In writing about this year’s SXSW work-in-progress screening of The Disaster Artist, James Franco’s dramatization (drawn from co-star Greg Sestero’s book) of the making of the modern bad-movie classic The Room, I noted the challenges of marketing such a movie – specifically, it’s a movie that relies heavily on its audience’s familiarity with The Room, and though this may come as a surprise to that picture’s cult, not everyone has seen The Room. So the good people at A24 – who are quite savvy at marketing! – will have to emphasize the considerable star power of the cast (Franco, his brother Dave, Seth Rogen, Alison Brie, Zac Efron, Ari Graynor, etc.) and educate moviegoers on what exactly this phenomenon is, right?
Eh, not so much! Here we have the first teaser trailer for the movie, which eschews any of those notions, instead drilling down on a single scene from The Disaster Artist: the tortured shoot of one of The Room’s most notorious lines of dialogue. In other words, they’re going for the fans on this one.
Check it out:
Again, this is a teaser, so maybe the full trailer will make more of an attempt to reach out to the novices in the audience. Or maybe they’ll just go full-on insiders-only with this one, like some sort of (light bulb) James Franco performance art piece? We’ll find out soon enough!
The Disaster Artist hits theaters on December 1. Do I smell an Oscar push?