The Greatest Movie Ever Sold Page #10

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and your budgets are being cut,"

Right. How are you going to make ends meet

without letting people go

or cutting programs.

- You gotta be creative.

- Yeah.

- Right there,

- Yeah, right there,

As low as $75 a month,

- I think it's a really great way to advertise,

- I love it,

- Yeah.

- Great. Done,

Look at that, you're two for two.

We're doing great, We're doing great,

We're on a roll now.

Now if I can just convince them

to name our building.

Oh, the building would be

the best thing ever.

- We're gonna work on that next.

- We're really gonna work on that,

Yeah,

So I'm David Laks

and I work with Morgan's team

and my role here

is to help facilitate interaction

between the sponsors

and all the people involved in helping

to promote The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.

This is what we're doing.

This whole thing's a bit layered,

because we're selling

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

but The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

will be selling all your products.

What's good for you is good

for the movie, good for Morgan, good for us,

it's all great,

Okay, so we set ourselves some objectives,

They shouldn't be too contentious.

They begin fairly robustly, I think.

Build buzz, for the purpose of selling tickets,

The audience is no longer an audience.

It's a partner in whatever communication

you choose to create.

The First two weeks in a movie are crucial.

There's a lot of reasons for this.

There's just more movies,

there's more content

there's more things in the world now,

so the cultural decay rate of ideas

is much, much faster.

So one of the lines we discussed

the very Erst time we met with Morgan

and the team was "Don't sell out, sell up!"

I kind of like that. Sounds good,

not sure what it meant, but I liked ii.

We wanted to extend that kind

of meta-narrative

down to the audience themselves

and make them involved

in the construction of the marketing.

There's a hope that when you sit down

in a theater to watch the movie,

you will see and understand

the flip-side of everything we did

to get you there because you would have

been involved with it in some capacity,

Hopefully making the whole experience

kind of, pleasingly circular.

Well, we wanted to either name a building

or we saw the mural she wanted to paint

on the back court of her school

which, to paint a mural there

would be fantastic.

The banners that she has are amazing.

I told him my school is for sale.

And say, "Well, boy, each of our sponsors

reaches 15 million people,"

We love the idea of the Board of Ed,

wrapping something here.

It's just, we're open to anything,

We have 12 sponsors,

and if we average out all the sponsors

and say, "Well, boy, each of our sponsors

reaches 15 million people,"

that is a lot of people to reach

with one viral promotion.

Since we do have a television station,

since I'm gonna have to pitch

our education television station

which represents a wonderful opportunity

for the Elm to co-brand,

we could maybe do a student film festival...

- A student Elm festival!

- A student film...

I thought about that idea

on the way to the meeting

so that could be a way to integrate and

to co-brand the film with our school system,

So, we're putting a sticker

on our bestselling pizzas

and that's gonna be a drive-to-web,

that'll be our micro-site

and we'll link up to the movietickets. Com site

and whatever else works out.

And we're gonna have a portion

of the proceeds of the sales of the pizzas

gonna go to feeding people at a food bank,

It's really up to you. If you wanna

do exposure on a building

- which then locks you into that,"

- I think a building is one thing.

- Okay.

- To do a building would be great,

To do, you know, a mural and some banners

would be fantastic.

To do the Elm festival would be amazing.

Morgan did Elm a video for us.

For everyone who has flown JetBlue,

you know that we have individual TVs

in each seat-back,

so we will run the welcome video,

I believe it's four to six weeks

leading up to the premiere.

How did you get financing

for the production?

It's being paid for by the companies,

it's being paid for by sponsors.

- Oh! Excellent!

- Yeah, Yeah,

Can you turn us over your sponsor list?

Maybe after the movie opens

we can talk about that.

- Okay.

- Yeah,

- Cool.

- Yeah,

What I've started to realize

over the course of making this Elm

is that once you open the door

to being what one person said,

one person called me, which is being

quote unquote "brand friendly,"

then that door is Open,

The floodgates are open and suddenly,

all of these opportunities,

different opportunities,

whether it's for promoting the Elm

like we're trying to do right now

or it's being tied to somebody else's product,

all these different opportunities

that represent real difficult

moral and artistic dilemmas

start popping up.

Here's a case in point.

Morgan, it's Ben Silverman giving you a caff.

Lve set up a new business

with Witt Arnett and Jason Bateman

that is focused on advertising production.

And we've got a really great idea

were working on

in and around the world of male grooming.

We want if to be funny and capture the tone

that you do so we!

And we thought of a fantastic brand partner

to work on it with us.

Give me a callback and we'll set something

up to introduce you to Will and Jason.

Thanks, buddy Bye.

How do you say no to that?

What's 3 Sell-Out?

A sell-out is someone that has no honor

and does something just for money

and doesn't take anything else

into consideration.

A sell-out is when, to attain a certain level

you give up some of those principles

that formed your identity to begin with,

So I'm making this Elm that's actually

being paid for by advertisers,

- by companies, about advertising.

- Right.

- Yeah. So am I selling out by doing that?

- I don't think so.

I mean, unless the point you're making

is that advertising is a bad thing.

Are you doing it with integrity?

- I hope so.

- And with a viewpoint of being objective?

Or are you doing it slanted,

for the side of the advertiser

as a puppet, doing whatever the

advertisement wants you to do?

As long as you do better than they do on it

then you're not... Then you're buying in,

IS that! Right?

Am 1 really not selling out?

Or am I finally just buying in?

Every sip gets you closer

to Justin Timberlake mp3s.

- Hey.

- Hey to you,

Seems like pushing a product

is the new standard for gauging success.

Today's superstar singers pitch for perfume,

action stars vouch for vodka.

Even America's Sweetheart

is the new face for a make-up company.

For a filmmaker like me,

this is pretty uncharted territory.

And to navigate these waters,

who better to tum to

than one of the most successful celebrity

spokesmen himself

The Donald.

Is there a difference between selling out

and being a celebrity spokesperson?

Well, the question's been asked

because I do a lot of different things,

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