From the days of Sam Arkoff and Joseph E. Levine to the modern-day media gamesmanship of Harvey Weinstein and Michael Moore, the movie business has always been full of wily hucksters willing to use any outrageous stunt to get moviegoers to see their film.
Back in the 1950s, the B-movie producer William Castle released a cheesy horror film called "Macabre." Patently awful, the film is remembered today only for Castle's bravura marketing gimmickry. The producer took out a policy with Lloyd's of London, insuring every ticket buyer for $1,000 in case they died of fright, displaying a huge reproduction of the insurance policy over every theater marquee. Castle had hearses parked outside the theaters with fake nurses on hand in the lobbies. The movie was a huge hit, with audiences showing up just to see if anyone dropped dead.
I'm only guessing here, but I have to believe that as a boy, Donald Trump caught a matinee presentation of "Macabre." After all, when it comes to showmanship, no one can hold a candle to the bombastic real estate tycoon who has been using an old Hollywood staple - controversy-based marketing - to bamboozle the media and put himself front and center in the GOP presidential race. According to a CNN poll released last week, Trump is now tied with Mike Huckabee atop the heap of GOP presidential aspirants, with 19 percent of likely Republican voters saying they would vote for him for president.
Trump's political ascendancy has been achieved by his single-minded focus on one hot-button issue - his incendiary claim that Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States. As Trump famously said on "The View": "I want him to show his birth certificate!"
I won't waste any space here shaming the media for being so gullible - or so cynical - that it's given Trump's charges a de facto legitimacy by providing him with free air time everywhere to hurl his stink bombs. Nor will I attempt to rebut Trump's charges, starting with that Obama has long ago produced a certification of live birth showing he was born in Hawaii. As Trump has undoubtedly figured out, the point isn't whether he can prove his case. The point is that by raising the issue, he can generate a tsunami of publicity.
To anyone who spent time in Hollywood, this is an all-too-familiar strategy, especially in the hands of a modern-day Svengali like Weinstein. Dating to his first big hit, "The Crying Game," Weinstein has shrewdly relied on controversy-based marketing, seeing it as a fountain of free publicity, allowing him to compete with larger studios with more lavish marketing resources. When Weinstein acquired "Priest," a 1995 film about a Catholic priest who was persecuted by the church for being gay, Weinstein counted on blowback from the church to make the film a cause celebre - his initial plan, just to fan the flames, was to release the film on Good Friday. As one of his lieutenants said at the time, fueling the fire "is the way he marketed movies. He saw controversy as an opportunity to create greater publicity and greater awareness."
More recently, Weinstein has counted on ratings controversies with films like "The King's Speech" and "Blue Valentine" to provide kindling wood for box-office success. So you might say that the Trump birther scam is right out of the Hollywood playbook. When the Wall Street Journal reported on the marketing campaign for Moore's 2007 film "Sicko," financed by Weinstein, the paper's Merissa Marr wrote: "Mr. Moore's formula is simple: Pick a divisive topic and goad opponents into a public debate."
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