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Focus on Interactive
GHOSTS IN THE MA
Spielberg’s latest, AI: Artificial Intelligence, rewrites the rules for movie marketing. Are the days of huge poster campaigns and TV commercials numbered? Ceri Thomas logs on to a web marketing revolution.
Three years ago, the internet was definitely not Warner Bros’ favourite toy. Batman & Robin had just been unmasked as a huge turkey by the inter- net site Ain’t It Cool News (which ran reviews of hugely negative early test screenings) and Warners were fuming.
“Now anybody with a computer is a newspaper,” Warner Bros’ marketing head Chris Pula told Variety at the time. “One guy on the internet could start enough of a stir that causes a reactionary shift in a whole marketing program...” But now Warners seem to have changed their tune. Instead of resisting the internet’s ability to gener- ate word of mouth, they seem to have embraced it with the marketing cam- paign for AI: Artificial Intelligence, which opens here in September.
Spielberg’s movie opened in America in July and is loosely based on a Brian Aldiss short story called Super Toys Last All Summer Long, set in a future world where truly intelligent machines exist alongside humans. It was originally one of Stanley Kubrick’s pet projects. After Kubrick’s death, Spielberg took it over casting Haley Joel Osment, Frances O’Connor and Jude Law in the lead roles.
A co-production between Warner Bros and DreamWorks, the film seems
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to have two distinctly different strands of marketing. On the one hand there’s been the one the studios have officially told people about; the posters, the trailers and the well-designed but hard- ly revolutionary website.
Then there’s been the one they’ve... well, sneaked out.
When the film’s second trailer was released onto the web, Harry Knowles’ influential web site, Ain’t It Cool News, received a very strange e- mail indeed from someone calling themselves “Clavius Base”. The email advised Knowles and Co to look close- ly at two things on the trailer, the first being the trailer credits. Nestled in there was a credit for a “sentient machine therapist” named Jeanine Salla. Now Sentient Machine Therapists don’t exist (there are no sentient machines after all), but if you
run Jeanine Salla’s name through an internet search engine you come across a sprinkling of sites. There’s her home page for instance (www.jeani- nesalla.com) or the website for the University she works at (www.banga- loreworldu-in.co.nz). All claiming to be written in the future year of 2142.
The second clue revolved around a series of marks above the words “Summer 2001” at the end of the trailer. These break down into an American phone number (503 321 5122). Call that and you get through to a very strange answering machine message about “drowned apartment blocks” that points you towards TheVisionary.net. Go there and you enter into a cryptic mail communication that again leads back to Jeanine Salla.
Early visitors to the Salla website were told that she was at the funeral
for one Evan Chan, who died in myste- rious circumstances aboard his intelli- gent yacht Cloudmaker. Salla’s site then points users towards the Chan family website (www.familychan.org).
From there the trail spirals off into around 50 other websites. There are sites for the coroner who handled Evan’s autopsy, for the Sentient Property Crime Bureau, for the organi- sation that believes AI’ s should have rights and the society that believes they should be destroyed. A huge
22nd-century world has been created on the net.
Now, while this is on a bigger scale than before, you could argue that it’s nothing new. After all The Blair Witch Project’s website offered up a detailed fictitious backstory of death and horror on its website, while films like the X-Men created sites for anti-mutant organisa- tions only mentioned within the movie.
The difference with the AI sites is a) that until recently none of the movie companies involved were admitting they had anything to do with it at all (“It’s a complete blackout,” Harry Knowles told the BBC) and b) it’s not just the existence of the sites that is drawing webusers in. It’s the mystery of Evan Chan’s death.
You see, as you move between the various AI sites, you find yourself
C