August 05, 2004

Wellspring Steers Their Own Kind of "Hummer" onto Hollywood Boulevard

A controversial billboard depicting a key sex scene in 'The Brown Bunny' has been generating quite a bite of publicity for the film's upcoming theatrical release. However, Wellspring, the film's distributor, has a long way to go before it digs Vincent Gallo's film out from under the massive mountain of bad publicity that it garnered last year. Dubbed the "worst Film at Cannes" by many prominent critics, the film sparked a venomous back-and-forth argument between Gallo and critic Roger Ebert.

The billboard has accomplished two critical things:

First, it has generated a massive amount of print publicity (articles in the New York Times, L.A. Times, and countless others) that is easily worth more than the $50,000 cost of the billboard.

Second, the attention has been shifted away from the nearly insurmountable wall of critical disdain towards the most talked about element in the film - the sex scene involving Gallo and Chloe Sevigny. One trick pony or not, that is the one big marketing hook that will get even the most jaded hipster's butt into the theater.

And as far as the risk of a public backlash is concerned, the billboard's not in Kentucky or Ohio -- it's in L.A., the home turf of the porno industry. And while I think Wellspring's notion that the ad's "no worse than a Calvin Klein ad" pretty ridiculous, we all know that an "incensed public" will only create a self-perpetuation of interest.

My biggest concern -- Wellspring has a "classy" brand image, and however you want to spin it, this campaign is the antithesis of classy. What would Sony Pictures Classics or New Yorker Films do?

The New York Times > Movies > Art? Smut? Commerce? Billboard Gets Attention