All May Be Quiet, but the Campaign Started Long Ago

Although it’s already mid-October, the silence around this year’s Oscar campaign, for the most part, has been deafening. As with its other publicity and marketing functions in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and recently launched military campaign in Afghanistan, the motion picture industry has adopted a lower-profile approach to the customarily splashy premieres and press junkets for new films.

Behind the scenes, however, the wheels are still turning as Hollywood begins to release its serious Oscar contenders, most of which are crammed into December. As early as this year’s Academy Awards ceremonies in March, a veteran Oscar consultant was approached by a studio executive hoping to lock in her services for the coming year and preempt the competition, despite the fact that the company’s potential award-worthy films hadn’t been finished. “Pretty soon, the campaign for next year’s Oscars will begin before last year’s Academy Awards have taken place,” says Bob Harper, vice chairman of 20th Century Fox. Harper was exaggerating, but not by much.

In the past, the Oscar race began in earnest in November. This year, industry sources observe that the initial volley may have come in May when DreamWorks’ “Shrek” had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, the first time an animated film had been accepted into competition. The Cannes slot was seen as a validation of the film’s pedigree, making it a front-runner for this year’s new Oscar category, best animated feature. “Shrek” will be vying with numerous other animated movies this year, most prominently the upcoming “Monsters, Inc.” from Disney/Pixar, which debuts Nov. 2.

A contest between Disney, whose name is synonymous with quality animation, and relative newcomer (and bitter rival) DreamWorks could add the same kind of spice to this year’s Oscar campaigning as the ferocious competition for best picture between Miramax for “Shakespeare in Love” and DreamWorks for “Saving Private Ryan” did three years ago.

In the past decade, thanks in part to high-profile efforts of companies such as Miramax and DreamWorks, the Oscar campaign bar has been raised. Not only are studios launching their strategies earlier than ever, but they are becoming increasingly more visible to the public.

“At one time it was not considered proper if a studio was obvious [outside the film industry] about its campaigning,” says Florence Grace, vice president of corporate publicity at 20th Century Fox. “I don’t think that is necessarily true anymore.” And while world events are reshaping the marketing approach for this year’s contenders, producers and directors are still pushing their studios to get their films into the race early, according to one Oscar consultant.

Since Miramax and DreamWorks have waged fierce campaigns and won four of the last five best picture awards, the major studios and other top independent companies have followed suit and are investing more time and personnel in the whole awards process--not just the Academy Awards, but their precursors as well: the year-end critics’ citations, the Golden Globes, the new American Film Institute awards and guild honors (Writers Guild, Directors Guild, Screen Actors Guild).

There has been jockeying to enter potential qualifiers at a major fall film festivals such as Toronto and New York as a launching pad, which DreamWorks did last year with “Almost Famous” and the year before with “American Beauty.”

One key component in a successful Oscar campaign is the hiring of outside consultants to help studios assess the chances of their year-end releases and to sustain positive momentum on worthy films that have already been released. Last year’s best picture winner, “Gladiator,” debuted in May, and by early fall DreamWorks had placed outside consultants, such as former Universal marketing chief Bruce Feldman, on the campaign. Apart from “Shrek,” the only other film many observers are mentioning for best picture so far is “Moulin Rouge,” which also bowed in May.

“I used to get calls [from consultants] in October and November for my opinion on Oscar hopefuls,” says Pete Hammond, an Oscar analyst and advisor for the TV network American Movie Classics. “This year I started getting calls in July.”

An Oscar in one of the major categories means more than just prestige and ego gratification for a studio and its filmmakers. It can presage an economic windfall. Even securing a nomination for best picture can be crucial to a film’s commercial prospects, as Miramax has proved the past two years with “The Cider House Rules” and “Chocolat,” both of which more than doubled their U.S. box-office take after their nominations were announced, and saw their fortunes enhanced in international markets as well.

The Oscars’ economic significance far outweighs that of the Emmys, which have been called off twice in the aftermath of Sept. 11. The Emmys, now set for Nov. 4, do serve a valuable platform for promoting TV shows, but the Oscars command much greater attention worldwide.

John Pavlik, spokesman for the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, stops short of promising that the Oscars for the movies released in 2001 will proceed as in any other year, particularly in light of the Emmy cancellations.

So far it’s business as usual. But, he cautions, “moods change very fast for the better and for the worse.” Since the Oscars are almost six months away, on March 24, he adds, many questions are, at this point, unanswerable.

As the international market has grown in importance, the Oscars’ worldwide name recognition has become a lucrative selling tool. After winning best picture, “Shakespeare in Love,” a Miramax/Universal co-production, grossed almost double internationally what it had grossed in the U.S. ($189 million versus $100 million). The 2000 winner, DreamWorks’ “American Beauty,” enjoyed a similar overseas/domestic split ($217 million versus $130 million).

Beyond their commercial value, Oscars can validate a company’s efforts. With consistent best picture nominations in the past dozen years (and two wins), New York-based Miramax grew into a major industry player and was purchased by the Walt Disney Co., greatly enhancing its funding resources. The even newer DreamWorks has won two best picture Oscars in a row and came very close with “Saving Private Ryan.” That raised that company’s profile, which was an important point in the company’s contract renewal negotiations with Universal Pictures, distributor of the younger studio’s films overseas.

“Awards have now become a serious part of the business,” says Geoffrey Ammer, head of marketing at Sony Pictures Entertainment. “And we need someone to pay attention to it full time, since most studio publicity and marketing departments are busy releasing anywhere from 12 to 30 movies a year.”

The studios have always availed themselves of outside public relations firms to augment their staffs during awards season. In the past, the campaigns were largely an industry affair as the studio-hired consultants wooed members of the academy with lavish dinners (now banned by the academy) and through voluminous “for your consideration” ads in the trade journals Variety and the Hollywood Reporter.

But as the competitive nature of the race has increased, so has the sophistication of the campaigns--as well as awareness among the moviegoing public. It is now not uncommon for studios to supplement their trade ads with subtler ads in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, the major newspapers in the two cities with the largest number of academy voters.

“The movie business has become more competitive, so why should the Oscar race be any different?” argues Oren Aviv, president of marketing at Disney.

The outside consultants handle many things, including the submission process, scheduling of screenings, marketing and publicity, and actual awards-night celebrations. “We’re hired to help not only with the broad strokes of a campaign, but all the minutiae as well,” says Tony Angelotti, who is working for Universal this year as well as for Pixar, the animation house that created “Monsters, Inc.” Angelotti worked for many years with Miramax, before signing with Universal for its “Erin Brockovich” and “Billy Elliot” campaigns last year. Most of the major film companies now hire two to four consultants for their contenders, to help secure not just a best picture nomination, but nominations in the other major categories and technical ones. (Outside public relations agencies are also hired, such as Block-Korenbrot, which handles Sony Pictures Classics films, such as last year’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” and which will also be working with New Line Cinema this year.)

“The academy consulting business has become a cottage industry,” says Russell Schwartz, president of marketing at New Line Cinema. Most of the consultants are publicity veterans who have worked on awards campaigns for years; some are former studio marketing and publicity executives who have segued into the freelance consulting business (like the aforementioned Feldman, who is again advising DreamWorks this year, as well as Vivian Mayer and Lisa Tayback, who worked at DreamWorks and Miramax respectively and are currently consultants at Disney). More experienced campaigners like Angelotti are kept on retainer year-round.

“We put people on movies in July this year,” says Amanda Lumberg, vice president of publicity at MGM. “There are people who are amazing [at campaigning], but there are only a few.... When you’re working at a studio publicity department, part of what you oversee is an Academy campaign,” Lumberg says. “But you can’t drop all your other movies to concentrate on that. You need someone on it 24 hours a day to make sure no stone is unturned.”

Most of these consultants prefer to remain anonymous. Some studios request they do not talk to the press in any official capacity. However, because part of their job is to take the pulse of the entertainment news media, they are in constant contact with print, broadcast and Web writers and editors.

It’s part of the dualistic nature of Oscar campaigning. David Brooks and Terry Press, senior marketing executives at Miramax and DreamWorks, respectively, have overseen some of the most successful and visible awards campaigns in recent years. Yet both are especially tight-lipped when asked about their respective Oscar hopefuls--which include Miramax’s literary adaptation “The Shipping News” and possibly Martin Scorsese’s epic drama “Gangs of New York” (which may be pushed back to 2002) and DreamWorks’ “Shrek.”

One of the most important duties of outside consultants is to reach the 6,000 or so members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and make sure they see a studio’s potential nominees. Many of the consultants are academy members, and although they can’t openly solicit other members, they can subtly take their pulse.

“What’s written about in the press doesn’t necessarily reflect what the academy or members of the Hollywood Foreign Press [Assn.] feel about a movie,” one Oscar consultant says. “An important part of our job is to gauge the mood of the members of these organizations.”

Taking that pulse will be complicated this year by current events, and consultants are sensitive to that. “If this happened the year that ‘Shakespeare in Love’ was up against ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ the outcome might have been different, because “Ryan” was a more relevant and resonant film,” one consultant surmises.

Miramax is the architect of the modern campaign blueprint for successfully coordinating those efforts to maximize both its box office and Oscar visibility, many observers agree.

“They brought showmanship back to the Oscar race, which the studios seemed to have forgotten,” says a former behind-the-scenes consultant. “They never gave up. Harvey [Weinstein, company co-chairman] would personally get on the phone with actors and their agents to convince them to work on behalf of a film and even promise them future employment. No other modern studio head would do something like that.”

“Miramax invented [the modern Oscar campaign] and DreamWorks has been the smartest at capitalizing on it,” Hammond concurs. “The other studios are now playing catch-up.” *