John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood

by Sellers, Michael D.

  The chatter in social media was equally mixed. Keywords that appeared with regularity including confusing, spectacle, cheesy -- but also epic and fun.

  By the time the dust had settled, the initial response to the trailer reflected a positive/negative sentiment ratio of 6.5/3.5, which was not a complete disaster -- but was a far cry from the 9/1 ratio that would have signaled broad acceptance of the trailer.

  On December 3, Scott Mendelson made a sharp case for Disney’s shortcomings, saying of the new trailer:201

  . . . it so painfully feels like a Mad Libs male-driven fantasy blockbuster that it borders on parody. It’s no secret that Disney thinks it has a boy problem. One of the reasons it bought Marvel two years ago was to build up a slate of boy-friendly franchises. And the last two years have seen an almost embarrassing attempt to fashion boy-friendly franchises (Prince of Persia, Tron: Legacy, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, I Am Number Four, Fright Night, and Real Steel), only half of which were even as successful as their alleged flop The Princess and the Frog (which obviously grossed ‘just’ $267 million on a $105 million budget because it starred a character with a vagina)......Now we have John Carter, which allegedly cost $300 million (if not more). It’s being released in March, where only one film (to be fair, Disney’s Alice In Wonderland) has ever even grossed $300 million. Hell, in all of January-through April, there have been just five $200 million grossers (The Passion of the Christ, Alice In Wonderland, How to Train Your Dragon, 300, and Fast Five). So you have yet another film that basically has to shatter all records regarding its release date in order to merely break even. But that’s okay, thinks Disney, because John Carter is a manly science fiction spectacle so it is surely worth risking the bank. Disney is so desperate to not only chase the young male demos that it is willing to risk alienating the young female demos that has netted it billions of dollars over the many decades.......

  The less than spectacular launch of the All Media phase of the campaign notwithstanding, the situation was far from hopeless. Many of those who had been following the John Carter story seemed to be on the fence, with the trailer having left them undecided but still willing to give the film the benefit of the doubt. For most, that benefit of the doubt was offered courtesy of their trust in Andrew Stanton, for whom they had a high degree of respect after Finding Nemo and Wall-E. True, there was cause for concern - but with 100 days remaining, there was time to get it right.

  It Becomes Personal

  Prior to the unveiling of the trailer on November 30, 2011, I had paid at best cursory attention to the promotion of John Carter. I’d seen the teaser trailer released in July 2011, which I had found to be moderately encouraging, and had read perhaps a half dozen articles at various times about the film in progress. When Avatar came out I had been startled at the similarities to Burroughs’ work, and had written an article for ERBzine about it, but that had been about it.202

  Coming into the unveiling of the main theatrical trailer 100 days before the March 9 release date, I had no thoughts of being anything other than an interested observer to the campaign -- an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan rooting on a movie that, regardless of whether or not it turned out to be a perfect adaptation, would have the potential to introduce my old friend Edgar Rice Burroughs to millions of new fans and in so doing refresh Burroughs’ legacy going into its second century.

  But . . . the unveiling of the trailer was a bumpy one. What had been hyped in advance as debut of the full theatrical trailer on Good Morning America didn’t turn out to be that at all. The full trailer finally did premiere sixteen hours later on Jimmy Kimmel and thankfully it was better than the cut-down version shown that morning. I checked on YouTube to see how the full trailer was being received, and discovered an ongoing argument between viewers who complained that it seemed to be a “ripoff of Avatar” and those trying to set the record straight about which story came first, and who ripped off whom. The same argument was being played out in comment threads on various of the entertainment sites that I checked. I left a few comments here and there, but otherwise just read.

  Online, Disney was being second guessed for both the content of the trailer, and the handling of its release.

  Then there was the disheartening discovery of just how lame the publicity for John Carter had been -- and how badly the film was being outclassed by both the Hunger Games and Avengers. I felt helpless, and discouraged.

  By Saturday, December 3rd, an idea was beginning to form.

  I had been a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs since I was 12, and I was a blogger -- but other than the article about Avatar and ERB, I hadn’t written much about Burroughs. As a filmmaker I had always wanted to do a Burroughs adaptation -- but my station in Hollywood as an “indie” filmmaker making movies at budgets of a few million dollars or less had made it unlikely that I would ever get that chance.

  Meanwhile, there were things about Burroughs I had always been interested in exploring. I had, for example, felt that his books achieved a level of deeply satisfying wish-fulfillment that truly set them apart from all other books of its kind, and yet he was widely written of as a “pulp adventure” writer in a manner that seemed to me to fall short of truly understanding his genius. This had always been just an impression I’d had, but life had never presented me with an opportunity to think deeply about it or write about.

  What if ....

  The next 100 days would be a period, I knew, where I would be thinking more about Edgar Rice Burroughs than I had in a number of years. And others would be too. Maybe this was the right time to try for a little repayment of a debt owed to the grandmaster who had filled me with hope and confidence about what is possible in life, just at the time in adolescence when feeling such inspiration can propel you into adulthood in a positive way. I was sure that the path I had taken in life was in some way affected by, if not inspired by, the “ERB magic.” Maybe it was time to try to do something positive for ERB and his legacy.

  Added to this was the fact that I knew a few tricks of the blogging trade that would make it possible to easily, and without putting much time into it, aggregate all of the articles on John Carter that were now starting to come out, and create a “John Carter Newsfeed” that could be promoted to entertainment journalists and bloggers as a one-stop-shop for John Carter information, and which should -- if my thinking was correct -- result in greater replay and online amplification of the articles that were now beginning to appear with regularity.

  On that Saturday I purchased the URL www.thejohncarterfiles.com and started creating a blogsite. I chose the name John Carter Files because I had in mind that when the film’s theatrical run was over, I would hopefully have assembled a good collection of background material on Burroughs, Barsoom, and John Carter, and this could remain online as a kind of resource archive for anyone stumbling across John Carter in the future.

  All day I roamed the internet finding pieces of background information and plugging them in to the blog -- a page for each character, a page on Edgar Rice Burroughs, links to all the Burroughs fan blogs that were out there, links to Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc., links to the project Gutenberg text of A Princess of Mars, examples of artwork through the years. It was a Burroughs fanboy feast and I was having a blast.

  By the time the end of that first day, I had a decent looking little blogsite up and running and had written and published the first substantive post: “John Carter Inspired Avatar, not vice versa -- let’s set the record straight.”203 I had also done my first aggregated “News About John Carter” newsfeed. Not bad for a Saturday on the couch.

  It felt good to strike a blow for old ERB.

  The Burroughs Community

  As the theatrical trailer was released on November 30, 2011, a very interested party was Jim Sullos, President of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., the publishing company that the entrepreneurial minded Burroughs had created in 1923. Almost 90 years later, the company continued to manage the rights to Burroughs’ creations, operating from the same small Spanish style bung
alow on Ventura Boulevard in Tarzana that Burroughs had built in 1926, and where he had written many of the Tarzan and John Carter novels.

  In those days, Ventura Boulevard was not paved, and Burroughs would ride his horse to work; today, the boulevard is eight lanes wide with dense commercial structures on both sides. The small bungalow, largely unchanged since 1926, stands as a quaint anachronism and a window into an earlier era. From the street it is almost obscured from view by a large walnut tree in a gated front yard that is almost a jungle-like tangle of trees, vines, and shrubbery. Adding to the sense of myth and mystery is the fact that Burroughs’ ashes are buried without markings at the base of the walnut tree.

  Sullos is an accountant by trade. After college and graduate school at Columbia University, he had joined the accounting firm of Windes & McClaughry in his native Long Beach. He spent his entire career with the firm, and from the mid 1990s counted Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. among the clients he served. His role included that of trustee and a member of the board of directors. When he reached mandatory retirement at age 62 in 2001, Sullos began divesting himself of clients. A trim and spritely 73 years old today, Sullos recalls: "When I was a 36-year-old partner, I voted for mandatory retirement without ever thinking I'd be that old. The time went just like that,” he says.204

  As a longtime and trusted ally, Sullos was tapped to become President of the company on May 1, 2008, in a restructure that would make Burroughs’ grandson, Danton Burroughs, the Chairman of the company. Tragically, that same day Danton Burroughs -- who had been the keeper of the flame for the Burroughs legacy for the last 36 years -- died of heart failure a day after a fire at his home destroyed a room full of priceless family memorabilia. "It was tragic and unexpected," says Sullos.

  In addition to the “official” Burroughs office in Tarzana, at the time of the release of the first trailer in July 2011, there was a nationwide network of Burroughs fan groups which, while not large in terms of absolute numbers, nevertheless represented a potential ally for Disney, with more than a thousand active participants spread among a half-dozen organizations and email lists, many of whom were academicians, journalists, and writers who have written extensively on Burroughs and were seasoned, excellent interview subjects. The roster of groups included the Burroughs Bibliophiles, founded in 1960 and with a lineage that could be traced back to 1947; Erbania, started in 1956; the National Capital Panthans, the Chicago Muckers, and others.

  Among the more prominent of the “ERBophiles”, were Bill Hillman, a retired college professor from Manitoba whose weekly “ERBzine” fanzine at www.erbzine.com has grown over the years into a 10,000 page online archive of everything from a detailed timeline of Burroughs’ life and collection of his letters, to a collection of virtually all of the art by Burroughs’ illustrators; Bob Zeuschner, a philosophy professor at Pasadena City College and author of “ERB: The Exhaustive Scholars and Collectors’s Descriptive Bibliography; George T. McWhorter of Louisville, Kentucky, the curator of the Burroughs memorial collection at the University of Louisville Library; David Bruce Bozarth of Houston, Texas, moderator and webmaster for the ERBlist Listserv email group and author of the exhaustive “Barsoom Glossary”; Scott Tracy Griffin, a Hollywood actor and writer, Laurence Dunn of London, President of the Burroughs Bibliophiles Fan Group; and Henry Franke III, the longtime Editor of the Burroughs Bulletin Magazine. Additionally, there were various bloggers who maintained fansites relating to Burroughs and Barsoom - Jeff Doten, an artist who had worked on the failed “Carson of Venus” project, maintained Barsoomia.org; Diana Cole maintained JCofMars.com, Mike Carembat maintained JohnCarterMovie.com; “MCR” maintained JCOMreader.blogspot.com; and Bill Hillman, in addition to his Erbzine efforts, maintained Cartermovie.com. Other ERBophiles maintained other sites, including Phil Normand’s Recoverings.com, which specialized in creating replica dust jackets for many of the Burroughs books.

  The attitude of the Burroughs community toward the film was one of cautious optimism; cautious because the many disappointing (from the perspective of Burroughs’ fans) Tarzan screen adaptations had taught them to expect Hollywood to alter fundamental aspects of the characters and story in ways that would probably result in less than total satisfaction from the ERB community. But there was also optimism that the film would attract new Burroughs enthusiasts -- something that was needed to keep the unique Burroughs brand of romance and visionary adventure from slipping toward oblivion as the wave of Baby Boomers who discovered Burroughs in the 1960’s age and pass on.

  Within the Burroughs community the full trailer, when taken in combination with the earlier teaser trailer, showed promise, as seen from the Burroughs fan perspective; the movie clearly contained elements of the frame story from the novel with Burroughs himself a character learning of Carter’s adventures through a journal left to him by Carter; it showed Carter arriving on Mars much as in the book; it contained brief depictions of Tharks that seemed true to the original; Dejah Thoris and John Carter seemed appropriate in terms of costumes and design, with the only deviation being the presence of reddish tattoos on Dejah Thoris that seemed to be Stanton’s interpretation of how to present the “red Martians” of Burroughs’ creation, plus substantially more clothing than Burroughs describes -- a nod to Disney realities that surprised no one. There was a brief glimpse of what seemed to be the pivotal Warhoon attack scene from the novel; the flyers and aircraft, while not perfectly in synch with what Burroughs had described, were close enough to satisfy most, and the shots of John Carter leaping showed him reaching a height of about 40 feet which was reasonably close to Burroughs description capping Carter’s leaping ability at 35 feet vertically, and 100 feet laterally.

  While the fan organizations tended to focus on the adaptation with a mixture of optimism and caution, for Jim Sullos and ERB Inc. it was less about the nuances of the adaptation and more about the success or failure of the release. After 100 years, John Carter was finally about to be introduced to a massively wider audience than had been the case at any time since the heyday of the sixties revival, and for the first time on film. Conservatively, even if the film did not do well, at least 30 million moviegoers worldwide would see the movie and at least some of those would be interested in the legacy on which the film had been constructed. That alone was progress.

  But John Carter was not a one-off, it was the beginning of a series, and the financial and other rewards for the company Burroughs founded in 1923 would multiply if the film did well. A trilogy (indeed, the story outline of the trilogy was already complete), and then a series that could go on indefinitely. That in turn would spark interest in Burroughs’ other properties, most notably the Carson of Venus series which had its own charms.

  For ERB Inc., at stake was nothing less than millions of dollars and the future of the Burroughs brand, and legacy of Edgar Rice Burroughs himself.

  The Final 100 Day Push Begins

  The release of the trailer vaulted John Carter from #986 on the IMDB Movie Meter to #67, and in the week of the trailer release IMDB monitored 400 news articles and blog posts about the movie, but the surge was short-lived. The very next week, December 11, ‘Carter fell to #130, and the week after, all the way to #501. Only 30 articles were monitored during the week of December 11. Meanwhile, throughout this whole period The Hunger Games was steadily climbing from #32 on December 11 to #14 on January 1.

  On Facebook, The Hunger Games had multiple pages for each District in the movie; updates were being published at least daily; 900,000 fans had already signed up, and each post that was published were generated 1000 or more comments. By contrast, John Carter had no “special” pages; updates for the entire month of November totaled a paltry 6; only 1 update generated more than 100 comments and even the posting of the new poster on November 29--a major event for any theatrical campaign -- drew only 68 comments and 84 shares.205

  The day after the trailer appeared, Disney released three new banners that had a distinctly different look than the main poster. These ban
ners, and a poster that would soon be released that matched them in style, were not produced by BLT Communications, the design house the created the main poster, but were rather the result of in-house efforts at Disney.

  Like the trailer, which had featured Carter battling the white apes as the dominant “takeaway” image, the banners featured the white apes and other creatures against a desert environment. Strikingly, there was no image of Dejah Thoris; nothing suggesting romance; nothing suggesting science or technology; and most of all no images of any of the human Martians who would figure prominently in the movie and the projected series. Reaction to the banners was largely swamped in the reaction to the trailer, which was still fresh and prompting commentary that was mostly neutral, with positives leading negatives two to one, which was very much short of the eight or nine to one ratio that would have signaled broad acceptance.

  It was incontrovertible: the early vote was in, and the campaign was not working.

  Meanwhile The Lorax, Universal’s animated Dr. Seuss feature starring Danny Devito, was set for release a week ahead of John Carter and released its trailer on December 6, a move which brought the film up to #373. Perceived as both a sequel to the successful Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who, which had opened at $45M en route to a $154M domestic gross, and an encore by the Despicable Me team, the Universal picture bore watching as, if strong, it could eat into John Carter’s opening weekend number, particularly with the ‘tween/family demographic that Disney had decided to pitch to as the core audience for John Carter. In most “buzz monitoring” categories it looked relatively non-threatening, but the 210,878 Facebook fans was alarming.206 The Lorax was clearly leveraging Facebook better than any of the films except The Hunger Games.