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MySpace page helps "Stick It" at box office

Posted on: Wednesday, 3 May 2006, 01:36 CDT

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

Source: REUTERS

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