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Feature
Sony's Word-of-Mouth Campaign Creates Buzz for 'Crouching Tiger'
By JOHN LIPPMAN Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Rapper Ghostface Killah and author Naomi Wolf don't travel in
the same circles. But lately, they've found common ground in
a single cause: making "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" into
a box-office hit and Academy Award contender. The member of
rap group Wu-Tang Clan and the feminist scribe have been willing
participants in a campaign by Sony Pictures Classics to generate
widespread interest in "Crouching Tiger." In one of the most
elaborate examples of grass-roots stealth marketing, the studio
has transformed director Ang Lee's lyrical period piece from
art-house obscurity to breakout film. This weekend Sony will
vault "Crouching Tiger" from its current limited engagements
to about 700 theaters around the country. How did the studio
create a nationwide buzz for a Chinese-language martial arts
film with a cast of largely unknown foreign actors? In Hollywood,
of course, these things don't just happen. In fact, the word-of-mouth
is the result of a concerted effort to position "Crouching Tiger,"
starring Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-Fat, to appeal to a broad
swath of women, teens, karate fans, action aficionados and foreign-film
aesthetes. To make that happen, a crew of public-relations agents
with fat Rolodexes targeted a core group of influential viewers
for early screenings, hoping they would fan out and create a
sort of party-circuit dialogue about the film. It's a tactic
well-suited for a market that's glutted with traditional ads,
in a nation heading for an economic downturn. Marketers who
sell everything from sneakers to music to vodka are desperate
to slip their messages into consumers' ears directly from the
mouths of real people. And when the approach works, it's much
more cost-effective than buying mass-market ads. The marketers
of "Crouching Tiger" took the tactic to an unusual extreme.
They set up a screening, hosted by Sports Illustrated for Women
magazine, aimed at female athletes. The studio arranged Wall
Street screenings for people like venture-fund manager Alan
Patricof, advertising executive Jay Chiat and CNBC "Squawk Box"
host Joe Kernen. Ms. Wolf presented the film to 150 graduates
of a women's leadership institute. At $5,000 a screening, the
events cost the studio a total of $40,000. Also recruited to
the cause: a teenage Internet prodigy and the Tiger Schulmann
Karate center chain, which hosted "Crouching Tiger" martial-arts
demonstrations. One of the pioneers of word-of-mouth marketing
in Hollywood was Walt Disney Co.'s 1996 hit "Mr. Holland's Opus"
starring Richard Dreyfuss. Paula Silver, a marketing consultant
on the movie, set up screenings for orchestra leaders, music-teacher
associations, instrument makers and congressional spouses to
hit the funding-for-the-arts crowd. "We went to the constituents
that would really have something to gain from seeing the movie,"
says Ms. Silver, in the hope they in turn would spread the word.
The strategy "magnified the movie outside the realm of movie
marketing," she says, resulting in "off-the-entertainment page
editorials" in newspapers about the importance of music programs
in the schools, and box-office grosses of $82.5 million. It
is an especially effective tactic when a film poses some kind
of marketing difficulty. For example, though the DreamWorks
SKG and Universal Pictures co-production "Gladiator" became
a big hit, initially there were doubts that the public would
embrace an old-style Roman epic. But last spring, DreamWorks
and Talk Magazine -- which was about to put star Russell Crowe
on its cover -- sponsored a select screening for 150 people
at New York's Ziegfeld Theater, followed by a dinner at the
restaurant Circo. The screening jump-started talk about the
film, and won some nice write-ups from the likes of gossip columnist
Liz Smith. Similarly, Walt Disney's Miramax unit recently held
a special screening of its current film "Chocolat" for Jesse
Jackson, on the theory that he would be a good spokesman for
the film's underlying theme of tolerance. The strategy takes
advantage of a simple fact: Most people are tempted by the offer
of a free movie -- and the flattery of an early invitation.
Sony's effort began last March, after Tom Bernard, co-president
of Sony Corp.'s Sony Pictures Classics and his partner, Michael
Barker, saw the first rough cut of "Crouching Tiger." The film
was directed by Mr. Lee, a Taiwanese-born director trained at
New York University's famed film school whose credits include
"The Ice Storm" and "Sense and Sensibility," and produced by
independent production company Good Machine Inc. The movie is
a kung fu genre piece, with virtuoso martial-arts scenes. It's
also a romance, enveloped in a musical score with performances
by cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The task of selling this odd mixture fell
to Mr. Barker, 47 years old, and Mr. Bernard, 48, two executives
who have toiled together in the small-potatoes field of independent
film for more than 20 years and since 1992 have run Sony Pictures
Classics. Their marketing budget for "Crouching Tiger" was $7
million, compared with the more than $20 million that is usually
spent on mainstream Hollywood releases. They started with the
obvious maneuver: a noncompetition screening at the Cannes Film
Festival in May. David Linde, a partner in Good Machine, said
the movie was deliberately not submitted for competition at
Cannes "because this film early on needed to be perceived outside
the art-house ghetto," which frequently stigmatizes prize winners.
Instead, says Mr. Linde, "we wanted to be perceived as entertainment,
and expand the audience." To court teens, Sony executives hired
a 13-year-old boy, John Otrakji, of Rumford, N.J., to design
a Web site about "Crouching Tiger." Mr. Bernard had run across
Mr. Otrakji's skills when his mother brought a printout of the
homepage of his Web site, cablejump.com, (www.cablejump.com),
to a barbecue. The site was devoted to Mr. Otrakji's views of
movies and games. An impressed Mr. Bernard dispatched a car
and driver to ferry Mr. Otrakji into New York, where he met
Sony executives. The Web site, which now focuses almost entirely
on 'Crouching Tiger,' has received more than 31,000 hits, with
young Mr. Otrakji receiving an initial fee of $100. He declares
on the site: "This is a movie everyone in my generation has
got to see." The guts of the push came after Labor Day, as Sony
sought to put the film before as many taste-makers as possible.
That task was made somewhat easier by the reception "Crouching
Tiger" had already received on the festival circuit: It had
captured the People's Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival
in September and was the closing night presentation at the New
York Film Festival the following month, giving the movie important
credibility. To engineer screenings, the studio hired Peggy
Siegal, a New York-based movie publicist and fixture on the
Hamptons party circuit. Ms. Siegal has built a database that
contains 20,000 names, comprising the New York film and media
community, which she uses to mine prospects for movie screenings.
Wanting her to branch out, Mr. Bernard told Ms. Siegal: "We
only want you to invite people to screenings you don't know."
Ms. Siegal didn't have any links to the hip-hop community, for
example. But her partner, Lizzie Grubman, is the daughter of
music-industry lawyer Alan Grubman. Through Ms. Grubman's connections,
they were able to persuade the Wu-Tang Clan to "host" two screenings
on Oct. 4 at Sony's U.S. headquarters in New York where 150
people showed up. "Crouching Tiger" struck a chord with Olie
"Power" Grant, executive producer of Wu-Tang Clan, who says
the group's members were influenced by martial-arts movies while
growing up and "were pretty much mixed up with that whole karate
scenario." The screening had the desired effect: It won a mention
in the New York Post's Page Six column, even though it mistakenly
reported that the Wu-Tang Clan stars in the film. The movie
itself has generated considerable enthusiasm in the hip-hop
community. Vibe magazine, which chronicles hip-hop culture,
has had no fewer than four stories or mentions of the film.
On Nov. 6 came a screening for on-air newscasters in New York,
hosted by local NBC anchor Chuck Scarborough and attended by
local NBC anchor Sue Simmons, NBC legal correspondent Dan Abrams,
CNN fashion guru Elsa Klensch and John Stossel of ABC News,
among others. Mr. Bernard said he wanted on-air personalities
at the screening rather than behind-the-scenes producers, hoping
they would feel they had "discovered" the film themselves rather
than having had it thrust upon them. To reach another important
group, a Nov. 8 screening was put together for 150 students
of the Woodhull Institute, a New York-based organization co-founded
by Ms. Wolf to mentor young women for leadership roles. They
raved. "I felt quite euphoric after I saw it," says Ms. Wolf.
"It was one of the least exploitative, most liberating and most
surprising textured portrayals of women in movies in a long
time. And besides, she says, it didn't star "yet another thin,
white ingenue to emulate." When arranging for the Wall Street
types to see the movie, Ms. Siegal contacted her friend Joe
Kernen of CNBC's "Squawk Box," who agreed along with colleagues
Mark Haines and David Faber to host a screening at Sony headquarters
on Nov. 20. Mr. Kernen, who says his idea of a good movie is
"watching 'Unforgiven' over and over again," thought "Crouching
Tiger" was "cool. It didn't matter [that] it was subtitled."
Mr. Patricof, meanwhile, said he realized after the movie started
that he had seen "Crouching Tiger" previews in theaters and
"decided I wasn't going to see it. People flying off the walls
didn't appeal to me." But after seeing it, he said, "I've recommended
it to everyone in the office." Among those who attended the
Sports Illustrated for Women screening was pro-basketball star
Rebecca Lobo of the New York Liberty. Ms. Lobo says she "would
not normally go to a Chinese-language movie." But in this case,
she says she has recommended the film widely, telling people
"it is action-packed, entertaining and shows positive images
of strong, feminine women." As the film goes into wide release,
Sony has minded even the most minute details. For example, it
paid Kodak $100 a screen to change bulbs, dust off lenses and
tune up screening systems in theaters where "Crouching Tiger"
would play, ensuring the best possible projection of the film.
And Ms. Seigal's screening campaign has continued, though not
all of her arrows have hit their mark. Last fall, her firm provided
"Crouching Tiger" tapes to the New York Yankees, hoping they
would be shown on the team plane during the baseball playoffs.
That didn't happen, but this week she sent half a dozen tapes
to the New York Jets football team, aiming to get it screened
for karate enthusiasts on the team including linebacker and
karate blackbelt Mo Lewis. -- Bruce Orwall contributed to this
article.
Write to John Lippman at john.lippman@wsj.com
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