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Beware The Hype, Not the Witch
The movie industry is in shock over the "Blair Witch Project," which is clobbering wannabe blockbusters like "Deep Blue Sea" and "The Haunting."
BWP looks to be one of the most profitable movies in modern times. It cost about $30,000 to make and is expected to earn as much as $140 million.
That kind of profit margin, unprecedented in modern filmmaking, sure gets the attention of the people who run the entertainment industry. And it's also send the media into digital over-Hype once again. The "Blair Witch Project" is a lot of fun. And it's truly original. But it's not a great movie, nor even a particularly frightening one.
It does, however, seem to be the most important story in the world this week. The press is reminding us again that if you can't be first, you might as well try to look hip.
Perhaps to cover their own behinds, chastened Hollywood producers are blaming the success of BWP on the movie's crafty Net and website campaigns. The simple truth may be a lot tougher for them, and for all those overheated reporters to face - this is a more original, contemporary and kid-savvy movie than Hollywood is capable of making.
The embodiment of anti-hype, BWP is now the personification of it, analyzed on evening newscasts, on magazine covers, and pondered by newspapers all over the country. And very quickly, of course, to be mimicked at a movie theater near you.
This film is, in fact, being hailed by its distributors as a cultural landmark, a new kind of Net phenomenon, as if the world could withstand any more.
"There was a young Internet audience out there that hasn't been tapped," says Bill Block, a happy partner at Artisan Entertainment, which distributed the movie. "This movie converges with that audience. They've embraced it. All the kids have seen it on the Internet. In some ways it's the first Internet movie."
There is, in fact, some evidence that the BWP reveals a generational divide. It's drawing hordes of people age 18 to 30, the Net-savviest demographic group in the country. People over 35 are not seeing it in great numbers, nor liking it much when they do.
But is this really an "Internet movie?" Or is it simply a good movie for kids whose real implications are too complex and unpleasant for the disconnected, decidedly non-interactive giant companies that run media, movie and other information and entertainment industries?
The movies website, www.blairwitch.com, has from the first abandoned the traditional line between reality and fiction by displaying updated police reports and video interviews that make the movie and the story on which its based seem true. Discerning readers and viewers will quickly get that this is fiction, but some kids buy -- or perhaps pretend to buy -- the idea that the "Blair Witch Project" is literal and real.
Although it's not clear how many people believe the movie to be a literal documentary, there are still arguments all over the Web, especially on hundreds of mailing lists on ICQ and Hotline (or just type Blair Witch into your search engine) about whether the movie is true.
This is the perfect kind of hype for a movie like BWP. It offers raging controversy and debate over an issue of no real consequence whatever.
In a different way, the temporal furor is reminiscent of the (calculated) scare the late film genius Orson Welles gave the country decades ago when he broadcast "War Of The Worlds" - panic inducing radio reports of a Martian invasion in New Jersey.
Given the ubiquity of modern media, and the communicative nature of the Net and the Web, the fact that the story is fictional will get around soon enough, although there will be pockets of fanatics who don't want to believe it, and the inevitable media reports about how dangerous the Net is to the impressionable young, blah-blah, and how much it needs truth-tellers like the ones in media.
There's no doubt this move marked highly savvy use of the Web. The Blair Witch website logged more than 20 million hits even before the movie came out. Now Block says the number of visits is closer to 80 million.
But the mega hype surrounding a movie that was strikingly minimalist, non-traditional, and non-corporate suggests some grounds for caution, especially about the world's "first Internet movie." As of this writing, there is no such thing as an "Internet" movie, only one that can be touted there. If the "Blair Witch Project" isn't a great movie, it might very well be an influential one. For more than a decade, the indie film movement has been building seadily, nibbling at the edges of the gargantuan studio system. If the BWP results in the making of more innovative films by idiosyncratic filmmakers, then the Net will have, however indirectly, added something else to the culture of the world.
BWP is, in many ways, the perfect teenage/Web movie. It's unnerving without being frightening. It has lots of suspense and little horror. Its young actors were tossed into the woods with no script, clear direction, and dwindling amounts of food. So they were highly credible.
Because it's so fast-moving, grainy and herky-jerky, there are many discussions and disagreements about details of the pictures and the story, including the murky ending. Thus it lends itself to being debated, discussed, seen and re-seen. You can't go see it and not talk about it, or disagree with somebody about what you saw.
The movie was also tailor made for younger kids because it came out of leftfield. The grownups didn't make it, the kids did. Making a $30,000 movie with unknown directors and actors, with no script, special effects or studio support is almost a rebellious act in itself, something anybody under 30 can relate to. This movie is, in fact, a victory for individuality over the corporatism that has captured Hollywood along with publishing and journalism.
By presenting the story line as real, the aura around the movie became more eerie, generated more controversy.
By initially avoiding traditional Hollywood hype - bombardment print and screen campaigns quoting critics, showing trailers, offering marketing tie-ins with fast food chains - the campaign for the movie was refreshing and original.
But the campaign for BWP was tailor-made for this particular movie. For all the hype, the very same campaign wouldn't help woofers like "Deep Blue Sea" or "The Haunting." It doesn't necessarily have universal implications for other films, or speak to the evolution of a new kind of Internet entity.
In conventional media and business, where the Net is continuously either hyped to the skies or demonized beyond all reason, there's a tendency to assume that because a particular project works once online, computer networks are going to revolutionize a subculture or industry overnight.
In this case, the film's distributors noticed the Web-site was drawing crowds, and that kids were loving the idea of the movie, and pumped nearly $20 million into a conventional - and definitely non-digital - advertising campaign. That was quick, but hardly revolutionary, thinking.
By using technology so skillfully --- digital, hand-held cameras, Global (satellite) Positioning Systems that guided the actors through the woods - the makers of the movie also gave it a techno-savvy and jarringly realistic quality.
The actors were believable. They could be the kids next door, or at the next desk. This is a level of reality no longer available to the gazillion-dollar Hollywood offerings which, while they vary wildly in quality, are loud, overpowering and frequently over-written, animated and produced. In lots of ways, the BWP is a rejection of everything about Hollywood, especially the way it makes and hypes movies.
The odd thing is that no Hollywood studio could make a movie like this any more, not matter how jazzy a website they came up with. The studio system - now totally dominated by enormous conglomerates in desperate need of "Titanic" style profits - makes it virtually impossible for a movie like that to come from within. Nor do they necessarily want to make those kinds of movies.
If movies can really be made by unheard of kid directors for tens of thousands of dollars, what does that mean for the hordes of high-priced actors, directors, studio VP's, techs, publicists, marketers, designers and animators involved in the production of even the lowest-budget Hollywood movie?
Small wonder the people in LA are running around claiming that the BWP is an Internet movie: the alternative is unthinkable.
If the Net has had any great impact here, it's typically via connectivity: letting kids find a movie they will love, and vice versa.
The originality of the BWP will be lost soon enough. According to reporters, more "lost" film from the three main actors, Heather Donahue, Michael Williams and Joshua Leonard will be found for the sequel.
You can bank on this: BWP II won't do as well or be as good.
As producers and journalists scramble to figure out why this movie did so well, they'll almost surely skip the most obvious answer: it deserved to.
Big studio competitors like "The Haunting" haven't stumbled because of their traditional Web marketing campaigns. They are doing poorly because they suck.
You can take this to the bank, too: "Bowfinger," a hilarious spoof of Hollywood movie-making will do just fine, even without a razzle-dazzle Net campaign.
The best way to grasp the success of the BWP is to go to a movie theater and watch the audience watching it. Any movie that can glue 200 teens to their chairs for more than an hour without hardly any of them making a sound understand its audience.
The secret to making an "Internet" movie isn't only marketing it on a Website, it's grasping as well that the cultural sensibility of the Net generation is truly different. If the BWP project was an Internet movie at all, it's because it was creative, surprising, relevant, interactive.
The real question isn't how Hollywood can use the Net to pump its movies; it's whether Hollywood is capable of making movies that people who grew up on the Net and Web will want to see.
Mr. Katz,
Are you forgetting that you yourself were touting this movie as a revolution in filmmaking only a week or so ago? Why do you fuel the hype then feel it necessary to criticize major publications for publishing what (in theme) is very similar to your original article about the movie? Sure, I think the media is putting too much emphasis and importance on this movie (which I didn't find particularly revolutionary, ingenious, or frightening) but I'd rather read about the success of the Blair Witch Project rather than most of the other trash that magazines publish!
~GoRK
I haven't seen it and don't want to - I hate scary movies. Give me a funny one any day of the week.
... volenteers should be easy to find ... only problem is the cost of film. And the script.
What I admire about the production is that they took their disadvantages and made them into advantages. Have a cameraperson who can't shoot? No problem - fold bad shooting into the plot. Have only 16mm and cheesy video equipment? Fine, make sure the plot requires it. Fantastic idea. Wish I'd thought of it.
However, I don't see this as being an easily duplicatable success, since it's really a one-idea movie. Copies of it are just that, cheap copies of a cheap concept. I'd only make a $30,000 movie (and yes, I could if I wanted to) if I had a unique concept. Too many clones of this will appear, and they'll all fail.
Thinking about this, I wonder how a parody of this would do? Seems like you could do almost the same thing, play it totally for laughs, and have a watchable movie that could still be made for next to nothing.
Arriflex 16mm cameras are for sale cheap on eBay
With all the competition about to bleed out of the woodworkd, it had better be good. Bear that in mind if you want to do one of your own.
D
PS This might not be news for nerds, but I think it is stuff that matters. I appreciate Jon' coverage of this issue. Just wanted to say that due to the large number of people slamming him about this story.
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All in all, a pretty week showing by Mr. Katz. Nothing even close to his masterpiece of:
pooptruck