MARKETING THUMBS UP
Most movie marketing sucks, so when a campaign for a new film catches my eye and causes me to surf to the site and learn more about it, it’s worth throwing some props towards the filmmaker and marketing team. I first noticed the sweetly ironic posters for Mike Mill’s Thumbsucker last weekend in the East Village, and now the website is up. Check it out and you’ll find some of the usual materials (cast bios, a trailer, etc.) but also a lot of other stuff that seems personal and direct from the filmmaker. There’s a page devoted to the Humane Society, a link to the art publisher Iconoclast who will be releasing a photobook from the movie with pics from artists like Ryan McGinley, a fantastic Friends page, with links to various art, political, music and other sites, and a Thumbsucker blog on which Mills posts photos and diary entries from his current publicity tour. Here’s one with Mills talking about travelling with actor Lou Pucci:
“At about 5pm everyday a black car picks me and Lou up, takes us to the airport, we fly to the next town, check in at about 9pm, eat room service together, I listen to Lou’s script idea wherein Lucifer is actually a Buddhist – not as odd as you might think. I go to sleep and dream that my relationship with my girlfriend is a series of different flavor cough drop bags hanging from a rope, like laundry. She and I are small white balls that move down the rope and enter each bag becoming the different flavors, each flavor being a different part of her, and then we move on to the next bag. I wake up, try to call my actual living breathing girlfriend but she’s in a very different time-zone so all I get is missing her all day, like carrying around five dollars worth of nickels in my pocket. We begin our next day of press, we meet a new person every half hour, they come and go so fast, like David in Denver and Hugh in Minn – These guys actually run the theaters where people will watch the film. David brought me to his Mayan Theatre, a beautiful old theatre that was going to be demolished. A very magical movie is playing there right now…”
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