Celebrity skin

It’s Toronto International Film Festival time, that moment when the global celebrity media and publicity machine converges on Canada. With this in mind, some perspectives on movie marketing and celebrity culture. I’ll try to keep the stars out of my eyes.

Sumner vs. Tom
Hollywood had a pretty good summer revenue-wise, certainly compared to last year when attendance plummeted 11.4%. According to box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations, between May 1 and Labour Day the U.S. film industry scooped up US$3.85 billion in “domestic” ticket sales (La-La Land includes Canada in its numbers), up 6.3% over 2005. Not too shabby. Although, once higher ticket prices are factored in, total attendance was up just 3.1%-and in the end, summer ’06 was still down 8% in terms of actual attendance.

All of which helps explain why Disney let hundreds of staff go while it racked up the summer’s two top box office performers, the Johnny Depp franchise Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, with $400 million-plus in grosses and the Pixar animated Cars, which topped $200 million. And it sheds light on Viacom chair Sumner Redstone’s very public “firing” of Tom Cruise.

That contretemps, which amounted to Viacom’s Paramount Pictures opting not to renew its 14-year-old production deal with Cruise valued at $10 million annually, has been played in the entertainment press as the great reckoning for Tom’s wacky actions of late. Redstone blasted Cruise’s behaviour, such as his infamous bouncing on Oprah Winfrey’s couch, as “unacceptable” and contributing to less than hoped for box office results for Cruise’s summer franchise MI:III.

Never mind that MI:III still earned a very respectable $133 million (MI: I, back in ’96, did just $181 million) and Cruise probably earned Paramount north of $3 billion under the life of the production arrangement. (And it didn’t take long for Cruise to land new financial backers: First and Goal LLC, an investor consortium headed by the owner of the Washington Redskins and chairman of the Six Flags amusement parks.)

This is really about money and power. In Hollywood’s golden age, the studios owned everything and called all the shots. Stars were made-and even named-and maintained through the company-run publicity machines. But since the 1970s, the biggest stars have in essence been free agents, brokering their blockbusters themselves and managing their own careers and images with the aid of powerful agencies like CAA. The balance of power has shifted dramatically. Just 15 years ago it was a big deal for a star to be guaranteed $1 million a picture. Now the Toms, Julia and Johnny can get $20 million a picture. As BusinessWeek notes, the really “unacceptable” thing about Cruise for Paramount is that he made more money on his films than they did.

Globe and Mail Moviegoer columnist Johanna Schneller argues that notwithstanding the perpetual uncertainty of predicting which movie will click with consumers and Cruise’s increasing oddness, no one has had a better track record for guaranteed boffo box office numbers over the past two decades than Tom Cruise. If he can be brought to heel, then no star is immune to the studio pressure. That’s what Sumner’s shot is all about.

But what’s most shocking and telling is how willing Paramount is to publicly undermine the credibility of one of the industry’s best brands in the name of control. This suggests that Hollywood is less about marketing and branding than it gets credit for, and more about distribution channels, spin and the power than big budgets can buy.

Bon marketing
The power of the Hollywood publicity model and distribution pipelines can be seen clearly in the performance of Bon Cop, Bad Cop. Touted as the first bilingual Canadian mainstream movie screening across the country at the same time, the Érik Canuel-directed action comedy is a True North take on the standard-issue buddy cop flick. Instead of a Tommy Lee Jones-Will Smith style odd couple, we get an uptight OPP officer (Colm Feore) and rebellious Montreal street cop (Patrick Huard, who conceived the film and co-wrote the script) who team up to solve a series of murders of unscrupulous hockey executives.

Alliance Atlantis put some major muscle-for a Canadian film, anyway-behind it with a $1 million marketing campaign, serious PR and a 100-plus screen opening in Quebec on Aug. 4 and a similar number in the English market Aug. 18.

In English Canada, the movie’s gotten some decent press, good reviews and has done a respectable, if slightly disappointing, $682,725 as of Aug. 31. In Quebec it’s been a monster hit, on track to break the record of $9.6 million box office for a Quebec film. In its second week, Bon Cop out-earned Snakes on a Plane in its opening weekend, by almost five to one in the province.

The big difference is the marketing tactics, and the infotainment infrastructure. In English, there’s been a guy-targeted TV buy primarily on sports specialty nets. In Quebec, there was a red carpet premiere at Place Des Arts and a full-court multimedia press, including an eight week outdoor buy and TV and radio spots on mainstream broadcasters. Publicity, which in English Canada resulted in a few newspaper entertainment section fronts, in Quebec included major magazine covers, front page newspaper treatment and even a pre-release hour-long “making of” special on TQS.

Language has given Quebec enough of a media outlet and concentrated screen time advantage to give it a running start when competing with L.A. product. And the film industry there thrives for it.

Hello! tabloid culture
Watched Men In Black, the 1997 sci-fi-comedy-buddy flick again recently, and one of the funniest sequences is when Tommy Lee Jones’ agent Kay scours the tabloids, declaring them full of the finest investigative journalism in America. Strangely, when it comes to Hollywood spin that could well be true.

It’s not just because the paparazzi trails them with telephoto lenses that entertainment industry players are contemptuous and fearful of the tabs. It’s the fact that, unlike most of the mainstream media that funnels the industry’s party line straight through to consumers with a minimum of editorial filtering, tabs generally can’t be relied upon to stay on script. And that’s something the Hollywood elite can’t abide.

In a sense, there’s a real subversiveness to the tabloid culture. It talks back to the powers that be by carrying unflattering and off-message stories about celebrities that undercut the stars’ image management efforts. Sure, much of what they publish is no doubt fiction, but a lot of what studio publicity departments churn out is as close to reality as some of those UFO abduction stories.

So while there is a serious celebrity obsession in our culture these days, the good news is it’s not a total mindless swallowing of spin. We like to see our celebrities taken down a notch even as we envy their money and lifestyles.

Which leads to the question: Does Canada really need the kind of mag “respectful” of celebrities that Rogers Media is promising the just-launched Hello! Canada will be?

It sounds strangely quaint, kind of a throwback to the days of ’50’s Hollywood. But, it might be kind of refreshing to see a steady diet of Colm Feore showing off his lovely Stratford, Ont. home just as his big-budget movie is in market, or Chantal Kreviazuk inviting the cameras to an intimate dinner party on the eve of her new album release.

As the Bon Cop, Bad Cop experience shows, English Canada can use all the pop-culture promotional machinery it can get. As long as Hello! doesn’t turn into yet another Canadian-owned vehicle devoted to almost exclusively promoting U.S. cultural product, I’m all for it.

And when we’ve built up a serious English Canadian celebrity culture, we’ll unleash the hounds. Should keep us all entertained.