MySpace page helps “Stick It” at box office

By Sheigh Crabtree

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – As the first-time
director of a studio feature, Jessica Bendinger worked overtime
to mobilize a core constituency of sports-minded teenage girls
to come out and see her film “Stick It.”

While Box Office Mojo forecast that “Stick It” would make
$5.7 million, the movie surprised boxoffice observers by
collecting $11 million and a $5,301 per-screen average when it
opened last weekend.

While the Walt Disney Co.’s Touchstone Pictures promoted
“Stick It” in a condensed two-week television campaign — with
10- to 15-second television spots on syndicated shows like
UPN’s “America’s Next Top Model” — the movie had no outdoor
marketing, minimal radio and one print ad in the Los Angeles
Times on Friday.

But behind the scenes and online, Bendinger and one of her
stars worked as evangelists to woo potential fans. Through
niche sports outlets and a MySpace page, Bendinger and crew
hoped to rally fans to hang up their gym bags and keyboards and
turn up in droves at the 2,000 theaters playing her gymnastics
movie.

“I tried to do some missionary work, but it’s hard, you
don’t want to piss people off,” Bendinger says of taking some
of the movie’s marketing into her own hands. “Disney’s a very
political place, and I’m a straight shooter.”

Nevertheless, the first promotional opportunity she seized
upon came to her in a roundabout manner.

In January, actress Vanessa Lengies (who plays the snotty
and boy-deprived Joanne Charis in “Stick It”) asked Bendinger
whether it was OK to set up a MySpace page for the movie.

“I knew MySpace was a cool thing, but I hadn’t had the time
at that point to investigate it myself,” Bendinger says. “So
Vanessa built her own really cool, primitive MySpace page.”

A few weeks later, Bendinger hired a person to work on the
site full time. Out of her own pocket, she paid a freelancer
$100 a day for four weeks to get friend requests, leave
friendly comments, send out birthday messages and build
targeted traffic for the page
(http://www.myspace.com/stickitmovie).

“We really strategized about our audience,” Bendinger says.
“First we sought out gymnasts, then cheerleaders who are likely
to be familiar with ‘Bring It On,’ then people who like (the
band) Fall Out Boy (because) it’s all over the movie and then
gay guys.”

Through those efforts, Bendinger’s homegrown team was able
to build up to 6,000 friends on the “Stick It” page.

“It was really a way to soothe my anxiety and to feel like
I was doing something in this purgatory period between after
the picture was locked and before the campaign was launched,”
Bendinger says.

Disney took over the MySpace site when the official
campaign began two weeks ago by adding special features. A TV
campaign that kicked off around the same time helped the site
grow to more than 10,000 friends by Friday.

Still, Bendinger is under no illusions that one Web page,
no matter how targeted or graphically snazzy, was enough by
itself to vault “Stick It” to gold during the weekend.

“MySpace is not going to be what the movie hinges on,” she
says. “Is 10,000 enough to open a movie? No. However, 10,000
friends who have anywhere from 50 to 3,000 friends each who are
seeing that page — the awareness certainly helps a great
deal.”

In a parallel effort to drill down to her constituency,
Bendinger hired gymnastics writer John Crumlish to write press
releases for all of the NCAA gymnasts who appear in the movie.
The releases were used to launch a campaign with college
magazines and newspapers, and Disney is using them on the
movie’s official Web site.

Bendinger also worked with Disney to package a special
mailing of the “Stick It” trailer and the Missy Elliott video
“We Run This,” the first single from the movie’s soundtrack, to
International Gymnast’s 30,000 subscribers. Many of the
recipients represented the movie’s target audience: the 3,000
private gymnastics clubs in the U.S.

“I wanted to do what I could for my own piece of mind,”
Bendinger says. “And I was definitely covering my butt and the
movie’s butt as best I cold given our limited resources.”

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter