You’ve seen ’em in the tabloids; now pay $9.50 to see ’em on the big screen.
That may not be the world’s most enticing marketing campaign, but the makers of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” — or, more accurately, the people who stand to make money from “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” — hope it pays off.
After all, without the sexually charged star wattage and “did they or didn’t they?” speculation surrounding Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, 20th Century Fox would be barreling into the brutally competitive summer market with . . . what? An action comedy about married assassins hired to kill each other.
That’s not a high-concept, franchise-making, “Star Wars”-conquering blockbuster. That’s “Prizzi’s Honor Redux.”
So in this supposed era of the fallen star — when the only name that can reliably open a movie appears to be Adam Sandler — this summer may prove the testing ground on whether celebrities’ extracurricular romances can help sell movies, as well as whether those exploits ultimately affect the viewers’ appreciation of what’s onscreen.
You can argue, after all, that stars have lost their drawing power because they’re so overexposed in the media.
“You don’t want to pay for something you can get for free,” said Alan Nierob, publicist for such actors as Mel Gibson, Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr.
Nevertheless, Tom Cruise has been conducting a one-man marketing campaign for his upcoming Steven Spielberg extravaganza “War of the Worlds” by going publicly bonkers proclaiming his love for actress Katie Holmes — that is, when he’s not trumpeting Scientology and attacking Brooke Shields for taking postpartum depression drugs. His May 23 performance on “Oprah” — in which he bounced up and down like a monkey on a string declaring ,”I love her! I love her!” and “Yes!” in between rapturous grabs of his TV hostess — was so unhinged that his mental state has become a more popular topic of conversation than his new film.
In the aftermath, a majority of readers polled by People and Us Weekly have deemed the romance a publicity stunt for Cruise and Holmes, a star of the soon-to-be-released “Batman Begins.” Plus, the New York Times reported that Cruise’s promotional schedule for “War of the Worlds,” a Paramount/DreamWorks co-production, was being scaled back.
But Nancy Kirkpatrick, Paramount’s executive vice president for worldwide publicity, refuted that report, saying Cruise’s extensive worldwide campaign for the film had yet to begin. She also dismissed the notion that Cruise’s behavior had become an issue for the film.
“I think `War of the Worlds’ is bigger than any of this,” Kirkpatrick said.
Meanwhile, Pitt and Jolie have yet to appear together publicly or to admit that their much-speculated-upon affair even occurred. They and the movie just have been swept along in the frenzy of coverage following Pitt’s split from wife Jennifer Aniston.
No one from “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” would address this topic on the record, but the movie is said to be tracking well — meaning that potential viewers contacted by research groups are professing eagerness to see it. But when you make a movie, you want your audience to get wrapped up in the story and characters, not to be looking for clues as to whether the stars actually were getting it on.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, director Doug Liman said one of the movie’s producers wanted him to scale back the sex scene between Pitt and Jolie because, the producer said, “I don’t want to lose that little niche audience of people who are huge Jennifer Aniston fans who are going to hate Angelina Jolie if the sex scene is too sexy. People will see the sex scene and say, `Oh, that’s how Angie did it.'”
Change of direction
Liman said he won that battle, though truth be told, the sex scene is brief and certainly doesn’t push the the movie’s PG-13 rating. Either way, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” wouldn’t be the first movie whose content or marketing strategy was altered in reaction to the stars’ extracurricular activities.
Director Taylor Hackford axed a sex scene from his 2000 film “Proof of Life” in the wake of perceived public disapproval of stars Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan’s affair while she was still married to Dennis Quaid. The pair also didn’t promote the movie together, a factor that Hackford later blamed for killing the film; it grossed $32.6 million in North America, far less than the two Crowe films flanking it, “Gladiator” and “A Beautiful Mind.” (“Proof” was also less well reviewed.)
There was nothing illicit about Ben Affleck’s romance with Jennifer Lopez, but it was so in-your-face that by the time their film “Gigli” was released in 2003, the knives were out.
“That’s when you have a problem, when you become larger than life,” said Alan Nierob, publicist for such stars as Mel Gibson, Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. “It’s hard because you’ve got to be believable in a role you’re playing, so they’ve got to see the character in the movie, not the actor.”
Not helping matters was that the movie turned out to be a stink bomb. Unfortunately for filmmaker Kevin Smith, Affleck and Lopez also were the stars of his film “Jersey Girl,” which had been slated for release soon after “Gigli” but was bumped to the following spring to let the stench dissipate.
Lopez’s role as the Affleck character’s wife, who dies, also was cut back, and she was invisible in the marketing campaign. Smith maintains that the trimming of Lopez’s role wasn’t a post-“Gigli” reaction.
“Honestly, it was never `Bennifer’ as much as it was that the story was off-balance,” he wrote in an e-mail. “In the first cut (and one I showed recently at our Vulgarthon Film Fest in L.A.), Jen’s character didn’t die until the 35-minute mark — and that death was kind of where the flick really begins. I think if it’d been any other actress in that role, we still would’ve cut as much as we did. As for the marketing campaign … well, that’s a whole different story.”
“Jersey Girl” grossed $25.3 million domestically — no blockbuster but a lot better than the $6.1 million for “Gigli.”
Real-life couples acting together is far from a modern phenomenon, and the results aren’t always “Gigli”-like — though the 1986 Madonna/Sean Penn embarrassment “Shanghai Surprise” would qualify. Husband and wife Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, two of the early cinema’s biggest stars, co-starred for the only time in the 1929 Shakespeare adaptation “The Taming of the Shrew,” an failure faulted more for its execution than the pairing.
Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy acted together numerous times on stage and screen (“The Green Years,” TV’s “The Gin Game,” “Cocoon”) without their marital status ever being an issue. The same is true of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, whose series of well-received collaborations began with 1958’s “The Long Hot Summer” and continued through the just-aired HBO mini-series “Empire Falls.”
Humphrey Bogart was still married to Mayo Methot when he and the much younger Lauren Bacall sparked on the set of Howard Hawks’ 1944 wartime drama, “To Have and Have Not,” but audiences had no qualms about checking out their on-screen chemistry. The pairing was so successful that they made “The Big Sleep” with Hawks a year later.
The most notorious on-set romance occurred during the filming of the 1963 epic “Cleopatra,” as Elizabeth Taylor took up with co-star Richard Burton at the expense of husband Eddie Fisher. (Taylor previously had come between Fisher and then-wife Debbie Reynolds.) “Cleopatra” was a big-budget bomb, but Taylor and Burton, as husband and wife, received perhaps the greatest acclaim of their careers when cast as the hard-drinking, feuding couple of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966).
Here’s a lesson for our times: Sam Peckinpah’s 1972 adaptation of “The Getaway,” during which Ali MacGraw dumped husband/mogul Robert Evans for co-star Steve McQueen, was a hit, but Roger Donaldson’s 1994 remake, starring the then-married Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, was a bust.
Crossing a line
Baldwin and Basinger, who hooked up while making the dud 1991 comedy “The Marrying Man,” had no qualms about putting their passion on screen. “I felt uncomfortable during the sex scenes,” film critic/historian Leonard Maltin recalled. “I remember feeling like I was invading their privacy somehow.”
That sense of voyeurism also was palpable — and probably intentional — in Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999), which starred Cruise and then wife Nicole Kidman as a couple experiencing marital tension. That difficult film, like the previous two Cruise-Kidman collaborations (“Days of Thunder,” “Far and Away”), grossed far less than the typical $100 million Cruise blockbuster. Cameron Crowe’s “Vanilla Sky,” the 2001 movie that Cruise promoted while touting his new relationship with co-star Penelope Cruz, did manage to scratch $100 million domestically.
Woody Allen’s habit of casting his significant others in his movies (Louise Lasser, Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow) became an issue only in the messy fallout of his dumping of Farrow for her adoptive daughter Soon-Yi Previn. “Husbands and Wives,” the 1992 Allen-Farrow movie released in that scandal’s wake, was probably Allen’s most emotionally searing film, though its modest $10.6 million box office take was in the ballpark of his other films of the time.
Which model will “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” follow? That will depend on several factors.
“The loyalty to Jennifer Aniston — how many tickets does that cost you compared to the Brad-Angelina factor?” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of the box office tabulation company Exhibitor Relations Co. “I think the Brad-Angelina pull is stronger than the `stay away from it for Jen’ sentiment.”
Plus, Pitt and Jolie in a sexy action comedy will be received differently than, say, a grim drama or fluffy farce.
“I think the right coupling in the right movie will produce a successful movie,” said Kevin Goetz, managing director of the Los Angeles-based research organization OTX. “I think the wrong coupling in the wrong movie will produce the wrong results.”
Or as Nierob put it: “At the end of the day the public can smell a rat. If the movie’s good, people are going to go see it. If the movie’s not, they won’t.”
