The fact is that the movie industry has never been shy about self-promotion; if we think about something as prominent as the Oscar ceremony, it is an awards which was established in order to get press coverage for the diva's, stars and film screen charmers of the day.
Cleverly-orchestrated PR campaigns have had a crucial role in promoting movies which eventually resulted in films' box-office success as the media coverage that the PR stunts would get, had the main goal of attracting the audiences attention and getting them in the theatres to see the movie which the campaign would revolve around, no matter whether the film was actually of good quality, interesting or appealing to the masses in the first place.
Here is a short list of the PR stunts in the history of Hollywood and the film industry in general up to this day.
1. The prisoner of Zenda (1937)
Legendary publicist Russell Birdwell generated a buzz around this motion picture by arranging for a dozen of Zenda (Ontario) citizens to attend the world premiere of the film in New York City. If we take in consideration that the film eventually went on winning 2 Oscars we can say that the publicity stunt certainly helped into getting the movie massive media coverage.
2. Gone with the wind (1939)
Even in this film Birdwell had it's geniality involved as both the director and him created huge media buzz at the time, when announcing they were going to hold open auditions around the U.S. to search for a perfect Scarlett, the main character in the Margaret Mitchell's novel ''Gone with the wind'' and soon to be a movie. Eminent stars like Lana Turner and Katherine Hepburn attended the audition with no success, as the role was swept away by at that time little known Vivien Leigh, an actress that managed to make history by playing the role of Scarlett O'Hara.
3. Down Missouri way (1946)
The movie was actually a musical, talking about an agriculture professor securing a movie role for his trained mule called Shirley. To promote the movie, the film publicist led Shirley, with an ad for the movie on her back, to walk down Fifth Avenue and enter the restaurant overlooking Rockefeller Plaza's ice rink, a stunt which secured plenty of column inches in the papers the next day.
4. Teacher's pet (1958)
This comedy was about a newspaper editor, starring Clark Gable and Doris Day. To promote the movie, Paramount Pictures filmed 50 newsmen sitting at a desk, and gave a few of them lines in the film. The sole purpose of getting in the movie Hollywood reporters was to make them focus and write about the movie, which resulted in pure success as the movie received 2 Oscars that year and was placed on the New York Times 10 best movies list of 1958.
5. Mr. Sardonicus (1961)
Columbia Pictures told the director of this movie to film an alternate, happy ending as the original one was rather dark; later on this was turned into a publicity opportunity by bringing in an audience and giving them cards with thumbs up and thumbs down to vote for the ending they prefer, and the whole thing did get on the mouths of a lot of people as it never happened before that the audience got to chose the ending of a movie.
6. The Blair Witch project (1999)
The producers of the movie thought of a unique way of getting a buzz in the media; before the movie was released, they spread the word that the footage of the documentary-style movie was actually real and discovered after 3 film students, searching for the so-called Blair Witch, disappeared in the woods of Maryland.
The stunt worked as the film made it to the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest earnings in relation to the movie budget as the movie cost only around $ 35,000 and it earned about $ 140 million at the box office, only in the U.S.
I'm posting for you both the kind of footage that was spread through internet and made believe to be real by the producers of the movie as well as the official trailer which obviously came out once it was known that the whole documentary was actually a movie.
7. House of wax (2005)
Even though using a world-wide known celebrity to draw attention on a movie isn't really anything we already didn't heard of, in this case the originality of the idea that the producers of the movie had was in using Paris Hilton, who starred in this horror, in an original way: they printed and put on sale t-shirts advertising the death of Paris the 6th of May, which was the date of the official release of the film. Even though the film didn't earn much at U.S. box office, it did have success over seas.
8. Borat (2006)
British actor Sacha Baron Cohen played a Kazakh journalist in this comedy and what he did to raise attention was trying to enter the White House, dressed as Borat, the Kazakh weird journalist, and invite American president George W. Bush to the screening of the film. Even the Kazakh government reacted to the numerous publicity stunts that Cohen performed to publicise the movie release and warned that the horrible character played by Cohen didn't represent properly the values and ways of the Kazakh people. No need to say that the implication of the Kazakh Government resulted in gaining even more press coverage and eventually the movie was a huge success throughout the globe.
Here's a video showing you exactly what happened when Borat went campaigning to promote the movie.(I do apologize for the subtitles)
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