NP? movies & the War & "business upside"

[pynchonoid]

Military using its promotional arms in theaters  
	  
By Dana Calvo, Times Staff Writer 

Aware that Americans' perception of war gets fuzzier
with each generation, the Marines and Navy have joined
forces for the first time to produce a polished
four-minute, 48-second movie trailer full of
Hollywood-style scenes and sound bites from the war on
terrorism.

Until the trailer debuted last month at theaters in
Southern California, New York and Denver, moviegoers
had not seen a rah-rah military booster film since
World War II.

"Enduring Freedom: The Opening Chapter" cost the
military $1.2 million to make. The high-quality
mini-movie is designed to bolster civilian support for
the armed forces. [...]

Regal Entertainment Group, which as the nation's
largest theater chain owns a quarter of the screens in
the country, now is showing the trailer on 800 of
them. A company spokeswoman said that it has received
some complaints but that it is getting mostly
favorable reviews.

On Monday morning, the company issued a statement that
read, in part: "The first year of the war against
terrorism has required the great sacrifice of many
men, women and their families. Regrettably, the
American public's recognition of the accomplishments
and sacrifices of these young patriots has been
short-lived. It was our intent to inform and educate
the public with this film. It is not intended to be
propaganda."   [...] 

"Enduring Freedom," which is also the name of the
Pentagon's campaign against terrorism, could play on
all of Regal's 4,000 screens by the end of next year.
This week, the military is awaiting opinion poll
results from theatergoers who saw the trailer.

For Regal, "Enduring Freedom" is a patriotic rollout
of its new $65-million digital network, which the
company aims to implement nationwide by the end of
2003.

The digital network enables Regal to download
advertisements and trailers from a satellite on an
individual screen basis. The technology made it
attractive to the military because it avoided the
distribution costs of a traditional reel.

It offers a business upside for the chain too. "The
ads we show now have not been really satisfying for
us, financially," said Lauren Leff, Regal's vice
president of communications. "We have static slides or
commercials they made for television that they are
transferring to a 40-foot screen."

In addition to playing before some children's flicks,
"Enduring Freedom" has been shown before films that
include "The Four Feathers" and "Sweet Home Alabama."

The trailer was made by American Rogue Film in Santa
Monica, which took studio-based cameras and modified
them into hand-held equipment to take on location and
into battle.

"We trained 12 cameramen from [the] Marines and Navy
and picked four of them. They had to have good eyes
and be technicians. We had to feel secure that if one
of these cameras broke on a carrier, they could fix
it," said Lance O'Connor, owner of American Rogue Film
and one of the trailer's producers.

The camera crews went with two anti-terrorist squads
onto the Indian Ocean and into Kabul, Afghanistan.
They also shot off Hawaii; at Twentynine Palms; Yuma,
Ariz.; and at bases in Norfolk, Va.

After several months, they had 250 hours of footage;
the leftovers will be crafted into recruiting
commercials and DVDs. The technology, O'Connor said,
was superior to anything his company has done for the
military in 10 years of advertising campaigns. For
starters, Raytheon designed infrared lenses to put on
the cameras, so footage of U.S. troops taking over
Kandahar, Afghanistan, at night enables glimpses of
what O'Connor described as "real Taliban in there." 


http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-et-dana15oct15,0,4722893.story?coll=cl%2Dcalendar









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