A Snapshot of Coming Attractions

In a plaid shirt, loose-fitting pants and nonchalant attitude, Adam Sandler was indistinguishable from the fans who’ve made him one of the most sought-after stars in America. “I’m not particularly smart,” he mock-confessed to increasing laughter and applause. “I’m not particularly talented, I’m not particularly good-looking. But I’m a multimillionaire because of you people. So thank you very much.”

Welcome to ShoWest, as in show me the talent, show me a little respect and, most of all, show me the money. Again and again at the awards banquet of an event that’s been called everything from “the largest and most important gathering of motion picture professionals in the world” to simply “the greatest show on Earth,” the gratitude expressed by Sandler, named ShoWest Comedy Star of the Year, was echoed by some of the biggest movie stars around.

Here was Sean Connery, talking up his next film, “Entrapment,” and concluding with a heartfelt hope “that we’ll make a lot of money.” Here was Meg Ryan wryly confessing, “I’ve never been called ‘bankable’ in front of so many people.” Here was Bobby Farrelly, half of “There’s Something About Mary’s” Farrelly brothers, admitting, in a serious moment for him, “If it weren’t for you people, Pete and I would be doing TV.” And here was super-popular Will Smith, introduced by his “The Wild, Wild West’ director Barry Sonnenfeld as the “ShoWest Human Being of the Planet,” topping the Farrellys with the deadpan tribute, “Without you, someone else would have had to buy the building and put movie theaters in there.”

Though little-known to the public, the four-day ShoWest extravaganza turns out to be in many ways the most fascinating, even the most significant dawn-to-dusk movie event in the country. If you want to know what’s happening in mainstream movie-making and moviegoing today, this is the place to be.

To come to ShoWest as more or less a civilian, as a once and future moviegoer, is to understand that in our lives inside theaters we’ve all been living a “Truman Show” experience without ever knowing it. Every casual decision we make, from what to see to what to eat, has been carefully observed, analyzed and acted upon. As a top Nestle marketing official put it when discussing strong consumer feelings about high concession prices, “I don’t want to say they can be manipulated, but they can be affected.”

A few weeks ago I took in ShoWest for the first time, and “affected” is a mild word for the wonders I experienced.

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On one level, ShoWest, which celebrated its 25th anniversary this year, is simply a convention, a film festival if you like (although films are rarely screened in their entirety), for people who own movie theaters in this country and overseas. Delegate registration is capped at 3,600, but when friends, family and related personnel are added in, an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 people annually crowd Bally’s hotel-casino complex in the center of the Las Vegas Strip.

ShoWest is a place where awards are given, like the one that went to Charles D. Cretors, a fourth-generation popcorn man whose great-grandfather patented the process of popping corn in oil back in 1885. It’s a place where trade announcements are made by the National Assn. of Theater Owners (NATO for short, and jokingly thanked a few years back by Leslie Nielsen for “the wonderful job you’re doing in Bosnia”), which this year unveiled a new initiative to keep the audio level of coming-attractions trailers down.

And it’s a place where speeches can lapse into boilerplate phraseology like “return on capital,” “cash-flow perspective” and the always popular “ancillary revenue streams.” Unlike other festivals (no names, please), the people here are not frightened by the prospect of earning a little money.

ShoWest, in fact, has a language of its own, opaque to civilians. Theater owners are known as exhibitors (“ ‘exhibitionists,’ as we call them in England,” Hugh Grant joked). Movie studios are never called studios, but are rather broken down into their component parts: production--the process of making films--and its more significant partner, distribution--the system of getting them into theaters. Moviegoers are often (no kidding) called guests, and as for the concession stand, it’s inevitably referred to, with appropriate reverence, as “our profit center.”

So calling ShoWest merely a convention is like calling “Scream” a satisfactory earner. ShoWest is the place where George Lucas, not known to be passionate about public speaking, came to give exhibitors “a special big hug” for their efforts with the “Star Wars” reissue and to personally unveil the new trailer for “The Phantom Menace.” It’s the place that Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein flew infrom New York not to receive an award, not even to present an award, but just to present a presenter to the assembled multitudes. And the very last creative thing Stanley Kubrick did on this planet was to personally put together a 30-second teaser for “Eyes Wide Shut,” his first film in more than a decade, specifically for the ShoWest crowd.

A privileged look behind the scenes at the interlocking gears of the theatrical experience, ShoWest has increased in importance over 25 years in part because it’s several events in one. One part is hard-core educational, a presentation of in-depth statistics, surveys and information. One part is flashy, an energizing showcase where studios display what they hope theaters will be showing in the months ahead.

Perhaps the most irresistible segment is the trade show (see accompanying story) where more than 500 vendors pack booths with an eye toward selling every single thing you can think a movie theater might possibly want or need, and some, like tiny ice cream pellets frozen to 40 degrees below zero and dubbed “Dippin’ Dots,” it would be difficult to even imagine.

ShoWest, obviously, hasn’t always been this big, and it hasn’t always been in Las Vegas either. The idea started with a 1974 meeting at Los Angeles International Airport between three key figures in West Coast motion picture exhibition: Jerry Forman, Bob Selig and B.V. Sturdivant. Differences of opinion with the national organization meant that California exhibitors were not then members of NATO and, remembers Forman, head of Pacific Theaters, “we were trying to establish a forum and a place to meet, to bring exhibition and distribution together in a little trade show where you could have a couple of lunches and just open an informal dialogue.”

The first ShoWest (no one is sure anymore just who came up with the name) was held in San Diego in 1975. The attendance was roughly 200, there were barely more than a dozen booths at the trade show, the filmmaking companies who attended were mostly now-defunct entities like Brut Productions and Crown International, and the big news was the new Containment Screen for drive-in theaters, which for the first time did not deflect images out onto the highway. “That,” says William Kartozian, now president of NATO, chuckling at the memory, “shows where we’ve come in 25 years.”

If there is one key to how big ShoWest has become, it was the decision, starting with the 1979 event, to move the proceedings to Las Vegas, a city where the airport looks like a casino and the casinos look like an Egyptian pyramid (Luxor), a medieval castle (Excalibur), even the Manhattan skyline (New York New York). The whole city can be viewed as one big show, and the synergy between location and event couldn’t have been better.

Vegas is “the key to the whole event,” said a top distribution executive, a potent energy source for the convention and a place, when all is said and done, where movie people feel right at home.

“It’s pretty glamorous, there’s a whole exciting aura about Las Vegas,” says Jean Gregory, who runs the Deluxe Outdoor Theaters in Clarmont, Ind. “If the convention was held somewhere else, there wouldn’t be as many people attending.” In 1989, the national organization finally got the message, and ShoWest, which had been run since its inception by NATO of California/Nevada, became the official convention of the entire exhibition industry as well.

Also attracted to Las Vegas were international exhibitors, theater owners in such far-off places as Thailand and Brazil, who felt even more removed from the heart of the business than their counterparts on the outskirts of Indianapolis. They came from so many countries--more than 40 were counted in 1999--that ShoWest set aside its first day just for them. And their problems.

Who knew, for instance, that video piracy is so out of control in Vietnam and Malaysia that the exhibition business has become impossible? Or that Russia, a nation of 170 million, “has virtually no modern screens.” Or that Italy suffers in the summer from a lack of air-conditioned theaters and that British exhibitors sometimes have show times dictated by uncaring local governments.

ShoWest can’t solve these difficulties, of course, but it can offer a forum to schmooze and complain and feel you’re among friends. American exhibitors tend to patronize ShoWest for the same reasons; as a theater owner succinctly put it to the Hollywood Reporter, “You’re with your peers, the people you love and the people you hate.”

There is an additional lure, of course, and that is the glamour, the chance to witness movie celebrity in the flesh, to experience what NATO president Kartozian calls “treating them to a bit of Hollywood in Las Vegas.” Does it work? You bet. “We like to see the stars of the films we run in person,” says Daniel Van Orden, circuit general manager of the Fulton, Mo.-based B&B; Theaters, which owns two dozen screens in that state and neighboring Kansas. “It makes for good talk in small towns.”

The studios, ever solicitous, have tried to oblige, putting on elaborate luncheons and dinners where wave after wave of stars parade to the dais and wave to exhibitors and a slickly produced montage of coming attractions (known as a product reel) is screened. Warner Bros. has traditionally set the standard for these events, and this year its dais groaned under the accumulated celebrity of Clint Eastwood, Keanu Reeves, Will Smith, Salma Hayek, Hugh Grant, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Elizabeth Hurley, George Clooney, Cuba Gooding Jr., Geoffrey Rush and numerous others. They’re all flown in on company jets in a hectic undertaking that Tom Hanks characterized as “one of the great and goofy 24 hours you get to spend in the business.”

But even though ShoWest picks up the tab for food at these events, providing that touch of glamour has proven expensive and difficult for studios. Those jets from around the world cost serious money, as does paying for a stop in production for whatever films the stars happen to be in at the moment. When all the expenses are added in, one of these afternoons can cost a studio $1 million or even $2 million.

So it’s not surprising, especially in a world where the top 10 movie circuits control 60% of America’s theatrical gross, that the studios periodically chafe at the expense of the ShoWest experience and search for alternatives. In 1995, for instance, MGM/UA flew 32 top exhibition executives to Paris for a preview experience. Even Warners, one of ShoWest’s most faithful supporters, now cites expense in its plan to do the Las Vegas event only every other year.

So why do the studios do it at all? In addition to intangible factors like inertia and the value of showing the flag to the industry, studios value the kind of instant feedback on upcoming product that only showing it to thousands of people who have a major stake in a film’s success or failure can provide. The feeling was unanimous after the New Line luncheon, for instance, that the new Mike Myers movie “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me” was the most likely success on that studio’s roster, and Warner Bros. watchers had the same sense about the Tom Hanks-starring, Stephen King-based “The Green Mile.”

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But while these successes may have been expected, ShoWest sometimes provides the more valuable service of anointing unexpected films. “Studios might not even be sure themselves what they’ve got, and ShoWest showcases what might be sleeper product,” explains Barry Reardon, Warners’ highly respected retiring head of distribution. “All of a sudden, boom, an unheralded film like ‘Free Willy’ can become a big hit here.” Reardon put a more colorful spin on the same thought when he told a reporter a few years back, “A little picture can get kosher at ShoWest.”

Also, as more and more mainstream media cover ShoWest, the event becomes a perfect opportunity to get invaluable international publicity on films. Which is just what Warners did by providing a small but provocative glimpse of Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” characterized by Daily Variety as “an eye-opening teaser that features more explicit nude footage of Nicole Kidman than the entire Broadway run of ‘The Blue Room.’ ”

As important as the information the clips provide, the ShoWest studio events, where executives are dutifully paraded onto the dais like members of the old Soviet Politburo, are useful in fostering a kind of intimacy and camaraderie between exhibitors and distributors, a celebratory “among ourselves” feeling capable of creating good will that can last through an entire year.

In case exhibitors don’t get the message that the studios want them to think they’re important, a lot of specific making nice and stroking of theater owners goes on at ShoWest. Two years ago, Julia Roberts, the biggest of female stars, assured the ShoWest crowd that her hair in “My Best Friend’s Wedding” was “red and long and curly, just the way you like it.” This year, Peter Chernin, president of News Corp., 20th Century Fox’s parent corporation, showed up to call film “the greatest igniter of human emotions ever invented” and promise that “the movies will always remain the core priority of what we do.”

Though it doesn’t draw the big stars, even the informational-educational aspect of ShoWest can seem glamorous in the right hands. A.C. Nielsen EDI, for instance, enlivened the statistics in its new Movie*Views survey of moviegoing habits with colorful graphics and by having the frequent moviegoers who drive the marketplace (the 18% of ticket buyers who account for 66% of the box-office gross) sound like the stars of their own TV program about poundage-challenged individuals by calling them “the Heavies.” Among the more daunting pieces of information revealed were that reviews were important to only 9% of all respondents (but 12% of the Heavies!). Theater owners also paid a lot more attention to seminars on two of the biggest issues facing them in the here and now, the explosion of the megaplex phenomenon, a.k.a “megaplex mania,” and the maturating of digital technology.

Roughly defined as a theater with from 14 to 30-something screens, the megaplex was virtually unheard of just a few years ago. Today, the megaplex is where everyone wants to be: 41 of the 50 top-grossing theaters in America are megaplexes.

They are enormous enterprises, as big as 150,000 square feet, utilizing 4,000 lightbulbs to illuminate six-story lobby rotundas, and they seat 12,000 to 15,000 people on a given weekend day, between 2 million and 3 million in a year. Yet they’ve also caused havoc in the exhibition sector, making non-megaplexes seem out of date years before their time, “siphoning customers from existing theaters,” warned Mike Campbell, head of Regal Cinemas, the nation’s largest chain, “like a huge vacuum cleaner and cannibalizing their business.”

These behemoths can be daunting to run, with even veteran theater managers saying they were not prepared. So in addition to informal discussions of these issues, ShoWest provided a nuts-and-bolts event called “Managing Top-Grossing Megaplexes” laden with real-world specifics. “You have to know who touches the money,” said one manager, detailing his own “triple-check system.”

Plus, you have to be smart with your concessions, said John King Jr., general manager of the Winnetka 20 in Chatsworth, relating how an exclusive contract to serve Pink’s hot dogs, the pride of Hollywood, led to 175,000 sold in the first year, a figure that drew appreciative gasps from the savvy crowd.

The other much-discussed issue at ShoWest was the coming of digital technology and whether, as one speaker put it, “we will enter the new millennium embracing a 100-year-old technology or a new one.” Two companies put on side-by-side comparisons of their digital images with Kodak film, and while the consensus was that film still had the edge, it was a near thing.

Later that same day, Lucas stunned the crowd by saying that “Star Wars: Episode One--The Phantom Menace” would play in four theaters in a digital version and that he’d shoot the next “Star Wars” prequel exclusively with digital equipment. Said one exhibitor to the Hollywood Reporter, “The sound you heard during the ‘Star Wars’ trailer was 20 guys from Kodak jumping off the roof of the hotel.”*