“If we weren’t making decisions based on marketability, John Malkovich would be in every movie.” Tad Friend's New Yorker article about modern movie marketing is full of great quotes like that. (It's attributed to a nameless "movie marketeer.") Friend writes, "It is often said in Hollywood that no one sets out to make a bad movie, but the truth is that people cheerfully set out to make bad movies all the time. It is more accurate to say that no one sets out to make a movie without having a particular audience in mind." Here's the way it breaks down: "The collective wisdom [among marketers] is that young males like explosions, blood, cars flying through the air, pratfalls, poop jokes, 'you’re so gay' banter, and sex—-but not romance. Young women like friendship, pop music, fashion, sarcasm, sensitive boys who think with their hearts, and romance—-but not sex (though they like to hear the naughty girl telling her friends about it)...Older women like feel-good films and Nicholas Sparks-style weepies: they are the core audience for stories of doomed love and triumphs of the human spirit. They enjoy seeing an older woman having her pick of men; they hate seeing a child in danger. Particularly once they reach thirty, these women are the most 'review-sensitive': a chorus of critical praise for a movie aimed at older women can increase the opening weekend’s gross by five million dollars. In other words, older women are discriminating, which is why so few films are made for them." On the other hand, a marketing consultant named Terry Press told Friend that “Guys [i.e., "older men"] only get off their couches twice a year, to go to Wild Hogs or 3:10 to Yuma. If all you have [in your movie's target demographic] is older males, it’s time to take a pill.”

Although marketing divisions may be the enemy of the art of movies, there is an art to devising a successful marketing campaign. Friend spends much of his time profiling Tim Palen, a 47-year-old who has designed campaigns for Lionsgate films ranging from Crash and W. to Rambo and the Saw franchise. It was he who came up with the weird mix of gross-out provocation and graphic elegance that was the poster image for Saw II: a pair of severed fingers laid out to look like a "II." (The ad was designed to do its work before the movie was released; Palen had to rejigger it so that the fingers' stubs weren't seen before the movie could get an R rating from the MPAA.) Palen's campaigns sometimes have a touch-every-base quality; with W., he had to make the director, Oliver Stone, feel that his even-handed treatment of George W. Bush was being handled with the respect it deserved, while keeping in mind that telling the world how fair and even-handed the movie was would not likely cause panic at the box offices. (Palen was disappointed when W. failed to become the second-biggest weekend grosser because he had an ad set to go that showed a picture of the movie's star, Josh Brolin, sitting on the toilet with the words, "W. Is Number Two!"

Friend happened to be shadowing Palen while he was starting work on a campaign for a new Renee Zellweger comedy, which was originally called Chilled in Miami but is now called New in Town. Palen calls it "The Devil Wears Patagonia." (“Did you see Baby Boom?" he asks Friend. "It’s that. It’s that without the baby.”) Palen worked on devising a trailer for the film with David Schneiderman, who reports on Palen's reaction to the first try: "‘Where’s the Mary Tyler Moore?’ He said, ‘This girl goes to this little town in Minnesota and she’s a cold person, and they warm her up, right? More warmth, more style, more Devil Wears Prada. ’ And I said, ‘I don’t know where that is in the movie.’ And he said, ‘Create it.’ ” You might think that people whose job it is to sell movies to the public would find it helpful to at least put up a front of thinking the movies in question are, well, not garbage, and if you do think that, you may find it sobering to discover just how very wrong you are. Palen worked on a Jessica Alba comedy called Good Luck Chuck that was so bad that Palen can only say that he "got the film open, which was kind of a feat. America likes cheese.”