“The Undefeated” is being screened for D.C. reporters all day, with the film’s director Steve Bannon on hand to answer questions. After the screening I saw, Bannon revealed that the movie would start to arrive in theaters on July 15, in a limited release in a couple of states. (Andy Barr says the states include
, funny enough, Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.) The movie now has a distributor, Cinedyne, and its ad campaign will start up next week.
“Every day next week, there’ll be another announcement,” said Bannon. “Look, this is not Batman : This is going to have to be smart. There are going to be radio ads, newspaper ads, Internet ads.”
Palin herself won’t be involved in the promotion of the film. Bannon didn’t want to involve her in the production in any way; he just showed the completed film to Todd and Sarah, and was pleased when they were “blown away.” Palin’s voice does appear in the film as clips from the Going Rogue
audiobook, which Bannon licensed.
“It’s great for them,” said Bannon. “They’re going to sell more books. They’ve got a film coming out.”
The movie cost $1 million to make, and Bannon was perfectly confident that it would succeed. Ideally it would break big with a mass audience, but even if it didn’t, there was a built-in crowd.
“There’s enough Palinistas out there, although I certainly didn’t make this for the Palinistas,” he said. “They know this stuff anyway. I made it for a middle class audience that doesn’t really know anything about her, doesn’t know what she’s really accomplished.”
I’ll have a full review of the movie tomorrow; for now, I can say that Bannon went into detail about a release strategy that made much more sense than the release of Atlas Shrugged , before anyone goes and makes that comparison.
“It’s very unusual for a documentary, unless it’s a Michael Moore documentary, to get into a theater, to have a major theatrical release,” he said. “People aren’t used to seeing a documentary that’s two hours long and about a political figure. Not in summer. The SVOD, VOD, pay-per-view guys, say this is a perfect product for us – this is something families can order and sit around and watch.”
