October 27, 2004

If everyone has super powers… then nobody does… mwah ha ha ha!
xxxxxxxxxx-- Paraphrased from Brad Bird's script for The Incredibles

The intersection of the media and the theatrical distribution business has changed forever. Publicists, both studio and personal, have been forced to shuffle and re-shuffle the deck, assessing and re-assessing who is covering their product (whether movie or movie star) and how each outlet should be valued.

It can't be easy.

For a long time, the media forest was growing out of control, internet weeds turning into oaks and then back into weeds every six months or so. Interview roundtables were jammed beyond logic. The tools for measuring website values were worthless, as they still tend to be, very much like NRG tracking young children and teens.

The forest shrunk greatly, even if the numbers of requests for access did not, when the internet boom crashed. And then it started getting even smaller as media started consolidating, reducing the field to a power base that was smaller, seems to me, than before the internet boom even began.

However, how each outlet exploited its efforts changed dramatically also. Print outlets made real efforts to position themselves on television and on the web. For the most part, the TV ventures have failed, but the websites remain and, for most major papers, have now superseded the daily print run as the primary means of access across the globe. In the meanwhile, the first generation of web-weaned writers and editors are working their way up the ladders at said long-standing institutions.

Formerly industry-only outlets, the trades in particular, have given themselves a mass market value by publishing not only their own websites, but by associating with wire services. So what is the difference now between an "early" review by Todd McCarthy in Variety and an anonymous "review" on Ain't It Cool News? Todd McCarthy.

Suddenly, in an age of quantity overwhelming quality, three anonymous AICN reviews is given the same credence, by people who pay attention to such things, as a Todd McCarthy review in Variety… perhaps more.

But studio publicists, stuck more and more in a defensive pose, are suffering a number of traditions in that scenario. The first is the "trades review first," which has become an anachronism. The notion in the past was that the trades were doing a service of sorts inside the industry. But with the reviews hitting not only the websites, but the wire services within hours of release, the trade reviews are being seen earlier and more often than any other outlet. The idea that any embargo should be respected past the date of the trade review is now a matter of competitive advantage for the trades based on… anyone… anyone?

The other big tradition/habit in play is the notion of controlling the buzz by dribbling out media access bit by bit. I would suggest that in this day and age, rolling out media is only viable of no one is interested in your product… control by inertia. But if you have a powerful commodity to work, there seem to be only two workable speeds right now… all in or all out.

There is a middle. But it demands that studios do the often unimaginable… treating their colleagues on the other side of the rope like human beings instead of as a pack of feral animals. Thing is, there are many, many people in the publicity game who are quite humane to we animals. But as the pressure ratchets up, the tendency to traditionthink becomes greater… just as the time when it needs to be lessened.

This is how I see it… for every movie, the head of marketing comes to a table full of weapons, like Bond going to see Q. As in Bond, there are crazy gadgets available that you can only use once and are best saved for extreme moments. But there are explosives… a lot of explosives, from bullets to atom bombs.

Every media outlet is a small explosion waiting to happen. It can kill the enemy or it can kill you. The good news is that no one explosive can kill your movie anymore. The bad news is that no one explosive (or five) can make your movie anymore. However, one tiny explosive can, sometimes, set off all of the other explosives and create absolute havoc, for better or for worse.

Tricky.

Tricky and scary.

So more often than not, studios revert back to traditions. They separate out the explosives based on their perceived power of each. Then they spend a proportional amount of effort and time trying to control the explosives, from the most powerful to the least.

What is often forgotten is that each explosive has a mind of its own. And while the little explosives in Group C are envious of those in Group A, those in Group A are shockingly vulnerable to the whims of Group C. The explosive grass is always greener, I guess.

And suddenly, the studio is caught up in a civil war between the Group A establishment and the Group C guerillas. Both sides are fighting dirty. Group A has to prove they are edgy and Group C needs to get "what they have coming" and stuck in the middle is the movie which, truth be told, is just trying to get through the publicity process unscathed so that the massive air bombardment of advertising can have its intended effect.

After all, you can look on Rotten Tomatoes and see that Team America: World Police and Friday Night Lights both had the positive support of over 75% of critics while The Grudge had less than 40%, but the former two films' combined openings totaled less than 80% of The Grudge's opening weekend.

Now, would TA:WP and FNL be in worse opening shape if they got slaughtered by the critics and feature writers? Sure. Did the New York Post run their review of Surviving Christmas two days early as a news story about Ben Affleck's current box office woes? Yeah. They went out of their way to brutalize the Red Sox fan. (Perhaps Ben has now taken on The Curse of the Bambino himself… or is it The Curse of the Former Jack Ryans?)

But I digress (sooooo far)…

Studios and media outlets have all run their games, trying to keep the guerilla wars from flaring up. The most popular one of the last couple of years has been running reviews hidden inside "first look" features. People will claim they can, but can you tell me who at Time and/or Newsweek is a critic and who is a movie feature writer these days? When the studios run "critics say" quotes from features, is the line any clearer?

And again, the media is not a pack of virgins here at all. How long a newsstand slump did it take before New York Magazine's "this magazine is about New York, not Hollywood" stance fell to weekly show biz coverage. (I know… "Alfie is set in New York… Miramax is a NY company…" Right. Edgy.) Time and Newsweek have served up their critics and their feature writers on the same plate (David Ansen usually being the one holdout) of their own accord. And any idiot knows that the cover of Entertainment Weekly is more valuable than an "A" from Owen… in fact, if any studio was told, "The price of the cover is an 'F' from Owen," they'd all go ahead happily with the bargain. Hell, they'd probably prefer an "F" to a "C+" anyway since an "F" at least conveys passion.

But how do studios rethink and fix this problem?

It's hard. Terry Press tried to go down this road when DreamWorks started up and the shrieking of Group A was unending. To be honest and personal for a moment, studios give me access to a lot of things ahead of the curve and they still have to deal with my peculiarities, whether it is an occasional Internet Napoleon Complex or legitimate earnest well-thought-out demands that they do what I see as the right thing.

When one side wants something and the other side doesn't want to give it, conflict is inevitable. That is true in any group, any situation. But the war, like chess in Star Trek, is being fought on multiple levels all at once. And the first goal for any studio in this day and age, in my opinion, has to be to keep the revolutionaries fat enough that they are too tired to spend all day looking for targets.

It's easy to forget in all of this "me first" insanity that the reason that newspapers review on the Friday of release is that they are serving their readers for whom a review two weeks ahead of time is little more than a faint memory and perhaps something they didn't even bother to read because it was not immediately relevant that day as was the new Family Circus.

I remind myself that no matter how strong a supporter of In America I was last year, when it finally came time to run print and TV ads, my comments and passion were irrelevant. Fox Searchlight, whose team was extremely nice and endlessly thankful for my early support, was understandably more interested in one word from Glenn Kenny and Premiere than a million words from me. And the same will be true of Sideways this season. And that's okay by me, even if it chafes a little. That's marketing. That's show biz.

There are hundreds of voices out there now, significant enough to be tracked, all on different levels. But the same ten outlets that have always been the ten outlets are the ones the studios live and die by… in their own estimation. With such an expansion of resources, why aren't studios expanding their reach? Why is the internet still so often a ghetto of ideas?

Of course, in the end, this is all about a trick… the magic trick of marketing. The movie will be the movie will be the movie. Once it is loose in the world, it makes its own way, for better or for worse. The size of the launch absolutely matters. The elements of the product absolutely matter. The reviews… hmmm…

The ongoing embrace of "the way it's done" surely keeps Group A as happy as they can be kept by the studios. But the Group C guerillas aren't going away. And they don't have to steal from the studios to make their incursions anymore. As Group A tries to hip themselves into looking like Group C-ers while still getting spending and earning millions, the movies are paying the price. (And as any high school princpal will tell you, when the smart kids try to hang out with the cool kids, it only diminishes the future of the smart kids... but that's a whole different column.)

It is time for a new way of doing it. Because if there is not one created and controlled by the studios, it will happen anyway and it will be worse for the system. I guess as a natural, if compromised, Group C-er, I'm supposed to be rooting for that. But I have always believed in change from within, because in the end, I still care about the movies more than I care about the machine.

Viva la movies! Viva La Motion Picture Diaries!

READER OF THE DAY: NOT QUITE PINOCHE writes: "Polar Express may be a very good movie, and the technology is another step towards a digital cinema. But for now, it is still gussied up animation. The reality of the look of the characters faces, gives one the willies when you realize that there eyes are dead. That was the amazing thing about Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, his eyes were alive, and you could peer back into his eyes down into is vile, cruddy little soul. From the previews for Polar Express all of the characters seem to have that dead fish eyed look, last seen in Final Fantasy. I hope the movie is a good as you say, and I hope I will get past what you call, "non-human look of the characters." As for Meryl playing Trotsky in a great Russian epic, that idea may play out to result in some great performances, but it is not something I look forward to, because too few actors would take advantage of the bodily escape, all the others would just be used to sell movies, Kevin Costner as Lady Macbeth what a perfectly horrible thought. Limitations sometimes make for a more human and inventive style of storytelling."

E-ME: Will the revolution be webcast?