The Captivity campaign is proceeding exactly according to plan. Mwa haha haa hahaha!

There’s a lot of chatter going on about the billboards that Lionsgate and After Dark Films have created in L.A. and NYC for their upcoming movie Captivity. The billboard campaign depicts the movie’s lead character, played by Justin Timberlake’s biggest fan Elisha Cuthbert, shown in the throes of abduction, captivity, torture and death. Lionsgate, responding to multiple complaints about the exploitative and visually abusive nature of the billboards, has ordered them to be taken down. According to the L.A. Times, a representative from After Dark claims that the whole thing was a big mistake:

That ad was one of 50 or 60 concepts under consideration, he said, and before any were approved, this one ended up at a printing plant and up on billboards in L.A., as well as on New York taxicabs. “To be honest with you, I don’t know where the confusion happened and who’s responsible,” Solomon said.

To which I would reply that that guy probably just got the biggest raise of his life.

This After Dark movie campaign is doing exactly what it was created to do, and no amount of protesting by this guy who claims that it’ll be very expensive to take down all the billboards convinces me that this effect wasn’t planned from the beginning. What better way to generate buzz about a movie than to suggest that we’re all too skittish and terrified because we might glimpse some images of an actress pretending to be scared? Billboard production is neither cheap nor instantaneous, so I have a very hard time believing that not a single approver of such a campaign didn’t see graphic art files to be released, pre-production proofs, or supervised the production of a single billboard. All of these steps are standard operating procedure for the creation of something like this – namely, something high profile that costs a lot of money.

And although the tactic to create something controversial and then remove it “due to public outrage” in order to create movie buzz isn’t new, I really have to hand it to L.A. Times writer Steve Lopez, who might as well be on the Lionsgate payroll when he indignantly claims,

Hooray for Hollywood. I thought about ordering up a photo of the billboard for this column, but trust me, you don’t want to see it (whoops! Here’s one!). I felt like I needed to take a shower just from having been within a hundred feet of it…On the upside, it’s so insultingly violent and gratuitous, maybe people will be disgusted enough to stay home.

Yeah, good luck with that, Lopez. Because Saw, Hostel and the The Hills Have Eyes and TCM remakes – none of these mainstream neuvo-torture-porn films have found any kind of audience in recent years, so I’m sure your prediction will come true.

And by the way, how strange is it that Captivity has been directed by a 60-ish, formerly highbrow director like Roland Joffe?