The one thing worse than being talked about…
Organising a blogger screening is always a far from straight-forward business. It involves contending with, in no particular order:
1) The manifest anxiety any self-respecting film publicist instinctively experiences when confronted by the prospect of somebody writing honestly about a movie before it has been released. (Oh, I know the critics sometimes have a go, but they also have meal tickets to worry about.)
2) The indignation bloggers often feel at being handled like the poorer cousins of journalists. Let’s face it, most journalists are pretty poor in the first place, but at least they can rely on picking up the odd free lunch, provided they play ball (see point 1).
3) The conspicuous absence of any kind of trade body or formal qualification distinguishing a blogger from someone who just set up a blog purely in order to gain access to a free preview screening of a movie.
4) The certain knowledge that the more successful you are in attracting influential, high profile bloggers to your screening, the more fucked you’ll be if (a) it falls through at the very last minute, (b) no-one bothers to turn up on the day or (c) it doesn’t fall through, everyone turns up, and everyone thinks the movie is utterly fucking worthless.
In the case of the WATCHMEN blogger screening, which took place in Paramount International’s screening room in Chiswick Park at 10.30am this morning, these are just some of the issues we’ve faced.
A few new ones also popped up. Notably:
i) The fact that Chiswick, for any of us who do not live there, is the middle of fucking nowhere.
ii) The fact that Chiswick Park is a business park, and that bloggers hate business parks.
iii) The fact that 10.30am on a Tuesday morning is not a time traditionally associated with watching movies.
iv) The fact that 24 hours is not a lot of notice to give a blogger in order for them to make the arrangements necessary to spend a Tuesday morning watching a movie in a business park in the middle of fucking nowhere.
With all this in mind, the roll-call in Starbucks at five past ten this morning was fairly extraordinary. I’m talking about Mike, Gia, Lloyd, Chris, Steve, Lobelia, Nik, Derek, Rachel, Melinda, Allix, Paul, Maegan and Marie, not to mention some friends of friends and a very nice chap called David from The Times.
Within minutes of the screening ending I could see that it had divided opinion. Not just in terms of the discussions that were taking place, but also on Twitter, where 140-word reviews quickly materialised presenting a plethora of pithy perspectives. Take this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or, if you really must, this one.
This has carried through in the full write-ups I’ve already seen posted. Rachel Clarke enjoyed the style and complexity, but found it excessively long and far too violent. Paul Bay felt that it probably should have run a little longer, and found it visually stunning, but was disappointed by the anachronistic soundtrack. And Steve Lawson, despite disliking the movie intensely, has written a very positive assessment of the event itself, exploring the benefits of taking this approach to driving conversation as part of the marketing process.
I imagine more write-ups will appear over the next day or two, so I’ll try to update this post accordingly.
Overall, the reactions I’m seeing are reminding me of working on Zack Snyder’s last movie, “300″. It was another R-rated movie, adapted from a graphic novel, showing a huge amount of respect for the source material – too much, as far as some critics were concerned.
It was violent, and it was sexy, taking a cast of relative unknowns and asking them to deliver characters we would genuinely care about, despite the fact that we were encountering them against a backdrop of implausibly hyper-real pseudo-historical circumstance.
“300″ was released in March, around two years ago, and set some box office records in the process. Part of its success was that it divided opinion so completely, and that this played out across a wide variety of different social channels and online media in the weeks ahead of release.
By the time “300″ came out it wasn’t enough to borrow somebody else’s opinion from the pages of a newspaper, website or film magazine – everybody seemed to want one all of their own.
On the evidence of today, here’s hoping Watchmen is set to go the same way.
Tags: watchmen
March 4th, 2009 at 7:48 am
I object! Chiswick is not the middle of nowhere, it has excellent transport links
Thanks for organising this, it was a fun morning.
March 4th, 2009 at 10:14 am
Rachel – the fact that I’m able to reach Chiswick by overland train from Hackney in roughly forty five minutes attests to the essential veracity of your claim. However, in its own way, and however efficiently London Transport plumb it into our capital’s many-tendrilled mass transit system, for this Londoner at least Chiswick will always be in the middle of fucking nowhere.
Glad you had fun. Look forward to the next one.
March 4th, 2009 at 10:19 am
Dan,
it was, as I said on my blog, a great event. You’re really onto something here. I’m continually impressed with the ways you’re able to innovate with marketing in a world where the only numbers that matter in any direction are in the millions, be it box office receipts or numbers of people connected with via a marketing campaign.
It’s infinitely easier for me to be rethinking music marketing when I have my own music to experiment with. It’s a whole other thing to do that with massive budget mainstream release films.
And for that, I salute you, many times over.
Thanks so much for inviting me – I hope I get to come again next time!
Steve
March 4th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Thanks again for the screening- as you say again Watchmen is a film where everyone wants their own opinion.
On another note for the distribution company i work for we’ve also held social media screenings (Wendy and Lucy was our last one and yes the film is going up against Watchmen this friday – although we are in a completely different league in terms of release size) and I agree on point 2 – I really hate having to say ‘you can go to this special screening’.
But at least I rest easy knowing that our bloggers/ social media screenings are more fun, social and better catered for our press shows and given the choice I know where I’d rather be
March 4th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
(oopps hit enter before i’d finished)… and the same goes for this screening- I really love the conversations that followed on for the rest of the day both on and offline -which is something that traditional reviews/ press shows often just don’t cater for.