It’s a sad fate that our region’s moviegoers know too well: Washington gets films (especially the really good ones) after New York and Los Angeles, sometimes even after Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. Back in the day, when there were only so many prints available and film distributors invented a pecking order, we were deemed second-rate. Washingtonians were supposed to have other things on their minds (pressing global concerns, perhaps?), and marketers devised a mysterious and self-serving metric for how long it took the cultural conversation to reach us.
In the 1980s, it was four weeks. Now, with their formula adjusted, the gurus say it’s more like two weeks — which is how long we’ll have to wait in January, when the Meryl-as-Maggie biopic “The Iron Lady” comes our way. Apparently, we’re still far behind the times.
Except we’re not, and there’s no good reason for Washington to take a back seat to New York or Los Angeles anymore. This is a city that starts conversations, and its citizens are fluent in cinema — and not just movies about pressing global concerns.
On top of that, Washingtonians exhibit two behaviors that marketers value most: We make money, and we spend money. We’re buying all sorts of cognoscenti things — e-books and tagliatelle pasta, Mercedes Benz and Michael Kors — but movies still come to us via a creaking cultural conveyor belt that studios are too entrenched to modernize.
As moviemaking got more radical in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hollywood got more conservative with its marketing money, deciding that adventurous films needed time to entice adventurous audiences. “If you go all the way back . . . to movies like ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’
‘Easy Rider’ . . . all of the great movies of that era, they were platform-released,” explained Tom Bernard, a Sony Pictures Classics executive.
“Platforms” were imaginary tiers that started with cineaste audiences in the most populous cities — New York and Los Angeles — and descended to the hinterlands, with hype orchestrated region by region. “It took awhile for people to learn about the film,” Bernard recalled. “There was only the telephone and the newspaper.”
But why persist with this system now? “We have this argument almost weekly,” lamented Jamie Shor, a film publicist who recently opened D.C.’s West End Cinema and who has encouraged distributors to think anew about the region. Washington readers consume all the coverage — premiere shots on E!, interviews on Vulture.com, reviews in Variety — but can’t act on it, she said. Before the movie ambles into town, “the national campaign dies off,” Shor explained. “Many times, you lost the window to capitalize on a really engaged audience.”
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