Long Form Storytelling and Hollywood Marketing

I want to revisit some of the ideas I was fumbling to elucidate in my earlier post about the Cloverfield marketing. Cloverfield was an excellent ignition for some thoughts I've had on this topic for a while, and they were equally stirred up again today whilst reading about the concerns in Hollywood now with how to market The Dark Knight, particularly some of the comments on the issue over at Defamer. For TDK the issue is around the centrality of Ledger's apparently powerful performance to the marketing campaign, and whether that is appropriate, post mortem. My feeling is that it is completely appropriate to continue as planned. It is openly acknowledged that Ledger put a lot of himself into the role, and he would want that role valued and given the attention it deserves. All the more so now that he has died and it is his last role. Appropriateness is a thin veil for what is really at issue for the studio though. After all, it is appropriate to cry when someone dies, but in doing so you are unlikely to be interested in paying for overpriced popcorn.

What the studio is scrambling to figure out is how to balance out the milking the news of Ledger's death between making people morbidly curious about his last performance, and making them too sad to want to watch it. The primary concern is bums on seats, and other points really are moot, despite lip-service. That is what the Hollywood marketing behemoth is all about, and the relationship between getting people in the cinema and what they are actually watching is tenuous at best. Actors, characters, special effects, dialogue, music - all are simply fodder to marketing departments. A dilemma like Ledger highlights the question marketers live by, 'What can we get away with?'

The whole sorry situation is based on a fundamental precept, once useful but now outdated, that sees production and marketing as two wholly separate, largely unrelated spheres. The manufacturing industry proved sometime ago that marketing was primary, production secondary. Unfortunately for Hollywood, the split into such a hierarchy hasn't been so simple, hard as they might try forcing it to fit. What Hollywood, and film makers in general need to do, is view the marketing and the film itself as part of an integrated whole. The processes of marketing a film and making one are quite similar. A marketing campaign, such as the one for TDK, is planned in advance, determining what elements, when and how much of them are revealed to the audience, hopefully building to a climax that culminates in the purchase of a ticket. A filmaker undertakes the same process, determining what to reveal to the audience, how much and when, which hopefully builds to a climax. Film-makers should be viewing marketing as the 'big picture' process of telling a story. Working in Hollywood with the amount of money put into marketing, they would in a sense double their budget for telling their story if they told it on more then just the cinema screen. Such an approach would require a new level of skill, of story-telling savvy for film-makers. They would need to know not just how the interplay of sound and images affects a viewer, but additionally all the skills involved with telling a story across a variety of mediums and without a 'captured' audience. It was the ability of The Blair Witch and Cloverfield to tell their stories off screen as part of the 'marketing', even if in a very simple sense, that made them successful, not magic 'Internet buzz'. I think the results of this approach to film-making story-telling could be phenomenal. I dream of the opportunity to create stories like this with Hollwood resources one day, but in I would happily settle for someone else doing so in the meantime.