Shhh! Oscar contenders get silent treatment

NEW YORK - If you think you’ve heard every Oscar trick in the book, try this one on: The newest way to promote a movie to voters might be not to promote it at all.

When Focus Features opens its awards-season contender “Atonement” in limited release next Friday, it will be the latest experiment in what might be called the anti-hype movement.

Director Joe Wright’s movie about forbidden love during World War II had a splashy debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Critics duly fawned and mainstream publications like Entertainment Weekly described the “great fanfare” of its premiere.

But after the festival, Universal Studios’ specialty division did the unexpected: It went quiet, or “hid the film” in the company’s parlance. Executives limited advance screenings, and publicists courted only select media.

“We said, ‘This movie is so powerful, we don’t want to hype it and let anyone else define it for us.’ We just wanted it to speak for itself,” Focus president James Schamus said.

Consider it playing against hype. The strategy isn’t the typical false humility of awards season but an effort to manage expectations, maximize dwindling marketing budgets and prevent Oscar chances from dying in the box office bloodbath that claims a new specialty-picture victim almost every week.

Trade ads, guild screenings and other trappings of awards season still are a fixture of campaigning, of course. But in the quantity and quality of promotion, these campaigns take a different tack. Media screenings are limited, trade and televisions ads start later, campaigns go less specific.

Buzz backfires
Ever since the season was shortened a month by the Oscars’ move to February a few years ago, the buzz has started earlier and grown louder. Toronto has become a kind of Super Tuesday where dreams are launched or crushed. May’s Cannes Film Festival is an Iowa caucus that paints an early portrait of a race. Even January’s Sundance, with its substantial awards fare on offer, has become like a presidential exploratory committee, testing Oscar waters eons before they can be understood.

All the hype means that it’s easy for the movies to peak too soon. The latest textbook case is “Dreamgirls.” Months ahead of Cannes and nine months before its release, DreamWorks touted footage from the Bill Condon musical. The half-hour shown at Cannes was the most-talked about reel on the Croisette in years.

David James / Dreamworks Actress Jennifer Hudson won the best supporting actress Oscar for "Dreamgirls" last year. The film received eight nominations, but was shut out in the best picture category after being considered a front-runner.

But besides Jennifer Hudson’s win for best supporting actress, the movie was shut out of the top Oscar categories.

“(The fate of) ‘Dreamgirls’ last year has sent a shiver and a shudder over how campaigns are done and changed the thinking of Academy strategists,” Miramax president Daniel Battsek said.

The idea of going easy on the hype in perhaps the most hype-filled competition in the Western hemisphere might seem not only counterintuitive but also laughable. And publicists, for reasons constitutional and professional, tend not to highlight a strategy that involves less publicity.

But those who are quietly practicing the silent treatment say that in a season when so little seems to work at the box office, and after a few years of upside-down Oscar races, a contrary impulse might be the best impulse.

In addition to Fox Searchlight’s one-two punch of Tamara Jenkins’ “The Savages” (opening Nov. 30) and the December 5 release “Juno” (the Diablo Cody-Jason Reitman collaboration initially wasn’t even slated for 2007 but now is quietly being prepped for an Oscar push), other candidates include Denzel Washington’s “The Great Debaters” and the Iraq War-themed John Cusack movie “Grace Is Gone” from the Weinstein Co., Paramount Vantage’s Paul Thomas Anderson period epic “There Will Be Blood,” DreamWorks’ Tim Burton musical “Sweeney Todd” and Focus’ “Atonement.”

Battle preparations
Just the below the radar, though, the campaigns all are putting their artillery in place. With deadlines for critics’ groups and Golden Globe voting fast approaching, such movies as ”Charlie Wilson’s War” and “Sweeney Todd,” still wet from the lab, began press screenings this week. While playing it low-key, other films like “Blood” already have held the strategic filmmaker Q&A with awards voters.

By Dec. 13, when the Globes nominations are announced, the recipients are sure to bask in the attention, and by year’s end, even the most reticent contenders will be engaged in the battle.

The anti-hype movement isn’t just reserved for December pictures, either. Earlier releases, having exhausted their 15 minutes, can paradoxically come back reborn if they peaked prematurely. Paul Haggis’ Iraq-themed “In the Valley of Elah,” a September release that quickly began losing theaters in October, is said by sources to be prepping for a comeback, as Warner Bros. hopes the late onslaught can work “Crash”-type magic.

One movie that fit the model last year: “Little Miss Sunshine.” Fox Searchlight had six months — including three with DVDs out — to promote the August release before the Oscars. But the studio went quiet for months, and when it did roll out the campaign it used understated, even abstract ads featuring the movie’s VW bus and little of the usual woo about specific award pitches. It scored four Oscar nominations, and won for supporting actor and original screenplay.

“It was very simple. We wanted to remind people what they felt when they saw the movie instead of telling them how to feel,” Searchlight publicity chief Michelle Hooper said.

That’s a key tenet of the anti-hype movement. Academy members are more likely to vote for a movie, it states, if they have to do a certain amount of work to find it. The theory says that not only are these voters indifferent to come-ons — “Every studio gets suckered in to spend big on events and consumer ads, and they don’t make a bit of difference,” is how one veteran awards specialist puts it — they actually prefer not to be sold a movie.

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