The $2-million romantic comedy "Cherish" from Fine Line Features doesn't have a big-studio summer movie marketing budget, and Marian Koltai-Levine hasn't had the six months her big-studio counterparts have to plot its release.
Instead, Koltai-Levine, Fine Line's executive vice president of marketing, "seeded" the specialty market: She screened the film extensively for magazines with a two- or three-month lead time and booked "Cherish" into regional film festivals like San Francisco and Seattle, aiming for a movie fan audience that would start positive word-of-mouth.
Because of the film's 1980s setting, Koltai-Levine planned promo screenings with radio stations and dance clubs around the country, to simultaneously encourage more word-of-mouth and the playing of the film's soundtrack (to be released on New Line Records). There were "teaser" ads in college newspapers, timed for before the end of the semester but still close enough to the release date to be fresh in students' minds.
Right before "Cherish" opens next month in New York and Los Angeles, and later in other major cities, Koltai-Levine will send the film's stars, Robin Tunney and Tim Blake Nelson, across the country to appear on film festival panels and be interviewed by local television and print media. Then, if the film breaks through and goes into multiple urban and suburban runs, Fine Line will bolster the expansion with a flash of cable TV commercials.
In what's been called a franchise summer for moviegoers--another "Star Wars" installment, sequels to "Men in Black" and "Austin Powers," for example--it's easy to overlook the fact that there is an eager audience for independent movies such as "Cherish." But there will be plenty of such films, more than 30, released during the season. The reason is the same as for the major studios.
"There's a block of about 10 weeks in summer that can't be beat," says Jeff Lipsky, president of Lot 47 Films, which is releasing two digitally shot films: "Some Body" and "The Fast Runner." "College students are out of school, working people are on vacation, everyone has more leisure time."
In addition to higher-profile breakout releases like last year's "The Others" and 1999's "The Blair Witch Project," smaller companies have had consistent success with specialized fare in summer, going back to the early '80s with "Kiss of the Spider Woman" and more recently with films such as "An Ideal Husband," "Trainspotting," "The Opposite of Sex," "The Deep End," "Sexy Beast" and even foreign-language movies such as "The Red Violin" and "The Closet."
