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The heights of hype – and depths, too

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Dateline: HOLLYWOOD, California – If a Yiddish word can rightly be used in connection with Mel Gibson, it takes chutzpah for the drunk-driving arrestee and anti-semitic ranter to be vigorously promoting his new film Apocalypto during this Oscar run-up season.


Gibson has chosen to attempt a modified repeat of his marketing success with the $611 million-grossing The Passion of The Christ, which was skillfully fed out, in advance of its official release, to a steadily building constituency based on Christian churches and their leaders.

This time he’s targeting Hispanic communities – a not entirely obvious fit for a movie about the Mayan civilization – and has been as canny about it as he was with faith-based entities. Gibson has shared advance sight of the still-unfinished film with grass-roots gatherings in Texas and Oklahoma, which included Native Americans as well as Latinos.

For movieland itself he and his deep-pocketed partners at Disney have turned to the Arenas Group marketing agency, run by Santiago Pozo from his Beverly Hills offices. After a screening arranged by Arenas, the city’s Latin Business Association (LBA) was suddenly persuaded to bestow its "Visionary Award" on Gibson, at a ceremony a few days later in the Beverly Hilton.

Unsurprisingly, the considerable Jewish element in Hollywood’s establishment is outraged – as are lots of others – and the Los Angeles Times spoke for many when it editorialized about the LBA as "a cheap date" for Gibson.

Alex Nogales, president of the National Hispanic Media Coalition has been a bit less metaphorical. He says simply that he wants no part in "embracing this kind of bigoted individual".



THIS IS THE LAND OF HYPE, so I repeat the following phrase somewhat sheepishly. "The most anticipated movie of all time" is said to be coming next summer. That would be the theatrical version of The Simpsons -- and maybe the marketers’ designation is not too wild, given that this popular Fox franchise has been around for seventeen years on TV, and only now is being transposed to the big screen.

The annual conference organized here by EPM Communications, a leading "boutique" market research company for the entertainment industry, has allowed me to glean some of the plans that Twentieth Century Fox is hatching for this movie (or "movie event" as marketers have to call it). The same promotional team that helped to turn Ice Age 2 - The Meltdown into an instant $75 million goldmine (some $25 more, they say, than they themselves expected) is on the Simpsons case.

 

Senior Vice President Lisa Licht professes special pride in her team's advance "cross-platform" work for that comedic cartoon epic featuring (vocally) John Leguizamo and Ray Romano. We can expect in the early part of next season, I am pretty sure, to see Homer and Bart Simpson showing up in some elaborately choreographed human-plus-animation TV spots in the pricey company of many NFL and/or NBA star players.

Fox’s campaign will need to be extra-good, to make the movie stand out. The summer of 2007 promises or threatens to be awash in a slop of sequels – thirteen of them, in fact.



BUT SOME CHANGE IS IN THE L.A. AIR. Tall, spindly palms – that ultimate signifier in movies, TV shows and web-videos for a scene-change to Tinseltown – look as if their days are numbered. The trees are falling victim to fungus attacks and to sheer old age (they were first introduced at the turn of the 20th century).

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is steadily replacing them as part of his "Plant a Million Trees" initiative - but with species that are genuinely indigenous to southern California.

Like, erm, oaks. Oh, and sycamores too.

"Dullsville" - as they might once have said in 90210.



AMONG OTHER CHANGES BECOMING EVIDENT here is a seismic mood-shift. Among all the eager analyses conducted throughout America’s media following the mid-term elections, few have been as intriguing as the conclusions drawn by the Los Angeles Times, via some in-depth drilling-down into the results of its exit-polls taken right across California.

The Times, for all its embattled state as a property for jettisoning by its corporate owner, the Tribune Company (and its editor Dean Baquet being pushed out because of his independent-minded defiance of that corporate owner), does a lot of enterprising journalism these days. And the message it extracted from its November 7th poll data is certainly attention-getting.

Californians - after re-electing a recently chastened and more bipartisan Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and giving Democrat Jerry Brown yet another role (as state Attorney General) - appear more hopeful now about their future than at any time since such soundings began 15 years ago, except for the irrational (and short-lived) exuberance of the dot.com boom.

 

In the past three years the percentage of people giving a positive answer to the classic question "Is the state headed in the right direction" (a precise echo of the perennial national poll query) has rocketed - the Times reports - from 27% to 62%. Some observers are beginning to believe that California’s old role as a pace-setting bellwether for the nation as a whole may be re-asserting itself – except, of course, for that small matter of ... The War.

 

But just to isolate and more closely examine this local phenomenon of renewed "California Dreamer" optimism, the Times went back, as newspapers regularly do, to a selection of its exit-poll interviewees and questioned them in further, anecdotal and attitudinal detail. One of them, an electrician and soccer dad in Riverside named (so fortuitously) Marcus Feliz, offered the paper his assessment of the Golden State: "Politically it may be kind of screwy, but if you can look past that, this is the place to be".