Innovative marketing campaign boosts 'Bonneville'

Conventional wisdom has it that "Bonneville," which began opening in theaters this week, should tank at the box office. It's a road movie about female friendship and post-menopausal rites of passage, and its marketing budget is less than 1 percent of what most studios spend to do their talent's dry cleaning.

Oh, and did I mention the film is rated PG?

Ding-dong.

Sounds like a death knell, right?

Not to "Bonneville" producer Robert May and marketing director Jeff Lipsky. They believe the marketing plan they've cooked up may set an example of a reasonably priced creative campaign for films nationwide.

"We're building a new paradigm," May says.

"Nobody's done this before," Lipsky adds, referring to his and May's innovative, grassroots and sometimes even wacky way of getting the word out to audiences they hope will hop in "Bonneville's" seat and take a ride.

Lipsky is a 30-year distributor who launched his career working for John Cassavetes. Later, he started Lot 47 and October Films, formidable indie film companies.

May founded the New York-based production company SenArt and produced critically acclaimed films such as "The Station Agent" and the Errol Morris Academy Award winner "The Fog of War."

"I remember," May reflected, "that when we shopped 'The Station Agent' around, everyone kept saying, 'Couldn't you just make the little guy tall?'," referring to the main character, played by actor Peter Dinklage, who is 4 feet, 5 inches tall.

"All our projects have been pretty soulful," Lipsky says, meaning they haven't appealed to the biggest slice of demographic pie -- men between ages 18 and 29 -- and thus are more challenging to market.

But the duo are determined to prove with their latest film, which stars Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates and Joan Allen, that it's possible, even in the world of smash-'em-up action films, to build a great movie and "they will come," Lipsky says.

While big studios have hundreds of bodies in marketing, SenArt's effort is the work of a five-member New York-based team. The five, who include Lipsky, do everything from securing theater venues to designing poster art.

But May and Lipsky have pursued and won partnerships with organizations and corporations nationwide to cross-promote "Bonneville," and the result is what Lipsky calls "a supreme effort of volunteerism. We're like the Peace Corps of independent film," he says, only half joking.

Will it take a force as great for May and Lipsky to reach their audience?

A great deal of ink has been spilled in the past decade about the dwindling number of leading roles for women in film and the dearth of films appealing to women ages 45-60. Just last week, in surveying this year's Oscar nominees, for example, writer Tim Robey of the Telegraph of London asked: "Why is Hollywood so scared of women's stories?"

"The problem," May says, "is that no one is making films for this demographic because they believe that mature women won't go to the theater."

"It's a self-fullfilling prophecy," agrees media analyst Maddie Dychtwald.

Dychtwald and her husband, Ken, are the founders of Agewave, a company tracking lifestyle trends among the baby-boom generation, which, Maddie Dychtwald quickly notes, is a highly underserved group with money.

Especially women.

She points to "Something's Got to Give," "The Banger Sisters," "Ladies in Lavender" and "The Boynton Beach Bereavement Club" as examples of niche films that have lured boomer women out of their living rooms and into theaters.

A 2006 report on increased theater attendance by the Motion Picture Association of America supports Dychtwald's assertions. In 2005, the fastest-growing sectors of audiences returning to theaters were 25-39 and over 60.

Peter Broderick, president of Paradigm Consulting in Santa Monica, a firm that advises independent filmmakers, likes May and Lipsky's techniques.

"The key things that make a movie succeed or not is that it's identified its core audience. Take the film 'Bend It Like Beckham,' for example," he says. "With 'Beckham,' (the marketing execs) identified their core audience right away - soccer girls, soccer moms and people of Asian Indian descent."

Broderick says that on opening weekend, the weekend that makes or breaks a film at the box office, "Beckham" had a reasonably decent showing.

"But what's more interesting," he says, "is that by the second weekend, the members of the opening-weekend audience were returning with friends with whom they wanted to share the film, and not all of those friends had anything to do with soccer or Indians. By the third weekend," he notes, "when the audience had expanded even further beyond its original core, you had a hit."

For more on "Bonneville," see www.bonnevillethemovie.com.

(Contact Julie Checkoway at jcheckoway(at)sltrib.com

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)