They Lay It On Thick for the Lower Crust

One day last month, two buxom young blonds showed up at “The Howard Stern Show” radio studios in New York. One was wearing an American flag thong bikini, the other a bathing suit that was little more than two slender ribbons. Each girl came armed with a freshly baked apple pie. Once they had Stern’s attention, they forked over the really important gift: a videocassette of “American Pie.”

It’s no easy task to market an $11-million comedy with a no-name cast at the height of a crowded summer movie season. Yet no one can say that Universal Pictures hasn’t gone all out--or been afraid to stoop too low--to market its raunchy new teen sex comedy. If there were ever anyone who would appreciate “American Pie’s” teen sexcapades, it would be Stern, the man whose own autobiographical film was called “Private Parts.”

“Once Howard watched the movie,” explained Universal marketing chief Marc Shmuger, “we figured that he would be thinking this is the other story of his life.”

As far back as December, when Universal first screened “American Pie” in Chatsworth to a theater full of specially recruited teenagers, the studio knew it had the makings of a hit. “After the first scene of the movie, there was this tremendous burst of applause,” recalls producer Warren Zide, who had brought the film to Universal. “For the rest of the screening, the audience had this incredible energy. At the end, the studio people wouldn’t leave. They just hung out, brainstorming ideas, clearly ecstatic about the response.”

Adam Herz, the film’s 26-year-old rookie screenwriter, had never been to a preview screening, so he had no idea what to think. “I guess I knew we had a good reaction when some guy in a suit--I assume he was a studio executive--looked at the response cards and immediately said, ‘Holy [expletive]!’ ”

The movie has all the ingredients of a favorite Hollywood Cinderella story: the low-budget sleeper hit that succeeds beyond everyone’s wildest dreams. Since that first screening, Universal has emphasized the film’s underdog appeal, executing a word-of-mouth campaign designed to build a groundswell of support for the film in and outside of the movie industry. If the campaign succeeds, this raunchy sex comedy, despite its R rating, could end up as the must-see film for many teenagers this summer. Premiere magazine has already predicted that “American Pie” will be a $100-million hit.

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The studio’s No. 1 marketing strategy: Screen the film early and often. By the time the film opened Friday, Universal had held 400 screenings, not counting a sneak preview last Monday on 1,036 screens nationwide.

Early on, the studio’s marketing team put together a list of opinion makers and industry insiders--”people who had big mouths,” as Shmuger puts it--who were invited to early screenings of the film. To make sure jaded media and industry types would get the jokes, the screenings were packed with noisy teenagers.

The aggressive screening strategy paid off. Ain’t It Cool News, a Web site that reviews test screenings--and is regularly monitored by industry executives--had a spy at a February screening at Universal’s CityWalk theater. In his rave review, he called the acting “awesome,” the writing “way more clever than you’d expect” and added, approvingly, “there’s nudity--wow, good nudity. ‘American Pie’ can stand beside the works of Savage Steve [Holland] and [John] Hughes. It’s fun as hell.”

By the second screening, the film had a new title. When Herz wrote it, he called it “East Grand Rapids High,” the actual name of his high school. That had to go. “Universal’s legal department freaked out because they thought they’d get millions of lawsuits from everyone who lived there,” recalls Chris Weitz, whose brother Paul came up with “American Pie.” (The Weitz brothers respectively co-produced and directed the film.)

“It was perfect,” Chris says. “It felt nostalgic, but it had a little innuendo too.”

Soon the media hype machine was in full gear. In early March, Newsweek included “American Pie” in a teen-movie summary story, saying it was “awash in bodily fluids” and had been heralded as “this generation’s ‘Porky’s.’ ” Shortly afterward, Entertainment Weekly was saying the “hilarious” high school comedy had elicited “huge laughs” from test audiences.

In late April, the Wall Street Journal picked “American Pie” as “one of the summer’s best bets for a sleeper,” saying that Universal claims “test audiences are standing up and applauding.” Days later, USA Today included the film in its top summer movie list, saying Hollywood was “buzzing about this over-the-top comedy.” Vanity Fair even joined in, including Paul and Chris Weitz in an April photo spread on Hollywood siblings.

In Sunday Calendar’s Summer Sneaks issue May 2, New Line Cinema production president Michael De Luca and director John Turtletaub predicted “American Pie” would be the summer’s big sleeper hit. De Luca said he immediately “loved the script. . . . It really made me think of the feeling we had as kids, when we were all tripping over ourselves to see ‘Porky’s.’ ”

In its May issue, Movieline magazine selected “American Pie” as the No. 2 summer film to see after “Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace.” Within weeks, Universal had cut a trailer that opened with the Movieline plug, followed by scenes from the film. In an admiring June 21 story in Time magazine, Imagine Entertainment producer Brian Grazer, one of the industry heavyweights invited to early screenings, told of taking his son and a friend to an early screening where “they went insane. They wanted to see it again, like the next second!”

The film became such an object of obsession that one fan obtained an editing floor snippet of the much talked about sex-with-a-piece scene and posted it on the Internet. Of course, the theft became part of the hype.

The industry reacted to the positive buzz too. In early April, Herz landed a high six-figure script deal to write “Eastbound and Down,” an update of “Smokey and the Bandit.” The Weitz brothers, thanks to how well “American Pie” went over with Grazer and his son, were hired in May to rewrite Imagine’s sequel to Eddie Murphy’s “The Nutty Professor.”

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To get buzz going among teenagers, Universal cut an R-rated trailer, which began showing in theaters in early February, running in front of “Rushmore.” Although “Rushmore” was a far more sophisticated comedy than “American Pie,” Universal felt “Rushmore’s” audience included the sort of influential trendsetters--Shmuger calls them “early adapters”--who would spread the word about “American Pie’s” outrageous comedy.

The trailer was so raw--including an abbreviated cut of that scene with the pie being used in ways Julia Child never dreamed of-- that the studio showed a rough cut to theater owners to make sure they were willing to play it. Shmuger says he got enthusiastic feedback, although the studio had to cut out a crude line of dialogue after several exhibitors voiced concerns about its taste. Still it was a calculated risk; R-rated trailers can only be shown before R-rated films, significantly limiting the number of moviegoers who could see the preview.

“We felt we couldn’t capture the comic essence of the picture without using R-rated material,” Shmuger says. “So rather than water down the film, we gave up the opportunity for everyone to see it right away.”

One reason the campaign began so early was that Universal originally intended to release “American Pie” in early April. But there were so many teen movies in the marketplace then, the studio decided to push back the release to Memorial Day weekend, positioning the film as the “subversive” alternative to “Star Wars.” The studio eventually decided that “Notting Hill,” an adult-oriented romantic comedy, was better “Star Wars” counter-programming. So it gave “Notting Hill” the May 28 date and scheduled “American Pie” for a July 9 release.

The marketing campaign kicked into high gear during spring break. The studio advertised heavily on MTV during the video channel’s spring-break programming. It also gave Playboy’s Web site exclusive spring-break access to the trailer, which site officials say was downloaded a million times throughout its run. Universal even got a little unwanted publicity when a shipment of Frisbees intended for spring-break frolickers was mistakenly delivered to various Hollywood types, one of whom described the Frisbees’ graphic artwork as being a portion of cherry pie that was “unmistakably a crude rendition of the female anatomy.”

The word-of-mouth campaign worked so well that when “American Pie” moved to July 9, Sony Pictures, which was going to release “Dick” on that date, was forced to push its teen comedy back into August. Of course, Hollywood being Hollywood, now that “American Pie” looks like a hit, some industry insiders are rooting against the film. “They’re going to have big trouble getting anybody over 15 to see the movie,” sniffs one detractor.

Live by the buzz, die by the buzz. “Getting all this attention is a real double-edged sword,” Chris Weitz says. “Our movie isn’t even out yet, and I’m already reading people writing into Ain’t It Cool News who are convinced the movie’s going to be terrible.”