Site Presented By
Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Glowing reviews and fan sites raise suspicions that Hollywood is planting ready-made buzz on the Net.
Jul 16, 1999 | One of the hottest topics on the Net this summer is "The Blair Witch Project," a low-budget horror film that's generated more buzz than the chainsaw used in that Texas massacre. Before it even opened, the indie had inspired over 20 fan sites, a mailing list, a Web ring, a Usenet group -- and more than its fair share of glowing reports on the influential movie site Ain't It Cool News. But was all the excitement genuine?
"Internet marketing," notes Gordon Paddison, director of interactive marketing at New Line Cinema, "is the most inexpensive and efficient mode of marketing around. And it's available to those with limited resources. Online is all about word of mouth."
"'The Blair Witch Project' filmmakers are using their friends to generate their fan sites," says another industry executive point-blank. "That was an organized effort. What happened is that they tricked the press."
Filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez declined to be interviewed for this story. But whether or not people involved with "The Blair Witch Project" have been seeding the Net with faux-amateurish fan sites or writing pseudonymous reviews of the movie, such practices seem to be increasingly popular in Hollywood. Many believe that deceptive cyberspace marketing is the movie industry's latest secret weapon in the campaign to take that opening weekend by storm.
A fan site for American Pie boasts an electronic counter labeled "Days UNIVERSAL Hasn't Shut Us Down" as well as a disclaimer that "I scammed some stuff of this movie off friends that work for a movie company in CA and posted some clips up on the net." OK. But wouldn't those purchase order numbers -- clearly visible on the purloined files -- give Universal a good idea of which employee had leaked it? And would a fan really create a scrolling credits area, playing up the film's writer, director and producers -- and pausing to add "In theaters July 9th"?
"You never quite know who the hand is -- the filmmaker, the studio. But I don't have any doubt that ["American Pie"] site was put up by somebody from Universal," says David Poland. Poland's insider column for TNT's Rough Cut, The Hot Button, frequently serves as a reality check for the Hollywood hype machine. "Can I substantiate that? No. And in fairness, when I asked, Universal denied any involvement."
