November 2011, despite nobody seeming to like it. (It scored a remarkable 3 on Rotten Tomatoes, an influential review blog, out of a possible 100.)

There aren’t many people who can do this. He also opened
The Social Network
with a cutting-edge campaign with an ad line
that was almost McLuhanesque in flavor: “We Are the Social Network.” We were all part of the opening; it was an online, around-the-world Event. He took an original filmmaker-driven biopic (David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin) and turned it into an Academy-contending social-networking phenomenon unto itself.

Then there is Fox Searchlight, Fox’s lean, small and very exciting classics division, run by Nancy Utley, who was first its marketing head and is now president of the whole thing. She made
Slumdog Millionaire
the belle of the Oscars in 2008, beating the bigger and better-financed Paramount entry,
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,
a David Fincher–directed love story about a boy who ages backward. Searchlight is a perennial Oscar contender, as it proved again in 2011 with
The Descendants.
Two of the best studio marketeers I know are now working together at Fox: Tony Sella and Oren Aviv, formerly president of marketing, then production, at Disney. Aviv both conceived of Disney’s hit
National Treasure
and devised its campaign, as well as running the early
Pirates of the Caribbean
campaigns. Aviv’s successes earned him the more volatile job of president of production at Disney, where he ran into politics and then ended up back in marketing with Sella at Fox. Heads of marketing becoming heads of studios could become a trend, or the marketers are so powerful where they are, they will be encouraged to stay in their jobs and given more and more money, like free agents. With rare exceptions, these talents tend to stay where they are, under lock and key, with escalating salaries and ever bigger offices. They attract producers and directors, who, over time, come to recognize these new moguls as allies in the trenches and as one of the reasons to pick a studio. They would like their movies to be seen as well as made.