Studio Built Victory ‘One Brick at a Time’

Last month, about five weeks before this year’s Oscar ballots were due, DreamWorks SKG decided to go for broke.

Executives at the young studio, whose weighty “Saving Private Ryan” had been deprived of the Academy Award for best picture in 1999 when voters opted for Miramax’s spirited “Shakespeare in Love,” knew they had another strong best picture contender: the dark comedy “American Beauty.” The film’s momentum had built steadily, from its carefully crafted release to its near-sweep of many of the industry’s most coveted awards. Already, DreamWorks was matching--and in some areas vastly outspending--its competition in traditional advertising, and the entertainment media had labeled “American Beauty” the front-runner.

But being the odds-on favorite and nabbing the most Oscar nominations are no consolation when you lose, DreamWorks’ marketing folks knew all too well. This year, they desperately wanted to win.

There’s no knowing whether what DreamWorks did next was the key to “American Beauty’s” victory Sunday night, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored it with not only best picture but four other awards: best director, best actor, best original screenplay and best cinematography. But the endgame strategy DreamWorks employed was striking in that it was largely invented by the very studio, Miramax, whose film many believed was the only rival of “American Beauty” for best picture: “The Cider House Rules.”

High Stakes for Newcomer

Every studio wants to score big on Oscar night, but for DreamWorks this year the stakes were particularly high. Formed by Jeffrey Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg and David Geffen with backing from Paul Allen in 1994, DreamWorks has released several profitable pictures and has what looks to be an impressive slate coming up this year. But especially after last year, when “Saving Private Ryan” won a best director Oscar for Spielberg but was passed over for best picture, Sunday’s resounding victory affirmed DreamWorks’ place among Hollywood’s major motion picture companies.

“Harvey skunked us last year,” Katzenberg had admitted a few days before the show, describing Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein as a “buddy.” Katzenberg compared this year’s Oscar race to the Democratic presidential primary, with Miramax pushing DreamWorks to campaign creatively just as “Bill Bradley made Al Gore a better candidate.”

In promoting “American Beauty,” DreamWorks borrowed a page from Miramax’s indie film playbook, bolstering traditional broad-based advertising and publicity with smaller, targeted maneuvers designed to reach the 5,600 academy voters if not literally where they lived (direct-mail campaigning is prohibited), then at least in casual, comfortable settings in their own communities. With the help of three veteran consultants, hired during the waning weeks of the campaign, the studio was determined, as one strategist put it, to build an Oscar victory “one brick at a time.”

“We wanted help spotting areas we might not be thinking of. The feeling was, ‘OK, the more minds in the room the better,’ ” DreamWorks marketing chief Terry Press said of the decision--not made during last year’s campaign for “Saving Private Ryan”--to bring in outside help. “They reminded us to keep it local.”

When consultants Nancy Willen, Dale Olson and Bruce Feldman got together to brainstorm with studio executives late last month, each offered DreamWorks the same overarching advice: You’ve thought big for months, but now it’s time to think small.

Willen, a longtime marketer who has run several Oscar campaigns for lower-budget specialty films, urged DreamWorks to produce a half-hour special on the making of “American Beauty,” which aired (at the studio’s expense) on a Los Angeles cable channel. She also created “American Beauty” displays in bookstore windows around town and set up a small question-and-answer session with director Sam Mendes for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (which includes academy voters).

Mendes won the best director Oscar on Sunday.

“This is an indie film strategy born out of necessity, when you have relatively little money for advertising,” said Willen, who ran last year’s campaign for the offbeat film “Affliction,” which won a best supporting actor Oscar for James Coburn. “It’s all about trying to find ways to play within the rules and still have as much visibility as possible.”

Olson, a publicist for 40 years widely seen as an elder statesman of movie marketing, reminded DreamWorks to advertise not just in big newspapers but also in free publications distributed in Beverly Hills, where many academy members live. He also organized “American Beauty” screenings in New York and Los Angeles for about 1,000 members of the Actors Fund of America, a philanthropic organization that includes many members of the academy’s largest voting block: actors.

“The whole idea here is not so much going out and tub-thumping for an Oscar. It’s making sure that every possible voter in the academy sees your product,” said Olson, who admitted to going to “the most obscure lengths” to reach even a few voters. “They’re smart. They can make up their own minds. So I never do anything to say, ‘Vote for me.’ I do everything to say, ‘See me.’ ”

Personal Touch

Meanwhile, Feldman, who has done marketing for studio and art-house films for more than 20 years, came up with something brilliantly simple: A few weeks ago, he took screenwriter Alan Ball to the Santa Barbara Film Festival a day early, to attend a tribute to Anthony Hopkins.

“Alan was invited to be on a panel. I took him up the night before to go to the tribute, got him seated in the front with all the board members, then took him to a private dinner [for Hopkins] at Citronella, where for two hours it was, ‘This is Alan Ball from “American Beauty,” ’ “ Feldman said, estimating that 30 to 40 academy voters reside in Santa Barbara, and that several of those were at the tribute. “Look, if you show up at a dinner, it doesn’t make anybody vote for the guy. But it’s human nature to be influenced by personal contact. We figured five, 10 or 25 votes could make a difference. Who’s to say that it wouldn’t?”

Ball won an Oscar on Sunday for best original screenplay.

That DreamWorks beat out Miramax this year was especially resonant given the long relationship between Katzenberg and Harvey and Bob Weinstein, the brothers who created Miramax. Katzenberg was still at Disney when that company acquired Miramax in 1993. Some people still describe him as the Weinsteins’ patron saint at Disney, who lobbied to buy Miramax because he was impressed by its creative (and cost-effective) promotion of such films as “The Crying Game” and “The Piano.”

Last year, many in Hollywood griped about Miramax’s tactics. At one point, for example, DreamWorks’ marketing chief Press asserted that in contrast to Miramax, “I’m running a competitive and respectful campaign. . . . My legs are hurting from being on the high road.”

But clearly this year, something--either a general desire to leave no stone unturned or a more pointed analysis of Miramax’s grass-roots marketing--led DreamWorks to partake in Hollywood’s sincerest form of flattery: imitation. Just one year after Miramax was widely accused of hijacking the Oscar race, its executives were struck by how familiar certain aspects of the DreamWorks campaign looked to them.

Miramax publicity chief Marcy Granata did not begrudge DreamWorks its best picture victory but still deftly cast the academy’s recognition of an offbeat picture as an indirect victory for Miramax as well.

“You have to give credit to the academy--they’ve gotten used to the idea that you can discover the gem outside the mainstream,” she said. “And I like to think that between ‘Pulp Fiction,’ ‘The English Patient’ and ‘Shakespeare in Love,’ we’re a forerunner of [promoting] that notion. I feel very proud of that legacy.”

Moreover, Mark Gill, president of Miramax’s Los Angeles operation, noted that his company accomplished a lot simply by getting seven Oscar nominations for “Cider House.” (The movie won two Oscars: best supporting actor for Michael Caine and best adapted screenplay for John Irving.)

“The nominations take a movie with limited appeal and substantially broaden it,” Gill said, noting that “Cider House’s” box-office take more than doubled after the nominations were announced. “When you become one of the five movies people have to see, that’s where the economics pay off.”

For her part, DreamWorks’ Press suggested that academy voters may have punished “Cider House” because of its marketing campaign. Press and others felt the campaign masked the darker components of the film, which explores themes of abortion and incest against the backdrop of a Maine orphanage.

“I never hid the darkness or the unsavory elements of ‘American Beauty’ in my advertising campaign--and that’s a real difference between us and ‘Cider House.’ That’s one thing I really draw the line at,” Press said a few days before the Oscar telecast. “I don’t think anybody in the end believed all those pictures of just orphans.”

Early Recognition

Whether that was the deciding factor or not, Harvey Weinstein seemed to see what was coming. Nine days before Oscar night, he reached Katzenberg by phone aboard the DreamWorks jet and all but conceded defeat.

“He said he called to say, ‘Congratulations. You saw the playbook and outplayed us,’ ” Katzenberg said a moment after ringing off with a friendly “What’s your Oscar movie for next year?”

That Weinstein would jump the gun is not so surprising, considering the kudos “American Beauty” had amassed before the statuettes were handed out Sunday night. The film had more Oscar nominations--eight--than any other film and had won three Golden Globes, including best picture. No one denied that it was by far the best-reviewed film of 1999, named best picture by more than 65 critics across the nation.

Nevertheless, the DreamWorks publicity machine--a relatively small eight-person outfit, as compared to Miramax’s more than 25--never took a rest.

In the last several weeks, Kevin Spacey appeared on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” on the Bravo cable channel’s “Inside the Actors Studio” and on the cover of Back Stage West magazine (which is well read by actors). Spacey won the best actor Oscar on Sunday night.

Annette Bening appeared on NBC’s “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” on an hourlong MSNBC special about her and Spacey’s careers and on the cover (wrapped in an American flag) of Los Angeles magazine’s Hollywood issue. Finally, Mendes, the director, gave an extensive interview on “CBS Sunday Morning.”

“We just continued doing what we normally do, though in the home stretch you just have to do it more creatively, with complete respect for the rules of the academy,” said DreamWorks publicity chief Vivian Mayer. She described the strategy this way: “Basically, just never letting up.”

According to one rival studio, the number of ad pages DreamWorks bought in the three trade papers--Daily Variety, Weekly Variety and the Hollywood Reporter--was twice that of any other studio. And that ratio was borne out in an independent tally by The Times of the advertising for best picture contenders in Daily Variety during the four weeks after the nominations were announced. DreamWorks spent more than $774,000 to promote “American Beauty” during that period, as compared to about $350,000 Miramax spent to promote “Cider House.” (Some of DreamWorks’ spending, however, was necessitated by a steady stream of congratulatory ad-buying that is considered de rigueur after nominations and award wins.)

All this makes it even more notable that DreamWorks opted not to coast to the finish line. The studio could have believed its own press. Instead, its 11th-hour hiring of the three veteran consultants was shrewd if only because, as one rival studio executive put it, “they couldn’t afford the embarrassment of losing again. They bought an insurance policy.”

At the end of the day, said Feldman, none of the strategies he, Willen and Olson employed “in themselves will be looked back upon as a brilliant master stroke. But that wasn’t the point of the assignment. The point was to be smart, appropriate and thorough.”

Olson agreed.

“You have to go into every single arena and force those people who were on the edge to go see your movie and then think for themselves,” he said. “They might not like the message, but they can’t avoid that it was very well done. Academy members love to be on the winning team. And if they think your movie is it, boom! At the last minute their pencil goes right up to that mark.”

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