Paramount Used to Buy 'True Grit' Novels to Hype Up Film

 

Call it deceitful or dishonest, but you have to hand it to the marketing arm of Paramount in the 1960's.  In an interview with the New York Times, former Paramount publicity executive Bob Rehme, confesses that he hyped up the 1969 version of True Grit prior to the movie's release by finding out which stores were used to gauge sales for the New York Times Best Seller list and bought boxes of books from those stores.

Here's an excerpt of the New York Times Article:

Mr. Rehme recalled sending out members of the Paramount office staff to buy boxes of books from stores that, according to his information, were being monitored by The New York Times in compiling its best-seller list. (These days a dagger symbol next to a book on the best-seller list indicates that booksellers have noted bulk sales.)

“It worked,” maintains Mr. Rehme, who then circulated all those books to people in the news media and others, pumping up interest in a story Paramount was promoting as “a brand-new brand of American frontier story.”

By the time the original “True Grit” started shooting, the Hollywood trades had pegged the novel as the No. 2 best-selling book in the country.

Awesome, though it's impossible these days to do this with online retail and The New York Times probably has a much more sophisticated way of factoring sales.  Still, you can see examples of these type of shenanigans in digital platforms such as the App Store for the iPhone, or the Facebook application store.  But these days, the instead of having to create name recognition by using inventive ways to hype up films, studios just purchase rights to classic, well known brands or characters.  I'm just waiting for the day someone makes a movie called Coca-Cola which is considered the most valuable brand in the world.  Call me crazy, but just the name recognition alone will produce at least $250 million at the worldwide box.  

Comments

[Shaun]

The Coca-Cola Kid? Eric Roberts in the performance of his career. A film literally about Coke. Check it out.