DUCK DIDN’T GET TO MARKET

On the morning of the world premiere of Universal’s “Howard the Duck,” independent producer Ray Stark sent studio Chairman Frank Price a live duck as a good-luck charm. “It was funny at first,” said one Universal executive. “But then the question became what do you do with a duck?”

That was the same challenge facing the marketing department at the studio when it set out to sell “Howard” to the public. From its very beginning in January, the advertising campaign--featuring a cigar-chomping duck bill bursting through a giant egg--was well received in the industry. But the future doesn’t look so promising for the summer’s only feathered leading man.

In a deeply disappointing debut last weekend, long-awaited “Howard the Duck,” which cost about $37 million to make before prints and advertising, took in just $5 million in its first weekend at 1,554 theaters, according to a studio spokesman. The competition was rough: Last weekend no fewer than 16 pictures took in more than $1 million each. (“Howard’s” per-screen average of $3,300 was about $900 below that of “Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives”).

The “soft opening” for “Howard” is especially surprising in light of the film’s appealing tongue-in-beak marketing campaign. Universal spent about $8 million on advertising, publicity and promotion for the movie. “It was a terrific campaign,” said one executive from a competing studio. “It generated a lot of talk because it was so visually striking.”

But the opening numbers demonstrate one thing: The campaign did not accomplish what it was supposed to. Studios on the average spend between $6 million and $9 million per film on marketing--a surprisingly high figure when you consider that the average movie is made for about $14 million. A primary goal of a campaign is to deliver a respectable audience for the critical first weekend. Like short-distance sprinters, movies rarely recover from shaky starts. “The opening weekend is the responsibility of the marketing department,” said one Universal insider, who requested anonymity.

The studio relied on mystique to bring viewers into theaters to see the Marvel Comics character come to life. Howard appeared in bits and pieces, an advertising striptease that showed more and more of the duck as opening day approached.

Keeping Howard from public view was a decision shared by Universal President of Marketing Marvin Antonowsky, along with Lucasfilm Ltd. Director of Creative Services Chris Werner and Brian Fox of B. D. Fox & Friends, the Santa Monica advertising agency that designed the posters. (Antonowsky, Lucasfilm’s Werner and the movie’s producer, Gloria Katz, all refused to comment for this column. Werner had agreed to talk on the day the movie opened but later changed his mind: “I don’t think I’m going to have much to say to you, so it’s best you go ahead without my input.”)

Said Fox: “The drill was to do a teaser campaign like ‘Ghostbusters.’ The problem was we couldn’t show the duck; we could only show parts of him.”

With that mandate, the 36-year-old Fox, a former toy designer who was responsible for the bicycle-against-the-moon poster for “E.T.,” and his creative team went to the drawing boards and came up with about two dozen concepts for the main poster or “one sheet,” as it’s called in industry parlance.

Along with the duck’s bill breaking out of the egg, there were a variety of other settings offered but eventually rejected:

--Howard in the foreground, posing with Lucas superheroes Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker. Headline: “A New Breed of Hero.”

--Howard’s webbed foot crashing through a brick wall. Headline: “Coming to Save the World.”

--Howard reclining in an easy chair, cigar in mouth, cruising through space. Headline: “Coming Next Summer.”

--Co-star Lea Thompson, guitar slung across her back, leaning against the egg and holding a feather. Headline: “More Adventure Than Humanly Possible.”

The resounding first choice? The duck bill and cigar crashing through the egg.

While some at Universal and Lucasfilm favored the drawing of Howard with Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker, the concept was rejected by Lucas himself. “George, just did not want to exploit his other characters to help sell Howard,” Fox said.

Initially, the Phase 1 cover-the-duck-up strategy seemed to work well. Though no one knew what the duck looked like, the poster and small stickers issued around New Year’s caught on. The poster instantly became one of the most heavily requested at the studio. Staffers on the lot alone have purchased more than $44,000 worth of Howard sweat shirts, T-shirts and other merchandise to date.

Phase 2 consisted of a 90-second trailer preceding Universal’s “The Money Pit” beginning the last Friday in April. A parody of a Calvin Klein jeans ad, the trailer showed Lea Thompson in a seductive pose, waxing romantic about Howard. The tag line: “I wish he were here so I could run my fingers through his feathers.” Still, the audience did not get to see Howard.

Phase 3, which started in late June, featured another trailer, called a “duckumentary,” created by Universal’s publicity and promotion group. In close-up one-on-one interviews, a variety of people praised Howard and his accomplishments a la the film “Reds.”

The final stage of the campaign, begun two weeks before the movie’s Aug. 1 opening, featured a new poster of Howard reading “Rolling Egg” magazine. Only a portion of Howard’s head and his feet are visible, the most the audience would see of Howard without going into the theater.

While the same sort of strategy for “Ghostbusters” worked perfectly, Howard just did not seem to have the same drawing power as Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis.

“The problem was there was no star, we weren’t selling a sequel and there was no good-looking newcomer to sell,” said one Universal insider, who insisted on anonymity. “We didn’t have any of the typical selling elements.”

Selling non-human leading players can be a tricky business and has yielded mixed results in the past. “Sometimes it’s just dumb luck or bad luck,” said Ashley Boone, president of marketing and distribution for Lorimar Motion Pictures and the man responsible for orchestrating the “Star Wars” campaign. “E.T. was not a human being. Disney has had no trouble selling ducks, mice, dogs, Volkswagens and absent-minded professors.”

But most of the time, Disney was selling children’s movies. In “Howard’s” case, the marketers wanted to make sure the audience knew this was not a kiddie picture (hence the cigar) and that it was not animated (it was always referred to as an adventure). But in the end, it didn’t matter.

“I don’t know what went wrong,” said Fox. “Maybe they (the audience) just didn’t care about the duck.”

Beyond the look of the campaign, Universal may have hurt the film’s opening chances when it decided to cancel national sneak previews and delayed press screenings until the day before the film’s opening.

“The whole campaign depended on advertising rather than supplementing it with publicity and promotion,” said one observer from another studio. “There was this great campaign, and then they suddenly canceled their sneaks. It made you wonder if they had doubts about their own film.”

Universal spokesmen said the sneaks were canceled because of additional special effects that were added at the last minute. But a high-ranking Universal insider acknowledged that if the studio believed “Howard” was hit-bound, the studio would have shown it to the press and recruited audiences sooner.

The delay hurt. The press rushed to make sure reviews arrived day and date with the film’s opening, and some were brutal. “The surprise is that Howard turns out to be dispensable in his own movie,” wrote Caryn James in the New York Times. “ ‘Howard’ Bows as One Lame Duck,’ ” said the Los Angeles Times headline.

The ultimate lesson in all of this may be that even the best campaigns--and this was a clever approach--can’t make an audience go to a movie it doesn’t want to see. Of course, that won’t stop creative types from trying again.

Even now, Brian Fox is considering what he might have done differently. “Now everyone is going to be looking for scapegoats,” Fox said. “Maybe we should have told the audience more about the story. Maybe we should have showed the whole duck.”

And maybe they should have gone with a goose. Yeah, with horn-rims and high-top Reeboks, and he lives on a subway car in Manhattan. . . .