Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business

by Lynda Obst

  Both The Informant and The Invention of Lying were destined to be “art” movies for Sue’s studio. By this I mean the box office estimate was under $50 million domestic, no matter what happened. (That would have been a bonanza for Lying.) But from the look-to-conquer in Sue’s eyes, you would have thought we were all Batmen. Well, she did have Matt. And that’s pretty hot.

  Sue spearheads each of Warner Bros. Pictures’ campaigns personally, working closely with President Jeff Robinov and his production team in every aspect of a movie’s release. Robinov, who started as an agent, has a keen eye for picking pictures. Making sure they get seen is Sue’s department.

  Marketing is the one hard cost in moviemaking now; the studios cannot change how much a television ad, a billboard, etc., costs. If the studio is smart and tough, they can lower a movie’s budget and rein in production costs with a responsible filmmaker. But getting the word out—through all the noise of the other movies getting their word out—costs a fortune. Free advertising and publicity have become crucial. Getting the stars—if there are any—to do their bit on TV is a job in itself. But if the reliance on titles of famous books and fairy tales, superheroes, games et al. ad nauseam comes from their preexistence in the culture, then marketing creatives working on original properties must compensate for their product’s lack of awareness with a campaign that captures the public’s imagination.

  Robinov also brought Sue Kroll onto his green-light team, making her a part of their early decision-making about what to produce. When the head of production and the head of marketing are on the green-light committee together, as is the case at Warner Bros. and now other studios too, there is more communication throughout the process. The whole team knows what it is selling from the moment it buys the script or idea and starts developing it. No marketing team can successfully open every movie, and Warner Bros. has had its failures: It couldn’t get an audience to go to female-fantasy-actioner Sucker Punch, or get sufficient numbers to launch Green Lantern into franchise territory, despite Herculean efforts. But it has opened “original” movies—those without preawareness—as well as anyone ever has; for example, the Warner Bros. marketing team’s phenomenonally successful campaigns for The Hangover and Inception. By October 2011, The Hangover I and II had crossed the $1 billion mark, the highest-grossing live-action (nonanimated) comedy franchise in history.

  In the hot fall of 2012, Warner Bros. also opened Ben Affleck’s Argo—the weird, mostly true story of a covert mission to help six Americans flee Iran in 1979 by posing as a Canadian movie crew—at $19.5 million and helped boost it and Affleck into Oscar contenders. The original hit had passed the $100 million mark before the festivities had even begun, exciting writers and producers all around town. All they had to do was score Ben Affleck and they could make their favorite story!

  Marketing is crucial to the life or death of a movie, and like advertising itself with its coveted Clios, it has evolved into an art form. Making the audience think they will like a movie is the job of the marketing department. If a campaign doesn’t click, the movie dies a quick death. If the idea isn’t a presold “title,” its concept should be easy to explain on a “one-sheet” (a poster on buses, billboards and theaters). If it’s not, it better have big stars’ faces on posters to plaster all over the world. Now that marketing people are often in on development decisions, Monday-morning meetings when execs talk about the scripts that were submitted and read over the weekend could, in the worst case, go something like this:

  PRESIDENT OF PRODUCTION: What script should we buy?

  EXEC: I love this one! It’s great!

  PRES: What’s it about?

  EXEC: Blah blah blah. Blah.

  MARKETING PRES: That was one blah too many. It won’t fit on a one-sheet!

  PRES: Pass.

  If they don’t know how to sell it, they won’t make it.

  SELLING INCEPTION

  Inception is the perfect example of a movie whose concept won’t fit on a one-sheet: A guy has a dream within a dream in which he’s looking for his wife, who may or may not be trying to kill him as they are chased by a series of bad guys in a multilevel dreamscape … while he is trying to get back to his kids. What??? A one-liner on a poster wasn’t going to sell this movie. It was a classic marketer’s nightmare.

  So I visited one of my favorite pundits, Vinny Bruzzese, a marketing research expert then with the marketing firm OTX (now called Ipsos), one of the outside companies the studios use when they’re out of ideas to discuss its prospects, for insight. Vinny, with his slicked-back black hair and Bronx accent, looks more OTB than OTX, and he was dubious, as he looked ahead to summer’s prospects.

  “Not big,” he said. “Specialty movie … for cinephiles … too hard to explain … big cities … lucky to break $100 million … no Dark Knight.”

  It wasn’t just Vinny who was thinking this way; that was the industry buzz before Sue Kroll and her team got ahold of the campaign. In the end, this one-off did $270 million domestically and $650 million worldwide once the campaign and the word of mouth on the film coalesced.

  How did Warner Bros.’s marketing team take an unknown property like Inception and turn it into an unexpected blockbuster? They made it a must-see phenomenon. If you didn’t have an opinion about Inception by Saturday, the day after it opened, you were simply uncool. As Oly put it, “I felt like they were saying, ‘Trust me. You don’t have to know what it’s about. You just have to see it. Dreams. Christopher Nolan. GO.’ ”

  So it was with the key demo (males ages twelve to twenty-four) all around the country. It was beyond water-cooler talk. It was the brunch topic in Chicago, the dinner party chatter in Austin and Denver. If you hadn’t seen it by Sunday, you were in the theater Sunday night to be ready for work chat Monday. Industry analysts call this buzz, or “want to see.” This buzz was created. How?

  First, they turned Christopher Nolan into a star—not a movie star, but a cinema star. They built a mystique around him and then built a campaign from there. He is one of a kind, a talent of a different caliber, pushing the boundaries of cinema. See the movie because of the director! He is the exciting element.

  No director besides Spielberg had successfully opened a movie based purely on reputation before. Spielberg’s name has instant recognition and is for many around the world enough of a reason to see a movie. It is placed above the title like a star’s name. In this case, the Dark Knight director wasn’t coming at them with an obvious blockbuster, as he was with his Dark Knight franchise. He had a “drawer” script from ten years ago that clocked in at two and a half hours, a formidable running time, with an idea that wouldn’t have fit on a poster designed by Christo and draped around the Golden Gate Bridge.

  They concentrated on the director, the astonishing visuals and the originality of the movie. I asked Sue how they handled this marketing crisis over dinner one night at her regular Italian haunt in Los Feliz, a ten-minute drive from Warner Bros.

  She explained, “Rather than attempting to answer all of the questions within the context of our materials, we really encouraged a dialogue. We wanted audiences to struggle a little and invest in what the movie promised to deliver. If they had questions, that was a good thing. To us it meant that they were engaged and paying attention, and that ultimately drove our results. Our campaign was a slow build over a period of months. We had to create ‘event status,’ but that can’t be done all at once when you have an original concept. By the time we got to release, it was an event, but it took careful planning to get there.”

  The campaign made these concise points:

  1. This is an Event.

  2. This Director (capital “D”) who made The Dark Knight is the Real Thing.

  3. It’s about dreams.

  4. This movie is cool.

  5. Here’s all the story you need.

  6. It’s action: mucho action.

  7. Here’s Leo.

  8. He goes home.

  9. The visuals are mind-blowing.


  10. More action.

  11. You have never seen anything like this.

  12. It’s romantic.

  What makes a great creative marketing executive like Sue so good at her job is the same gift that a great creative production executive has: total absorption and the ability to discover something about each movie to fall in love with. But her gift is by no means reserved for highbrow material. She made hits out of Clash of the Titans and The Hangover: “Bachelor party buddies wake up hungover in a palatial hotel room with Mike Tyson’s tiger but no groom!’ Go.”

  • • •

  Sony has its own marketing star in its chairman of worldwide marketing and distribution, Jeff Blake. The return of Julia Roberts was a big deal for Sony. She worked and worked and helped open their movie Eat Pray Love. But just as important was Blake’s campaign. It was beautiful, dreamy and everywhere. If you’d even remotely heard of the book, you would have noticed the poster, the jewelry, the movie tie-in bookstore displays with Sony-merchandized prayer beads. It was utterly female-friendly penetration. His campaign for David Fincher’s The Social Network, the story of the founding of Facebook, was equally brilliant and helped the film to open all around the world, like the global social phenomenon that Facebook had by that point become.

  Ten years ago we never knew the names of the heads of marketing; they were the guys in modest suits who came to previews. Now they are the other rock stars, along with the studio heads. We know they are vital participants in the studio process, and we hear that they are called into meetings to decide on whether to green-light a script! More important, if no one sees your movie, what’s the point of having made it? If that’s the case, what’s the difference between a marketing head and a studio head? It doesn’t matter, as long as the marketing head believes in your movie. What does a marketing head think about? How to read and reach the audience, and, specifically, the segment of the audience that is going to like your movie the most. This is a cultivated skill based on quadrant-think. Everyone is part of this, like it or not.

  QUADRANT-THINK

  Quadrant-think is one of the main exercises that movie and marketing execs use to figure out whether they are going to make a movie. Then they use it again to determine exactly how to sell the movie by determining who would like it and who they should target. It’s how they model whether a large enough base potentially exists to see the movie, or whether to cut their losses and unceremoniously dump it. (Release it in one theater in limited cities with no ads.)

  It’s HellOOO? Who’s out there? Anyone? Are there enough of you who go to movies for us to make this thing? Or spend the ad money and release it?

  Here’s how it works: Think of the entire moviegoing public as a pie, divided into quarters. Each quarter of that pie is a different demographic flavor. The idea is to get as many quadrants of the pie into the theater as possible.

  If there is not a significant portion of the pie or combination of pieces of pie that can be reliably targeted to show up, the movie will not happen. The more slices you can get, the more likely it is to get made. If the movie you want to make is specific enough, if it can target two quadrants to which it can easily be marketed, the marketers will know exactly how to reach those quadrants on TV and online. Then it might get made. It depends on which two. But at least you can make a good argument. Any kind of pie will do.

  The upper female quadrant—shall we call it Apple Pie?—is composed of women over twenty-four, like me. We are the least frequently targeted quadrant because of our penchant for waiting until we have unloaded the dishwasher and done every other imaginable errand we have to do before we leave the house and go to the movies.

  Vinny Bruzzese regularly tells me, “They rent,” and he has the numbers to back his point.

  We are only potent when combined with our sisters, nieces or daughters in the “lower” female quadrant, those under twenty-four: the Berry Pies. AppleBerries have made reliable hits over three decades. But forget making a movie for Apple Pies alone: They call those Lifetime TV movies.

  The opposite of Apple Pie renters is the most coveted quadrant, the lower male—the Mud Pies, which encompasses boys ages twelve to twenty-four. They used to go to movies on Friday nights in droves. But they are going less often now, as they are buried in video games and the Net, gaming, searching, Facebooking, everything. The studios just can’t give these boys up, kind of like your nutty girlfriend who won’t stop stalking an old lover despite his obvious lack of interest. Every week there is an update about whether the boys’ attention is finally back, and if not, what will draw them back.

  When Mud Pies show up for a movie, they can make it a hit all by themselves, because they go en masse on the first weekend, when studios make the most money.1 Moreover, the opening number instantly brands the movie as a hit or a flop. This is why they are still the key demographic. The upper male quad (over twenty-four)—let’s call them Pecan Pies—loves political thrillers. They go to the movies more than my Apple quad, but rarely make a hit alone. When they combine with the lower male quadrant, you have a big hit. Pecan and Mud together make your Man movies, some of which cross over to lower female (Berry) as well, so they make date-night action movies (Thor, Iron Man).

  When any two quadrants show up, like my favorite two, the upper and lower female, you have AppleBerry Pie, and it makes a solid domestic performer. We can make a hit without a slice of Pecan or Mud pie showing up, à la The Proposal, Julie & Julia, The Devil Wears Prada, Something’s Gotta Give, Legally Blonde, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Hope Floats or hundreds of others. If we show up in droves, you have Twilight.

  With a film like Bridesmaids, or The Devil Wears Prada, or Sleepless in Seattle, where we drew in many Pecans who identified with Tom Hanks, you have a three-quadrant movie. If in those cases we cross that movie over to a few of the lower (or upper) males by not making it absolutely toxic to men in casting, title or premise, we can make a big hit. Remember, these movies cost nothing. They require no expensive special effects, no huge action sequences. They are just casting with locations and sets. (And a lot of hair, makeup and wardrobe.) All of the aforementioned movies easily exceeded $100 million. Three-quad franchises based on bestselling intellectual properties, or IPs, such as The Hunger Games and Twilight, brought in some AppleBerry and Mud pies, but Berries came in droves. Berries pushed the first of each of these movies into franchise territory.

  The Holy Grail of the business is the four-quadrant movie: Avatar, Titanic, Toy Story. These are movies that everyone wants to see. Family movies are often four-quadrant movies, such as Shrek, The Lion King, Madagascar (from DreamWorks Animation) and almost all of the Pixar movies. The Pixar formula, if it existed, would have already been copied, stolen or in some way breached. They make them up, they make them well and they never copy themselves. All are originals, and so far only two have gotten sequels—Cars and Toy Story—so Pixar doesn’t seem reliant on the sequel model for success. Quite a formula. No formula. That’s why they don’t die anywhere. If you can hit all four quads, well, it’s time to retire—but you can’t because you have to make another movie right away. It’s the start of a potential franchise! A four-quadrant movie is the point of the game. We call that a blockbuster.

  GIVING TESTIMONY AT TEST SCREENINGS: CALL-AND-RESPONSE

  We meet the quadrants—that is, the audience—and discover what they have to say about our baby at the first recruited test preview. The marketing department decides who will be recruited based on a conversation with the producer. “Who was the movie intended for? Berries? Muds? Pecans? Apples?”

  Then they spread the word at the malls: what the movie is about, who is in it and what other movies it is like. Often they hire outside companies such as Kevin Goetz’s Screen Engine or OTX to help bring in the audience and run the preview. Pretty much everything is at stake: the advertising budget, the release date, the entire destiny of the picture.

  That’s why I arrive at the theater looking like a deer caught in headlights f
or the first test preview of any movie, after driving during crushing rush-hour traffic for at least an hour and a half on the 101 freeway in the Valley. I then stare closely at the line waiting outside. I say to these people, but not out loud—at least, not very loud—You are the most powerful people in my life. Please be kind. In fact, be wonderful. Then I smile like an idiot at all of them. And somehow I believe this behavior will affect their test scores. Sometimes it works. Sometimes, oddly, it doesn’t.

  The test-preview process is the horrifying reality show we live through right after the first cut of the picture is delivered to the studio. So I’ve developed some superstitions. I always request Kevin Goetz to run the preview, to keep both the focus group and me focused. Everyone is there, including my director, whose feelings I am more worried about than my own. Also present are various divisions of the studio whose moods I have to discern. It’s here that we find out if we are a hit or a flop and what we can do to make us closer to the former. This is a do-or-die process, as we find out through this thumbs-up or thumbs-down roller-coaster night whether we have a shot in the marketplace.

  We arrive at the preview with the big marketing issues unresolved and on the line. But then something consequential happens: We begin our dialogue with the audience. Before this moment, the movie was all ours. We knew what worked, what we loved, what was funny, what was moving. Until this moment, we knew our movie. But once we share it with the audience and we feel them in the room, in our bones, our subjective experience becomes a joined experience. We see the picture with new eyes now, both ours and theirs. To me, more important than what we read later in the audience preview cards is what we feel in our gut, especially with a comedy, but also with a drama. Where were they laughing? Where were they bored, twitching, rustling in their seats? After this, we never see the movie in exactly the same way. The audience owns it with us. And this isn’t all bad.

  If we are sane, we realize that we’ve fallen in love with our movie during shooting. During the cutting process, some of our thousands of choices have become ingrained. We may have lost some objectivity. This is inevitable when the filmmakers are alone together in a small, dark room eight hours a day for eight weeks. This is our last chance to regain that objectivity, as well as an opportunity to go Zen and just listen.