Marketing "Lady In The Water"

So I'm going to make a prediction now. I have absolutely no hard evidence to back it up, but there's something in my brain that says it is so.

My prediction is that "Lady In The Water", the new M. Night Shyamalan film, isn't the movie that it is being sold as.

The current compaign is actually a great one, because it makes the movie look mysterious and exciting. No longer does it look like a motel version of "Splash"; now there is Danger! And Evil Creatures! And Characters Running in Fear!

It is being sold as a horror/thriller, and sold well. And maybe I'm wrong (I haven't read the script), and maybe it is a truly effective horror/thriller, and that audiences going to see it based on that idea aren't going to be disappointed.

But I don't think so.

Because the initial trailers for this movie were sort of lame. They were trying to set this up as a "fairy tale", and there was only the barest glimmer of potential menace. Mostly we got the sense of a lonely janitor, foggy nights, and a girl in a pool who seemed like she was destined to be some sort of otherworldly love interest.

The problem is that, if this is an intense horror/thriller, I have no idea why you'd try to sell it with the first trailer. Unless there is some brilliant bait-and-switch going on here (the studio making you think it's a light fairy tale, with the idea of surprising you and scaring you, provided that you actually come and see it), what it feels more like is the studio trying to figure out how to market a story that didn't fall into traditional marketing plans.

Because let's face it. If it really is the movie they are selling it as now, there'd be no reason not to sell it to the public that way from the start. I think the studio would have been thrilled if M. Night delivered a scary foggy motel creature feature, and would have had a ball letting the public know about it from day one.

Instead, this feels like the marketing team worried because no one was all that excited by the first trailer, so they are cobbling together as many scary-looking moments as they can, and grabbing enough random story elements out of the actual storyline so that they can later credibly claim that the movie they are selling is the movie they are delivering.

I hope I'm wrong. I think M. Night still has a great movie or two in him, and it would be nice if he started reversing his recent downward trend here. But there's a smell around this movie, that is a bit too pungent to ignore.
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Marketing also came into play during my recent low-pay, no-credit rewrite.

The original writer had started the tale off with a sequence lifted from the third act of the movie, which is a common technique in scripts that take a while to build; you want to reassure the reader that this is going somewhere interesting, so you tease with the climax stuff, before settling into your actual story.

It's a form of marketing, that makes a certain amount of sense for the right kind of script; it's the same reason that horror scripts (including my original one, that I'm noodling around with) often start with someone getting violently knocked off, just to set the tone. "Scream", for example.

The irony is that, in terms of horror/thriller type scripts, the showing-the-scene-from-Act-3 is really something that is only necessary for the script, and not the actual movie.

Because thanks to the deluge of marketing, by the time anyone would sit down to watch a movie based on this script, they already know the kind of movie it is, so there is no reason to tease with third act stuff (and, if you don't know what kind of movie it is, you've bought your ticket, so the slow build-up won't lose you).

Which is one of the weird things about the movie biz. You are writing something that won't exist in a bubble; if it's a movie, people will already be bringing expectations to it. But it's hard to really reflect this with a script that someone is cold-reading, because unless you've been able to prime them beforehand, they can always toss it away and move to the next one.

As writers, we're always told that you need to grab the reader early, and it's generally a good idea just from a basic storytelling standpoint; hell, you should grab the reader throughout. But again, if it's a film, the people have paid to see it; there's no real need to hook them from minute one once they are sitting down. Because the marketing has already done that for you.

Obviously, the closest thing to marketing for screenwriters is in the process of getting someone to read your script. Building interest in a query or cover letter, or pitching it to an exec to make them want to read it. You are essentially putting together little commercials for your script, coming up with little expectation-building shorthand. "It's 'The Wedding Crashers' meets 'Beaches', but with more nudity".

And yet, actually doing something like putting a mock-up of a potential poster on the cover of your script is considered amateurish.

My second prediction? The day is coming when things like poster mock-ups will be common. As the movie biz moves more and more toward films only getting made that can reach a wide audience, there will be a distinct advantage in writers having marketing skills (maybe even studying marketing -- ack, I know), and being able to let the movie execs see the commercial potential of your idea beyond what's on the page.

I know, the purist in you is cringing. But seriously, want to sell a script? Write a great story, that a lot of people are going to want to see. And then figure out how to let the execs vividly imagine this happening.

Better yet, get the execs to imagine that your great script will still make money even after they hire McG to direct it and he screws up the movie.

Basic stuff, but if you write a script that you are hoping that someone else will buy and spend a lot of money making, you'd better at least ask yourself how this movie would be sold, and what its potential is in that arena.

Because, when push comes to shove, writing a good story only gets you so far. The money people are going to want to make money on it too.

And if you are making a "Lady In The Water" type genre film, and you find yourself pitching it as the kind of tale that you haven't actually written, well maybe it's time to write the version of the story that everyone is going to want to see.

And then write the hell out of it, and bring enough originality to it so you haven't just written another dumb movie in which Tara Reid plays a scientist.

Might as well embrace that now, and figure out how to kick ass within those parameters.