Marketing The Chase (1966)

Oscar-winning film producers like Sam Spiegel – The African Queen (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Suddenly Last Summer (1959) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) – tended to abhor gimmicky promotions and depended on more classic marketing strategies to sell their pictures.

in this case, Spiegel relied on a 16-page A3 Pressbook (plus a slightly smaller four-page supplement) which in the main concentrated on a series of advertisements. Having said that, it was quite clear that Speigel considred his own name one of the movie’s biggest selling tools since his accomplishments were splashed over many ads and he took second billing to Marlon Brando. His name was above the title whereas that of director Arthur Penn was in a typeface smaller than all the leading players. Of the 20 pages available for original pressbook and supplement, a total of 14 were given over to the advertisements.

However, efforts were made to secure promotional partners. Harper’s Bazaar blocked out an eight-page section of its January 1966 issue for a fashion merchandising spread involving four top manufacturers – Ben Zuckerman, Originals, Larry Aldrich and Patullo-Jo Copeland – and 20 major retailers including Joseph Magnin in Los Angeles, De Pinna in New York and Couture Ltd in Chicago. New York exhibitors also benefited from marketing tie-ins from Horn & Hadart Co in its 88 restaurants and and Kinney System Inc. in 96 parking lots.

There was a big push in radio stations and record stores for the soundtrack by John Barry and in bookstores for the novel by Horton Foote published by New England Library with photos from the film on front and back covers. The closest Spiegel came to a gimmick was a tie-in with Barb-Q-Matic which sponsored barbecues for press previews and special screenings. The company had 1,500 distributors lined up to provide the necessary equipment and food.

Otherwise, the producer expected the movie’s various talking points to provide fuel for media discussion. The way in which a community deteriorates “from a group of average people into a mob of hatefilled manhunters” would be ideal fodder for newspaper columnists, radio discussion and screenings for law enforcement agencies.

Among the attempts to provide filler material for newspapers was the notion that those involved were global citizens – Brando flying in from Tahiti, Spiegel and Jane Fonda from France, James Fox from London, while screenwriter Llllian Hellman was living at the time in Mexico. This was also the first pairing of Brando with his sister Jocelyn and a return to the screen for 1930s star Miriam Hopkins.

A measure of the film’s scope was that it required five sound stages at Columbia studios in Hollywood. In order to achieve authenticity art director Richard Day traveled 3,000 miles to photograph southwestern towns, rice fields, junkyards and sugar mills. There was an unusually high proportion of night shooting – 50 days in total – and 500 extras were on call for some critical scenes.

Interestingly, there was no great promotional push for Robert Redford. Brando, Fonda, Janice Rule and Hellman were the first stars mentioned in the first page of the editorial section of Pressbook, followed on the next page by Angie Dickinson, E.G. Marshall and Miriam Hopkins. Redford did not appear until the final editorial page, allocated space along with Katharine Walsh and Diana Hyland.

There were ten separate adverts, some of which were altered in minor ways to create another half-dozen. One of the unusual aspects of the advertising was the thematic design of the title and the image of a running man. The main advert had Brando center stage in casual mode smoking a cigarette surrounded by a montage of characters and incidents with the tagline “The Chase Is On” and a list of the producer’s credits. The second advert was identical except for an extra tagline – “He was the right man in the right place…the day everything went wrong.” A third ad used the running man theme around Brando and split the montage which now showed some characters in different ways with a new tagline “A breathless explosive story of today” plus the Spiegel credits.

The fourth ad also split the montage but this time Brando was more aligned with the characters on one side and the Spiegel credit reduced to “the man who has brought the screen its most exciting productions.” The running man logo took pride of place on advert number six with six main characters featured at the edges each with a quote – e.g. Fonda: “I never asked for anything because I knew I wouldn’t get it.” A seventh advert used a montage in criss-cross fashion. Violence and sex were the keys to the eighth advert while the ninth featured “the women”, “the men” and “the excitement” of The Chase. The final ad was more suggestive, just the thematic typeface, the logo of the running man and the names of star and producer.