Shyamaladenfreude

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No one seems to quite know what to make of M. Night Shyamalan anymore. After he had his first monster hit, ‘The Sixth Sense,’ he was easy to typecast. Newsweek magazine put him on the cover, positioning him as the new Spielberg, the hot young outsider who made spooky, vaguely arty but really commercial movies. Shyamalan went on to make several successful but increasingly critically lackluster films, allowing the press to see him as a solid if slightly self-involved commercial auteur, living on a bucolic farm in Pennsylvania, always keeping everything about his movies a big secret, starting with the scripts, which were kept under lock and key.

But after his 2006 flop, ‘Lady in the Water,’ Shyamalan has been in Hollywood’s penalty box, especially when his flop was accompanied by a hilariously self-aggrandizing book, ‘The Man Who Heard Voices’ (penned by a sportswriter-pal), which dug Shyamalan an even deeper hole. He comes off as arrogant, insecure and, well, insufferable: In a meeting at his agent’s office, when talk turns to basketball, Night (who’s about the same height as Spud Webb) says, ‘I believe if I had unlimited time to practice, after two years, I’d be able to shoot with any NBA player.’

Now he has a new movie coming out — ‘The Happening,’ due June 13th — and it’s time for damage control. Since the film’s distributor, 20th Century Fox, is keeping the movie out of sight until the last possible moment (always a bad sign), Night decided to make his case to the New York Times today.

The results were not pretty.

In the piece, written by Allison Hope Weiner, Night continued his Blame Hollywood campaign, claiming that he is now considered a one-trick pony as a filmmaker because Disney insisted on promoting ‘Unbreakable,’ his ‘Sixth Sense’ follow-up, as a spooky thriller instead of a comic-book movie, as he’d wanted. He also offers the preposterous complaint that Hollywood studios are unwilling to use a filmmaker’s name to promote a big movie.

If you’re a director, you’re supposed to be hidden? Maybe Night hasn’t been going to the movies much lately, but if he went to any multiplex to watch the coming attractions, he’d see that if they have a name that means something to moviegoers, film directors are routinely used as promotional fodder. The first title you saw in the ‘Sweeney Todd’ trailer was not ‘starring Johnny Depp’’ but ‘from director Tim Burton.’ In ‘Transformers,’ the first title announces ‘from director Michael Bay,’ even before there’s any mention of exec producer Steven Spielberg.

All Oscar season long, we were treated to giant ads promoting such directorial talent as Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen brothers and Julian Schnabel, whose names were often as big in the trade ads as the titles of their films. Plenty of directors get possessory credit, from Sam Raimi, who presents nearly all his Ghost House pictures, to Tim Burton, as in ‘Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.’

Weiner does quote a retired marketing executive, who claims that filmmakers don’t sell tickets, but if she’d talked to any present-day marketers, they would have told her that you always go with what grabs the most attention. Usually that means the star of the picture, but in many cases, from Scorsese to Tarantino to Coppola to all the other filmmakers we know on a first-name basis, the director is just as much of a star as any of the acting talent.

Come on — didn’t Night even look at his own billboard? He doesn’t have to share billing with any of his cast members. When it comes to marketing ‘The Happening,’ Night Shyamalan is the sole star, which means if the movie doesn’t open, he’ll only have himself to blame.

Photo: Patrick Goldstein / Los Angeles Times