Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Viral Film Marketing: A Brief History Of ‘Sweding’

Swe·ding (swee'ding) 1. verb. To express your love for something by imitating it in a way that is obviously an imitation. Especially the act of a fan remaking a beloved film with no budget. 2. noun. A marketing campaign from New Line Cinema for the Michel Gondry directed film Be Kind Rewind.

Alison at IFC Blog was kind enough to help us get the word's origins straight:

In the film, a character comes up with it spontaneously while attempting to placate a customer — I don't think it's meant to evoke anything at all. Erik Davis at Cinematical has a bit on this: While explaining "Sweding," Gondry says: "I wanted a name that meant nothing. I had in mind, like, the suede shoes -- a fake velvet. A sort of ultra-suede? But I always get the word wrong because I'm French."

Gondry's film is about a couple of hapless VHS Video Store clerks who have to swede the inventory of their store in order to keep product on the shelves after a massive tape demagnetization mishap. The film has taken sweding one step further by using the sweding practice in all aspects of the film’s viral marketing campaign: Gondry swedes the film's own trailers, Youtube users are invited to swede scenes of their film favs on Be Kind Rewind's YouTube channel, and the film’s website stages a breakdown of the Internet and quickly swedes a site.

Sweding is basically remaking with no dollars. With a lot of love, duct tape, and well, that's about it. The joy of sweding is the gap between the lack of resources available to the sweder and the sweder's tremendous love for what is being sweded. Anyone can pay tribute with a budget; sweding is paying tribute despite the fact you don’t have a budget. That's true love.

While Gondry might be the first to put a name to this phenomenon, the practice has been around for awhile, and, if the New Line Cinema marketing team has their way, it will reach critical mass in 2008. Who are some notable sweding pioneers? Keep reading...

The best known sweder is Max Fischer from Wes Anderson's Rushmore, a precocious youth who swedes Serpico on stage. Indeed, the peculiar charm of Anderson's films, the key to their nostalgic overtones, is that they seem to be a swede themselves of some missing, yet familiar, original. In some sense, Anderson's films swede the 1970s, ransacking it for its kinder gentler foibles and putting it on as a children’s play with all of the clothes mom and dad don’t wear anymore. Fischer’s sweding had a brief cultural moment in 1999, when The Max Fischer Players sweded versions of all the nominated films at the MTV Movie Awards.

However, while Max Fischer might be the best-known sweder, the real heroes are Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala and Jason Lamb. These three intrepid lads were so inspired when, as kids, they saw Raiders Of The Lost Ark when it was released, that they decided to make a shot-by-shot remake. Which brings us to the key of sweding: children are natural sweders, possessing the mix of tenacity, unhealthy obsession, joy and wonder that the best sweding is founded on. These kids were committed to their vision; at one point, their mania for realism left the basement rec room in flames. After shooting for 7 years, the completed work: Raiders Of The Lost Ark: The Adaptation had a successful run at Austin's Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, and in a perfectly logical turn of events, Scott Rudin brought rights to make a biographical film of the guys' obsessive and wonderful odyssey. The sweder becomes the sweded?

Whoops, but someone else sweded Rudin to the punch. The 2007 Sundance comedy Son Of Rambow is the story of two tween-aged friends trying to remake the 1982 Stallone film Rambo: First Blood. The film looks like fun and captures the 80s nicely, though like so many British feel-good films, it seems a bit twee. The trailer is fun: I love being reminded that “Reckless Behavior” is cause for a PG-13 rating.

Sweding has been brewing for years and 2008 would have been the perfect time for it to blow up -- or at least become an organized Youtube hit. However, promotion for Gondry's film started too late to give it the audience and users that would have turned it into a bona fide Internet phenomenon. To date the film's YouTube channel is underused and while Jack Black and crew ran a plug encouraging people to swede, with the possibility of the sweded nuggets making it onto the film's website, last I checked it looked like only one was posted. In theory, this marketing campaign is the sort of interactive tech-savvy fun that should take viral marketing to the next level. So far it hasn’t. Possibly, it could grow into the cultural vernacular in time for the DVD release.

Posted by Drew on 02/12 at 10:08 AM
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