An Open Letter to MT Carney From Julian Myers, “Hollywood’s longest active movie publicist”:
Welcome to “Hollywood.”
We understand you have new methods of winning customers, and we could use them. Our costs of film production are high, and fresh ways of raising revenues will enable us to keep investing ambitiously.
Because the budgets on most of our pictures are in the tens of millions they must “open” on their first weekends or they are regarded as failures. To prevent this from happening you would be wise to spend 90 percent of your marketing budgets in the ways that “Hollywood” has found are most productive. Use the other 10 percent in “your” ways. No doubt you’ll open our eyes with your innovative advancements, yet you will not be endangering yourself by abandoning our current give-the-picture-a-chance techniques.
We hope we will have the pleasure of your association for a long time, so we urge you to protect your tenure by supplementing your methods with those that are scoring today.
We’re learning from “Avatar” and we can learn from an adventurer. We have just protected the Hollywood sign, and you can help us protect “Hollywood.”