Marketing to Moviegoers

Introduction

 

You can fool all of the people all of the time—if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough.

Joseph E. Levine

Hollywood still lives by those words, uttered decades ago, which play off a famous Abraham Lincoln quote. Joseph E. Levine, who passed away in 1987, was the film impresario whose eclectic credits range from the Oscar-winning period drama The Lion in Winter to Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Levine pioneered the coupling of heavy spending on-spot television advertising with saturation theater bookings in a city to make box office hits out of unlikely films such as Hercules, an Italian import released in 1959.

The major studios today are not above likewise stooping to “buy” an audience for a film release. ...