Some viewers faint during ‘127 Hours’ , but is that a marketing nightmare or dream?

0

LOS ANGELES
— Two at the Telluride Film Festival, three at the Toronto
International Film Festival and one at the Mill Valley Film Festival.

If that were a list of trophies for the new movie
“127 Hours,” which opens Friday, the filmmakers would be overjoyed. In
fact, it’s a partial tally of people who have collapsed during early
screenings of the movie about a real-life hiker who amputated his
forearm after a falling boulder pinned his hand in a remote canyon.

“I started to feel like I was going to throw up,” said Courtney Phelps, who was watching “127 Hours” at a recent Producers Guild of America screening in Hollywood
and grew ill just as the amputation scene ended. “So I went to the
bathroom, and then I started feeling dizzy and my heart started racing.”

Phelps fainted on the restroom floor, and was
treated by paramedics who had been called when another moviegoer
suffered an apparent seizure. “I have never had, even remotely, an
experience like this,” she said. “I’m a television producer. I know
this stuff is not real.”

Evidently, that doesn’t matter.

Filmmakers always hope their work will affect
audiences in powerful ways. But the strong physical and emotional
responses generated by “127 Hours” have not only surprised director Danny Boyle and his creative team — they’ve also presented a delicate marketing
challenge for Fox Searchlight, which co-financed and is distributing
the $20-million movie.

“I would prefer that people not pass out — it’s not a plus,” said Stephen Gilula, the studio’s co-president. “We don’t see a particular publicity value in it.”

Still, Gilula said the swoons — besides the incidents in Telluride, Toronto and Mill Valley,
there have been at least eight more at other preview screenings — prove
the film’s artistic power. “It’s the most empathetic experience I’ve
ever seen,” he said. The movie, rated R for “language and some
disturbing violent content/bloody images,” opens Friday in limited
release, with more cities set to be added in the coming weeks.

Such fainting spells aren’t unprecedented in Hollywood,
though they’ve been much more commonly caused by horror movies like
“The Exorcist” and “Alien,” nightmare-inducing films intended to shock
patrons with scenes of projectile vomiting and creatures bursting forth
from human abdomens.

In some cases, extreme audience reactions have been
used to help drum up interest in the film. Last year’s “Paranormal
Activity” was promoted with shots of moviegoers recoiling in their
seats, and the colorful B-movie producer William Castle
stationed fake nurses in theater lobbies for his 1958 release “Macabre”
and offered life insurance for ticket buyers who feared they might die
of fright.

But “127 Hours,” loosely adapted by Boyle and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy from hiker Aron Ralston’s memoir, is hardly a fright flick. It is intended to be, and critics are
singling it out as, a highbrow drama for sophisticated moviegoers.
Awards prognosticators have picked it as a likely nominee for best
picture in this year’s Oscar race. (Boyle’s last movie, “Slumdog
Millionaire,” won eight Academy Awards, including best picture,
director and adapted screenplay.)

“127 Hours” stars James Franco as Ralston, who in 2003 was trapped by a falling chockstone in an isolated gully in Utah’s
wilderness. Having told no one where he was headed and hiking with
scant supplies, Ralston knew that if he didn’t free himself he would
perish from starvation, dehydration or exposure. Five days into his
ordeal, Ralston figured out that if he broke the two bones in his right
forearm, he would be able to use a dull multi-tool to saw through the
flesh, muscles and tendons that bound him to a certain death.

Although Boyle does not depict Ralston’s backcountry
surgery in medical-school-like detail, his cameras do not shy away from
some of the amputation’s grislier steps, such as when the hiker snaps a
spaghetti-like nerve strand. Like much of the movie, the procedure is
filmed in a realistic, documentary style, with the camera sometimes
mere inches from Franco’s body.

Boyle employs a variety of sound effects during the
amputation, amplifying the bone breaks with a gunshot and the
nerve-cutting with an electronic vibration. As he’s chipping away at
his flesh, the hiker quietly says — in a line perhaps directed as much
at the audienceas himself — “Don’t pass out.”

In real life, it took Ralston nearly an hour to
sever his arm; the sequence in the film lasts only a few minutes. But
for a small percentage of moviegoers, its intensity outstrips its
brevity.

In addition to the film festival faintings, four
people dropped at a “127 Hours” preview at Pixar Animation Studios,
according to a person in the theater; three people fainted at the
Producers Guild screening; and one person passed out at a research
screening in Huntington Beach, Calif.
(the studio and test screening company Screen Engine said that the last
casualty returned to the theater to give the movie a grade of
“excellent”). There have been no reports of lasting sickness, and Fox
Searchlight says it is not changing its marketing materials to caution
moviegoers.

The team behind “127 Hours” has different theories
about why the movie is affecting some people so strongly, many of them
hinging on Boyle’s filmmaking style. Other directors might have cut
away from Ralston to show the rescue effort, but Boyle keeps his
attention on Ralston in the canyon. Boyle said he intended moviegoers
to share Ralston’s predicament so intensely that they would root for
him to escape as if their own lives hung in the balance. “I wanted it
to be a subjective experience,” Boyle said.

Perhaps he succeeded too well.

“I am almost looking into the camera at times, and
it almost feels like I am talking to the audience,” Franco said. “It’s
a very intimate experience. One of the reasons the reaction is so
intense is because you’re so invested in the character. When you go to
a horror movie, you know the characters are just expendable. So you
don’t care at the same level.”

Although some early “127 Hours” viewers have averted
their eyes during the amputation scene, few people have walked out of
the theater, which producer Christian Colson said is
“a testament to the power of the movie.” He said the fact that it
dramatizes an actual event magnifies the audience’s reaction. “That
makes it more real for people,” Colson said. “They are in the
experience. And that’s for the whole audience, not just the fainters.”

Gary Meyer, a co-director of the Telluride Film
Festival, where “127 Hours” enjoyed its world premiere in September,
said that if he books the film into his two-screen Balboa Theater in San Francisco,
he would post a sign warning patrons about what’s in store. “I believe
we will say that the film includes intense sequences, or something to
that effect,” Meyer said.

Jason Squire, who teaches about the movie business at the University of Southern California’s School
of Cinematic Arts, said that the fainting reports might actually boost
box-office receipts for “127 Hours.” “Are you kidding? I think it
really helps,” Squire said, speculating that the film’s intensity could
prove especially appealing to teens and young adults. “They’ll wait in
line an hour earlier.”

———

(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.

Visit the Los Angeles Times on the Internet at http://www.latimes.com/.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.