Last year, Oscar-winning producer Jon Landau passed away from cancer at the age of 63.
Landau served as executive vice president of feature film production at 20th Century Fox in the early 1990s before leaving that post to work as James Cameron’s right-hand man and producing partner for decades – starting with 1997’s “Titanic”.
Next month, a memoir he wrote titled “The Bigger Picture” will be published posthumously and now an excerpt has gone online via Variety which looks at how the ovewhelmingly negative buzz surrounding “Titanic” was changed – and it all came down to a very long trailer.
The “Titanic” trailer was famously long – clocking in at 242 seconds, when most trailers at the time were restricted by the MPA to be no longer than 150 seconds and anything over required special dispensation from them. Landau says even then, it all came down to the trailer screening at ShoWest (now CinemaCon):
“We ultimately convinced Sherry Lansing, Paramount’s chairperson and CEO, to veto her own distribution department and let us test our trailer at ShoWest…
Our trailer was long. To us, it seemed proportionate to the length of the movie. And necessary. It was the first footage almost anyone outside the studio and production team had seen of “Titanic.” The stakes were high. Everyone was tense. We’d spent five years and $200 million. At times, it seemed like the whole world was rooting for us to fail.
Rae Sanchini [executive producer] and I sat at Paramount’s table at ShoWest with some of their top executives and biggest names, including Kurt Russell, the star of their upcoming film ‘Breakdown’. I sat nervously as our trailer played in that banquet hall in Las Vegas, and just as it ended, Kurt Russell loudly announced, ‘I’d pay ten dollars just to see that trailer again’.”
The special dispensation came from the MPA shortly after, and then the trailer was unleashed upon the world. It changed everything: “from that day on, every negative article about the film ended with the sentiment that the movie might actually be good. It was a real turning point.”
The full “The Bigger Picture” book will release on November 4th.
