 |
|
The Swan Archives Marketing Collateral Page
The Swan Archives' principal mission is to preserve Swan's legacy through Phantom's original marketing collateral, and make it available over the Internet to historians, researchers, and others with a serious interest in the pinnacle of human achievement that is Phantom of the Paradise, and in the man who made it; the girl who sang it; and the marketers who....didn't really do a very good job.
THE FIRST CAMPAIGN
Phantom opened in the US on October 31, 1974 to poor box office virtually everywhere outside Los Angeles. Director/writer Brian De Palma stopped by an opening day screening in New York, only to find the theater heartbreakingly empty.
The involvement of A&M records (which issued the soundtrack, and which more or less owned the exclusive rights to Paul Williams' life at the time) in the co-marketing campaign with 20th Century Fox meant that the film was initially pitched towards what A&M and Fox believed to be the teens-through-college "rock music demographic."
Fox's Phantom presskit (marketing package sent to journalists to assist them in writing stories) typically included an assortment of nine black and white stills from the full set of 20, as well as production notes and a template press release.
The black and white stills in the presskit featured, in their lower-right hand corners, suggested captions for use by newspaper editors. The versions of the stills sent to theaters for lobby decoration purposes had, in place of the captions, the National Screen Service verbiage, as seen in these eight examples:
Depending on the amount of attention devoted by the studio's advertising and marketing department to a particular film, up to four different designs, or styles, might have been used for posters, newspaper advertising, and other promotion. The artwork associated with the most dominant campaign was generally known as Style A, and the other campaigns would be referred to as Styles B, C, and D, in descending order of importance. Movie theaters showing the film would invariably display the Style A art in their lobby poster display case, and if a second or third poster case was also available, they might also have the Style B and Style C art. In Phantom's case, two styles of art were created initially. The Style A art, with the title of the film shown in neon in front of a blue lightning bolt with illustrations of the three principal characters, was also used for the soundtrack album cover. The Style B art, centered around a black and white photo of the Phantom at his keyboard, was used exclusively for marketing the film, but not the soundtrack.
The Style A art was designed by Anthony Goldschmidt, and illustrated by the great John Alvin, probably the best and most well known creator of movie art in the world. Alvin created the spectacular posters for Young Frankenstein; ET: The Extra Terrestrial; Aladdin; Cocoon; and Willow, as well as for My Favorite Year (which, incidentally, also featured Jessica Harper) and nearly 200 other films. His Phantom poster was selected by the National Collection of Fine Arts, the Smithsonian Institution and the Museum of Modern Art to be included in "Images of an Era (1945-1975)," a collection of posters that toured Europe as part of the US Bicentennial under the auspices of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
This is the pride of the Archives' collection: the original art for the Style A campaign, handpainted by Mr. Alvin in 1974 with radiant dyes and inks (mostly with airbrush), on Strathmore paper. It's about 22" x 20", and is the only original, handmade color rendering of this artwork known to exist. Mr. Alvin created this as a preliminary version, for review by the studio and other interested parties, before he created the final painting (the whereabouts of which are unknown) that was reproduced en masse for the poster. As can be seen, it differs from the poster artwork in many respects, three of which are very significant: First, the title shown here is simply " Phantom," rather than " Phantom of the Paradise," because this art was created before Fox implemented the title-change occasioned by their concerns about possible conflict with the King Features comic strip called Phantom. Second, the depiction of Paul Williams is "cuter" (maybe more Muppet-y) than it is in the final version. Finally, this version has two swans on either side of Paul Williams' head, rather than the stars that appear in the final version. You can read more about the fate of the two swans on our Swan Song Fiasco page. |
|
Canadian version of the Style A one sheet (which doesn't have the "PG" logo)
|
|
|
|
An extremely limited number of 36" x 36" posters like this one (we're not sure how many, but we sure don't see these very often) were specially printed prior to the film's release, at designer Anthony Goldschmidt's urging, for distribution to studio executives, publicity people, and the like. These were printed on high quality paper, with special partial Day-Glo inks for the neon "lights," and were coated with Marcoat, sort of a shellac glaze, which added gloss and protection from fading. Because of the large size, the luxurious printing process used, and the fact that they were distributed rolled rather than folded, they are far more attractive than the theatrical posters, and show the artwork to better advantage than any other format we know of.
|
|
|
|
|
|
| American version of the Style A, which had the "PG" logo, in the 30" x 40" size and the 40" x 60" size: These two sizes came rolled on heavy cardboard, rather than folded like the one sheets.
|
The 22" x 28" of the Style A, which came on heavy cardboard stock.
The film's tag line, "He sold his soul for rock n'roll", took square aim at the rock audience, as did the graphics used on the posters, which emphasized guitars, keyboards, microphones, patch cords, and other musical ephemera.
A&M seems to have made diligent efforts to push the hype pretty hard, working with record stores on promotions for the soundtrack, giving out free posters, t-shirts, and buttons at screenings, and going after the audience as if they were promoting any other high profile music product. A&M's rock-oriented Phantom presskit contained a write-up by Gerrit Graham who, in addition to his acting gigs, was getting work at the time as a music reviewer, writing for Rolling Stone and other magazines. (A&M also put Gerrit's prose in the sheet music book; we at The Swan Archives hope he got some royalties.) And, A&M included in their presskit a couple of black and white stills of Paul Williams, using Fox's shots, but with their own logo on them.
A&M presskit
(Open the Presskit to see inside)
 Presskit text
The very-hard-to-find pinback button given away at early screenings.
|
One of the posters they were giving away at screenings. The lack of credits (and the fact that it was distributed rolled, rather than machine folded, so it didn't have crease-lines) makes it easily distinguishable from the regular Style B 27" x 41" (one sheet) movie poster intended for use in theater lobbies.
|
|
|
Style B one sheet
|
The 22" x 28" of the Style B, which came on heavy cardboard stock
|
This is a very unusual cardboard standee that came from A&M's marketing department, intended for use as a counter display in record stores.
|
|
|
|
|
| Front and back of flyer distributed in Los Angeles to advertise the premiere.
|
|
Newspaper ad for the October 31 Los Angeles premiere, with a lame "come as your favorite phantom" costume contest. Wow. A costume on Halloween. Marketing Geniuses.
|
|
|
|
Newspaper ad for the New York premiere.
|
|
|
|
Newspaper ad for the sneak preview in Los Angeles.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Souvenir program booklet handed out at the Los Angeles premiere.
|
|
|
|
|
| A fairly rare "three sheet": three times the size of the one sheet, it came in two separate pieces that had to be mated for display. These were made in smaller numbers because most theaters didn't have poster cases large enough to accommodate them...so they're pretty hard to find now.
|
Pressbooks were created by the distributor's marketing team, and contained information and ad copy that could be provided by exhibitors to newspapers.
Here are the lobby card sets; lobby cards came in sets of eight, in two sizes (11" x 14", and 8" x 10"), were printed on light cardboard, and were intended for display in, as the name suggests, theater lobbies. Nearly all of Phantom's lobby cards were printed with the pictures reversed! Click on a lobby card to see the entire set of eight.
|
11" x 14" Lobby Set
|
|
8" x 10" Lobby Set
|
Unfortunately, Fox was completely out of touch with the audience they were trying to reach.
Radio and TV spots that featured voiceover by Wolfman Jack were particularly ill-calculated: while the Wolfman might have been thought of as avant-garde by the suits at Fox (he was, after all, hosting The Midnight Special on TV), he was probably more closely associated by the youth audience in 1974 with his role in the previous year's hugely popular nostalgia-fest American Graffiti, in which he appeared as a disingenuous 1962-era disc jockey whose true character is revealed to be nothing like his on-air wildman persona; like the Wizard of Oz, he's made out to be something of a fraud. American Graffiti, by so effectively typing him as a relic of the early '60's, and a sham at that, rendered him immediately irrelevant, and even suspect, to hip teenagers in the '70's. It's ironic that Phantom's pitchman is himself an early example of the "manufactured entertainment" that Phantom is critiquing: the Wolfman had, in the early 60's, promoted his public persona by attempting to conceal all information about his real name (Bob Smith) and background, both to hide his "pirate radio" activities from his legitimate employers, and, like Swan, to create an aura of mystery about himself. In fact, his appearance in American Graffiti marked the first time he had allowed himself to be seen.
That Fox was completely at sea in terms of trying to figure out how to position the film was evident from the flailing narration Wolfman recited in the TV spots: "It's a horror story...it's a love story...it's a comedy...all rolled into one..."
|
|
|
We wish the film had been promoted with a trailer more like this fan-made example, from Ross Raventos. His editing, while it might not seem as flashy as what you see in the trailers of today, is just right for the period, and this piece makes the film seem far more enticing than did the awful original trailers. Great job, Ross! Click the thumbnail above to watch the trailer [9.5 MB] in pop-up window (requires QuickTime player 5.0.2 or higher). Or click here to view... • QuickTime file (9.5 MB) • Windows Media File (5.7 MB) |
|
The Wolfman also recorded several terrible radio spots (commercials), which were provided to radio stations on 7" vinyl records, like this one. Here you can enjoy (we're not sure that's the right word) a 60-second spot, a 30-second spot, and a special 30-second spot featuring Mr. Jack giving the film his wholehearted endorsement. He sounds so very sincere.
If you want to watch the theatrical trailers (previews of coming attractions), they're available on the French collector's edition double DVD set. The Swan Archives is very proud to have provided these original trailers from its collection to the DVD producers for their use in the collector's editon; apparently, the trailers were unavailable anywhere else in good enough condition to be used.
Here's what an actual 35mm Phantom trailer looks like.
Along with the anachronistic Wolfman, a fundamental problem in marketing to the rock audience was that Phantom was skewering precisely what that audience took most seriously in their lives: their music, and the musicians they had affirmed as heroes. The film was, in essence, telling its intended audience that they were a bunch of idiots for buying into the market-driven personas of the Mick Jaggers, David Bowies, and Alice Coopers of the world. (The Swan Archives' extremely nonscientific polling of today's Phantom fans reveals that, of those who remember loving the film when it was first released, the overwhelming majority were between 11 and 13 years old at the time...a bit younger than the audience for which Fox was aiming, and perhaps less inclined than their older siblings to take offense at Phantom's swipes at rock culture).
The unintended effect of the campaign was to position the film as one put out by geezers to make fun of the tastes of youth. The film also was not helped by some of the poor reviews. Perhaps the worst was Rex Reed's spiteful write-up in the New York Daily News, which proves that Reed has been an idiot for longer than most people have been alive.
Rex Reed's review.
|
|
| Long universally regarded as the know-nothing laughingstock of the critical establishment, "overly urbane" (that's a euphemism) gossip-hound Reed appeals principally to the same witless little-old-lady demographic as, a generation previously, swooned for Liberace. How seriously can anyone take a guy who was arrested for shoplifting Peggy Lee CD's, can't tell a chimpanzee from an orangutan, and who wrote, more recently, "And so I Heart Huckabees may not be the worst movie ever made, depending on how you feel about such hollow, juvenile and superficial trash as Brewster McCloud, Hudson Hawk, Punch-Drunk Love, Mulholland Drive, The Royal Tenenbaums, Lost Highway, Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind..."? Yeah, OK, he's right about Hudson Hawk, we'll give him that.
|
Vincent Canby's review in the New York Times wasn't a whole lot nicer. Canby, who wrote enthusiastically of most of De Palma's other films, just couldn't find it within himself to like Phantom.
Phantom also received a mixed review from Pauline Kael in the New Yorker, who usually found a lot to like in De Palma's work, and is typically thought of as having been one of his early champions. Kael's piece, though not entirely positive, remains one of the most incisive and interesting writeups the film received.
THE SECOND CAMPAIGN
A few months after release, when it became clear that the campaign was failing miserably, Phantom producer Ed Pressman cut a deal with Fox allowing him to reposition the film (it wasn't technically a "re-release"), with new publicity. Pressman went into action by launching a second campaign, in mid-1975, which tagged the film as "The Most Highly Acclaimed Horror Phantasy of Our Time," pushing the horror angle. De Palma, Finley, Graham and Williams were made extremely available to give interviews to Castle of Frankenstein, Monster World, and every other horror magazine that would make time for them, new trailers and TV spots were struck (without Wolfman Jack) emphasizing the cinematic, rather than musical, appeal of the film, and Pressman commissioned new poster artwork, from famed comic book artist Richard Corben, who painted from a rarely-seen rough sketch drawn by comic artist Neal Adams.
Neal Adams' sketch for the Style C art
The new art emphasized the Phantom's mangled face and an anatomically exaggerated version of Phoenix. Pressman's strategy focused on cities where buying advertising time was cheap, and the film gradually took on life, bringing in decent (though never great) box office and some positive reviews.
|
The second campaign included three new TV spots. One was 60 seconds long, and the other two were 30 seconds each. The Archives has obtained the original 16mm negatives of all three of these, with their original runcards from Movielab, the film processor. What you're looking at here is two original negatives, with each negative containing all three spots, plus a third spool that contains the optical soundtrack for the spots, as negatives don't normally have sound. To print a positive, the picture negative is combined with the optical soundtrack into a single print.
|
|
|
|
The Archives transferred the 16mm negatives and sound to digital, so now you can click the thumbnail above to watch all three TV spots from the second campaign (22 MB). We at the Archives SO have your back! (Unfortunately, these spots are only slightly less dorky than the Wolfman Jack spots from the original campaign.)
|
|
|
The centerpiece to Pressman's campaign, the "Style C" poster with the Corben artwork. The copyright notice on the poster specifies that the art is owned by Pressman Williams, rather than Fox, reflecting the fact that it was the producer, rather than the distributor, who commissioned the artwork.
|
|
|
|
The 30" x 40" rolled cardboard version of the "Style C" poster.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Pressman put out the call to the world of monster magazines,
and was rewarded with pretty healthy coverage in the mid-1975 timeframe.
|
Pressman's strategy was reasonably, but not spectacularly, successful; in early 1976, Fox was bragging in Variety about the decent box office Phantom was pulling down in Texas and Arkansas.
Phantom fever wasn't exactly sweeping the world, though. For the most part, the film simply did not do well, except in a few places: Paris (where it ran for many years), Japan, Los Angeles, and, mysteriously, Winnipeg, Canada, where it ran, off and on, for over a year; the soundtrack album went gold in Canada based on sales in Winnipeg alone. Although the claim was made not long ago in a gushing story in Winnipeg's local press that the film played continuously there for 62 weeks in the same theater, this is a bit of overly romantic exaggeration. In fact, it enjoyed an eighteen week run at the Garrick Theatre starting in December of 1974, but was replaced in that cinema by The Great Waldo Pepper on May 2nd of 1975. It was then picked up at the North Main Drive-In for one week, from May 15-22, and then the Park Theatre for two weeks, from June 20 to July 3. It disappeared from Winnipeg screens at that point, until its return in February 1976, double billed at the Garrick (as it was in many other localities) with Young Frankenstein, for four weeks starting February 6. For the full story of Phantom's run in Winnipeg in 1975, see Doug Carlson's Why Winnipeg? pages.
Fox invested in a campaign promoting Phantom's music with Academy voters, and was rewarded with a nomination for Paul Williams and George Aliceson Tipton (who composed the incidental music), for Best Music, Scoring Original Song Score and/or Adaptation. (Nelson Riddle's score for The Great Gatsby won.)
Williams was also nominated for a Golden Globe for his score (losing to Lerner and Loewe for their work on The Little Prince; there's certainly no shame, though, in losing to the guys responsible for, among others, Camelot, My Fair Lady, and Gigi.)
Phantom was also nominated for the year's Best Horror Film by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films, won the Grand Prize at France's Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival (as De Palma's Carrie would two years later); was nominated for Best Dramatic Presentation at the Hugo Awards, and was nominated as Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen, by the Writers Guild of America.
This link will take you to the INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGNS.
Some images not loading? Try refreshing the page, but wait for all the images to load BEFORE clicking on any of the pop-up links. (Some browsers stop loading images as soon as you click on anything in the page.)
All inquiries should be directed by email to archivist at swanarchives.org. The words "grand guignol" appear nowhere on this site. All website text, design, and coding is Copyright 2006-2008, Ari the Principal Archivist. No claim is made to the copyrighted works, trademarks or service marks of 20th Century Fox or A&M Records, and The Swan Archives is in no way affiliated with either company.
|
|
