Production Diary - Day Eight

I have to start getting the word out about this Kubrick Napoloen documentary I am financing. I like problems that tickle my brain but I find publicity and advertising to be tedious to consider. I know that making a movie is literally launching a new business each and every time and entering a crowded marketplace where I will be competing with the Fortune 500 as well as Michael Moore. My primary impulse in backing my pictures lies with story. I will be living intimately with the story for years so if it does not excite me on a gut level I will certainly lose interest in the project. So the trick is to sell others the same way I sell myself; I have to launch a movement of strong supporters for the story. I have tried to convince the director to take the same approach in his community and raise money for a location production kit he can use for this shoot. He is resisting becoming what in his mind would be either a shill or a charity case. Hopefully he will not denigrate charity for much longer. He's still young and has plenty of time to learn. Which gets me to the point of this entry today. I hope to reverse engineer publicity for the Kubrick Napoleon documentary. I will have to brainstorm some ideas on how do it but I already have an idea that will use Google Adwords. I will keep you posted.

Picture of the day. Marilyn and Ella, a musical based on racial unity set during the Jim Crow era of the United States of 1955, opens this weekend in Stratford. It is selling out quickly. Kubrick put brown faces in his first three mid-century features, Fear and Desire, Killer's Kiss, and The Killing. No brown people in the French trenches of Paths of Glory, but he has Laurence Olivier kill Woody Strode in Spartacus, put James Earl Jones on board the cold war bomber in Dr. Strangelove. Then Kubrick travels to the future and to 18th Century Europe where they keep the brown faces out of sight. It isn't until Kubrick has Jack Nicholson kill Scatman Crothers at the Overlook Hotel in the Shining do the brown faces reappear.