Some six or seven years ago, the smart people at New Line decided on a marketing strategy for their absurdly risky venture. They would get the Mavens on their side.
You see, there happen to be quite a few Tolkein Mavens in the world. Many of these are also fantasy-movie mavens, or more general fantasy-lit mavens. They know, and care, an awful lot about The Lord of the Rings, and they have that sense of ownership that the Simpsons writers parodied in the Comic Book Guy (“You owe me”). Once New Line decided to invest, they could be sure that there would be people talking about the movies for the next several years.
That could be good or bad, of course. The screenplay would be very different from the books. Some things have to be cut to fit the expected nine-hour runtime, and many people would find their favorite thing left out. In addition, some things had to be invented or changed, and that would drive people up the wall. Word would eventually leak out about this or that change, and the Mavens could take against it, and they would certainly tell there friends, and people would be comparing it to Dune well before it actually got projected against a screen.
In fact, they made a deliberate, concerted effort to woo the Mavens. They made some nicely judged leaks. They set a few people to hang out on the Usenet and report nasty rumors. They contacted people who had LotR websites, and gave ‘exclusives’; they put a lot of stuff on the web (while keeping a lot of stuff secret as well). Most of all, they gave the (probably correct) impression that the filmmakers were Mavens as well; and that they cared a lot about the sorts of things the Mavens cared about.
By the time a lot of the specific changes became clear, many of the Tolkein Mavens reacted pretty well. They accepted that the filmmakers had to make some tough choices, and they argued plusses and minuses of those choices in ludicrous detail, but with, for the most part, a certain sympathy. And they had lots of cool stuff to talk about, too; early costume sketches, photos of the aging of Hobbiton, and rumors about the incredible stuff they were doing with Gollum.
Not that every Tolkein Maven was satisfied. But lots of them were really eager to see the movie, and told all their friends and acquaintances, and stopped strangers on trains to tell them, six months before the movie came out. The Mavens provided a substantial amount of the publicity for the movie. They were an army of publicists, paid only in respect. It seemed to work out OK.
Of course, it helped that the movies were worth the wait.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
Has Gibson done something similar with Passion?
How was Dean’s meet-up and house parties different from this? (Have you see Meetup?)
Follow up to previous comment on last entry… are online Connectors connectors of people to information, not people to people? Are they some crossbreed between Mavens and Connectors as Gladwell characterizes them?
Hmmm… I really ought to be working, here!
Yes, you make an excellent point. Mel Gibson used the Law of the Few to promote Passion, and did it skillfully and successfully.
Dean’s campaign (remember that Gov. Dean didn’t decide on the Meetup strategy himself) attempted to do something along those lines, but failed to identify the Few. What they got was a small section of the Many, which was enough to raise money but not enough to start a social epidemic. Another excellent example, and a telling one about how tricky it is to use the Few.
R.I.,
-V.