What If the Film Business Was More Like a Presidential Primary?

By Steven Zeitchik

After watching a retina-bleeding amount of TV punditry Tuesday night on the endless Obama-Clinton saga (we think the diplomatic Hollywood word would be "franchiseable"), it made us wonder if the film world and the election-blather worlds shouldn't come a little closer.

After all, politics already borrow so much from entertainment -- note the lukewarm reviews of Bill Clinton in those shots of him behind Hillary on Tuesday (who gave that director final cut anyway?) or Anderson Cooper's reference to John King's digital-screen-savant act as "the Rain Man" of the political process. Why not have film borrow from politics?

Turns out at least one bigwig is already there. Todd Wagner -- the powerful Texas outsider-turned-insider (Ross Perot, anyone?) told Risky Biz recently in an interview that one of his big goals for 2008 was to import some political strategy into the movie-marketing process.  We don't think that means linking the Rev. Wright to his boxoffice rivals. So what does he have in mind?

"It's tougher to get movies out and have them survive. We should bring in political consultants who've run political campaigns and see if they can help us run movie campaigns," he said.

He continued, "I'm fascinated by the political world. You have a candidate you never heard of and twelve months later you're trying to get people to vote for them. We do the same thing. You have a movie people never heard of and twelve months later you have to get them to go out and see it."

And how would he use specific tactics? "There are lessons to be learned from (political) people and how they database-mine. You're going to see us experiment this way. Everything is fair game. What if for example you could come up with a system where you spent 20%-30% less and still reached the same people?"

Actually this seems like precisely the opposite of what happens in politics, where each election cycle candidates spend 20%-30% more to reach fewer people. But we get his point, and it's a good one -- why not think about how to market in ways that are more inventive instead of just more expensive? (Cue "end of marketing-as-usual" jokes here.)

Of course, there are some juicy development ideas to emerge from this election cycle already. HBO later in the month will debut the 2000 election saga "Recount" -- which, by the way, garnered a nice gratis plug from CNN's Jeff Toobin on Tuesday night -- so we're casting for the 2016 movie version. By then Chelsea Clinton will be making her presidential run and Hollywood's labor troubles may actually be over. (Sumner Redstone, of course, will still be running Viacom.)

So who's attached to our movie version? We think Will Smith is Barack, Meryl Streep is Hillary, Alan Arkin is John McCain, Alec Baldwin is Mitt Romney (mostly for the hair), and Anderson Cooper is Anderson Cooper. As for who plays John King, we're thinking it should be -- who else? -- Dustin Hoffman.

Comments

[stuiec]

Excuse me, but I don't think Chelsea Clinton is stupid enough to want to run for President. It's one thing to volunteer to help out Mom, it's quite another to volunteer to step into that meat grinder on her own account.

And if "nobody knows anything" in Hollywood, then it must be true that in politics, even fewer know even less.