Trailer Geeks and Teaser Gods

Jim Fredrick sits down with his former boss Dawn Taubin, President of Marketing at Warner Bros. Pictures during one of the studio's strongest runs. They talk about handling filmmakers, protecting the world of Harry Potter, and the movies nobody thought they could open. Takeaways Everybody has two jobs. Every filmmaker thinks they know how to market their movie. For Dawn, the hard part was sticking to the strategy while still making everyone feel heard. Money doesn't fix a bad movie. Production often wanted marketing to spend its way out of trouble. Dawn was graded on managing a billion-dollar budget as well as managing the filmmakers. No Happy Meals. To stay true to J.K. Rowling's world, Warner turned down a McDonald's tie-in on Harry Potter and the hundreds of millions in promotion that came with it. The movies nobody thought could open. The Matrix, Million Dollar Baby, and 300 are the wins Dawn is proudest of, more than the tentpoles everyone expected to work. Never say "that's not my job." Her advice to new grads in a tough market: whatever they ask you to do, do more of it than anyone else. Pull Quotes "You would never see Harry, Ron, and Hermione at McDonald's." – Dawn Taubin "They want you to bail them out of them making a bad movie." – Dawn Taubin "Sometimes the biggest successes are the movies that people don't think you're gonna open." – Dawn Taubin "The smartest, savviest person I've ever met in the business is you, Dawn." – Jim Fredrick Sponsors The Golden Trailer Awards (goldentrailer.com) Atlas Talent Agency (atlastalent.com) Opening Weekend now has its own feed. Follow the series on Apple Podcasts and Spotify: Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/opening-weekend-selling-hollywood-with-jim-fredrick/id6806323200 Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/39EWkVdYbK7P4kNDWLzH0E

Some movies are loved by the people who make them and by the people who sell them, and they're still tough to open. Jim Fredrick, who ran the marketing on The Iron Giant at Warner Bros., sits down with producer Allison Abbate to talk about how the film was made, why it opened to just $5.7 million, and how it became one of the most beloved animated films ever. Takeaways Half the money, halfway through. The film started with an $80 million budget. After Quest for Camelot flopped, the studio cut it to $40 million, and by then a big chunk of the original money had already been spent. A poster drawn by the filmmakers. Brad Bird and his animators made the key art themselves, which is almost unheard of. The only real argument at the studio was how small to draw Hogarth. Lay the track early. Allison believes the film needed a teaser and buzz a year ahead of release. An August date against Tarzan didn't give audiences time to find it. Don't be a feathered fish. Jim shares Alan Horn's advice on picking one message, and explains why the film's heart was the hardest thing to get into the trailer. The long road to classic. The film swept the Annies and won a BAFTA, a year before animation even had an Oscar category. Pull Quotes "I always say I got more hugs from Iron Giant than box office dollars." – Allison Abbate "If the studio doesn't treat it like it's a jewel in the crown, the people are not gonna think that it is." – Allison Abbate "I sometimes worry that that poster hurt us because it didn't look like a movie poster." – Allison Abbate "Iron Giant is my animated version of Shawshank Redemption." – Jim Fredrick Sponsors This episode is brought to you by the Golden Trailer Awards (goldentrailer.com) and Atlas Talent Agency (atlastalent.com). Follow Opening Weekend: Selling Hollywood with Jim Fredrick on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Gerry Rich started planning his escape to Hollywood from a basement desk in the Midwest at age ten, and he went on to run marketing at Miramax, MGM, Paramount and Amazon MGM Studios. Now he's written it all down in Chasing Hollywood: A Marketing Chief's Lessons on Breaking Through, and he joins Corey to talk about the letters, the screamers, the twist nobody gave away, and why culture beats contracts. In this episode: Letters, not asks. As a college student, Gerry wrote to the studio marketing chiefs he admired and asked only for their time and insight. Decades later, one of them framed his letter and gave it back to him. The movie everybody's talking about. Miramax had no money for paid media, so The Crying Game broke out on earned media alone.  Volume vs. knowledge. With the town's famous screamers, the only defense was to be on top of everything: show you care, bring the facts, have a game plan. Alchemy. Rebuilding a bankrupt MGM with GoldenEye, Get Shorty and Leaving Las Vegas taught him that no two marketing plans should look alike, and that the right team is worth protecting. A few lines that landed: "If you get the right group of people together and do magic together, the worst thing you could do is come in and haphazardly shake them all up like dice." (Gerry Rich) "You don't try to respond to volume with volume." (Gerry Rich) "Nobody is gonna figure it out for you." (Gerry Rich) "As much as you're seeking out bigger opportunities, better opportunities, also seek out your people." (Gerry Rich) Chasing Hollywood is out October 13 from HarperCollins Leadership, in hardcover, ebook and audiobook. www.harpercollinsleadership.com/books/chasing-hollywood Brought to you by the Golden Trailer Awards and Atlas Talent Agency. goldentrailer.com atlastalent.com

Opening Weekend: Selling Hollywood with Jim Fredrick continues on the TG&TG feed. This week Jim sits down with longtime friend and colleague Bryan Allen, the poster designer and former Paramount creative executive behind The Truman Show mosaic one-sheet. From cutting type by hand in the '80s to the thumb-stopping digital age, Bryan breaks down how a single still image helps a movie find its audience. Takeaways: The 30-mile-an-hour read. Tony Seiniger's rule that a poster has to land at a glance, from the billboard era to the scroll. Fonts have feelings. How a typeface, and even its weight, sends an emotional message before you read a single word. Symbol or soup can. The two essential approaches to a one-sheet, and why three heads in the sky is sometimes the responsible call. Every frame of the film. How a 1986 joke about the Wall Street poster became The Truman Show mosaic. Make the posters. Bryan's advice for young designers trying to break into the business. Just remember: "It helps the audience find the movie. It helps the movie find the audience." — Bryan Allen Our sponsors: The Golden Trailer Awards (goldentrailer.com) Atlas Talent Agency (atlastalent.com) Opening Weekend now has its own feed. Follow the series on Apple Podcasts and Spotify: Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/opening-weekend-selling-hollywood-with-jim-fredrick/id6806323200 Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/39EWkVdYbK7P4kNDWLzH0E

Opening Weekend: Selling Hollywood with Jim Fredrick continues on the TG&TG feed. This week Jim rides solo, revisiting the campaign he calls "the assignment of a lifetime": Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. As senior vice president of creative advertising at Warner Brothers, he traces the campaign from an illustrated owl poster with no actors in sight to a $90 million opening weekend that turned one film into a franchise. Takeaways: The call upstairs. A 1999 meeting with his boss turns into the assignment of a lifetime. Freezing in Leavesden. A week cutting a promo reel on location, scored to the Home Alone soundtrack, and the door that opened onto a world of pure movie magic. The slow reveal. Why the campaign opened with an owl and a letter, then opened the envelope a little further with each poster. Sitting on the fence. Balancing filmmakers on one side and studio bosses on the other, and why that tension is the whole job. One agency, one shot. Why Jim hired only The Ant Farm, and what Drew Struzan's final poster meant for the campaign. Just remember: "There is no franchise unless the first film is a hit." — Jim Fredrick Our sponsor: The Golden Trailer Awards (goldentrailer.com) Opening Weekend now has its own feed. Follow the series on Apple Podcasts and Spotify: Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/opening-weekend-selling-hollywood-with-jim-fredrick/id6806323200 Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/39EWkVdYbK7P4kNDWLzH0E

Opening Weekend: Selling Hollywood with Jim Fredrick continues on the TG&TG feed. Barbara Glazer was one of our very first guests on this podcast, back in 2019. She's also one of the industry's true glass-ceiling breakers: co-founder of The Ant Farm, and the creative leader behind campaigns for Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Kill Bill among hundreds of others. She sits down with Jim Fredrick to trace a career that started by accident on a Moviola upright and ended up reshaping who gets to run a trailer house. Takeaways: A trailer she never meant to cut. Barbara started in documentaries. A client short on cash brought in a trailer for The Dead Zone as payment in 1982, and she ended up cutting it herself. She broke the glass ceiling without setting out to. She built a partnership at Silver/Glazer, then left after fifteen years to co-found The Ant Farm in 1997, one of the only women running a shop like it at the time. Culture was the whole strategy. She wanted to train and nurture people in a business that didn't always do that, and it's a big part of why Ant Farm grew as fast as it did. Just remember: "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke." — Barbara Glazer Our sponsor: The Golden Trailer Awards (goldentrailer.com) Opening Weekend now has its own feed. Follow the series on Apple Podcasts and Spotify: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/opening-weekend-selling-hollywood-with-jim-fredrick/id6806323200 open.spotify.com/show/39EWkVdYbK7P4kNDWLzH0E

Trailer Park's doors are closed, but the tribute rolls on. Chapter 2 picks up as the shop outgrows Cahuenga, settles into the Santa Monica Boulevard building and then Ivar, and finally lands the industry rock star it had been courting for two years. Tim Nett, Benedict Coulter, Brett Winn, Ellie Speare, Charlotte Honess, and Charlie Austin trace how a scrappy comedy house grew into a full-service powerhouse without losing what made it fun. Part reunion, part masterclass in the culture that kept people around for decades. In this episode: The rock star joins the band. After seventeen years at Kaleidoscope and a stint at Aspect, Benny Coulter passed on a bigger offer to become an owner at the scrappy shop instead. His action and drama work alongside Tim's comedy turned Trailer Park into a true full-service house. Do three, send six. The signature move was over-delivering on purpose. Clients asked for three cuts and got six at no charge, and most of the shop's awards came from the spots nobody requested. No brilliant jerks. Talent alone never got you hired. Anyone who wouldn't fit the family stayed out, no matter how good, and that rule is a big reason Ellie Speare stayed twenty years. A few lines that landed: "It didn't matter how brilliant they were. If they weren't gonna fit in, they weren't welcome." (Tim Nett) "I was thinking about the money. Then I said, no, no, no. I'm going to Trailer Park." (Benedict Coulter, on turning down a bigger offer to become an owner) "Everyone said, 'You're a girl, you can't cut action.' Benny said, 'Absolutely you can.'" (Charlotte Honess) Brought to you by the Golden Trailer Awards and Audiomachine. goldentrailer.com audiomachine.com

Opening Weekend: Selling Hollywood with Jim Fredrick continues on the TG&TG feed. A soap marketer who'd never set foot in Los Angeles became the most successful studio head in movie history. Alan Horn ran Warner Brothers and then Disney, greenlighting Harry Potter, The Dark Knight, and the modern Marvel and Star Wars era. He sits down with Jim Fredrick to trace a 60-year career built on serendipity, and to talk honestly about what selling a movie takes now. Takeaways: Hired because he was perfect. A Procter & Gamble marketer working on Ivory soap, Alan got recruited by Jerry Perenchio precisely because he'd never watched much TV and never been to LA. "You're perfect. You're hired." Norman Lear backed him against a mutiny. Writers walked out of his first All in the Family table read. A month later Lear stood up in front of 40 people and told them to accept it or get out. The Blackwing 602 pencil made it official: "You are now qualified to give notes." Green light or nothing. Alan took the Warner Brothers presidency only with final say on what got made, then built the run that led Bob Iger to call him for Disney. You can't buy an opening weekend anymore. Social media broke the old playbook. Audiences text each other 20 minutes into a Friday screening, and marketing keeps getting treated as low-hanging fruit when studios need to cut. Pull quotes (social-ready): "Every problem that I've ever had in business is a people problem." — Alan Horn "Throw a hundred lines in the water, because all you need to do is catch one fish." — Alan Horn "It's not so easy to buy an opening weekend, because people start texting each other 20 minutes into a movie on a Friday." — Alan Horn "It isn't really pre-COVID anymore to me. It's pre-streaming dominance." — Alan Horn Sponsors: Golden Trailer Awards (goldentrailer.com) West One Music and Q Factory by Robert Etoll (westonemusic.com)

We're proud to introduce Opening Weekend: Selling Hollywood with Jim Fredrick, starting with episode one right here on TG&TG! The most beloved movie on IMDb was, on opening weekend, a flop. Jim Fredrick, who cut the original trailer at Castle Rock, reunites with producer Liz Glotzer to unpack how The Shawshank Redemption got left at the box office and found its audience anyway. Takeaways: The title took the blame. Trimming Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption down to The Shawshank Redemption was meant to play commercial. The press pinned the soft open on a title nobody could decode. No stars, an R rating, a prison. Jim walks through the marketing wall he faced, with Darabont sitting beside him guarding the cut so the trailer gave nothing away. Three million to walk away. Darabont turned down a big payday to not direct, and chose to helm his debut instead, one of several near-misses behind the finished film. Oscars, then Turner, then legacy. Seven nominations nudged theatrical, but the film truly found its audience through relentless TNT airings and a chart-topping home video run. Pull quotes (social-ready): "For 18 years, The Shawshank Redemption has been the number one movie on IMDb. So why wasn't I able to open the film?" — Jim Fredrick "We thought we were being commercial by changing it from Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption to The Shawshank Redemption. Probably that was our first mistake." — Liz Glotzer "The marketing perspective is always give as much away as possible." — Liz Glotzer "You pretty much couldn't turn on the channel and Shawshank wasn't playing." — Liz Glotzer Sponsors: Golden Trailer Awards (goldentrailer.com) West One Music and Q Factory by Robert Etoll (westonemusic.com)

It was so cool to get to hang out with Chris Daniel, the Senior Vice President of Global Creative Marketing at LionsGate. Prior to LionsGate, Chris led 360 marketing campaigns on some of Netflix's biggest films such as Red Notice, Glass Onion, Dayshift, To All The Boys: P.S. I Still Love You, Dolemite Is My Name, and Over The Moon. Previously, he edited and produced trailers, digital-social, and brand campaigns at AV Squad where he was a part of a ton of award-winning work. Chris came up through the ranks at highly creative shops Mocean, Ignition and Seismic. Over his years on the agency side, he's been recognized with Clio Entertainment and Golden Trailer Awards (and even a CUTTER AWARD - y'all remember that?) for his campaigns for Red Notice, Dayshift, Bright, The 13th, Spy, Top 5, The Drop and many more. Be sure to check out our wonderful sponsors: Audiomachine - audiomachine.com The Golden Trailer Awards - goldentrailer.com Please leave us a rating and review: apple.co/3QYy80e You can find Corey on all the socials @coreysnathan such as www.linkedin.com/in/coreysnathan.