Marketing the Myst Movie
Back in the early 1990's, some of us played a computer game called "Myst", which was a really more of a series of puzzles tied together around an imaginary world and a loose narrative. Either you played it because you loved games like that, or you were like me, and played it merely because you hadn't discovered the World Wide Web yet. (Actually, the game wasn't that bad; in an era of games like Halo, it's easy to knock, but I liked it quite a bit.)
There is now a small group of people who are making an effort to get the Myst computer game, as well as the series of paperback novels that followed it, made into a movie. You can track the progress of what's happening at the Myst Movie website. They have a blog, and they update it pretty frequently with pre-pre-production notes, which, for this kind of project, basically involves the blog contributors writing about their late-night coffee-fueled brainstorming sessions.
That's not the amazing part. The amazing part is, people are reading. They're listening. They're commenting. For the Myst Movie crew, that's great news.
Consider a different scenario. Let's say you have a piece of crap movie and it stars Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. For the purposes of this hypothetical example, let's call it The Proposal. The success of the film will be based on how many people go see it, so the challenge you face, as a person hired to promote it, is to create a buzz about the film. The traditional method of doing this is to create a handful of trailers and then put them all over the place.
Hope the trailers stick in a few people's heads, they talk about it to their friends, drag their boyfriends to see the film, etc, etc, and hopefully you make back what you put into it so you can make another one.
The people working to create the Myst Movie are facing a slightly different challenge. Recently, they ventured out to Hollywood to ask for funding from a production company. My entire sales pitch to Hollywood executives would have been: "Take a look at the website for the movie. People are reading and commenting on stories of us driving around Los Angeles looking for a Starbucks! They love it! They want to see it!"
The buzz is already there; demonstrate that, and, if I were a Hollywood executive, you would have my attention. Whether I said yes or no would depend on how you answered the following question: "How are you going to leverage this small group of enthusiastic fans to generate interest amongst more mainstream fans?"
There's a small niche of enthusiastic fans who are scattered around the country (maybe around the world) and they're all coming together on this site to rally their support for the idea. That's a huge, huge asset to the production team. However, if all of these scattered pockets of fans never get the idea out to everyone else, it's at best a wasted opportunity. So, how do you make sure they tell everyone else?
That's not an easy question to answer. Although I'm drastically inexperienced in such matters, here are a few suggestions to answer the above question:
1. Successful products have the marketing built in. The writers of the movie actually have the most difficult job. They can't write something so obscure and "artsy" without any material that's designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. You have to have universal appeal in there so that if a Myst fanatic takes a friend to see it, the friend will also find merit in the storyline and tell other people about it. But if you make it too lowest common denominator, then the fans will be pissed and no one will end up liking it. This is why so many movies suck; one-by-one, each person involved in the project removes every last rough edge in the hopes that it will appeal to everyone. It's a tough balance to strike, and even harder to bring out in the writing. When in doubt, err on the side of fans.
2. Give these "early adopters" the tools they need, both on and offline, to spread the word about it to their friends. Some of them are nerds who are in love with the Myst franchise and will talk, unabashedly, about it to anyone they meet. Several others will be more timid and might keep quiet out of fear of sounding like a nerd. The trick is to make the frightened ones not feel as nerdy talking about the movie. The inevitable T-shirt design must be more than just the cover of the box the game was sold in with "Myst Movie" on the back. It has to be interesting and eye-catching, and still identify itself.
3. Make trailers and put them everywhere. (obvious, I know, but it still has to be done.)
4. Sooner or later, the content of the blog has to shift from production notes to something more engaging. Now, I might be dead wrong about this one. Perhaps Myst fans would love following the "On the Set" blog because they feel like something is happening. It makes them feel close to it. I still think there's a better use than what's there now, but I can't say for certain what that would be, although I have one idea, which I detail in my last suggestion:
5. Myst fans liked solving puzzles. Give them a puzzle to solve surrounding the release of the movie. (This is the part of the marketing I'd love to be in on.) This is the most fun step, and, if they do it right, the creators of the movie will have a runaway success on their hands. The key is to make it a puzzle that everyone is interested in solving, not just Myst fans. Hide clues somewhere (on a single website, or, even better, scattered all over the Internet in plain sight), and have them all point to a single solution, a big reveal, that points to the movie. Where they hide the clues, what the clues are, and to what they are pointing really isn't terribly important, so long as they incentivize everyone to participate. (That last step is the hard part.) Make it fun. Make it a game worth talking about. Offer a prize to the people who figure it out, like the aforementioned T-shirt, so they can walk around promoting your movie for you. Heck, give them five, so they'll hand them out to friends. Is it a gimmick? Sure it is.
I understand that artists resist marketing because it seems like cheating and, if you succeed, you're never really sure how much of your success can be attributed to the merits of your art versus the marketing hype that went into it. On the surface that makes sense, but artists have to realize that if you create something truly great and it doesn't achieve the recognition you had strived more, that doesn't mean you've failed.
Without any marketing, a lot of really great, brilliant ideas would probably be unknown to us now. Van Gogh committed suicide. Would we know him today if he had lived out his life to the end and started selling his paintings in his old age? Suicide is far from being a gimmick, but it helped his story to spread.
Of course, there's a lot more to it than this, but that's a start. Talk is always cheap, while execution remains the most scarce, and therefore valuable, natural human resource. And I'm certainly not encouraging the Myst team "sell out" and start doing anything that compromises their vision. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, and it's intended to be a small, low-budget film with a small, cult following. (But I get a sense they want to make the next Lord of the Rings.)
As a means of full disclosure, I'm old high school/college friends with one of the writers that's currently working on the project, but I haven't talked to him in a long time. (He's the guy from whom I stole the name "godlikeguy" for this site.) I was really just interested in exploring the marketing that would go into creating a movie based on some existing concept with dedicated fans.
I do hope that the Myst team creates something grand, and that they achieve what they set out to do. Hopefully the Hollywood executives are listening intently, because there's a big opportunity there. And as a final piece of advice: if the Los Angeles fatcats ask you to bring them a blue page, turn around and run.
There is now a small group of people who are making an effort to get the Myst computer game, as well as the series of paperback novels that followed it, made into a movie. You can track the progress of what's happening at the Myst Movie website. They have a blog, and they update it pretty frequently with pre-pre-production notes, which, for this kind of project, basically involves the blog contributors writing about their late-night coffee-fueled brainstorming sessions.
That's not the amazing part. The amazing part is, people are reading. They're listening. They're commenting. For the Myst Movie crew, that's great news.
Consider a different scenario. Let's say you have a piece of crap movie and it stars Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. For the purposes of this hypothetical example, let's call it The Proposal. The success of the film will be based on how many people go see it, so the challenge you face, as a person hired to promote it, is to create a buzz about the film. The traditional method of doing this is to create a handful of trailers and then put them all over the place.
Hope the trailers stick in a few people's heads, they talk about it to their friends, drag their boyfriends to see the film, etc, etc, and hopefully you make back what you put into it so you can make another one.
The people working to create the Myst Movie are facing a slightly different challenge. Recently, they ventured out to Hollywood to ask for funding from a production company. My entire sales pitch to Hollywood executives would have been: "Take a look at the website for the movie. People are reading and commenting on stories of us driving around Los Angeles looking for a Starbucks! They love it! They want to see it!"
The buzz is already there; demonstrate that, and, if I were a Hollywood executive, you would have my attention. Whether I said yes or no would depend on how you answered the following question: "How are you going to leverage this small group of enthusiastic fans to generate interest amongst more mainstream fans?"
There's a small niche of enthusiastic fans who are scattered around the country (maybe around the world) and they're all coming together on this site to rally their support for the idea. That's a huge, huge asset to the production team. However, if all of these scattered pockets of fans never get the idea out to everyone else, it's at best a wasted opportunity. So, how do you make sure they tell everyone else?
That's not an easy question to answer. Although I'm drastically inexperienced in such matters, here are a few suggestions to answer the above question:
1. Successful products have the marketing built in. The writers of the movie actually have the most difficult job. They can't write something so obscure and "artsy" without any material that's designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. You have to have universal appeal in there so that if a Myst fanatic takes a friend to see it, the friend will also find merit in the storyline and tell other people about it. But if you make it too lowest common denominator, then the fans will be pissed and no one will end up liking it. This is why so many movies suck; one-by-one, each person involved in the project removes every last rough edge in the hopes that it will appeal to everyone. It's a tough balance to strike, and even harder to bring out in the writing. When in doubt, err on the side of fans.
2. Give these "early adopters" the tools they need, both on and offline, to spread the word about it to their friends. Some of them are nerds who are in love with the Myst franchise and will talk, unabashedly, about it to anyone they meet. Several others will be more timid and might keep quiet out of fear of sounding like a nerd. The trick is to make the frightened ones not feel as nerdy talking about the movie. The inevitable T-shirt design must be more than just the cover of the box the game was sold in with "Myst Movie" on the back. It has to be interesting and eye-catching, and still identify itself.
3. Make trailers and put them everywhere. (obvious, I know, but it still has to be done.)
4. Sooner or later, the content of the blog has to shift from production notes to something more engaging. Now, I might be dead wrong about this one. Perhaps Myst fans would love following the "On the Set" blog because they feel like something is happening. It makes them feel close to it. I still think there's a better use than what's there now, but I can't say for certain what that would be, although I have one idea, which I detail in my last suggestion:
5. Myst fans liked solving puzzles. Give them a puzzle to solve surrounding the release of the movie. (This is the part of the marketing I'd love to be in on.) This is the most fun step, and, if they do it right, the creators of the movie will have a runaway success on their hands. The key is to make it a puzzle that everyone is interested in solving, not just Myst fans. Hide clues somewhere (on a single website, or, even better, scattered all over the Internet in plain sight), and have them all point to a single solution, a big reveal, that points to the movie. Where they hide the clues, what the clues are, and to what they are pointing really isn't terribly important, so long as they incentivize everyone to participate. (That last step is the hard part.) Make it fun. Make it a game worth talking about. Offer a prize to the people who figure it out, like the aforementioned T-shirt, so they can walk around promoting your movie for you. Heck, give them five, so they'll hand them out to friends. Is it a gimmick? Sure it is.
I understand that artists resist marketing because it seems like cheating and, if you succeed, you're never really sure how much of your success can be attributed to the merits of your art versus the marketing hype that went into it. On the surface that makes sense, but artists have to realize that if you create something truly great and it doesn't achieve the recognition you had strived more, that doesn't mean you've failed.
Without any marketing, a lot of really great, brilliant ideas would probably be unknown to us now. Van Gogh committed suicide. Would we know him today if he had lived out his life to the end and started selling his paintings in his old age? Suicide is far from being a gimmick, but it helped his story to spread.
Of course, there's a lot more to it than this, but that's a start. Talk is always cheap, while execution remains the most scarce, and therefore valuable, natural human resource. And I'm certainly not encouraging the Myst team "sell out" and start doing anything that compromises their vision. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, and it's intended to be a small, low-budget film with a small, cult following. (But I get a sense they want to make the next Lord of the Rings.)
As a means of full disclosure, I'm old high school/college friends with one of the writers that's currently working on the project, but I haven't talked to him in a long time. (He's the guy from whom I stole the name "godlikeguy" for this site.) I was really just interested in exploring the marketing that would go into creating a movie based on some existing concept with dedicated fans.
I do hope that the Myst team creates something grand, and that they achieve what they set out to do. Hopefully the Hollywood executives are listening intently, because there's a big opportunity there. And as a final piece of advice: if the Los Angeles fatcats ask you to bring them a blue page, turn around and run.