..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Never Play Against the House..

So you’ve made a movie and you want to be absolutely sure the public knows it exists and want to see it.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm!

In the logical world, one might assume there are a series of rational steps to reach that end. Let’s cut out a couple of steps to get to the nub of the situation. Namely that you have a distributor who can, minimally, affect an advertising campaign and has the apparatus to book your movie and ship it to theaters. Neither of these considerations is inconsequential, yet they can also be viewed as obstacles to overcome to reach further obstacles that may be even more difficult to surmount.

At this point it’s helpful to understand the human capacity for choice. Echoes of Statistics 101 ring in my ear but it all boils down to one’s comfort zone. Typically, we human beings function best when confronted with three to seven options. It doesn’t require a lot of explanation to understand that one choice offers no option; two can render an arbitrary decision and more than seven can involve so much data to interrupt that the selection made is corrupt.

Imagine for a moment a trip to the supermarket and a shopping list with the word “cereal.” When you arrive at that section and gaze at the sea of 24 different breakfast grains panic could well set in. After all, your choice will affect the lives of a household of five. Your physical proximity to the product gives you a special privilege and your personal contact with the absent quartet is both an asset and detriment to arriving at a compromise solution. However, you will have to bear the praise or scorn of the others for what you ultimately bring home in a bag. That sense of pressure will only intensify as you repeat the process for “laundry detergent,” “pet food” and “potato chips.”

Let’s set a basic scenario in a major metropolitan area of more than one million inhabitants. The decision to be made by a thirtysomething couple is what movie to see Friday night with another couple. The choice is theirs but the decision will unquestionably be influenced by their knowledge of the other pair’s viewing preferences.

As we all know, most films open on Friday and advertising can be particularly ferocious leading up to a movie’s debut. On this hypothetical weekend, four films are debuting across America and six more films are opening in the city on a specialized basis. Toss into the mix two dozen other films that are playing continuing runs. The bottom line here is that the decision to be made involves more than seven choices and, therefore, beyond the boundaries of one’s comfort zone.

Reaching an ultimate choice will likely involve - at least initially - reversing the organic methods generally associated in the process. Rather than working up to a decision, the people involved will arrive at their choice by a process of elimination. Potential candidates can be crossed off the list for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with their intrinsic merits. The reasons are generally banal and might include the fact that someone has already seen a particular movie, the show time is inconvenient to dinner plans or the location poses parking problems or is a venue with small auditoriums and poor projection. Going through that process reduces the choices from 34 to 22, still well beyond a preferred range.

At this point the struggle is coming to a simple solution when confronted with myriad options. Or, to be more precise, giving the impression of deriving a logical choice when one has neither the time nor the required information at hand to reach it rationally.

Unlike taking a test drive when buying a car, selecting a film to see has no practical demonstration along this pathway. One’s impression of a movie is culled from a sampling (s) that often has only a tangential relationship to the product. The people who want you to see the film, the people with a vested interest in your seeing the movie, are not above or below selling the sizzle and not the steak. They will orchestrate a movie trailer with the very best and most attractive three minutes (even include material excised from the final cut) and devise an ad campaign that sweeps “unpleasant” elements under the carpet. The Motion Picture Association of America attempts to do some internal policing but its priority has been to clamp down on inappropriate marketing to impressionable teens and not white lies inflicted upon adult movie goers.

I believe it was P.T. Barnum who said that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public and time and time again it’s taken the sucker punch of a pitchman’s hook. But, for most, tainted information is the best and certainly the easiest means of access to a movie and blame for that cannot always be placed upon the public. People respond to canned quotes rather than reading reviews and without a media watchdog patrolling the beat are enticed into back alleys they would normally never traverse. Still, individuals will complain that they were given bad directions. The simple fact is that once one buys a ticket the deal has been completed. One can’t subsequently go back to a returns counter and exchange the experience for a “better” product or the same product with improvements.

Meanwhile, back at the kitchen table our couple continues to eliminate options employing a combination of likes and dislikes. Comedies go into the column for consideration but teen comedies are tossed into the shredder. Anything employing sub-titles is tossed out but British dramas are retained. Action gets a priority status while comic book heroes are banished.

Understand that prior to reaching this Solomonic moment, the couple has been barraged by dozens of messages both subtle and overt about any one of the possible movies they might see. I asked several people in market research about the number of movie-specific impressions someone is likely to encounter in a given day and they said that sort of sophisticated research has yet to be conducted.

Test it out for yourself. Upon rising and clearing the cobwebs from your mind, do you open a newspaper? Turn on a morning talk show? Surf the Internet? Any one of those outlets is apt to provide you with stories or ads about a particular film. Then, when you drive to work, do you listen to talk radio? Are there billboards or kiosks with advertising? What’s discussed by the water cooler, during coffee break, on the telephone? All that before noon.

And with such an onslaught, why should we be surprised that what’s retained might be incorrect or incorrectly weighted. Someone will say that they heard a film received bad reviews based on a single review that may have been the exception or confuse the stories of two similarly titled or advertised films. A marketing executive at a studio told me that in an awareness study for one of their recent releases, radio ads scored very high despite the fact that not a penny was spent for the film in that medium.

Our couple has now whittled the list to 10 and is grasping to find criteria that will reduce it to the lowest prime number. They delve into their feelings about the cast, the proximity of the theater to the restaurant and venues with twilight ticket pricing. However, when they finally cut the choices to four they are spent and opt, in frustration, to toss the ball to the other couple to make the final selection. Their hours of consideration, discussion and fretting generated a selection in the range that the average person feels comfortable tackling. The other couple peruses the options and in a twinkling opts for a title.

Things have gone so smoothly one can only hold out the slim hope for a sell out … but that’s another yarn. 

- by Leonard Klady