Shhh! Oscar contenders get silent treatment

By Steven Zeitchik

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - 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.

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," said a top executive at a specialty division.

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 November 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."