One night in mid-October, as the movie executive Tim Palen looked on with panoramic vigilance, a roar from jostling photographers seemed to freeze Josh Brolin’s grin in place. Brolin plays George W. Bush in Oliver Stone’s “W.,” a Lionsgate film that was having its première, and he was making such halting progress down the red carpet outside Manhattan’s Ziegfeld Theatre that he seemed to be still in character. Palen, who is Lionsgate’s co-president of theatrical marketing—the studio’s resident promotional genius—had been working for months to make people care about “W.,” a film that didn’t have an obvious audience; indeed, the film’s subject, in the intense focus on the Presidential election and the economic crash, had all but disappeared. This evening would be a kind of sardonic resurrection: a few yards away on the red carpet, James Cromwell (who plays George H. W. Bush) was slyly telling an interviewer, “I play Dennis Kucinich,” and Richard Dreyfuss (Dick Cheney) was posing in a green velvet jacket that made clear he was no Republican.

Tim Palen wants his core audience to feel that a film is theirs, one marketer says: “He gives them content that feels bloggy and street.” Illustration by John Ritter

When Brolin spotted Palen, his fixed grin became a real smile. He mimed opening a magazine with an expression of amazement, then rushed over and gave the marketer a hug. Brolin and Oliver Stone had taped an appearance on “Charlie Rose” earlier that day, and Rose had surprised the actor with a photograph that showed him yawning, flamboyantly, across a full page of the latest Newsweek. Palen, an accomplished photographer, had taken the picture in a session that also produced the film’s posters. Newsweek ran a lengthy essay about “W.,” which concluded that the film was, “surprisingly, more or less fair.” This had been Oliver Stone’s goal—and was now Tim Palen’s problem. His job was not to encapsulate the film’s artistry but, rather, to insist to a busy, jaded, and suspicious audience that “W.” would really stir them up. As Tom Ortenberg, Lionsgate’s president of theatrical films, told me, he had said at a marketing meeting, “Who wants to see an evenhanded editorial think piece from Oliver Stone?”

Publicity is selling what you have: the film’s stars and sometimes its director. Marketing, very often, is selling what you don’t have; it’s the art of the tease. A première lets the marketing and publicity teams join in a final effort to “eventize” a film, to move it to the top of the nation’s long to-do list. Many premières feel slack and dutiful, but this one had the fizz of a genuine event. Lionsgate, which, together with “W.” ’s other investors, spent about three hundred thousand dollars on the début—three times its usual outlay—later reckoned that coverage on “Entertainment Tonight” and “Access Hollywood” and in dozens of other outlets was worth more than a million dollars in advertising.

Palen, in silence, watched the parade of stars until Thandie Newton, the British actress who plays Condoleezza Rice, came by and he reached out to clasp her hand. “I’m such a groupie,” Palen sheepishly acknowledged after Newton glided on. “I’m a fourteen-year-old girl. But having a girl’s viewing habits”—he is devoted to “The Hills” and “Project Runway”—“actually comes in very handy.”

Palen, who is forty-seven, has a shaved head, a graying beard, and the bulging, tattooed arms of a steamfitter. Usually he wears jeans and a hoodie, but this evening he was in a black Prada suit, a black Prada shirt, and black Prada shoes: his première outfit. His uncommon mixture of traits—he is warm, incisive, competitive, loyal, and catty—makes him fun to be around, even at premières, where he often feels anxious and out of place. When Michael Pitt, an actor who was in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” ambled past in a ratty military jacket, Palen said, “I see he got dressed up. Headache and the Angry Itch.”

You have to have some of that spitballer’s attitude to do Palen’s job; you have to love a ruckus. Even as movie attendance has dropped nineteen per cent from its peak of 1.6 billion theatregoers, in 2002, the number of films released each year since then has increased by thirty per cent. A dozen new films—three of them big studio releases—now vie for attention on any given weekend. To cut through the ambient noise, major studios spend an average of thirty-six million dollars to market one of their films. “Most of a movie’s opening gross is about marketing,” Clint Culpepper, the president of Sony Screen Gems, says. “You can have the most terrific movie in the world, and if you can’t convey that fact in fifteen- and thirty-second TV ads it’s like having bad speakers on a great stereo.” At Sony, executives ask, “Can we make this seem ‘babysitter-worthy’? Will it get them out of the house?”

Lionsgate, smaller, scrappier, and stingier than the six major studios, has released such distinguished films as “Crash,” “Monster’s Ball,” and “Away from Her,” but it has made its reputation with edgy, low-budget action and horror movies, particularly the five “Saw” films. In August, the company opened a new production division to make a broader range of films, including romantic comedies. The studio has also declared itself willing to make an occasional big-budget “tent pole”; it has cautiously begun to take on the big studios.

These changes will place a greater burden on Palen, not so much of additional work—the line in Lionsgate’s marketing division is that every job already includes “D.F.E.,” or “Do Fucking Everything”—as of adapting his sensibility to new audiences, and of curbing his instinct, usually couched behind a restless politeness, that he knows best. Many Hollywood marketers construct their campaigns in slow-motion groupthink; Palen strikes so quickly that one of his regular poster venders calls him “the Cobra.” He believes that if you express a strong opinion, fast, others will fall in line. But he also has a pitiless eye. At another Lionsgate première, for “Saw V,” in Las Vegas, he glanced at the romantic-kiss photo on the Paris Hotel’s marquee and remarked, “I don’t like that fingernail.” It became impossible to look at the marquee and see anything but the woman’s lurid white-tipped nail against the man’s neck, glowing like the evidence of a murder.

Palen’s campaigns, which have won many of the movie industry’s Key Art and Golden Trailer awards, are witty and pugnacious, particularly the ones that are borderline pornographic. For the gory 2006 hit “Hostel,” Palen created a poster from his own photo of a giant chainsaw springing out of a nearly naked man’s lap. For his “Rambo” poster, last year, Palen chose a dripping stencil of Sylvester Stallone’s face which called to mind the famous Che Guevara image. “A lot of people wouldn’t have had the nerve to do a piece of street art that subliminally sampled the Che poster,” Stallone told me. “Studios usually crowd everything in, hoping to reach you with something—I’ve had posters with nine overlapping images. But Tim’s was a piece of art.”

Paul Haggis, the writer-director of the 2005 film “Crash,” says, “I came in thinking Tim was doing everything wrong. He made the poster Michael Peña screaming over his daughter, rather than selling Brendan Fraser or Matt Dillon or Sandra Bullock. I worried that the trailer, a mood piece about how people have to crash into each other to feel alive, was going to seem like overly significant claptrap. Then Tim and Sarah”—Sarah Greenberg, Palen’s co-president, who handles publicity—“came to me and said, ‘We’re going to go for an Academy campaign.’ I really, really thought they were crazy: this was a little six-million-dollar film.” For the cost of three full-page ads in the Times, about two hundred thousand dollars, Lionsgate sent more than a hundred thousand DVDs of the film to every member of the Screen Actors Guild—pioneering a now common saturation technique. In a huge upset, “Crash” beat “Brokeback Mountain” and “Munich” to win Best Picture.

“W.,” an earnest drama that punctuates George Bush’s struggle to emerge from his father’s shadow with satiric sequences set in the Situation Room, was rejected by several of the larger studios before Lionsgate agreed to make it. “We took ‘W.’ because of Oliver Stone, pedigree, and built-in controversy—controversy leads to marketing,” Michael Burns, Lionsgate’s vice-chairman, told me. Palen said, “I don’t know if everyone here loved the concept of ‘W.,’ but we felt we could kick some ass on it.”

Stone, in an early meeting to discuss the film’s marketing, told Palen, “I know you’re good with ‘Saw,’ but this isn’t ‘Saw.’ ”

Palen replied, “It’s also not ‘Crash,’ and it’s not ‘3:10 to Yuma’ ”—two of the studio’s hits. “It’s its own movie, and we’ll treat it as such.”

Marketers and filmmakers are often quietly at war. “The most common comment you hear from filmmakers after we’ve done our work is ‘This is not my movie,’ ” Terry Press, a consultant who used to run marketing at Dreamworks SKG, says. “I’d always say, ‘You’re right—this is the movie America wants to see.’ ”

To reëngage moviegoers with a dormant President, Palen spent twenty-three million dollars trying to tie the film to the long-awaited end of Bush’s term and to tap the same appetite for political ridicule that feasted on Tina Fey’s impersonations of Sarah Palin. Most of the movie’s trailers and TV spots were in the rollicking spirit of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which the studio also distributed: they featured Bush driving drunk, mouthing malapropisms, and looking confounded. At the close, Palen wanted to run a new banner ad on Internet ticketing sites and political blogs: “Sitting President,” a photo that he’d taken of Brolin as Bush on the toilet, posed like Rodin’s “The Thinker.” Stone vetoed it: he was concerned that Palen’s materials made his film seem giddy and trifling. “Josh on the toilet, that one I didn’t go for,” the director told me.

“I sympathize,” Palen told me. “Oliver Stone has the President taking a shit—how disrespectful. But from the marketing perspective we needed some teeth. Moritz Borman”—one of the film’s producers—“told me, ‘I don’t want to know about “Sitting President,” and if Oliver finds out and yells, I’m going to yell at you, too. But you have to do it.’ ” So Palen did. And Stone didn’t find out. (Borman says that he didn’t authorize the ad.)

Yet a number of Hollywood observers believed that no amount of marketing could save “W.” from being a “feathered fish”—a film whose target audience thinks it’s for someone else. “They made the movie look like ‘Animal House,’ a Judd Apatow film, and that audience won’t be going because they know it’s about Bush and politics,” one film-marketing consultant told me. “When the reviews reveal that it’s shockingly fair, the ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ crowd will stay away. And the people who like Bush are out once they hear it’s Oliver Stone. I think the film opens at five million”—disaster.

When Palen saw Stone on the red carpet, the men smiled and tapped each other on the wrists. Then Stone mischievously stuck out his tongue. “These are the duties,” Palen murmured as he watched the filmmaker move on. “We say ‘Hey!’ ” In effect, Palen had now passed the baton back. His work in selling what the studio didn’t quite have—a brisk, playful romp—would now begin to give way to what the movie really was. But not before the verdict on Palen’s marketing became clear, three days later, when the film opened.

One afternoon in June of 2001, Andrew Fogelson, a longtime Hollywood executive who had run marketing divisions at Columbia and Warner Bros., was driving down Olympic Boulevard in Santa Monica when he saw a billboard advertising “The Fast and the Furious,” a forthcoming film about street racers. The billboard showed only a streaking yellow sports car. Recognizing it as a Universal Pictures film, Fogelson picked up his cell phone and called his son, Adam, then Universal’s senior vice-president of creative marketing, at his office. “Adam,” he said, “what the fuck is this car movie, and why would anyone go see a movie about hubcaps?”

“That’s why I’m here, and you’re on Olympic Boulevard,” Adam Fogelson replied.

“What are you hoping for?” his father asked.

“Twenty million.”

“Lifetime?”

“No, opening.”

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“If that opens at twenty million,” Andrew Fogelson said, “I’ll eat it.” The picture opened at forty million. “My father saw a car, and not a particularly special car, at an angle on a billboard,” Adam Fogelson, who now runs Universal’s marketing department, says. “And he thought, How would that motivate? For us, that image was simply a graphic, readable reminder—an exclamation point—on a very expensive campaign of trailers and TV ads that had already got our target audience excited. If you’re my dad and you say, ‘What the hell is that?,’ it wasn’t for you in the first place.”

“In 1970, when I started,” Andrew Fogelson told me, “marketing was called ‘advertising and publicity,’ and it was a totally unrefined art that consisted of making posters that tried to capture the essence of the movie and said ‘Starts Tomorrow.’ ”

The business began to change in 1973, when “Billy Jack,” about a rebellious ex-Green Beret, was reissued by its writer and star, Tom Laughlin, after a Warner Bros. release fizzled. Laughlin’s company, Taylor-Laughlin Distribution, saturated the airwaves with television spots aimed at twelve different demographics—“carefully calculated overkill,” as one Taylor-Laughlin executive put it. When the film grossed a then enormous seventy-five million dollars, the studios suddenly understood that television ads really work. And if you’re going to spend a lot of money on advertising, they realized, you need to be in more theatres to amortize the cost. “Jaws” opened “wide” in 1975, on four hundred and nine screens, at the time a large number; big studio films now open everywhere on more than four thousand. And if you’re in that many theatres you need huge audiences as soon as a film opens—so you need a movie that sells itself. And then you need to sell the hell out of it.