Cinema Canada (Nov 1977)

SPOT LIGHT So I did that, then I went back to Toronto and did Coup d’Etat, and then came back here to do Tomorrow Never Comes. What’s involved in promoting a film? Well, first of all, you have to do the initial Press Release. I get them done in French too. With Tomorrow Never Comes, I’m learning a great deal because I’m not only just doing Canadian publicity. I mean, on Angela I also did American publicity too. I got Sophia Loren into Time mag. I also got Disappearance into Time mag, but they never followed up in England with a photograph. Which really pissed me off because Time mag was there... thinking, you know, that ’'m not doing my job very well. But what could I do? With Tomorrow, I’m having to do a great deal more writing, because I’m working through Michael Klinger’s PR guy in London, Fred Hift. Hift does publicity and he also contacts about 130 distributors around the world, so the information I send him goes out to all these people. There are photographs, production notes, column items, and I have to do, you know, little featurettes, and that’s hard work. Fred Hift handles international publicity, if you like, and I do Canada. If I set up something for John Osborne with the New York Times, there again, they have another guy in L.A., Chuck Moses. He’s giving me people to call up in terms of bringing some Americans up here next week to get more American coverage. John Osborne did an interview with the New York Times this week. So this is good experience for me because I’m broadening my experience outside of just immediately Canada. It’s important for the industry too, that I can have these contacts outside. I mean this is quite fun, because it’s international. I’m beginning to realize the importance of international promotion of the film. It goes hand in hand with international marketing which is something I don’t think Canadians have really thought seriously about until recently. It would seem that, although you deal with the press, who in turn writes for the public, the thrust of your work is aimed at marketing the film, aimed at the distributors and the world sales. The movie-going public seems to come second. 10/Cinema Canada I think the Canadians are beginning to realize the value of publicity during a shoot. On the other hand, I don’t know how valuable that is when the film comes out. Do people remember that Susan George gave an interview in the Gazette? I think publicity during the shoot is valid for a number of reasons; one, packaging the information which will go to the eventual distributor. Two, egos. Three, it’s very important for the investors to see articles in the newspaper because they want to see something and say, “Hey, that’s my movie, you know?” Obviously, it’s good for the stars to have their faces in the public eye as often as possible. Now, whether or not, as I say, that particular article will bring people to the cinema, I have no idea. photo: Lois Siegel I mention it only because we hear more and more often that films have completely recouped before they have been released; I’m thinking of Angela for example. You think the producers are making films for the distributors... I can’t see any harm in that. I think it’s good business, and it’s a big time business now. Investors will reinvest in the next picture if they understand that their money is going to be recouped so rapidly. If the distributor likes the idea of the film, he obviously has to judge the market; therefore, the audience has to be taken into consideration. Then again, the distributors use my information when they prepare their own advertising and publicity. So there is a follow-through once the film gets into release. Are you concerned about the quality of the films you work on? .P. That’s a good question. I will be quite honest; we need work, so if it’s an exploitation film, it doesn’t matter to me because I'll just do my job as professionally as I can. I’m hired for that purpose. Of course, it would be wonderful to be involved in what they term an “artistic film’’, but artistic films seem to have a problem in distribution, I don’t think we've really done anything that could be labelled as such. We haven’t done any Antonioni-kind of stuff here but it doesn’t matter, because it’s as important that we’re getting the experience. I think that the films I have been fortunate enough to work on have been pretty good feature films, good commercial feature films. We’ve always seemed to have good casts — I mean, you can’t get much better than Sophia Loren and John Huston and John Vernon and Steve Railsback. I got to know John Huston very well; in fact, he was going to direct a film in Toronto this summer, and he wanted me to do the publicity. I was very, very flattered, of course. It fell through, but... the joys of working on a film are maybe making one or two friends. That makes it all worthwhile despite all the “angst” that accompany any kind of production because of the pressures. How do you handle it when you have to present people to the press who are difficult or just plain loathsome. Do you cover up for them? No. I don’t work like that. I work very straight. I don’t believe in superhype. I believe in straightforward facts. First of all, if you try and cover something up, they always find out, so what’s the point, right? I prefer to just give factual information. Now I know that some producers like to super-hype. But I don’t agree with it. You know, big adjectives, prestigeous blah blah blah. I really don’t go in for that. That guy is what that guy is like, and I don’t see how you can cover something like that up, really, because the journalists are intelligent people.