Marketing Coup: Let a Fan Do the Work

Nick Des Barres is a 23-year-old aspiring actor and ex-video game magazine designer who can normally be found at any hour--the later, the better--playing Rez, Final Fantasy 10 and Metal Gear Solid 2.

Now he has something to add to his resume: He’s designed the movie poster for “Resident Evil,” an action horror film that’s being released by Screen Gems next month.

Under normal circumstances, an untutored fan like Des Barres wouldn’t have a prayer of even getting in the door. Known in the business as one-sheets, posters are the product of a sophisticated, tightly controlled marketing process by which print advertising firms submit dozens of poster concepts to studios, which decide on a final image only after running contenders past a gantlet of market research focus groups.

But when Screen Gems marketing chief Valerie Van Galder saw “Resident Evil,” she thought it was the kind of movie that needed a fan-friendly approach. Based on a popular video game of the same name, “Resident Evil” was clearly a movie whose core audience would be young video game fans and Internet geeks.

Made by Paul W.S. Anderson, who directed the video game-derived “Mortal Kombat,” the film features Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez as commandos who have three hours to neutralize a deadly virus that has overwhelmed a genetic research facility and threatens to overrun the entire planet. It’s full of yucky creatures like the Licker and the Zombie Dogs that are well known to fans of the “Evil” video games.

A Web devotee who still believes that the fabled “Blair Witch Project” online blitzkrieg was a portent of things to come, Van Galder had a brainstorm: If we really want a poster that appeals to young, Internet-savvy video gamers, why not let one of them design the poster?

After plowing through studio legal obstacles, (Screen Gems is a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment), Van Galder launched the poster design contest on “Resident Evil’s” Web site. Contestants were given a studio-designed title treatment, roughly 100 stills from the movie and links to graphic software. After that, they were on their own. Publicizing the contest solely through Internet word-of-mouth, Screen Gems got 3,000 submissions.

Van Galder and three other staffers picked five finalists, put them on the Web and received 10,000 votes on the winner. Des Barres’ poster--which features the film’s heroines surrounded by ghost-like hands clawing at them in a sea of blackness--won by a landslide. In addition to having the studio use his artwork, Des Barres received $2,500, a framed poster and a free screening for friends on the Sony lot.

What makes the “Evil” poster contest so unusual is that it defies one of the original commandments of Hollywood: Never give up control of any aspect of your publicity campaign. But times are changing in movie marketing. One of the past year’s biggest hits, New Line Cinema’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” owes at least some of its success to a savvy Internet marketing campaign that allowed fan-based Web sites unprecedented access to the filmmaking process.

Van Galder has a similar philosophy at Screen Gems, a veteran film label that was reborn three years ago and that bears a close resemblance to the brash mid-90s-era New Line; its mandate is to release modest-budgeted genre films geared to young moviegoers. In the last year, its films have included “Snatch,” a Brad Pitt-starring gangster comedy; “Two Can Play That Game,” an African American romantic comedy with Morris Chestnut and Vivica A. Fox; and a low-budget Richard Gere thriller called “The Mothman Prophecies,” which just passed the $30-million mark at the box office.

Though it is housed on the button-down Sony lot, Screen Gems is an oasis of informality. Van Galder’s office door has a photo of Pitt from the “Snatch” premiere which her staff has adorned with the scrawled inscription: “Don’t worry, Val, I’m a Money-Making Machine!” The “Evil” poster contest was a good example of Screen Gems’ eagerness to use the Internet as a link between the studio and young moviegoers.

Poster Contest ‘Was the Ultimate Focus Group’

“If you do research to see what a movie’s core audience likes, then this was the ultimate focus group,” says Van Galder. “The Internet is the key market that wants to see this film, and they overwhelmingly picked the poster they liked, so in a way it was better than having a focus group do it. We let the real fans do it.”

Even though movie posters from Hollywood’s golden age are valuable collectibles, today’s film posters are a neglected art. Since the rise of TV advertising in the late 1970s, posters have been relegated to a lesser role in movie marketing campaigns. It’s no coincidence that the last great era of poster design, which produced a string of evocative images for films like “The Exorcist,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “A Clockwork Orange,” came just before the ascendancy of TV ad campaigns.

Research has shown that the vast majority of moviegoers make their film-going decisions based on TV ads and movie trailers. Poster design has also been hamstrung by star contracts that give actors control over the size and placement of their names and image.

Nonetheless, posters remain a pivotal ingredient in movie publicity campaigns, establishing a film’s identity by providing fans with the first images from an upcoming movie. For movie marketers, it’s a no-brainer: If you’re paying a star $20 million, your poster might as well display his or her head as if were a Thanksgiving Day’s parade balloon.

That’s what Sony did with Mel Gibson on the poster for “The Patriot” and MGM did with Bruce Willis on the “Hart’s War” poster, even though he’s not the Hart of the movie. The poster for “Vanilla Sky” is virtually identical to the poster for “Jerry Maguire,” except in the “Vanilla Sky” version, the giant picture of Tom Cruise has sky and clouds behind it.

But many of the best modern-day posters have substituted movie star bobble heads with more vivid imagery. “Ocean’s Eleven” was chockfull of big-name actors, but Warner Bros. simply showed the outline of their legs, straddling an “11” painted in red at their feet. “It’s a great piece of graphic art, because it evoked the coolness of the original movie with a modern sensibility,” says DreamWorks marketing chief Terry Press. “It essentially said, ‘This cast is so great we only need to show their feet!’”

When DreamWorks released “What Lies Beneath” in 2000, it had two stars--Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer--but chose a poster that showed a woman’s hand, a wedding ring visible on her finger, clutching at the edge of a bathtub.

The studio’s poster for “American Beauty,” its 1999 Oscar best picture, was devoid of stars as well, instead displaying a woman’s hand pressing a single red rose next to her exposed belly button. The studio has designed an equally striking poster for “The Road to Perdition,” a film starring Tom Hanks due out in July. Although Hanks is pictured in the poster, leading a young boy with one hand, holding a tommy gun in the other, his face is partially obscured by the shadow of his fedora and a driving rain.

Each Poster Conveys an Image or a Mood

The common denominator? Each poster conveys an instantly identifiable image or mood. As DreamWorks creative advertising chief David Sameth puts it: “The image becomes an icon that the audience will always associate with the movie.”

At one glance, you could tell that “What Lies Beneath” was a Hitchcockian thriller, that “American Beauty” was tangled up with ideas of temptation. The poster for “Road to Perdition” has a bleakness that evokes the saga of a hit man on a journey of revenge after much of his family is murdered.

“It’s all about will you cross the lobby of the theater to look at our poster?” says Press. “Sometimes a movie star’s face isn’t the most valuable piece of information for the consumer. I’ll trade Tom Hanks’ face for someone thinking the poster has an arresting image, because the longer you look at the poster, the more likely you are to want to see the movie.”

Another current winner is the poster for Revolution Studios’ “Black Hawk Down,” which shows Josh Hartnett, one of the soldiers in the film, sitting on the edge of a helicopter, his gun cradled in one hand, his helmet in the other, his face etched with grime and blood. The image--taken from a still photo shot between takes--is pensive and haunting, with none of Hollywood’s usual war movie swagger.

“[Director] Ridley Scott picked the shot himself and fought vociferously to use it as the poster image,” explains Revolution chief Joe Roth. “For Ridley, this was what the movie was about. There are no flags waving, no gung-ho soldiers, none of the war movie cliches.”

The best movie posters are half art, half advertising and all visual stimulation. They tickle our subconscious through the art of suggestion. Des Barres’ “Resident Evil” design isn’t going to make a movie poster hall of fame, but its image delivers a clear message--this movie is going to give you a real scare.

“I’m no poster expert,” says Des Barres. “But I wanted to suggest a lot of gore without hitting you over the head with it. You only have five seconds to catch someone’s eye, so I wanted to do something that people might think was striking and new.”

*

“The Big Picture” is published every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com