If anybody should be repeatedly uttering the F-word, it's these guys.
''Right after the election, I started getting all these pitches — 'This is really going to be big in the red states,''' says one top-ranking executive at a major studio. ''But it was a joke. That's not how we make movies. We don't look at red states or blue states. We just don't think about it like that.''
The color green, however, is another matter. They think about that one a lot in Hollywood. And nothing they saw on election night convinced them that they could make any more of it by producing a different sort of entertainment. ''I wouldn't overreact to what some are saying is a conservative mandate for the culture,'' says former studio chief Michael De Luca. ''Why people go to the movies rarely lines up with why they go to the polls. Nixon won in '72 in a landslide, yet the films making money during that period couldn't have been more progressive.'' Another studio exec puts it more succinctly. ''Everyone looked at the board on election night and realized there were a lot of red states,'' she says. ''But just because you're a red state doesn't mean you have bad taste.'' Anyway, audiences don't make their entertainment choices based on politics, according to avowed Democrat and Miramax co-chief Harvey Weinstein: ''Absolutely not, and thank God. I think people go to the movies to have a good time, to be entranced, to be enchanted.''
Of course, there was one moment — right around February, when The Passion of the Christ opened with an $83.8 million box office tally — when Hollywood briefly contemplated the possibility it might have overlooked some folks in the heartland. But the notion passed. ''I think Hollywood is always suspect of anything other than the young teen market it's used to,'' says Bob Berney, president of Newmarket Films. ''The Passion [which Newmarket distributed] shook things up — money talks — but they were still suspect of it.''
Suspect, perhaps, because they don't know how to reach a faith-based audience. Paul Lauer, president of Motive Entertainment, which marketed The Passion for Mel Gibson, thinks that the marketing departments of big studios aren't designed to create the kind of intimate, grassroots campaigns that can reach ''red state'' groups like born-again Christians. ''[This market] needs to trust the entity that is allegedly bringing them this thing. That's why it was so important with The Passion that we went out with Mel and met face-to-face with people and did screenings and gave people the chance to meet him personally, so they can trust the messenger.'' No wonder The Passion's success came as such a shock to the movie establishment.
Hollywood may still have a ways to go when it comes to reaching fundamentalist Christians. But believe it or not, movie studios do spend millions trying to figure out what people outside of L.A. want. ''We've been doing research forever,'' says an exec at one of the major studios. ''Pretty much everything you see out there — from billboard ads to trailers to the actual film — has been run through a focus group. We study everything about the audience, from what products they buy to what stories they can identify with.'' Even for a movie as partisan as Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11: ''We did exit polling like we always do, like all studios do, but people's political persuasions were the last thing on our mind,'' says Tom Ortenberg, president of 9/11 codistributor Lions Gate. ''We were looking to maximize the box office for a provocative and broadly entertaining movie.''
