Twentieth Century Fox's upcoming fall release "The Good Son" is headlined by two of Hollywood's hottest kid stars - Macaulay Culkin and Elijah Wood. And yet young moviegoing fans can't see their screen idols this time around because the movie - which will be released this fall - is rated R.
Nor for that matter, could Macaulay or Elijah, theoretically speaking, even buy a ticket to their own movie without being accompanied by mom and/or dad or some adult guardian.This poses some interesting marketing questions for Fox, which has to sell adults on a movie driven by two kid stars - both of whom have only played lovable characters. Can the rambunctious-but-sweet "Home Alone" star pull off a super-evil child in "The Good Son"?
Fox seems to think so.
In fact, it made a study of some past adult films that starred children such as "The Omen," "The Exorcist" and "Village of the Damned," all of which were successful. (They all had supernatural elements that "The Good Son" doesn't have.)
While the studio is still formulating its campaign for the picture - which opens in September - it recently completed a 71-second teaser trailer aimed at establishing the movie as an adult psychological suspense thriller and Culkin as the evil lead.
The trailer begins playing in theaters this weekend attached to Fox's murder-mystery "Rising Sun" and is prefaced with the R rating.
Andrea Jaffe, Fox's president of domestic marketing, says the thrust and intention of the teaser campaign is to "get people used to seeing Mac in a way they've never seen him before."
There is also an early movie poster in the works, which Jaffe said will be "a big photo of an innocent, smiling Mac, with the tag line " `Evil has many faces': `The Good Son.' "
Though the film's tone and content is reminiscent of Mervyn LeRoy's 1956 classic "The Bad Seed," which starred Patty McCormack as the malicious child who causes the death of several people, Fox production president Tom Jacobson said "The Good Son" is in no way based on that movie ("It's a completely different story"). The original screenplay is by Ian McEwan.
The story is about a 12-year-old boy (Wood) who goes to live with his aunt and uncle after his mother's death and comes under the influence of his malevolent cousin (Culkin), who he suspects is evil and potentially murderous.
Jaffe doesn't believe "Good Son" will be a tough sell: "It's going to be so much fun to sell because it's a shocking, unique film. To have this genre of adult film and have the focal point be two young boys is what's going to make it different." - CLAUDIA ELLER
- "Is this the summer of the arrow and are we part of a vogue?" asked Mel Brooks just before last Wednesday's opening of his latest genre spoof, "Robin Hood: Men in Tights."
What Brooks was referring to - three new movies that are using images of archery as a visual centerpiece in their one-sheet posters - is more of a movie marketing blip than a vogue. It was not only Universal's decision to use an arrow (actually a spear) motif in its poster for the upcoming Jean-Claude van Damme actioner "Hard Target," it was also 20th Century Fox's decision to use a pair of nearly identical bow-and-arrow images to advertise two strongly similar spoof comedies - Brooks' "Men in Tights" and "Hot Shots, Part Deux" - with opening dates less than nine weeks apart. The "Men in Tights" one-sheet depicts star Cary Elwes about to launch six arrows simultaneously, while the "Hot Shots" poster features a Rambo-esque Charlie Sheen preparing to fling a chicken.
This raises a modest question, given that "Hot Shots, Part Deux" was only a modest-grossing breadwinner (roughly $38 million from U.S. theaters) and was generally seen as a comic letdown. Is Fox dampening the potential interest in "Men in Tights" by suggesting it's a chip off the "Hot Shots" block, or is the similarity between the posters too subtle for audiences to notice?
"I honestly don't think that's the association that people are making here," argues Michael Kaiser, Fox's executive vice president of marketing. "The image is a joke on the Costner poster (for 1991's "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves"), with that shot of him about to shoot the flaming arrow. You always want to have a simple, iconographic image, and this one got the joke across."
Seinegger Advertising chief Tony Seinegger, who created the popular arrow POV shot agrees: "I don't think the public remembers that was used in the trailer for the Costner film (and which was also spoofed in Fox's teaser for "Men in Tights"). Industry people are the only ones who notice stuff like this."
"I heard somewhere that the public generally forgets ads after about three weeks," adds Brian Fox, whose Fox & Friends agency tailored the one-sheet ads for "Hot Shots."
On the other hand, the subliminal suggestion that this is another "Hot Shots" "is clearly there," admits an anonymous advertising executive.
Adds a studio source: "I think the problem is, they didn't even think about it. Unlike a good `borrow,' it's like, oh, I've seen this one before."
Fox's Kaiser is whimsically unbothered by these observations. "All I can say is, if you look at all those action movie posters showing guys pointing guns at the camera - and there've been hundreds over the years - bows-and-arrows are running significantly behind guns. The real trouble is, there are too many action movies and an insufficient variety of weapons." - JEFFREY WELLS
- Poor Tiny Tim. Here's a gentle soul who believes in tiptoeing through the tulips and that "Hollywood is the Shangri-La - the fairyland of the imagination" and he can't catch a damn break in this town.
He was just rejected for the role of an old woman in Paramount Pictures' sequel "The Naked Gun III: The Final Insult," after sending the studio a videotaped audition from his home in Des Moines, Iowa.
"They sent me a script, so I put a bonnet on my head and read the part on video - I thought it was good, but they turned me down. They said they changed their mind and wanted a girl," said Tim, whose real name is Herbert Khaury.
Nonetheless, Tim acknowledges: "I know I need a lot of experience in acting." He said he is not disheartened by the rejection and still strongly believes that "Hollywood is the greatest."
The closest he's ever gotten to breaking into the movies, he said, was appearing in the ill-conceived 1968 documentary of the mid-'60s "You Are What You Eat" along with such luminaries of the era as Peter Yarrow, Paul Butterfield, Barry McGuire, Father Malcolm Boyd, the Electric Flag and Harper's Bizarre.
The 63-year-old Tim, who married Miss Vicki on Dec 17, 1969, on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" in front of zillions of home viewers, says: "I just keep on going." - CLAUDIA ELLER
- He looks like a classic melodrama villain: tall, rail-thin and sporting a waxed mustache. He speaks in mellifluous tones, drives a classic red convertible and has a capacity for dirty deeds unequaled by any recent movie scoundrel.
Meet Lickboot, the screen's latest lawyer.
Lawyer? 'Fraid so. The most politically incorrect legal eagle to come down the pike in decades is one of the stars of "Tom and Jerry: The Movie."
Harvey Saferstein, the president of the State Bar of California, was just about over the furor he created when he suggested early last month that jokes about lawyers may have some link to violence directed at the profession, when he was told about Lickboot.
Wincing and laughing, he said at his Los Angeles area office: "I guess this isn't going to help the cause . . . but it does give me one more chance to set the record straight.
"I have tried to make it clear that nobody's out to censor anybody. There is nothing wrong with making the villain a lawyer. My big objection was commercials selling products by making lawyers the bad guys."
The Miller Brewing Co. shelved a TV commercial showing an overweight tax attorney being roped at a rodeo after his objections. It is now back on the air, however.
Tom and Jerry producer Phil Roman is unrepentant about Lickboot. "I wouldn't change a frame of him even if I could," he said.
Saferstein said that at one time lawyers were heroes in movies and occasionally still are.
"Just as there are good cats and bad cats there is nothing wrong with making a lawyer the villain. However Tom Cruise played a good guy in `A Few Good Men' and not a totally bad guy in `The Firm' so maybe things are looking up." - MIKE KERRIGAN