Gibson set stage for 'Passion' with controlled marketing:
The greatest story ever sold?
09:06 PM CST on Tuesday, February 17, 2004
By JANE SUMNER / The Dallas Morning News
American James Caviezel, Romanian actress Maia Morgenstern and Italian sexpot Monica Bellucci aren't exactly megastars in the Hollywood sky. Nor is an R-rated, subtitled film in ancient languages usually a hot ticket, especially when the climax is a Crucifixion.
But owing to Mel Gibson's wariness of mainstream media, his fear of what he calls "the anti-Christian sentiment out there" and a one-of-a-kind faith-based marketing campaign, his movie The Passion of the Christ is expected to make a triumphant entry into theaters a week from today. It's already become the first big "buzz" film of the year.
Based on recent surveys by Nielsen, Variety is predicting a $30 million opening-week blowout. That's not as big as The Return of the King, or even 50 First Dates, but it's a more-than-respectable draw for an admittedly brutal religious film with relative unknowns speaking Latin and Aramaic.
So with such expectations, why did Mr. Gibson's Icon Productions gag nearly every company connected with the marketing of the movie about the last 12 hours of Jesus? Even gutsy Newmarket Films clammed up. The distributor will release The Passion in 2,000 theaters on Ash Wednesday.
People outside the Gibson organization agree that the Lethal Weapon star, who says he felt guided by the Holy Ghost during production, has achieved at least part of what he wanted: maximum, cheap exposure within a friendly target group.
"The closest strategic plan I can remember is probably the behind-the-scenes lobbying that Monty Python engaged in to get The Life of Brian (1979) on screen," says Jim Farrelly, director of film studies at the University of Dayton. "Most of their efforts were aimed at raising funds to make the movie, but the controversial nature of the film did generate a lot of pre-release word of mouth and press coverage."
Mr. Gibson went further, showing rough cuts to religious and conservative groups for months.
"In taking his show on the road even before it was released, Mel was clearly breaking new ground," Mr. Farrelly says. "His reward was finding a distributor for his Passion and generating a lot of free publicity along the way."
Mr. Gibson has done that by going outside the normal movie-publicity machine – and in some cases, turning his back on Hollywood.
Area firms involved
Central to the strategy is Outreach Inc., in Vista, Calif., which produces marketing products and services for churches. Founded in 1996, the company sent out 250,000 promotional DVDs to churches and encouraged pastors to play them for their congregations, according to Variety.
Dallas-area companies are also playing a big role. A. Larry Ross Communications, a 10-year-old Carrollton firm, has been hired by Icon to coordinate religious print media. Founded by the Rev. Billy Graham's longtime spokesman, the company also represented DreamWorks' Prince of Egypt and Jonah: A Veggie Tales Movie.
Another Dallas-area company, angelcom media group, is handling media relations for some national TV and radio, predominantly in the religious sector, owner Bob Angelotti says.
By courting evangelical Christians and selectively pre-screening The Passion for thousands of pastors, religious broadcasters, Catholic priests, church leaders and conservatives, Icon has whipped up advance ticket demand.
Church members across the country are buying tickets in bulk; one member of Prestonwood Baptist has purchased all the seats for early-morning Ash Wednesday screenings at the 20-screen Cinemark Tinseltown in Plano.
But several months of controlled screenings, which excluded almost all mainstream movie critics, also set off a backlash from some biblical scholars and Jewish organizations protesting inaccuracies and alleging an anti-Semitic slant.
"Mel Gibson makes action flicks," says Paula Fredriksen, Aurelio professor of Scripture at Boston University and author of Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. "Anyone who has seen the final half-hour of Braveheart, a medieval action flick, has essentially seen The Passion already."
Dr. Fredriksen is one of the scholars convened by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Anti-Defamation League last spring to evaluate Mr. Gibson's script after the shoot. She reports that the group was surprised and alarmed by misrepresentations of both scripture and history.
But when the scholars, working with Mr. Gibson's knowledge, sent him their report, he threatened lawsuits, saying they'd stolen the script and he considered their evaluation an attack on his film, she says.
"The point of Gibson's errors is not that they are there," she says, "but that they give the lie to Gibson's strident assertions of historical accuracy."
Chance to evangelize?
The actor-turned-director declined to be interviewed for this story. But on Monday, he told ABC's Diane Sawyer that the film was not anti-Semitic and was instead about "faith, hope, love and forgiveness."
Mr. Gibson, who as co-writer and director shot his self-financed film at Rome's Cinecitta studios, has acknowledged that the brouhaha is some of the best marketing and publicity he's ever seen.
Some Christians see the film as an opportunity to evangelize. But Dr. A. Daniel Frankforter, medieval history professor at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, and author of Stones for Bread: A Critique of Contemporary Worship, isn't so sure.
"It will probably prove to be supremely successful as an instrument for church marketing," he says, "but only to the element of the population that is already swept up by the evangelical tide."
That tide has been pushed along by a campaign like no other, ranging from a reported endorsement from the pope (later denied) to a sizable ad on the hood of Bobby Labonte's entry in last weekend's Daytona 500. And the Internet has been an important tool.
The film's official Web site (www.passion-movie.com) sells tickets, offers free promotional materials, provides petitions asking theaters to carry the film and solicits donors to pay for TV ads.
Before Icon ordered its marketing partners to refuse interviews until the film opens, Nashville-based BuzzPlant founder Bob Hutchins said he was "humbled" to direct the film's online grassroots campaign, which includes helping college students and campus ministry teams coordinate outreach and evangelism strategy.
Early buzz favorable
Advance word from many of early viewers invited to see The Passion has been favorable. Billy Graham said it made him feel as if he'd actually been there. And Internet critic Harry Knowles, who screened the film to 250 film fans assembled for the Butt-Numb-a-Thon festival in Austin in December, said he was impressed.
"Mel Gibson's marketing strategy for The Passion is among the cagiest in film history," says Robert Thompson, professor of media and culture at Syracuse University. "He's managing to control the flow of information and at the same time harness the controversy that keeps the film in the headlines."
That a movie with dialogue in Latin and Aramaic could get this type of attention, he says, is "an extraordinary sleight of hand."
Most subtitled films get a "platform" release, meaning they are distributed gradually to a limited number of theaters. But Variety reports that the unspooling of what it calls the "dead-lingo" film on 2,000 screens is the biggest for a subtitled pic, topping the 1,225-screen reissue of the Hong Kong film Iron Monkey in 2001.
Despite the controversy, the angry picketing that accompanied The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988 seems unlikely – even though, as Variety says, the blood and gore in The Passion makes Martin Scorsese's film look like Elf.
Mr. Gibson, of course, isn't the first to target the Christian market. Left Behind, a $17 million film based on the best-selling series of Christian sci-fi books, bombed on the big screen, collecting just $2.2 million. DreamWorks contacted churches for its animated Prince of Egypt. And last fall, the high school thriller Hangman's Curse, promoted in a similar if much smaller fashion, quickly vanished after collecting just $152,000.
Whatever happens, Elayne Rapping, professor of media and women's studies at the University of Buffalo, doesn't think it will hurt the man who played Mad Max.
"The trend lately is highly conservative, and religion is very big in political and pop culture circles," she says. "So many movies and TV shows feature God and angels. Not to mention the political and corporate corruption that makes religious posturing more than a bit hypocritical."
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