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

Snap, Crackle, Sizzle  

Let’s begin with an industry truism. A film works on its own merits; a film fails because of a bad publicity campaign.

The wonderful thing about Hollywood truisms is that they are almost always wrong. Not that there aren’t instances where a quality film has prevailed in the face of a club footed advertising/marketing campaign, or that a potential blockbuster was quashed by a misconceived strategy.

Let me offer up a couple of verities. The best publicity campaigns are generally invisible. That is they are not obvious. They are there, but not in your face. And, something of that subtle and complex a nature takes an unbelievable amount of work.

That said, on reflection, I can’t think of very many recent publicity campaigns that demonstrated both an acute understanding of the film and a keen sense of its most appreciative audience. For instance, Fox Searchlight may have done the singular most creative publicity push of recent note for its late 2002 release Antwone Fisher. While its opening was accompanied by the perforce pieces with performers and creatives, one could also find related stories outside the confines of the arts section that ranged from minorities in the military to sagas centering on adoption and children seeking out birth parents.

Nonetheless, the considerable and thoughtful work did not translate at the box office, and that’s both a shame and another chip against the work of publicists. It’s easy to place the blame for the film’s lack of success on its campaign though other factors certainly contributed. The film’s release at a time when other serious fare, including About Schmidt and The Pianist, was tapping the same sort of moviegoer had an effect and, though it’s difficult to quantify, the message being sent out may not have reached the intended listener because other messages, from the likes of Chicago and The Two Towers, were drowning it out.

Going back to the top of this piece, publicity is a commodity that’s impossible to quantify. Twenty cover stories, 62 news pieces and 143 interviews cannot be translated with any consistency into a dollar value. Whereas throwing $20 million or $40 million into massive television and print advertising has somehow, according to studio mavens, been given a correlation to a bottom line opening box office gross. It doesn’t require a lot of thought to simply flood the marketplace with images and sounds from an upcoming vaunted sequel and trot out its marquee names for photo ops and well-intended sound bytes.

Obviously, when a film doesn’t have stars and isn’t a broad comedy or a pyrotechnic extravaganza, one cannot employ the same sort of blitzkrieg marketing approach. Publicity, theoretically, ought to level the playing field. Imagination and creativity should provide some balance against the ultra tsunami of The Matrix Reloaded, X2 or Terminator 3. While industry watchers have noted that Universal’s Seabiscuit, the saga of the Depression-era racehorse, is about the only quality, adult release from the majors this summer, to date its publicity campaign has been limited to advance production pieces. This may work well in tandem with what’s to come. The word is out that the film is alternative viewing and the studio next has to explain exactly what it hopes the public will want to buy.

Seabiscuit and dozens of “quality” films released annually are perceived to be harder to sell because they lack blatant marketing “hooks.” Publicity is cheaper than marketing costs but it tends to be more time consuming and produces less tangible results. And as the majors and indies have become increasingly caught up in a cause and effect attitude toward their wares, the value of publicity has been gradually and consistently eroded during the past two decades. Some might say it’s not valued, but it’s probably more accurate to concur that its status has inched down on the totem pole.

In a general sense - particularly in the arena of the majors - less is expected of publicists. People working on film sets used to be hired because they were capable of writing preliminary notes, coming up with story ideas, hiring set photographers and inter-facing between the talent on set and the studio honchos. The most grim analysis and depictions of contemporary unit publicists are as “hand holders” and people who say “no” to most interview and set visit requests. The studios don’t appear to be interested in employing units with a strong sense of the movie or how to sell it. Staff writers commonly put press kits together back at headquarters and publicity departments physically divorced from the location determine what media will have access.

Some of these elements become even more obscured when talent with personal handlers step in to dictate what a client will and won’t do. I recall a publicist relating the story of receiving an angry phone from a star’s Manhattan-based publicist during the picture’s location filming in Italy. The Gothamite was spitting venom, outraged that the unit had been talking and discussing publicity matters with the actor and wanted to know why this was occurring. The publicist, undaunted by the bile, simply replied, “because he was sitting across the room from me.”

The role of the publicist has not only been diminished, the compensation - particularly for film work - hasn’t appreciably changed in a decade and when cost of living escalators are factored in, pay rates have actually declined.

One veteran publicist tells the story of receiving a frantic call to help out an actress with a photo shoot prior to her beginning a film in Australia. She began to call around for hair and makeup people and was suddenly struck by the fact that they were commanding $10,000 to $15,000 for a couple of days work while she was being paid a $3,000 monthly retainer. Tony Angellotti, an L.A.-based agency owner, bluntly states, “you cannot get by doing film publicity, you have to have corporate and personal clients.”

One can see the stress lines on the faces of publicists at boutique agencies that once specialized in difficult, alternative films and filmmakers. In the past five years, they’ve seen work loads double to keep up the profit margin as fees have been put on hold. And, the attenuated work schedule has resulted in many films receiving barely competent attention.

At an advance screening last month of The Magdalene Sisters - the British social drama that won top honors at Venice in September -  a 15-page set of preliminary notes were made available. It consisted of: a front cover, 6 pages of credits, a page with a brief bio of the writer/director and the producer, and a 7-page synopsis. Conspicuously absent from the package were bios of the young actresses who were hitherto unknown and a really important description of the historic background on the real life incidents the film depicts.

Press notes are a not-to-be-undervalued tool. However, you wouldn’t know it from the increasing number of occasions where one attends a screening and receives little more than screen credits and a synopsis. In the 1980s, even small companies such as Vestron and Island paid top dollar to secure a very good writer that would fashion press notes to appropriately position a film and give it its due significance. Today’s comparable distributors are employing people to dash out generally inferior packages in a week for fees of $2,000 or $3,000. It shows. However, in the case of The Magdalene Sisters, I’m told that the final notes (still unseen by this writer) have been held up pending approval from the film’s artistic principles.

In this dire climate for film publicity - one publicist contends that if you read all the major magazine in Braille you could not differentiate 90% of them - it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the field isn’t attracting the sort of quality person that once populated the landscape. “Training is crucial,” maintains Melody Korenbrot, owner of Block-Korenbrott in Los Angeles. “I’m very skittish about hiring people who’ve come up through certain agencies. You are in a certain sense a servant and with that comes a certain decorum and understandings are what can and cannot be said.”

Angellotti is decidedly less diplomatic, characterizing a new generation of publicists as “star fuckers” and “control freaks.” “I cannot speak for anyone else. What keeps me going are those jobs that force me to be creative. That’s the challenge, that’s the fun.”

Some Cannes, Some Canned’t

In the opening night coverage of the Cannes Film Festival, mention was made that the stars and director of curtain-raiser Fanfan la Tulipe opted not to be ferried to the Palais via limo but to simply stroll over from the nearby Majestic Hotel.

Why that struck a chord I don’t know. However, the following day I received a call from someone attending the event that asked if I was aware that the Cannes festival was in severe financial straights. Last year, senior officers acquired a building in Paris as its headquarters and the initial money spent on acquiring and renovating the site left the organization cash strapped. He went on to add that it was just barely able to secure the fee for its fleet of rental cars that arrived the day prior to the current edition. It was only then that administrators realized that no one had budgeted for either parking or gasoline. Cannes officials could not be reached for comment (possibly in meetings with bankers).

 

- by Leonard Klady