A 'Passion' for promotion
March 16, 2004

William Castle Jr. was the master of hyping and promoting films into becoming unlikely hits. Though he died more than two decades ago, his marketing and promotional spirit lives on.

When I first heard of the Mel Gibson movie "The Passion of the Christ" and the controversy surrounding it, I thought of Bill. After all, consider the subject matter, the violence and the fact that the film wasn't shot in English. Would there have been a small audience for such a film in a normal release? Yes, of course. But grosses in the hundreds of millions of dollars? No way.

Bill broke into Broadway productions in the 1930s, went to Hollywood later in the decade and began directing films for Columbia, including "The Whistler" (1944) and "Crime Doctor's Man Hunt" (1946).

He also began using gimmicks to hype his films: For instance, for "Macabre" (1958), theatergoers were issued a life insurance policy that was payable if any audience member died of fright while watching the film. Castle's gimmicks were nothing short of brilliant: Using wired plastic skeletons to frighten theatergoers watching "The House on Haunted Hill" (1959), buzzing movie seats for "The Tingler" (1959) and 3-D for "13 Ghosts" (1960).

In the early '70s, my partner Herb Lazarus and I traveled from New York to Los Angeles on behalf of Screen Gems in order to sell our new season's television shows to our major international buyers. We met with the producers of our pilots, and invited them to our client lunches and dinners so we could show them off.

The most interesting was Bill, who at that time was making a series called "Ghost Story" for NBC and Screen Gems. At lunch one day, Bill told Herb and me a story that we absolutely loved.

Bill had acquired the rights to a play set in Germany in the mid to late '30s. He produced it on Broadway in 1939, with a German actress playing the lead. On opening night, Bill and a few friends were at Sardi's, waiting for the reviews, and sadly, every one of them was terrible. Bill of course was disappointed by the reviews, but he quickly decided on a course of action.

He called some of his actor friends and put them in the uniforms of the Nazi Brown Shirts, complete with swastika armbands. They proceeded to paint the outside of the theater with swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans. They put up crude posters, threatening the star and Castle with death if the show continued. He had a photographer capture this, and early the next morning he called for the press to come to the theater to view the blatant acts of these "ruthless Nazis."

Bill told them of his commitment not to be intimidated, and to continue with the play. He would risk his life in order to protect his artistic freedom! Instead of the production being closed down, the publicity given by the susceptible press allowed the show to run for almost a year.

Dishonest? Perhaps. But as a genius of promotion, Bill was most certainly among the best.

It is fair, in my view, to compare Mel Gibson to Bill Castle. Both were inclined to "sell" something, and both of them succeeded.

As a Jew, am I happy with the Gibson film? No, I'm not. But at the same time, nothing could or should be done to stop it, or any other creative or artistic work. I can only wonder what the public's reaction would have been if Gibson's film had offended blacks, or Asians?

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