Mining 'Brokeback Mountain'

WSJ.com - Hollywood Report: "To Make Hit, Studio Wooed Women, Weighed Venues; New York's Microclimates

Like microclimates in Napa Valley that can produce dramatically different wines, neighborhoods in Manhattan can draw entirely different audiences: Chelsea attracts gay viewers, the Village students, the Lincoln Center-area affluent boomers. Word of mouth from a Manhattan opening can determine with what audience a film succeeds or fails.

Normally, "Brokeback" would have opened in downtown theaters in the SoHo-East Village areas -- typical for an art-house film. Instead, on its opening weekend Dec. 9, Mr. Foley placed "Brokeback" into a megaplex in Chelsea, another uptown at Lincoln Center, and only one near Greenwich Village.

At the same time, Focus has been marketing "Brokeback" as an epic romance aimed at women. The movie's poster advertises that "Love is a Force of Nature," and the movie's trailer shows seven shots of tender romantic and happy moments between Mr. Ledger's and Jake Gyllenhaal's characters and their respective wives and families. By comparison, only three shots in the trailer show husband-wife confrontations over the gay affair. (Focus executives say the marketing materials are the same nationwide.)

The studio also carefully selected the movies to which it attached the promotional trailer for "Brokeback," with the idea of targeting female viewers, Mr. Brooks says. One was "Flightplan," with Jodie Foster, whose fan base is heavily female. Another was the Charlize Theron drama "North Country," since its theme -- women confronting bias at a Minnesota mine -- had a strong female appeal.

And as the weeks pass, the demographics of the "Brokeback" audience have shifted. Gays turned out for the first weekend, with 60% of the audience male and 40% female. But in the next three weeks, women responded to marketing and the audience flipped to 60% female and 40% male. Now, as the media attention intensifies in the wake of the film's wins at the Golden Globes, heterosexual men are going to the film on their own and the women are sliding back down to the mid-50 percentile, Mr. Brooks says."