The Screening and Selling of Clueless

Once Clueless was edited and in mostly completed form, it was time to show it to key people at Paramount, then start test-screening it with actual audiences. Once higher-ups at Paramount could see they had something special (and potentially lucrative) on their hands, the marketing team, in conjunction with Adam Schroeder and others on Team Clueless, had to devise a strategy that would convince potential ticket buyers Clueless was something special, too. Fortunately, they had a couple of advantageous allies on their side: star Alicia Silverstone, who was already known to the coveted Clueless demographic as America’s Video Vixen Sweetheart, and MTV, which played a big part in promoting Clueless on a platform widely watched by future Cher Horowitz disciples.

Adam Schroeder, coproducer: We finish the film and then the director has ten weeks of cutting, and the producers get in there during that time, and you work with them, and then you show it to the studio. I remember we showed it to Sherry [Lansing] and the other executives in the Paramount screening room. And you’re a nervous wreck because you think it’s great, but God only knows you’re living in a bubble. After which you walk over to Sherry’s office, and I’ve done this many times since then, but you walk over to her office and she gives you her thoughts. And she literally said—we could hear her laughing in her seat and all, and that was always a good sign—she said, “This is fantastic. I don’t have anything I think you should change. I think you should lock it”—finish it, you know, color timing and any of the other kinds of things you do. And then she gave us more money for the soundtrack. It’s never happened to me before where it was just so positive and she was so incredibly supportive, and then gave a bit more money for finishing costs.

Twink Caplan, associate producer and Miss Geist: Sherry’s got the most engaging laugh. It’s this very beautiful, powerful laugh that makes everything okay. It’s like sprinkles. Amy and I were elbowing each other every time she would laugh. And we knew. It was . . . oh my God. Extremely exciting. I had my grandfather’s pocket watch around my neck just for luck. And I never bring it out, because it’s like one hundred years old. But it was incredible.

Sherry Lansing, former chair and CEO of Paramount Pictures: She’s right, Twink—I laughed my head off through the whole thing. I probably had no notes. I said, “I love it, I love it.” So I thought everyone else would, too.

Amy Heckerling, writer-director: There was one note, after seeing it, from Sherry. Alicia is looking all daydreamy and she says, “Looking for love in high school is like looking for meaning in a Chevy Chase movie.” And Sherry Lansing was like, “Oh, no, he’s a nice guy. I see him socially at some charity things and stuff. So can we change that from Chevy to somebody else?” So I put in Pauly Shore and it didn’t seem to hurt anything. I mean, maybe it hurt Pauly Shore’s feelings, which I’m sorry for. . . . That was the only note I got.

Arthur Cohen, chief of worldwide marketing, Paramount Pictures: Some movies, you have to open. Some movies, maybe you’ll open. And some movies you’d love to open. And this was one that we really loved to open.

Michelle Manning, executive vice president of production at Paramount Pictures: I think everybody thought it was going to do well. It’s not like it exceeded our expectations. Everybody had very high expectations for it. We had good screenings. Kids loved it.

Amy Heckerling: In Hollywood, they talk about these quadrants—there’s younger males, younger females, older males, older females—and how you want four quadrants [to respond positively]. The scores were sort of uneven in that it really spiked with the younger females. So I was kind of afraid, because this other movie I had done that had done well, Look Who’s Talking, that had much higher scores [across all four quadrants].

I thought Clueless was good, if not better. Everybody’s got their own personal favorites, but it was shocking that the numbers weren’t nearly as high and they just really spiked in that one quadrant. And I was like, Oh no, what should I do? After the screening, Sherry showed me the numbers and I said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” And she said, “What’s the problem? We’ve found our audience, now we’re going to sell it.” So they were cool. They were fine, they knew what they had to do. They knew what would work.

Adam Schroeder: I feel like it was a different time where maybe young girls, I don’t know, thirteen to thirty-five, wasn’t a quadrant that was gone after in such a way. But it was a quadrant that wasn’t being served, either. Maybe Sherry realized that was going to be a great thing for this film. But those test screenings are always terrifying. Because you always leave in doubt even if you get great scores.

Sherry Lansing: That demographic was so strong, and maybe this was one of the first films that really tapped into that demographic of young girls. It remains so strong today with The Hunger Games, with Twilight, whatever it is. Young girls coming out is enormous, and then that spreads.

Elisa Donovan, Amber: There was a test screening that Alicia, Donald, Justin, and myself, and Paul Rudd, went to, and we all sat in the back row. And as soon as the movie was over, I just looked at Alicia and I was like, “You are going to be a huge star.”

Debra Chiate, editor: I remember having meetings after the screenings and all the executives were excited. Like, how can we start the lingo going on talk shows?

Arthur Cohen: At the beginning of any of this stuff, you release a few photographs, a few things to long-lead press, and you start building a budget. But you really can’t do much until you see enough of the film to know whether it’s good or not.

If you start building a budget that’s large, it’s hard to come back off of it with the talent. And if you build a budget that’s too small, you’re not servicing the movie right. It was a B+ budget. This was a phenomenon that was manufactured.

The important thing in movies like that, and Forrest Gump, and Titanic, and other movies we’ve done, is once you’ve set a tone and a goal, you have to stay true to it. If you breach it—and this was pre-Internet even—the audience knows it right away.

Setting a tone for marketing Clueless meant selling the movie as something fun, glossy, and youth-oriented. That approach permeated everything, from the movie’s one-sheet (the Hollywood term for the movie poster); to in-theater displays, or standees; to TV commercials; to the cutesy Clueless swag distributed to members of the media.

Michelle Manning: I remember it being about the girls and that one-sheet. Everything was sort of stylized and pushed. It was to make something, not hyperreal, but more fun and not edgy. So it was about showing the wealth and the spirit of the movie.

Adam Schroeder: We were doing the poster shoot for the one-sheet and we went back to the house where we shot [Cher’s] house. The photographer David LaChapelle was shooting the one-sheet, because often we got people—Herb Ritts would shoot one-sheets. You want beautiful photography. So David LaChapelle shot the one-sheet art, and then we also had this really fantastic in-theater standee. The one-sheet was the three girls on the steps of Cher’s house with the phones . . . in their best outfits that they wore. I think they were outfits from the movie. Then the standee was the three girls, and they were putting on makeup, and it was a big heart thing that had a mirror treatment on it. So it was like they were looking into the mirror. It was expensive. It wasn’t just a cardboard cutout. They spent money to make this special, unique thing, which was pretty cool.

Except I remember I was at the AMC Universal and it was in the front lobby and I was all excited: Ooh, my first movie and look at this great standee! And I’m looking at it and some people are coming over to look at it. And I’m like: Ooh, let me hear what they’re going to say. And I remember these teenage girls said, “Ooh, what’s this? A movie about teen prostitutes?” It was kind of crushing. . . . I went home very sad.

Arthur Cohen: We didn’t take it too seriously. If we saw a [TV] spot, if somebody tried a spot that we liked, we would put it on the air without testing it. Because we knew—there were four or five of us who knew what it was. And once we knew what it was, it was easy to do things.

Amy Heckerling: The executives told us: “We’ve got a team that’s so excited about this stuff.” The marketing people were making little dictionaries and they were giving out fluffy pens . . . [it was] the stuff that you gave to the writers and press people, to make people excited about it: Here’s this special little world you’re going into. In case you don’t understand, here’s a little vocabulary guide. It was very cute. They were jazzed. They were coming up with ideas for things they hadn’t ever done before.

As far as selling merchandise to the masses goes, Schroeder says that attempts at prerelease cross-promotion with other products didn’t really go anywhere.

Adam Schroeder: We tried. I know we tried. But it just wasn’t a known quantity. And I remember we showed the movie to MTV very early on to do our thing with them, and I think there were attempts to show it to other, possibly, marketing alliances. It just wasn’t that desirable. Because it wasn’t known and it didn’t have a cast that was famous and all.

Ultimately, generating interest in the movie came down to a couple of key things: selling the allure of Silverstone and making maximum use of Paramount’s connections with sister company MTV. Prior to the release of Clueless, Silverstone’s face was splashed across magazines like Entertainment Weekly and Seventeen. And in the days immediately before the movie opened, she was on MTV on a practically hourly basis.

Adam Schroeder: Alicia had currency and we really put her out there, and then we put the other cast members out there as well. Then once the movie came out, Alicia really took off in a huge way.

Arthur Cohen: [Alicia’s] agent was difficult, okay? And not constructive. And that’s all I’ll say.

Alicia was fine. Alicia was actually pretty great.

What she did, she really hit it big. She was smart enough to know that a movie is more than just ninety days shooting. You’ve got to do the rest of it.

Adam Schroeder: MTV Films was just starting at that time, they were just starting their label. Viacom [Paramount’s parent company] owned MTV and MTV Films was going to do movies. And we came to them, maybe before we even made it. We said to them, “Would you be interested in partnering with us and making this your first MTV film?” And they passed on it.

They didn’t feel this was what an MTV film was going to be or should be. We said okay, fine, it could have been a good alliance . . . but then, the movie turned out really well. We went [back to MTV] and we showed them the movie and they loved it. We ended up doing this huge marketing alliance with MTV, where we produced these special interstitials. We came back and shot five little one-minute pieces, with Alicia and some of the other cast, totally original, that they spread throughout their programming for the couple weeks prior.

Sherry Lansing: One of the things that we were incredibly blessed with when Sumner Redstone bought the company was that MTV became a sister to us. And a sister we could often use to market to that young demographic.

Adam Schroeder: We did these special shoots and one of the shoots we actually did was a confessional, like in The Real World, where Cher is in a room, and she does a confessional about something that happened to her. So we really tried to tie into the MTV programming with our characters. You know, with the same production team and all. It was a big deal.

Arthur Cohen: I think during the last week [before the movie came out]—this is from memory, but we were on air every twenty minutes. So that’s a lot.

Ken Stovitz, Amy Heckerling’s agent: The great irony was that I begged [MTV Films] to get involved with the movie and then they didn’t, but they just sold it like shit on their network. I mean, they sold it like crazy on their network.

Adam Schroeder: To have that kind of exposure on MTV—and you know, movie studios will buy time to play the trailers and TV spots on MTV and other networks. But this was its own dedicated campaign, which was really, really cool.

Arthur Cohen: The reason it was hard for, we’ll call—I’m looking for the right term—the outsiders [to predict the movie’s success] is that for teen movies, you spent the bulk of your [marketing] money in the last four days. So, you know, you really drive it home. Most of them make up their mind [about what to see at the movies] in the last forty-five minutes. I’m telling you the truth. It may have changed, because time has passed. But that’s the way it was.

[Clueless was] the most fun [project I worked on at Paramount]. Titanic was the most satisfying, Forrest Gump was extremely satisfying. Braveheart was amazing and a miracle. This was the most fun. Everybody liked each other, everybody was having a good time, everybody would call one another and say, “I just got this great idea!”

For a marketing department, the greatest thrill for everybody that I’ve observed over the years is when a movie comes out of no place and, because of your effort, it becomes something. This is one of those movies.