Three Men and a Baby

The entrance to the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank, CA.

I worked for Walt Disney Pictures on the the Walt Disney Studios lot (500 South Buena Vista Street, Burbank, CA, 91521 - but who's counting?) in Burbank for just under a year from mid-1987 to mid-1988.

The department I worked in was called Creative Film Services.  With a name like that, any idea what the department did or produced?  I'll give you a clue: we were a division of the Marketing department.  You would see our work every time you walked in to a movie theater.  Some of the work we did would go on to become valued by movie memorabilia collectors.  You would hear our work on the radio and see it on television.  If it's any consolation, I had no idea what the department did either until I started working there.  Give up?

Creative Film Services was basically the in-house ad agency for all of the feature films released by Walt Disney Pictures and Touchstone Pictures (Touchstone released all the PG and R rated films that might not be considered worthy of the family-friendly Disney name).

The print side - where I toiled - produced the large, glossy "one sheet" or "lobby" posters of films that you see every time you enter the lobby of a movie theater.  The print department also produced the graphics that would make up the print ads that would be placed in newspapers and free weeklies around the country.

Down the hall was the A.V. side of the department that produced the radio and TV ads and "coming attractions" or "preview" trailers.

Walt Disney Pictures had just exited a long period of creative and financial stagnation, and under the new management of Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg - both new to Disney after successful runs at Paramount Pictures - would greatly increase the slate of films produced, as well as diversify the subject matter.  Disney was not just going to produce family-friendly, G-rated, kiddie fare anymore.

I was brought in, on a temporary basis through a staffing agency, to be the assistant to the Director of Creative Film Services, basically the Art Director on the print side.  He was a young, brash, temperamental New Yorker who had graduated from a highly regarded Art & Design school in New York and then been recruited from an ad agency in New York to come West and help create this in-house ad agency for Disney.  He was definitely a fish out of water in Hollywood, but he had artistic talent.  Most importantly in that business, he could produce work quickly.

It would be a couple of months before I would learn that he had previously gone through assistants like Bon Jovi goes through hair products.  Everyone was amazed that I stuck.  He was definitely a difficult person to work for, but we got along fine.

I arrived in the summer of 1987 - fresh out of college - and the studio was starting to ramp up the marketing of what management thought would be its big Holiday hit at the end of the year - Three Men and a Baby.

The lobby poster for Three Men and a Baby.

Three Men and a Baby, starring Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg and Ted Danson, was a remake of a French film that followed three working professionals, confirmed bachelors, who found themselves suddenly responsible for a young baby girl.  Comedy hijinks ensued.  None of the stars were "hot" or expensive at the time, and the film was shot in Toronto (less expensive due to the exchange rate).

It was what the new Disney management loved most in a film: low risk, low budget with the possibility of a high reward.

About a month after I started working in the department, when it appeared I was going to stick around for a while, I was told to go into an empty office and watch a videotape of the latest cut of Three Men and a Baby on a small TV.  It was a still a couple of months away from its release date, so the cut was very rough - the music hadn't been scored yet, there was plenty of ADR, Foley and sound mixing work that still needed to be done, the print wasn't color corrected and the transitions (fades, dissolves, wipes, etc.) were still indicated with marks on the film from a grease pencil.  I was familiar with looking at a film in this condition because it looked just like the prints of films I had worked on in college.  It was the first time, however, that I had seen a major studio film under these conditions.

I sat alone in the office, admittedly not the best of conditions to view a comedy, for ninety minutes and watched the movie.  Maybe it was the fact that I was getting paid to watch it, or the thrill of seeing a work print of a major studio picture for the first time - or perhaps the undeniable giddiness of watching the great Steve Guttenberg - but I thoroughly enjoyed the film.  I was definitely on board with everyone else at the studio who seemed to think this would be one of the biggest comedy hits of the Holidays.  Scheduled for release on Thanksgiving weekend, it would be a great date movie for couples of all ages.

Or so I thought.  You never knew for sure in that business.  There were stories of plenty of movies that everyone inside the studio loved before it was released, and tested well for preview audiences, only to die a quiet death once it was released in the open marketplace.  This was going to be the first time I would form my own opinion on the financial viability of a film long before it had been released to the public.  Would my opinion hold up?   In Hollywood, the public is ALWAYS right.

One of my main responsibilities in the office was to catalog and organize the literally thousands and thousands of large, white, hard cardboard composite sketches - internally known as "comps" - that were mock-ups of prospective one sheet posters for a movie.  The sketches and concepts for a movie's poster would start as soon as the movie went into production.  Everyone working on the marketing of the movie would have access to the original script and a rough cut of the film shortly after it finished production.  We would also see hundreds of production stills - photographs from the set of the movie - that would give us an idea of the look and feel of the film.

I would estimate that Disney had about 30 films in various stages of production while I was there - from the most recent "greenlight" picture that would eventually be titled Cocktail and star Tom Cruise (which I read before it was produced and just didn't understand why they were making it), to the carefully calculated re-releases of such Disney animated classics as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella - and each one of these projects had 100 - 200 composite sketches for the final one sheet poster.  It was common for my boss to ask me to gather 15-20 composite sketches of an upcoming release that were first presented to studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg six months earlier, and that he wanted to see again in his office in ten minutes.

The iconic Mickey Mouse water tower on the Disney Studios lot in Burbank,

I found it was quite common that if the perfect concept was presented in the initial marketing meeting for a movie - even if everyone loved it and thought it was perfect - the entire department went through the same steps and machinations and produced hundreds and hundreds of these composite sketches only - always at the last minute - to return to the idea originally presented in the first meeting six months earlier.

If you move to a new town and are looking to buy a new house and the first one you see looks perfect, you're still going to spend a couple of more days looking at homes to see if anything better is out there, right?  It's human nature.  I was amazed how often the first idea out of the box won the day.

As concepts and ideas started to become clearer and details of the artwork and copy came into focus,  in-house copywriters and freelancers on the outside would come up with pages and pages of tag lines - the catchy and clever one or two sentences at the top or bottom of a movie poster that make you interested in seeing the film - from which only one line would be chosen to appear on the finished poster.

My boss encouraged me to have a go at copywriting and I did submit pages and pages of taglines for a couple of movies that were in production, but I didn't have a knack for it and nothing ever stuck.

I was involved with a lot of the accounting (billing, invoices, payments, etc.) on the posters and art work that went through our department, and I saw that our typical budget for a major studio release was about $200,000 (double that in today's dollars).  That included trips to the film location and New York for my boss, paying artists to draw the hundreds of composite sketches along the way, paying the copywriters,  paying a name celebrity/fashion photographer for a photo shoot, or an artist for the final artwork if it was a painting and the cost of the final run of 5,000 or so glossy lobby posters.

If memory serves me correctly, well-known celebrity/fashion  photographer Annie Leibovitz did the photo that would wind up as the artwork for the Three Men and a Baby poster.  My department worked with her and Greg Gorman quite a bit, but I think she did that one.  Their typical rates were $15,000 - 20,000 for a one or two day photo shoot (again, double that to get the equivalent in today's dollars).

(Side note for Trekkies:  Most people probably don't remember that actor Leonard Nimoy directed Three Men and a Baby.  As the director, he had some input to the marketing of the movie.  I never met him in person, but spoke with him several times over the phone, and he was always polite, friendly and intelligent.)

Three Men and a Baby was finally released on November 29, 1987.  It grossed $10 million on its  opening weekend - a smash hit - and would go on to make over $150 million in the U.S. - the highest grossing film released in 1987.  I guess I was able to smell a hit.

At the same time that my department was working overtime on marketing Three Men and a Baby - a film that everyone felt had big, commercial smash hit written all over it - I was rooting for a more serious, sometimes violent, melancholy war film with comic moments starring Robin Williams - who was not a big box office draw at the time - that was directed by one of my favorite Directors: Barry Levinson (Diner, The Natural, Tin Men).

The studio's faith in the film was shown by the fact that they quietly released it on only four screens during the last week of of 1987.  Shot on a low budget of only $13 million dollars (double that for inflation and that would still be a very low budget Hollywood film), it would go on to gross over $100 million and garner Robin Williams an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.

Come back next week and we'll discuss what I learned about film marketing on Good Morning, Vietnam.