The centerpiece of Lionsgate’s Hunger Games campaign “has been a yearlong, four-phase digital effort built around the content platforms cherished by young audiences,” writes N.Y. Times reporter Brooks Barnes. “A near-constant use of Facebook and Twitter, a YouTube channel, a Tumblr blog, iPhone games and live Yahoo streaming from the premiere.

In so doing, Lionsgatemarketing honcho Tim Palen “appears to have created a box-office inferno.

“Analysts project that the The Hunger Games, which cost about $80 million to make and is planned as a four-movie franchise, could have opening-weekend sales of about $90 million — far more than the first Twilight and on par with Iron Man, which went on to take in over $585 million worldwide in 2008.”

“Selling a movie used to be a snap,” Barnes writes. “You printed a poster, ran trailers in theaters and carpet-bombed NBC’s Thursday night lineup with ads. Today, that kind of campaign would get a movie marketer fired [as] the dark art of movie promotion increasingly lives on the web.”

There is ample evidence that young females are by far the shallowest and most myopic moviegoers in existence as they (a) tend to financially support the worst kind of romantic crap, and (b) otherwise support movies that cater to their delusional dreams (romantic idealism and young-female empowerment) while showing no interest in films that portray reality as most people on the planet earth perceive and understand it. They live in their own membrane.

Palen’s genius is (a) he understands and respects the passion that drives the under-30 female demographic, and (b) has taken this understanding and learned how to exploit it.

As one who’s reported on the shortcomings of movie-ad campaign decisions by Lionsgate marketing vp Tim Palen (such as Dane Cook‘s 8.12 complaint about the one-sheet for My Best Friend’s Girl) and voiced my own issues from time to time (like the gay-metrosexual ads for 3:10 to Yuma), I have to take my hat off and say “job well done” regarding those new W ads.

The slogan, in particular, is a bulls-eye: “A Life Misunderestimated.” (And it’s not finessed. About.com’s Daniel Kurtzman has reported that Bush said “they misunderestimated me” in Bentonville, Arkansas, on Nov. 6, 2000.) Crew Creative was hired to turn out the ads, but the final creative call always rests with the top in-house marketing guy.
Ad Age‘s Claude Brodesser-Akner is reporting that the W posters will be billboarded in Denver and Minneapolis during the respective Democratic and Republican conventions. The piece doesn’t make clear if the more swaggering poster image of Josh Brolin‘s Bush (look of calm and confidence, cowboy boots up on desk) will be used in Minneapolis while the more doofusy-looking one will be used in Denver, or if the posters are meant to be regarded side by side.
It would be great, of course, if W is on tomorrow morning’s list of the final Toronto Film Festival titles. Here’s hoping. W is opening on 10.17, or slightly more than a month after the festival concludes.
Sidenote: A page on Crew Creative‘s website takes credit for the much-maligned poster for My Best Friend’s Girl….whoops.

If, back in the summer of 2007, James Mangold had been a man of honor, precision and decency he would have only forwarded the portion of my sixteen-paragraph letter that he thought would be of interest to Lionsgate marketing hotshot Tim Palen — a portion in which I discussed my having recently spoken to Elmore “Dutch” Leonard, original author of “3:10 to Yuma” (the short story published in March ‘53) about Mangold’s adaptation of same.

I can’t recall if Dutch had seen Mangold’s film at the time (I don’t think he had) but we did discuss Delmer Daves’ 1957 adaptation with Glenn Ford and Van Heflin. I definitely recall that mild-mannered Dutch of Bloomfield Hills thought Daves had missed the essence or messed it up to some degree.

Anyway THAT, in Mangold’s view, was the most compelling portion of my long letter and not the digressive, adolescent, piddly-dick paragraph about Vinessa Shaw, which I, coasting along on the white-water rapids of my second glass of Pinot Grigio, had forgotten about two minutes after tapping it out .

Alas, Mangold wasn’t enough of a tech-savvy fellow of precision and discretion to simply copy and paste the Dutch section of my email and forward it to Palen. That, for Mangold, apparently required too much vigor, too much technical exactitude.

So Mangold, Sloppy Joe-style, just forwarded the whole damn email to Palen, who, as fate would have it, was miffed over my having characterized the Beau Brummell western duds worn by costar Ben Foster, images of which were used in ads for Lionsgate’s 3:10 to Yuma, as gay cowboy-ish or metro-sexualish or otherwise disrespectful of the Old West atmosphere.

This was why Palen, a genius photographer and marketing wiz** but also a vicious & scheming flying monkey if there ever was one, forwarded the letter to Nikki Finke, the vindictive, green-faced, broom-riding Wicked Witch of the West who was determined to get me for having passed along a second-hand tale about Finke to a couple of N.Y. Daily News guys…a loose-talk story about Finke having allegedly faxed an early draft of an EW story to a source — a story I had only “heard” and knew almost nothing about, but which seemed of mild interest to a couple of N.Y. Daily News colleagues during a no-big-deal water cooler moment in ‘94.

And that was what happened, o my howling, screeching, petty and profoundly detestable winged monkeys of the HE sewing circle.

Being a straightforward, high-thread-count T-shirt-wearing straight guy I am not calling myself the Dorothy figure in this Wizard of Oz saga. I am, rather, an Average Suburban Joe who is one-part sentimental Tin Man, one-part Cowardly Lion, one-part brainy Scarecrow and one-part Professor Marvel. In the shower or in the car I tell myself I can sing as well as Jack Haley and certainly better than Ray Bolger or Bert Lahr.   

** https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/?s=Tim+Palen

The promise of Bob Dylan soul and salvation has saved 2024 in terms of movie voltage…poppa-poppa-poppa-ooh-mow-mow-poppa-oooh-mow-muh-mow.

Up until now 2024, hobbled by the strikes, had been regarded as something of a weak sister. No longer! A Complete Unknown to the rescue!

I feel really great about this morning’s news that James Mangold‘s Bob Dylan biopic (which will obviously cover the span of 1961 folkie scruff to the 1966 motorcycle accident and not just the electric transformational shift at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and which should have been titled Ghost of Electricity) will open in December.

This is an obvious shot in the arm in terms of Oscar schematics…Best Picture (duhh), Timothee Chalamet for Best Actor (he delivers an exceptionally spot-on Dylan singing voice), Best Director (Mangold) and so on. Millions of boomer-aged Dylan fans have just dropped to their knees.

I’m much more of an ornery X-factor cosmic pushbacker than a “boomer” (disgusting, despicable term) but my eyes are leaking as we speak…

This has been a seriously amazing three or four days — Droolin’ Joe finally drops out, Kamala Harris immediately ignites and A Complete Unknown is locked in for a December release….all within the span of 72 hours, give or take.

Besides pushing for the title change (Ghost of Electricity over A Complete Unknown), I’ve been urging a late ’24 release for many months, and certainly since last March.

All I can say is that after whispering the words “my weariness amazes me” over and over and over since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, this is a joyous moment. Right now, I mean. It may or may not be joyous when the film begins to screen, but here’s hoping.

Hey, Mangold…how about cutting together a 20-minute product reel and screening it at Telluride? Rocky mountain orgasm!

It is a measure of my magnanimous and forgiving nature (seriously) that I’m wishing and hoping that A Complete Unknown fulfills its potential in every way imaginable, despite Mangold having royally fucked me 17 years ago when he forwarded that 15-paragraph letter I’d emailed him (late summer of ’07) to Lionsgate marketing wiz Tim Palen, who in turn sent it along to the late Nikki Finke, who used it to embarass and trash me several months later.

It was a truly filthy episode all around, but I’ve since let it go. Well, mostly.

H.R. Giger‘s groundbreaking production design for Ridley Scott‘s Alien (’79) was organic and porous and oozy…giant rib-cage interiors and moist reptilian leather and gloopy saliva drippings. I don’t know or care which way Giger personally swung but his work was fairly gay and throbbing and meat-lockerish. In one fell swoop Giger erased all those smooth antisceptic sci-fi space-travel imaginings that began with the Flash Gordon serials and The Day The Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet and….sorry, I fell asleep. No disrespect or anything. I was lying on the bad as I wrote this on the iPhone and I dropped off…sorry. In his own glistening meat-and-bone way Giger’s realm was almost certainly influenced by the paintings of Francis Bacon, whether he copped to it or not. (Ditto Tim Palen‘s Guts.)

Boris Kachka‘s New York article about…well, a portion of the Los Angeles Oscar-blogging community (myself, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg and Deadline‘s Pete Hammond) posted this morning. Like I said yesterday I have a beef or two but it’s mostly an honest, comprehensively reported, smoothly written thing. Boris could have been a little kinder, a little more complimentary…but I guess I can live with it. For the most part he played it straight and fair.

Lionsgate marketing maestro Tim Palen has snapped an obviously provocative concept photo of Paz de la Huerta (Boardwalk Empire) to promote Douglas Aarniokoski‘s Nurse 3D, a “psycho-sexual thriller” about “a beautiful nurse who uses her sexuality to very severe ends.” The pic will begin shooting in Toronto on 9.6, or just before the start of the Toronto Film Festival.

As a title, Nurse 3D sounds a little bit simplistic. I would have come up with something allusive, double-layered, with an echo…something.

Lionsgate’s just-released Rabbit Hole poster is highly intriguing. Congrats again to co-marketing chief Tim Palen. The hanging tire suggests a kind of emptiness by way of the absence of a child who once played with it. It also suggests a kind of purgatory. A body isn’t hanging from the rope, but something is stuck and twisting in a world of hurt. I also like that the poster doesn’t resort to the expected cast faces (Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, Dianne Wiest, etc.)

Tyler Perry‘s For Colored Girls is being promoted today with an online art gallery display designed by Lionsgate marketing director Tim Palen. The idea is to digitally animate eight portraits of Colored Girls actresses by making their eyes, lips and heads move as we hear dialogue from one of their scenes. This is way beyond the realm of Clutch Cargo, but the minimal-movement aesthetic triggered this association.

An actual real-world version of same will show in Manhattan’s Lehman Maupin Gallery (540 West 26th Street) from 10.24 through 10.27.

Palen’s “Living Portraits,” which he conceived of and directed, were shot on 35mm film.

Sidestepping for the time being the near-certainty that Tyler Perry‘s For Colored Girls (Lionsgate, 11.5) will be regarded as a rank embarassment by people of taste, this is a relatively alluring poster. Congrats to Lionsgate’s Tim Palen and his marketing team. Seriously.

Cheers to Garrison Dean and the Monocular Group for making an Expendables trailer that Tim Palen and this Lionsgate marketing team probably should have created themselves. Wait…was this a secret sub-contract?

Lionsgate’s advertising team (led by co-marketing chiefs Tim Palen and Sarah Greenberg) have gone with a Saul Bass-ian, Vertigo-like one-sheet for Rodrigo Cortes‘ Buried (9.24). Which everyone likes or admires or both. Me included. Any sort of Bass tribute gets my vote.

I reviewed Buried at last January’s Sundance Film Festival. It’s a highly claustrophobic (to say the least) exercise about an American contractor in Iraq (Ryan Reynolds) who’s been kidnapped and buried alive in a wooden box. Cortes uses Hitchcock-like ingenuity in telling this story, but the bottom line is that Buried refuses to deliver the kind of ending that any popcorn-eating moviegoer would want to see.

“You may assume going in that Buried will be a harrowing mental ingenuity/physical feat/engineering movie about a guy managing to free himself from a large coffin-sized crate that’s been buried two or three feet underground,” I wrote. “But what it is, really, is a darkly humorous socio-cultural message flick about selfishness and distraction — i.e., how everyone is too caught up in their own agenda to give a shit about a person who really needs help.

Reynolds’ character “manages to speak to several people on a cell phone that he’s found inside the crate. The prolonged joke is that each and every person he turns to for help (with the exception of his wife) tells him that they first need him to address or answer their needs before they”ll give him any assistance.

“Boiled down, the movie is kind of a metaphor for dealing with tech support or any corporate or bureaucratic employee who specializes in driving complaining customers crazy. Everyone Reynolds speaks to patronizes him, tells him to calm down and speak slowly, asks stupid questions and in one way or another blows him off or fails to really engage and provide serious assistance.”