‘Oh, well done! I commend your pains, And every one shall share i’ th’ gains’
IDEA No 61
THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT
On 30 July 1999, a couple of amateur filmmakers released an indie flick that would challenge Hollywood’s preconceptions about how to make and market a film.
The Blair Witch Project cost less than $50,000 to shoot. Filmmakers Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick developed a script around three students investigating a local legend. They provided the framework for the story and then dropped the cast on location with the camera equipment. Each day, the three actors would improvise the dialogue and shoot the film themselves. The hand-held, amateur-looking footage they shot gave the film a documentary feel.
The film was screened on 24 January 1999 at the Sundance Film Festival. The opening sequence portrayed the events as real. ‘In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary .... A year later their footage was found.’
Artisan Entertainment picked up the film for $1 million, as intrigued by the background story as by the film itself. They created a website leveraging the idea that the film was the product of recovered videotapes. By adding police reports and interviews with grieving parents, they added to the mystery. Background information on the legend was supplied to online communities interested in the supernatural. Instead of broadcasting to the passive masses, interest was stoked in those most likely to talk about and share the legend.
As Sánchez puts it, ‘We had created this whole mythology and I just kept massaging it and building more details into it. Really for us, it wasn’t about creating this whole new way of marketing films. People are on the Web asking about this movie, how else are we going to get it to them?’
But create a new way to market films is exactly what they did. The weekend the film opened, Artisan bought a full-page ad in Variety. It read: ‘Blairwitch.com ... 21,222,589 hits to date.’ It was the first film advert promoting a website rather than the film itself. For the first time, the website was as much a destination as the film.
Shot by amateurs with virtually no filmmaking experience, The Blair Witch Project demonstrated that in the age of the Web, anyone could reach a global audience. And even more than that, if you engaged that audience, they would market the film for you. For free. The message of The Blair Witch Project resonated far beyond Burkittsville Woods.■
‘The Blair Witch Project demonstrated that in the age of the Web, anyone could reach a global audience.’
1999’s The Blair Witch Project changed how films were promoted. Artisan Entertainment had the vision to see the potential of the Web beyond an online trailer.