Troubled, I decided to do a little more checking. Until this point, I had only been paying intermittent casual attention to the campaign -- what had I missed? Was I witnessing a one-time stumble, or an ongoing problem?
On IMDB Pro,4 I checked John Carter’s “MovieMeter” ranking. It was ranked 986 as of November 27, the most recent ranking, meaning 985 movies were receiving more hits and IMDB message board activity than John Carter. This seemed low for a $250M tentpole film 100 days out from its release date. It should be higher, I thought. A lot higher.
I decided to compare John Carter to two comparable upcoming “tentpole” films -- Lionsgate’s The Hunger Games, slated for release two weeks after John Carter on March 23, and Disney’s The Avengers slated for release two months after John Carter on May 4. John Carter didn’t need to be ranked higher or even as high as either of these two -- but it should be in the same general vicinity and seeing how these films rank would give an “order of magnitude” indication of where the other high profile films slated for a spring release were ranked.
The results? The Hunger Games was ranked 17,5 while The Avengers was ranked 26.6
I pulled up the IMDB Pro Data Table View for each film,7 which includes a week by week summary of ranking and links to each article on the film that appeared in entertainment media outlets for the week. These articles don’t just happen – they are seeded by the publicity team who release to the media stills, concept art, interviews, etc, all according to a predetermined plan and schedule.
I picked a random week, October 9, and compared John Carter, The Hunger Games, and The Avengers side by side. The Hunger Games publicity team had generated 72 articles placed for the week; The Avengers had placed 149 articles; the John Carter team had generated a total of 9 article placements.
Nine?
I then looked at the entire month of October and compared the article output as monitored by IMDB Pro: The score for October?
Avengers 640, Hunger Games 224, John Carter 31.
Taking the entire period from the end of August until the end of November, the disparity remained the same -- both Avengers and Hunger Games were well over 1,000 articles, and John Carter?
A whopping 45 articles.
Or, stated differently: IMDB was monitoring a little over four articles per week about John Carter, versus well over 100 per week for the other two.
What did it mean?
Unless there was something I was missing -- it seemed clear that the John Carter promotional campaign was being severely and inexplicably out-hustled and out-worked by each of the other two films. If there were a ten point scale for ranking effort expended to promote, The Avengers would rate a 9.4; The Hunger Games would rate an 8.9 for its promotional effort; and John Carter would be lucky to rate a 3.0.
Complacency? Impossible.
Because of its $250M price tag, the “bar” that John Carter had to get over was higher than the bar for either The Avengers, which had a reported cost of $220M, or The Hunger Games, with a budget of $80M. Plus John Carter was closer to its release date than either of the other two -- meaning it was deeper into its promotional campaign and should be operating with a greater sense of urgency than either of the other two, not lesser.
I tried to imagine any scenario under which it would make sense for John Carter, during a critical period just months prior to its release, to go silent like this. Could there be some artful “lie low” rationale that would explain John Carter being silent while other “tentpole” releases were grinding out the “buzz fodder”?
I couldn’t think of any.
It made no sense.
No sense at all.
Clearly something was seriously amiss.
A Gift for “Damphool” Narrative
We win when we are defeated. Edgar Rice Burroughs8
In the summer of 1911, Edgar Rice Burroughs was a desperate man, and defeat was at his doorstep. He would later calculate that before his circumstances changed for the better, he had slogged through 18 jobs and business schemes without success. At 35, he was able to keep his family of four fed and clothed only through regular visits to a nearby pawnshop and the occasional largesse of his wife’s wealthy and generous family. He had pawned his wife’s jewelry and his watch, and now there was nothing left to pawn. Burroughs needed a solution.
Repeatedly he answered blind newspaper ads but no salaried jobs materialized. He eventually cobbled together a few dollars which allowed him to buy agency rights for a company selling pencil sharpeners. He borrowed office space, recruited a team of sub-agents, and set out once again to make a go of it as an entrepreneur -- only this time, fate intervened.
Frequently alone in the borrowed office space while his subagents were out making calls, he began reading the pulp magazines of the Frank A. Munsey company -- Argosy, All-Story, and others. The pulps had evolved out of the dime novels of the previous century, and had formed a key place in the culture of America since 1896 when Argosy, the first pulp, began publication. The magazines delivered 192 pages of all-fiction entertainment for the bargain price of 10 cents. All-Story liked to boast: “192 pages -- All stories--stories of rapid action and stirring adventure, stories with sweep and go to them. Stories without tiresome descriptions or baffling dialect.”9
As he read the tales of adventure, romance, and mystery, he became convinced that he could replicate and in all probability improve upon the stories he was reading. He famously said of his entry into the writing arena: “...if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines.”10
In attempting imaginative fiction for the pulps, Burroughs had substantial personal experience to draw on. Before settling down in Chicago, he had attended various military schools and academies; he had volunteered for the Rough Riders; he had panned gold and carried the mail on horseback in Idaho; he had served as a cavalryman chasing the last Apache holdouts in Arizona; and he had served as a detective for a railroad company in Salt Lake City.
For his first literary effort, he chose to pose a highly imaginative “what if” scenario: What if a Virginia civil war cavalryman was mysteriously transported to Mars, there to find himself captive among a warlike tribe of fifteen-foot tall, six-limbed Tharks, only to later find himself caught up in an epic war between nations of humans including Dejah Thoris, the incomparable Princess of Helium, with whom he falls in love and for whom he would lay down his life?
He initially titled the story: My First Adventure on Mars, then retitled it The Green Martians, before finally submitting under the title Dejah Thoris, Martian Princess using the pseudonym “Normal Bean.”
“I had never met an editor, or an author, or a publisher,” Burroughs would later write in his autobiography. “I had no idea how to submit a story or what I could expect to get in payment. Had I known anything about it at all I would not have thought of submitting half a novel.”11
Securing a supply of onionskin stationery of The American Genealogical Society, Burroughs began to write.12
The Story
The words that Burroughs first wrote in the summer of 1911 would see him transformed in a few short years from a desperate, failed entrepreneur to the most popular author on the face of the planet. What was about his appeal that was unique? A close examination of the opening pages of his first published story provides clues to a genius that is more psychological than literary -- a sharp and natural sense of how to vividly evoke his settings and engage readers with his characters:
DEJAH THORIS, MARTIAN PRINCESS
by Normal Bean (Edgar Rice Burroughs)
FOREWORD
To the Reader of this Work:
In submitting Captain Carter's strange manuscript to you in book form, I believe that a few words relative to this remarkable personality will be of
interest.
My first recollection of Captain Carter is of the few months he spent at my father's home in Virginia, just prior to the opening of the civil war. I was then a child of but five years, yet I well remember the tall, dark, smooth-faced, athletic man whom I called Uncle Jack.
He seemed always to be laughing; and he entered into the sports of the children with the same hearty good fellowship he displayed toward those pastimes in which the men and women of his own age indulged; or he would sit for an hour at a time entertaining my old grandmother with stories of his strange, wild life in all parts of the world. We all loved him, and our slaves fairly worshipped the ground he trod.
He was a splendid specimen of manhood, standing a good two inches over six feet, broad of shoulder and narrow of hip, with the carriage of the trained fighting man. His features were regular and clear cut, his hair black and closely cropped, while his eyes were of a steel gray, reflecting a strong and loyal character, filled with fire and initiative. His manners were perfect, and his courtliness was that of a typical southern gentleman of the highest type.
The frame story would become one of the signatures of Burroughs narrative strategy. Knowing that he would be taking the reader on what he would later term a “damphool species of narrative,”13 Burroughs always hastened to convey to the reader that he was acting in the role of messenger only, delivering a narrative that had in some fashion been delivered to him by a third party. It was an affectation of course, but an effective one.
In this case, he uses the character Burroughs in the frame story to offer an objective if somewhat idealized portrait, quickly sketching Carter as a man who embodies the characteristics that every virtuous man would like to possess, from the “splendid specimen of manhood,” to “loyal character, fire, and initiative.” This segment sets up Carter as a man worthy of respect and admiration, but intentionally does not allow us to see inside the character of the man.
Burroughs then describes how Captain Carter was absent for “15 or 16 years” during which the war was fought and lost, and when Carter returned, he was genial as before, but did not seem to have aged appreciably. Burroughs also observes: “. . . when he thought himself alone I have seen him sit for hours gazing off into space, his face set in a look of wistful longing and hopeless misery; and at night he would sit thus looking up into the heavens, at what I did not know until I read his manuscript years afterward.”
Soon Carter begins to narrate his own story:
I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty. I appear today as I did forty years and more ago, and yet I feel that I cannot go on living forever; that someday I shall die the real death from which there is no resurrection. I do not know why I should fear death, I who have died twice and am still alive; but yet I have the same horror of it as you who have never died, and it is because of this terror of death, I believe, that I am so convinced of my mortality.
And because of this conviction I have determined to write down the story of the interesting periods of my life and of my death. I cannot explain the phenomena; I can only set down here in the words of an ordinary soldier of fortune a chronicle of the strange events that befell me during the ten years that my dead body lay undiscovered in an Arizona cave.
From the moment Carter himself begins to speak, the reader is drawn in by the carefully implanted contradictions between the third-person physical description by Burroughs, and the interior monologue of the actual character John Carter. The “splendid specimen of manhood” tells the reader he is actually a “very old man” who does not know how old he is, and has always appeared “about thirty.” He claims to have “died twice and am still alive” -- but knows he is mortal and has a very human “terror of death.” Because of this, Carter tells us, he has decided to write down a narrative of the (adroitly understated) “interesting periods of my life and death.” Acknowledging that “I cannot explain the phenomena,” he then promises to tell the story as an “ordinary soldier of fortune” -- although the reader knows instinctively that this is an extraordinary man, yet one who seems quite real, is compellingly spiritual, and does not, evidently, have all the answers in spite of all the superlatives heaped on him by the Burroughs character.
It was Thornton Wilder who said: “There is something mysterious about the endowment of the storyteller. Some very great writers possessed very little of it, and some others, lightly esteemed, possessed it in so large a measure that their books survive down the ages, to the confusion of severer critics.”14 Burroughs was a natural storyteller, and the opening paragraphs of A Princess of Mars confirmed it.
In a few words Burroughs had introduced a mysteriously alluring character. As Lance Salvosa would put it 100 years later: “Best of all was the timeless mystery and white-hot courage of John Carter himself. He didn’t know how old he was; he only knew what mattered. And there was something stirring and meaningful about that.”15
A few paragraphs later Carter infuses his narrative with sly, ironic humor:
At the close of the Civil War I found myself possessed of several hundred thousand dollars (Confederate) and a captain's commission in the cavalry arm of an army which no longer existed; the servant of a state which had vanished with the hopes of the South. Masterless, penniless, and with my only means of livelihood, fighting, gone, I determined to work my way to the Southwest and attempt to retrieve my fallen fortunes in a search for gold.
His travels take him to Arizona, where, pursued by Apaches, he takes shelter in a cave where he is overcome by drowsiness, so that a sense of “delicious dreaminess” overcomes him. He is at the point of giving in to his desire to sleep when he hears horses approaching and attempts to spring to his feet, only to be “horrified to discover that my muscles refused to respond to my will.” He then notices a vapor filling the cave, and concludes initially that he has been overcome by poisonous gas. The sound of horses is revealed to be Apaches, who climb to the entrance of the cave, look at Carter’s prostate body, and recoil in fear, leaving him where he lies.
Then, with the Apaches gone, a new terror -- from the cave, out of sight to Carter’s rear, he hears the sound of a “low, distinct moaning.” The sound is moving closer. Carter hears it approach, yet he cannot move - he is paralyzed. He ponders his predicament:
To be held paralyzed, with one's back toward some horrible and unknown danger from the very sound of which the ferocious Apache warriors turn in wild stampede, as a flock of sheep would madly flee from a pack of wolves, seems to me the last word in fearsome predicaments for a man who had ever been used to fighting for his life with all the energy of a powerful physique.
He lies still, unable to move, until near midnight, when suddenly he hears the moaning again.
The shock to my already overstrained nervous system was terrible in the extreme, and with a superhuman effort I strove to break my awful bonds. It was an effort of the mind, of the will, of the nerves; not muscular, for I could not move even so much as my little finger, but nonetheless mighty for all that. And then something gave, there was a momentary feeling of nausea, a sharp click as of the snapping of a steel wire, and I stood with my back against the wall of the cave facing my unknown foe.
Carter stands above the “lifeless clay” of his former body, and wonders: “Have I indeed passed over forever into that other life?” But he can feel his heart pounding; he can feel the cold sweat.....At the entrance to the cave he looks into the Arizona moonlit landscape.
My attention was quickly riveted by a large red star close to the distant horizon. As I gazed upon it, I felt a spell of overpowering fascination—it was Mars, the god of war, and for me, the fighting man, it had always held the power of irresistible enchantment. As I gazed at it on that far-gone night it seemed to call across the unthinkable void, to lure me to it, to draw me as the lodestone attracts a parti
cle of iron.
My longing was beyond the power of opposition; I closed my eyes, stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space. There was an instant of extreme cold and utter darkness.
Next, under the Chapter title “My Advent on Mars,” Carter relates:
I opened my eyes upon a strange and weird landscape. I knew that I was on Mars; not once did I question either my sanity or my wakefulness. I was not asleep, no need for pinching here; my inner consciousness told me as plainly that I was upon Mars as your conscious mind tells you that you are upon Earth. You do not question the fact; neither did I.
I found myself lying prone upon a bed of yellowish, mosslike vegetation which stretched around me in all directions for interminable miles. I seemed to be lying in a deep, circular basin, along the outer verge of which I could distinguish the irregularities of low hills.
He is naked, and his attempts at locomotion produce “a series of evolutions which even then seemed ludicrous in the extreme.” He finds that he must learn to walk all over again due to the lower gravity. In spite of the difficulty with walking he is determined to explore a walled structure, about four feet in height, which is adjacent to where he finds himself. That structure turns out to be an incubator, filled with eggs of uniform size, about two-and-one-half feet in diameter. He then describes the creatures that are emerging from the eggs:
Five or six had already hatched and the grotesque caricatures which sat blinking in the sunlight were enough to cause me to doubt my sanity. They seemed mostly head, with little scrawny bodies, long necks and six legs, or, as I afterward learned, two legs and two arms, with an intermediary pair of limbs which could be used at will either as arms or legs. Their eyes were set at the extreme sides of their heads a trifle above the center and protruded in such a manner that they could be directed either forward or back and also independently of each other, thus permitting this queer animal to look in any direction, or in two directions at once, without the necessity of turning the head.
John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood Page 2