Film Marketers, Resting on Empty Laurels

When I was a budding film buff at age 16, laurels helped me find my way. Those gold, leafy parentheses on VHS boxes and advertisements denoted that the film had competed at a festival, Cannes or Sundance, and would be arty, foreign, dark or weird. Just how I liked 'em.

It's a strategy that would fail miserably today. Laurel leaves have spread like weeds, growing most heartily during the run-up to the Oscar nominations. And in their ubiquity, laurels seem to have lost all meaning. Browse today's movie ads and they're found stamped on mainstream fare: "Miss Potter," "The Departed," "Happy Feet." Cutting edge? Not so much.

"It's almost a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval," says Susan Nunziata, executive editor of the New York-based Entertainment Marketing Letter.

Studios are slapping them on almost anything, like this recent "Babel" ad: "WINNER: One of the Best Films of the Year (Movie City Minute -- Joanna Langfield)." The ad contained 17 sets of laurels.

"The proliferation is pretty out of hand," says Stephen Garrett, co-founder of Kinetic Trailerworks, which makes movie trailers for independent and foreign films.

How out of hand? Back in 1997, seven laurels appeared in ads in the New York Times' Jan. 12 Weekend Arts section. Zoom ahead to the second Friday in January 2007: 53 laurels. In The Washington Post, for the same time period, laurel use grew from one appearance to 12.

Now comes the backlash. Bob Berney, president of Picturehouse Entertainment, the studio behind "Pan's Labyrinth," has already hit the saturation point.

"I'm a little over the laurels," he says. "If you're the 40th movie with laurels all over the place, it's . . . self-defeating."

Berney oversaw the marketing for such crossover hit films as "The Passion of the Christ" and "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and "Memento" -- all of which were fertile ground for laurels.

Laurels signified prestige in Greek and Roman times when they were given to poets and winners of competitions. The Cannes Film Festival gave out its first Golden Palm (Palme d'Or) in 1955 to director Delbert Mann for his film "Marty," according to festival spokeswoman Christine Aimé.

The award's design still consists of a single palm, in honor of the city's coat of arms.

No one interviewed for this article could recall when the parentheses-style wreaths first popped up in advertising. Berney thinks that the current proliferation "probably has something to do with Harvey Weinstein, as many innovations in independent film marketing do."

Weinstein, co-founder of the Weinstein Company, is known for his muscular marketing of independent films in the '90s with his former company, Miramax. "The art-house-going and upscale audiences know what the laurels mean," Weinstein said in an e-mail. "They understand the film festival circuit and know that awards from those festivals signify quality in film."

In the month before the Academy Awards ceremony, Berney likes to eliminate all the laurels and rely on one strong quote from a critic. The most recent "Pan's Labyrinth" ad plays up the film's six Academy Award nominations and Entertainment Weekly calling it an "outstanding work of art."

Garrett, who made the trailers for movies including "Half Nelson," "Maria Full of Grace" and "Spellbound," says he goes for "quantity over quality."

"We have laurels stocked away in our computer that we constantly trot out," he says. "There's no question of whether or not to use them [in the ad], it's just where to place them."

The latest development is the riffing on the laurel. Ads indicating a movie was accepted to the 2007 Sundance Film Festival have popped up showing a streamlined, DNA-like laurel. The Indiana-based Heartland Film Festival puts heart-shaped laurels around its awards because it "communicates film festival artsy-fartsy," says Heartland's president, Jeffrey L. Sparks.

But the era of laurels as instant prestige is ending.

"A once venerated icon has been devalued by the hordes of eager-beaver marketers," says Jeffrey Wells, editor of the film blog Hollywood-elsewhere.com. "Welcome to the devalued world."