Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business Read Online Free

to “flatten,” which means it didn’t go up, even though they added TV spots. This stumped everyone. I checked in with my trusted source and colleague, Kevin Goetz, Hollywood’s go-to market research guru in times of crisis.
    Kevin Goetz is a marketing research legend, one of those guys many of us trust with interpreting the numbers and making the wise calls on inside-Hollywood baseball. He’s been with most of the top market research companies, and I’ve had the pleasure of working with him on the research testing of almost all my movies. He is cherubic-looking, well liked and cutting-edge. You want him in the trenches when you need to figure out how to fix your picture or your marketing message, when your tracking—as with Bridesmaids —suddenly stalls out.
    As I drove to work Thursday of opening week, I called Kevin: “So, Kev, how’s Bridesmaids going to do this weekend?”
    “Looks like it could be as low as fifteen. Could go high teens, if it picks up some big buzz from word of mouth. They came on strong but then they stalled, and nothing seems to be happening right now.”
    This is what all the prognosticators were saying.
    “Nothing?” I asked, then added, “Call me if you see any buzz picking up as we get closer.” God only knows what prevented me from bumping into the car in front of me. All the buzz was the same—and it wasn’t good.
    In Hollywood, “buzz” is a semitechnical term that means “everyone is talking about this.” It can result from a multitude of things: word of mouth, great reviews, sudden media attention, a spike in tracking or an amazing television spot that clicks with the audience. There can also be bad buzz, but that’s another thing: Everyone was saying that John Carter —the sci-fi fantasyflop—would be terrible months before anyone had seen a frame. Gigli —starring then couple Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez—provoked barely suppressed giggles around the globe even before it opened to no business whatsoever. That is bad buzz.
    But good buzz is hard to predict and hard to generate, especially in a noisy summer market full of highly expensive advertising. Who knew what the buzz on Bridesmaids would be? It would have to be money to compete against the oncoming thunderous Thor.
    My gal pals and I were placing wagers and consulting fortune-tellers and doing our own preawareness grassroots marketing. On the night the movie opened, I organized a small army with my dear girlfriend screenwriter Kiwi Smith ( Legally Blonde ). If I’m defined by Hello, He Lied because the title of my last book displays my cynicism, she’s defined as “Kiwi Loves You” because her Twitter handle shows her refusal to see the dark side. We’re a good team. Curly haired, slightly haywire, yet seductive to every gender, Kiwi is an ardent cheerleader for girl power.
    Kiwi sent a rallying message to her entire email list that was so infectious, I sent it to my buddy Rebecca Traister at Salon.com , where it then did its social-networking proliferating thing. Kiwi was already a mentor and cottage industry to many young writers, and the thousands on her list reached out to their thousands to help us create a little femme-movie-ment. We convened a concerned (read “panicked”) group of female writers, studio execs and actresses to meet first for dinner and drinks and then head to the ArcLight Hollywood theater on Sunset Boulevard, where we would meet with, we hoped, a larger group of female industry friends. Over dinner, texts were flying in from Kristen Wiig’s manager that the matinees on the East Coast were “way overperforming expectations!” She knew that her client’s life was about to change. At that point, Kristen was known nationally as part of the Saturday Night Live ensemble, but opening a movie wouldtransform her career. Some of us veterans knew that overperforming matinees meant Friday night would be even better, Saturday more so. We started to throw back tequilas.
    A gaggle of us,