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| 'Bonneville' rides into Valley | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| By Craig Outhier, Get Out | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| February 20, 2008 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
But when the new road movie “Bonneville” rolls out the scarlet weave this Friday at the Harkins Camelview — bringing with it Jessica Lange, Joan Allen and untold curious onlookers — it will mark a recent first for the Valley of the Sun: a bona fide, Hollywood-style movie premiere, with bona fide Hollywood stars. It’s unusual, but not unprecedented, for gala movie premieres — essentially, giant coming-out parties — to take place outside the media epicenters of New York and Los Angeles. (For instance, the Red Sox-themed “Fever Pitch” premiered in Boston in 2005.) But what compelled the producers of “Bonneville,” a movie with no obvious Arizona ties, to choose Scottsdale? The answer: money, demographics and innovative showmanship. Produced independently by New York-based SenArt Films, “Bonneville” — about three middle-aged women from Idaho who hit the road for bonding and self-discovery — doesn’t enjoy the “eight-figure marketing budget” afforded most studio movies, according to SenArt distribution chief Jeff Lipsky. To optimize the film’s budget, the company adopted an approach called “hyper-viral marketing” — essentially, a series of partnerships with brands and organizations that service the movie’s “female boomer” target audience. These groups include the 50-and-over Red Hat Society and the AARP. The company even designed a promotion with Princess Cruises to engender positive word-of-mouth, a phenomenon that the film’s first-time director, Christopher Rawley, likens to a “phone tree.” In keeping with the hyper-viral model, Lipsky identified markets where the coveted 40-and-up female audience was abundant. And what place fits that description better than the Phoenix metro area in late February, where snowbirds are still in season and the boomer-targeted “The Bucket List” registered the country’s highest per-screen average? “We decided to target one market and blow it out in a mainstream studio way,” says Lipsky. The movie will open in limited nationwide release on Feb. 29, including 30 screens in Arizona. That figure makes the state “ground zero” for the film’s success or failure, according to Lipsky. “Bonneville” wasn’t filmed in Arizona, but there’s another reason why the Valley is well-suited for the premiere: the movie’s faint, almost decorative underpinnings of Mormonism. As Arvilla, the widow who ferries her husband’s ashes — and her two best friends, played by Allen and Kathy Bates — to California in an early-model Pontiac Bonneville, Lange is playing a character based on screenwriter Daniel D. Davis’ Mormon grandmother. In one scene, a Book of Mormon is offered to a hitchhiker. In another, Allen’s character takes an unwitting swig of coffee and almost spits it out. These scenes may well strike a chord with the area’s Mormon population, but director Rawley refuses to brand “Bonneville” a faith-based film. “I’d describe it as a dramatic comedy,” he says. “Sure, it has an encompassing theme of faith, but it’s not religious in nature — it’s spiritual. It’s putting your faith in what may come.” If the Valley’s surfeit of middle-aged women and Mormons didn’t make the area attractive enough to the “Bonneville” brain trust, there was also Harkins Theatres — precisely the kind of market-dominant, mom-and-pop throwback that Lipsky wanted to partner with, so he wouldn’t have to “deal with eight different exhibitors.” (The movie will also play at several AMC locations.) It helped Lipsky and Harkins Theatres CEO Dan Harkins had a working relationship that goes back to the 1970s. Lipsky was an acolyte of maverick filmmaker John Cassavetes. Harkins was a theater biz parvenu determined to energize his family’s near-bankrupt company. And Harkins Theatres came to screen some of the great indie films of the decade — including Cassavetes’ “A Woman Under the Influence” and “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” — as well as later, Lipsky-distributed gems (Lasse Hallstrom’s “My Life as a Dog” and Jim Jarmusch’s “Stranger Than Paradise”). The way Harkins tells it, the red carpet premiere for “Bonneville” was his idea — as was making the event interactive. For $150, guests can walk the red carpet before the movie and party in the tent out back. For $300, they can hang out in a “green room” with the celebrities. Harkins will staff the gala with pseudo paparazzi if the genuine articles don’t fire off enough flashbulbs. (Nonpaying sightseers can also ogle the stars, albeit on the other side of the velvet rope.) “You’ll be breathing the same air, drinking from the same bar as the stars,” says Harkins of the paying guests, noting all proceeds will benefit the audiovisual arts department at Arcadia High School, which his children attend. “We’ve absolutely never, in the history of Arizona, had a star-studded premiere of this magnitude.” For the stars themselves, the Scottsdale premiere could make for a refreshing change-of-pace. Allen says she looks forward to reuniting with her colleagues in Arizona. (Co-stars Tom Skerritt and Christine Baranski will walk the carpet alongside Allen and Lange.) “We all had a very tight rapport on the set,” says Allen from her home in New York. “I loved how there were a lot of women on this movie. Usually I’m surrounded by guys. And I’d admired both Jessica and Kathy for a long time, so this was really wonderful.” 'Bonneville’ World Premiere What: Red carpet gala, movie screening When: 6:30 p.m, Friday Where: Harkins Camelview, 7001 E. Highland Ave., Scottsdale Cost: $150, $300 Information: (602) 222-4275 or harkinstheatres.com Contact Craig Outhier by email, or phone (480) 898-5683 |
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