The Big Picture by Edward Jay Epstein

Author:Edward Jay Epstein
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781588364548
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2005-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

As D day approaches, the studio’s marketing department does whatever it can to further increase audience awareness. Such measures include creating individual websites for films, renting billboards, and distributing T-shirts. To get advance news stories and reviews, studios often fly dozens of entertainment reporters on junkets to hotels or specially chosen locations where they are granted brief “revolving-door” interviews with the stars and other notables of the film. Before the extraterrestrial fantasy film Independence Day opened in 1996, for example, Twentieth Century–Fox publicists bussed more than one hundred journalists to Rachel, Nevada, to Area 51 on Highway 375—a place where the U.S. military had conducted a “top secret alien study project,” according to a Twentieth Century–Fox newsletter. In fact, there is no such project, but as part of the “news event,” the publicists arranged for the governor of Nevada, Bob Miller, to dedicate Highway 375 as an “Extraterrestrial Highway,” where aliens would be granted safe haven. The studio also unveiled for the press a monument intended to serve as a beacon to guide aliens to Nevada. The press junket may have been an absurd exercise, but it was also successful, resulting in more than one hundred news stories prior to the film’s release.

Publicists also arrange hundreds of screenings for film critics and distribute electronic press kits to television stations. If they have succeeded in their mission, the stars will appear on magazine covers and in entertainment-news reports, as well as on television talk shows.

Just prior to D day, the targeted audience is blanketed over and over again with the same spot ads on television programs. Then, the night before the film opens, the reels are sent by UPS trucks to thousands of multiplexes across the country.

Whether the drive has succeeded or failed is decided by one thing: how many “voters” elect to see the movie on its opening weekend.

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