Time for another round-up.
1. The stories about Hollywood’s efforts to appeal to the Christian niche market just keep on comin’. GetReligion.org links to a Wall Street Journal story on The Exorcism of Emily Rose:
The $19 million project is a hit in part because Screen Gems deliberately courted an audience that it might not have counted on for a typical horror flick: religious conservatives. . . .
Studio executives figured that horror movie-loving teens would flock to the picture, which stars Tom Wilkinson as the priest who is put on trial for allegedly causing the girl’s death and Laura Linney as the spiritually conflicted lawyer who defends him. But Screen Gems worked hard to attract a spiritually-oriented audience as well. It conducted an online poll asking participants if they believed in demonic possession (66% did) and issued a promotional mini-newspaper that reprinted articles from recent years about the Vatican’s views on Satanism and incidences of real-life exorcisms.
“We tried to get people thinking about the fact that this exists in the world,” says Valerie Van Galder, who handled the marketing of the film. “We tried to make exorcisms newsworthy.” . . .
Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports:
At some of the largest and most influential Christian churches in the country, the lights dim and congregants watch a sneak preview of a new movie about golf.
The Walt Disney Co. is marketing “The Greatest Game Ever Played” to faith-based groups even though the film, about Francis Ouimet’s improbable win in the 1913 U.S. Open, isn’t overtly religious.
“Its themes are about family, about not giving up on your dreams, courage,” said Dennis Rice, head of publicity at the Walt Disney Studios. “They are very secular virtues, but they also could potentially be Christian virtues.”
Other major studios have undertaken similar marketing for films that aren’t about God, including the recent father-son story “The Thing About My Folks” and even the dark drama “The Exorcism of Emily Rose.” Twentieth Century Fox has launched a Web site to market family-friendly videos directly to Christian groups. . . .
Studios said it’s hard to quantify potential revenue from the family-values demographic, but one industry analyst gave a sense of what’s at stake. Targeted marketing of this kind happens only if a studio expects to add $25 million to $50 million to the box office gross and sell perhaps an extra 5 million DVDs, according to Harold Vogel, who heads the New York investment firm Vogel Capital Management.
For their part, churches recognize that just denouncing violent or sexually explicit films doesn’t influence their content so their members are using buying power to support films that reflect their values. . . .
This last story is particularly interesting to me, as I recently caught flak from the higher-ups at one studio (which shall remain nameless) for actually mentioning the fact that their film was being niche-marketed to an interviewee whose only reason for talking to me was the fact that their film was being niche-marketed. I thought I was just stating a fact, but apparently it’s supposed to be more of an open secret, or an elephant in the room.
2. GetReligion.org also links to a very interesting A.V. Club interview with my favorite documentarian Errol Morris, which includes some fascinating anecdotes. For example, while discussing the editing of Gates of Heaven (1978), he says:
There was an editor who worked downstairs, doing mostly pornography. His name was David Webb Peoples. He’s subsequently become a famous scriptwriter. And Dave Peoples came up and looked at it. I had tremendous difficulty editing the movie, because there was no principle for editing that kind of thing. I don’t think that it’s even clear now how radically different that movie is from other movies. It involved these very strange dioramas, edited against each other. You can say it’s talking heads, but it’s not talking heads in a context where they’ve been stitched together by voiceover and various kinds of visual detritus. There was something extreme and radical about this material, and it wasn’t clear whether it was editable. And Dave Peoples said, “You know, I think it’s really terrific, but I don’t know how to edit it. I have no advice.” And he loved the movie, understand. Dave Peoples is a really good guy.
David Webb Peoples, of course, went on to write Blade Runner (1982) and Unforgiven (1992), among other films.
Then there’s this bit, where Morris discusses the ads he shot for MoveOn.org during last year’s election campaign:
I mean, I’m proud of having done those ads. I wish I could’ve done more. I wish the ads could’ve been used. I kept thinking that the only way ads like this could be effective was to just blanket the markets with them. You don’t show one person, you show 50 people. Make it seem as though there’s a bandwagon. And one thing that really interested me is, I shot evangelical Christians, and MoveOn didn’t even put those in the mix! For reasons that, you know… I’m speechless. It was assumed that you can’t touch evangelical Christians. “Oh, they’re the Republican Right. Stay away from those people. Don’t even try to talk to them.” Well, what’s interesting is that there were evangelical Christians who were voting for Kerry. There were right-to-lifers who were voting for Kerry. And it’s interesting to listen to the reasons why. To ignore that segment of the electorate is moronic. Particularly if you don’t know who those people are, or what their concerns are.
We imagine what this country is, but quite clearly, this country is a mystery. I mean, one of the reasons I did the ads is, I thought I could learn something. Like, what the hell is going on? I think anybody—particularly a person of leftist persuasion such as myself—who stops and thinks even for a moment, realizes that something strange is going on and we don’t quite get it.
3. FilmStew.com reports that Walden Media, the outfit behind The Chronicles of Narnia and the upcoming William Wilberforce biopic Amazing Grace, are dipping into history yet again for Manhunt — with Harrison Ford already signed to play Col. Everton Conger, the Civil War hero who tracked down Abraham Lincoln’s assassins.
FWIW, it occurs to me that, while Ford has made a number of films set in the past, I can think of only one other film in which he played an actual historical figure, namely K-19: The Widowmaker (2002; my review). Not sure if that means anything, but hey.
4. Reuters reports on the current state of the on-again, off-again Disney-Pixar relationship, and notes in passing that The Chronicles of Narnia will have its world premiere December 7 in London, with Prince Charles and Camilla in attendance.
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