by Lynda Obst
This is a wise posture, because there is often a combination of ego and interpretive conflict about what the audience reactions on the cards say. At times, the written comments are so random they are uninterpretable. Conversely, a picture can get better, or at least improve its numbers, from very clear and consistent notes that the cards reveal. (This happens more often than not.) Sometimes the process devolves into an ideological battle about whether the audience, marketeers and studio suits should be factored into the filmmakers’ decision-making process at all. But now that show business has become business business as the cost of movies and marketing has exploded, there is little if any patience for these debates; or, when they do happen, they take place among the filmmakers on the ride home, where we strategize as to what we are willing to do and where to hold the line.
Certain “arty” and “indie” movies get to avoid this fate altogether: Nonstudio movies can’t afford this process, and even if they could, the point of independent production is to allow the filmmaker his final cut. That’s what independent means. Even at the classics divisions inside the studio system, they will test for marketing purposes, and A-list filmmakers get their pick of which notes to listen to and which to ignore; that’s the price of working with these kinds of directors. For example, Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt did not test well at all. Movies like this cannot randomly recruit a target audience in malls, because that’s not where educated grown-ups who love Payne’s movies hang out on weekends. When filmmakers like Payne work inside the studio system, as with The Descendants—a delicious dramedy starring George Clooney about a dysfunctional family becoming functional—they make only the changes they approve. (It helps that The Descendants was released by Fox’s Searchlight division, which specializes in smaller, specialty films.) This also happens if the movie tests over 90, which is terrific, believe me. The same goes for Darren Aronofsky, Paul Thomas Anderson, etc., when they are working outside of the studios. I highly doubt Anderson previewed The Master. But when Darren makes Noah—about the biblical flood—for Fox for over $100 million, he will be testing, because that is the fate of tentpoles.
Our call-and-response begins at this moment in back of the dark cinema as the first audience watches the picture. Testimony is given right after, in the recruited focus group, filmmakers and studio silent in their hidden seats, as the righteous speak of obvious mistakes, confusions, backstory problems, jokes that fell flat, continuity mistakes and problems or confusions with the ending. Hands are raised for numbers. Hearts sink or soar. You get an instant A or F (Cs are Fs, by the way). Our dialogue with America has begun.
This is not new. I found preview cards used by David O. Selznick, director of the 1939 movie Gone with the Wind, in the Fox vaults. These cards asked virtually the same questions we ask today. Based on some of my past focus groups, I imagined what Selznick might experience in the San Fernando Valley if Gone with the Wind were coming out now, and he had recruited the wrong audience—which happens all the time.
KEVIN: Hi, everyone. I’m Kevin! What’s your name?
THE FOCUS GROUP: (In sequence, raising their hands) I’m Cindy! I’m James! I’m Donna! I’m Billy! I’m Andrea! I’m Diego! I’m Joe the Plumber!
(Everyone laughs.)
KEVIN: You can be honest with me. I had nothing to do with making this film. You won’t hurt my feelings. It’s only a print. It’s not finished or color-corrected. They have lots of work yet to do. And much of the Civil War footage is still waiting for effects. So, what worked for you? What didn’t work?
DONNA: (Raises her hand) Well, Scarlett is a total bitch. She tried to steal Melanie’s boyfriend. And she was a terrible mother. I hated her.
(David O. slouches in his chair.)
KEVIN: Who agrees with Donna?
(All the girls shoot up their hands in agreement.)
KEVIN: (Trying another tack) Who was your favorite character?
DONNA: Ashley Wilkes. He was dreamy.
KEVIN: Okay, Donna. And Joe the Plumber—what did you think?
JOE THE PLUMBER: I thought he was a pussy.
DIEGO: Yeah, I liked Rhett. He was a gunrunner. Cool.
CINDY: Me too. I liked him. I was glad he turned that bitch out.
ANDREA: Rhett is way cooler than Ashley.
DONNA: No way. He’s a drunk.
KEVIN: (Sees this quickly devolving into a catfight) Girls? What do you think the theme of the movie was?
ANDREA: If you string the guy along, you’re gonna lose him.
JAMES: (Derisively) God. It’s not a romantic comedy. It’s a war movie.
KEVIN: Good. Guys? What do you think the theme was?
JOE THE PLUMBER: The South will rise again!
(The studio head can no longer see David O.)
KEVIN: How many of you would recommend this movie to your friends?
(Half the hands in the room go up.)
KEVIN: What would you change about the movie so that you would recommend it to your friends?
CINDY: I think Melanie should come back to life and get revenge.
(Girls agree, all cheer.)
(Filmmakers cringe in the back, looking at one another in dismay, and at Kevin hopelessly.)
KEVIN: What if I told you this was based on a famous book and we can’t bring Melanie back to life?
(Girls are deflated.)
BILLY: I know that book! My mother loves it.
Sometimes you leave the focus group and want to shoot yourself or the person who recruited the focus group or the focus group itself, deploying a mental firing squad. Sometimes, a point Joe the Plumber makes is a point that the director made in an earlier debate. At that moment in the focus group, he glares at the studio exec in his seat. Or sometimes a point Donna makes is a note that the studio exec had been pushing, so he smiles at the director. But often so many points are made that it’s a jumble, and everyone just rolls their eyes.
While all this drama and annihilation of our hard work is going on, a little man who sits pretty low down on the totem pole is standing in a hidden dark booth in the theater somewhere where no one can find him. He is frantically counting the critical numbers marked in the boxes on the preview cards that the recruited audience has just completed, trying to arrive at The Number.
THE NUMBER! THE TOP TWO BOXES!
When it’s all over and the audience has written and spoken its critiques, the whole team meets in the same small, dark projection booth like a bunch of outlaws and grabs at the little man in possession of the papers with the numbers. Someone has calculated the bottom line. Nuances are for tomorrow. First, are we a hit? Are we a disaster? Do we have work to do? And will it be easy, or hard, painful lifting?
The “everything” number is decided by how the audience rates the movie on their preview cards. There are five options: “excellent,” “very good,” “good,” “fair” and “poor.” The Number is the percentage (out of the total number of cards) of viewers who check one of the top two boxes, rating it as either excellent or very good. Good doesn’t count. Fair is bad. Poor is terrible.
The point of these tests is to find ways to push the “goods” into “very goods” by analyzing those “goods” and seeing what the issues are.
Another question asks whether you would recommend the movie to your friends. The top two boxes are “yes, definitely” and “yes, probably.” Again, only these boxes count in gauging a Number, and again we try to push the “yes, probably”s to “yes, definitely”s. The lesser options are “might or might not recommend”; “no, probably not”; and “no, definitely not.” Anything other than the top two translates to “I’ll watch it on TV or when it comes out on Netflix, or forget about it altogether!”
Everyone prays that their number is over 80. Then they’re safe. Most movies tend to test in the 60s. Average is low 70s. Mid-80s to 90 and up is a potential hit; 50s or worse, hide.
The data on the cards that we are interpreting in the dark booth are this: If you’re not recommending the movie to
your friends, why not? It is interpreted through questions like: If you could change one thing about the film, what would it be? What will get you to recommend this movie to your friends? (This question is asked in the focus group, often.) Who is this movie for? What was wrong or right about the ending of this movie? (Read: How much will reshoots cost us to fix it?) What characters did you dislike most? (Read: Off with their heads!) What did you not understand? (Read: Cuts? Or reshoots?)
Sherry Lansing was the best I’ve seen at leading these meetings. Calm and focused, never domineering or overriding anyone else, she could read and interpret the cards in four minutes flat, figure out how to fix existing scenes, what to reshoot and how to do it all for a price. And she knew how to make the filmmaker think it was his idea.
Years later, Sherry told me her secret: She actually had all her notes while she watched the movie and took little of the cards into account. She shared her notes privately with the filmmaker so he knew that she was saying what she really thought, not what the audience was saying. It worked, and quickly.
You can sometimes gain upward of ten points by fixing a bad ending, or clearing up confusions and muddles, with judicious editing. Sometimes a movie is just too long in places, and cuts and trims help. This is what we hope for.
Sometimes a reshoot is called for. This costs big money, but it’s a drop in the bucket if it makes a movie work. Particularly a movie that cost a lot to begin with.
The Number is the bottom line, the whole point of the evening, what we leave with. If it’s great, we have great spin, we soar. If it’s terrible, if we have a flop, we keep quiet. If it’s in the middle, we go to work and spin that it’s great and inflate the number by ten points. It’s kind of like someone’s age or weight in an online dating profile: No one believes the Number.
Constant studio test screenings in the San Fernando Valley have turned locals into mini-Roger Eberts—they are by now expert critics, writing as though they had their own Chicago Sun-Times column, TV show and blog, because every studio is testing their products in the same ten malls, and the same gene pool is getting all the action. The call-and-response with the audience is therefore a multilogue between these anointed geniuses (standing in for America) and the filmmaking team of directors, producers, marketing gurus and studio heads anxious for feedback. After we get the Number, the purpose of the meeting in the dark is to Figure Out What the Audience Is Saying and then to Figure Out What to Do. It is a song we have all learned to sing, some of us better than others.
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.”