Charleston Daily Mail: MU Movie deal isn’t about dollars and cents

From the Charleston Daily Mail:

MU Movie deal isn’t about dollars and cents

George Hohmann
Daily Mail business editor

Thursday April 27, 2006

Marshall University’s movie deal isn’t bringing in much cash up front, but university officials say the arrangement is priceless in terms of the publicity from a high-profile, widely-distributed film and a 45-minute documentary about Marshall on the DVD.

State officials say West Virginia also has plunked down $250,000 for a five-minute promotion of the Mountain State on the DVD.

“What we see out of this from the business side is, clearly we are having the name Marshall disseminated throughout this country and the story of Marshall University,” said Keith Spears, Marshall’s vice president for communications and marketing.

“If you think of it from the business side, clearly the bonus we’ve received is the marketing of the name.”

The movie, which was the subject of filming in Huntington for much of the past month, focuses on the most devastating event in the university’s history, the 1970 plane crash that killed most of the football team, coaches and some boosters and reporters.

Marshall signed a release giving Warner Bros. permission to use Marshall’s name and logo, but didn’t ask for much else up front, Spears said.

“A little bit of money is changing hands but it is not significant, quite honestly,” he said. “We don’t get a cut of the movie or anything like that.”

“We did not go after any deep, cutthroat approach,” he said.

Instead, the university will receive unprecedented publicity from the film, which stars Matthew McConaughey as Jack Lengyel, the coach who took over the Thundering Herd for the 1971 season.

For example, movies typically are released on DVD soon after they stop showing in theaters. Spears said he asked Warner Bros. to put a feature about Marshall, as it is today, on the DVD with the movie because young people and families might want to know more about the university.

“The first reaction was, ‘The DVD is the property of the filmmaker and they don’t share space.’

But he persisted, asking for five minutes because Marshall is at the heart of the story. Then he asked for eight minutes.

“Ultimately they decided to give me 45 minutes,” he said.

Spears said his first reaction was, “How am I going to produce 45 minutes? They’re going to produce a movie that costs tens of millions of dollars. Something like that (45 minute documentary) costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to accomplish.”

Now Spears said he is writing the script and director McG is producing the documentary. There will be no cost to Marshall, he said.

“McG’s film crews have come in and interviewed people and will produce a 45-minute documentary on what happened to Marshall after the 1970-71 season. It looks like they’ll use football as a continuing thread, but also the growth of the university, culminating in a piece about Marshall and what it is today. We’re very excited about that.

“If you look at other football movies and marketing strategies, you’re talking about millions of DVDs ending up in families’ homes across the country,” Spears said. “That’s the kind of distribution a university the size of Marshall could never afford. Warner Brothers is paying for all of that.

“We’re talking something very remarkable here.”

Spears emphasized that Warner Bros. did not have to come to Marshall but instead could have gone anywhere else, hung up a Marshall sign and made a film. But instead, the filmmakers spent three weeks on Marshall’s campus, involving the university and community.

The release Marshall signed contains clauses about intellectual property rights “and a lot of issues that go into that,” Spears said. “Part of that is signing off on certain elements of the script. We’re very pleased they’ve kept us involved every step of the way.”

He declined to provide a copy of the release. Spears said the Marshall University Research Corp. signed it on behalf of the university. He referred a request for it to Marshall President Stephen Kopp.

“Most of this quite honestly is in a ladies and gentlemen’s agreement and thus far they’ve been responsive to that,” Spears said. “Everything they said they would do they are doing and everything they said they would not do they are not doing. We laid down three parameters,” he said. They are: