Miramax Plan Paves Way to Gold

Miramax’s strong showing at Sunday night’s Academy Awards is the payoff of a concerted promotional and marketing effort on both “Shakespeare in Love” and “Life Is Beautiful” that extends back to last May. But it is also the beneficiary of the company’s strategies on its previously nominated films. Miramax has had seven best picture contenders in a row (and one win--”The English Patient”) and 11 contenders for best foreign-language film, at least one in each of the last 11 years (six wins including “Life Is Beautiful”). Each Oscar campaign has served as a refining process for the next one.

And each film’s marketing and promotional efforts intertwined to produce both strong box-office and Academy Award glory.

The blueprints for this year’s campaign for “Shakespeare in Love” and “Life Is Beautiful” were originally drawn for “The English Patient” and “Il Postino,” respectively, though Miramax releases as far back as 1989’s “Cinema Paradiso” and “My Left Foot” contributed to the effort. Over the last decade Miramax’s Oscar season marketing machine has become so aggressive that this year it evoked complaints from the industry.

The ubiquity in recent months of the company’s advertising and personal appearance efforts on both “Life” and “Shakespeare” has slowly been building for months, long before either film was even released. The Oscar nominations announced on Feb. 9 kicked the release schedule and promotional efforts into high gear. Suddenly both films were everywhere, as were its stars, writers and directors.

But work on “Life” began at last year’s Cannes Film Festival last May when critics like Roger Ebert first predicted it would be a best picture nominee. On “Shakespeare,” it began with a 20-minute reel shown to the media last fall to help lay the groundwork for the still uncompleted film.

“For us each [nominated] movie has been a coattail for the next,” says marketing and publicity executive Marcy Granata, who, along with West Coast President Mark Gill, decamped to Miramax five years ago from Sony Pictures. Oscar nominations (and wins) have served as engines for box-office success and wider acceptance from theater owners--from the major cities, to the suburbs to small towns. With their specialized films, Miramax broke through to blockbuster status with such films as “Pulp Fiction” and “Good Will Hunting,” both of which grossed more than $100 million.

The company won its first best picture Oscar for “The English Patient,” a film no other studio would release. “English Patient” went on to gross $80 million in the U.S. “Shakespeare in Love” followed a similar release plan and is expected to top “The English Patient’s” box-office performance (it has already grossed $73 million). Miramax’s first foreign-made best picture nominee, “Il Postino,” was considered a longshot when it was nominated in 1995. But it prepared audiences for “Life Is Beautiful,” which surpassed “Il Postino” as the largest-grossing foreign film ever released in the U.S.

“ ‘Il Postino’ broke the ceiling for us and helped in our efforts to promote ‘Life Is Beautiful,’ ” says Gill. “Life Is Beautiful’s” unprecedented seven nominations also helped the company book theaters that were still resisting playing subtitled films.

And as with “Shakespeare,” as “Life” became more popular its performers were increasingly in demand by the media, especially “Life’s” writer-director-star Roberto Benigni.

Benigni’s recent appearance on “60 Minutes” was a coup for a foreign film that would not have been possible, says Granata, without the company’s previous foreign hits “Cinema Paradiso” (which won the foreign-language Oscar in 1989) and “Il Postino.”

“Shakespeare” faced several of the same barriers that greeted “The English Patient”: The sense that both films were art-house efforts not meant for a general audience.

“Neither movie on the face of it is a ‘marketable’ movie,” says Gill. “But we knew that both were extremely playable.”

By building momentum from the end-of-the-year critics’ polls through Oscar season--with consistent marketing and promotional support--both films were able to break through with general audiences. “For ‘The English Patient’ we looked back to the ‘Piano’ and a film both Marcy and I worked on at Columbia, ‘Remains of the Day,’ ” says Gill. “For all these movies we’re looking at the growth of the adult audience and we’ve learned something each time.” Each film grossed more than the previous one and played in smaller towns for longer periods of time. “We’re just getting more effective at doing it,” Gill says with a shrug. And at winning Oscars as well.