Week 7 [Seminar Notes] - Marketing and Paratexts

Week 7: Marketing and Paratexts in Hollywood

This session introduces some relevant methods and theories for your research essay, with examples of critical analyses based on ‘paratexts’ in circulation around a selection of Hollywood films. Materials considered will include posters, trailers, behind-the-scenes featurettes, websites, and social media. We will discuss the theory of ‘paratexts’ (Gray), and other relevant concepts, including ‘proprietary characteristics’ (Altman), ‘high concept’ (Wyatt), and the ‘discursive surround’ (Klinger). We will also look at various promotional materials produced for The Bling Ring as a case study of marketing in contemporary Hollywood.

Different elements of film marketing and promotion are there

- Viral marketing campaign and spreadability 

- Trailers

- Review and Interview snippets

- Creating narratives beyond the film texts in different markets

- Blair Witch Project people deliberately gave authenticity to the found footage to spark debate

- Participation

- Trailers

- Posters

- Interviews and other journalistic materials

- Toys and merchandising

- Uses of social media to make it engage

These are all about anticipation, participation and shareability. 

FIlm History and the Discursive Surround

-"Promotional forms...operate as an intertextual network specifically designed to identify a film as as commodity...Films circulate as products, not in semantic vacuum, but in a mass culutural environment teeming with related commercial significations." (1989: 9)

- Marketing, merchandising and hype pluralise a film by 'raiding' the text for 'capitalizable' features that can circulate on their own.

- The dissemination of images, characters, songs, stars, ideas and re-interpretations extend's the film's presencee in social arena of potential viewers.

Paratexts/Satellite Texts

- The term 'paratexts' first coined by literary theorist Herard Genette to refer to printed materials that surround the texts of a book

- Adapted into film and TV studies and expanded by scholars such as Babara Klinger, Janet Staiger, Jonathan Gray, Jason Mittell; sometimes referred to as 'satellite texts'.

- Encompasses all materails that circulate around a film or TV 'text' - including (but not restrcited to) adverts, posters, trailers, interviewers, reviews, DVDs extra, commentaries, games

- Entryway Paratexts - Before you view the film

- In Medias Res Paratexts - 'in the middle of the action' during or after viewing

(Gray 2010)

- Paratexts create filters/frames through which we experience the text, create viewing strategies, extended beyond the text and its initial consumption

"hype and surrounding texts do more than just ask us to believe them or not; rather, they establish frames and filters through ......"

Genres and 'Proprietary Characteristics

"By definition, genres can never be fully controlled by a single studio, whereas individual studios have exclusive access to contract actors, house directors, proprietary characteristics which are copyrights and trademarks that protect story/character properties.....

(Altman 1999: 115)

Watch Whiplash

Justin Wyatt and High Concept

Five key elements:

- Look

- Stars

- Characters

- Music

- Genre

- Marketability of the concept must possess a visual form, presentable in TV spots, trailers and print ads

- Modular aesthetic: songs, sequences are extracted for marketing merchandising