The Deluge

At first, in Hollywood's golden sky, it looked like a cloud no bigger than a publicity man's handout. But by last week it was a fat thunderhead of pressagentry that threatened to soak the U.S. right down to its grass roots. Paramount called it a "motion picture merchandising method...which sets a completely new standard in harnessing opinion-influencing power to film promotion."

The picture in the cloud, Samson and Delilah with Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr, will not be released until January, but last week Producer Cecil B. DeMille's special emissary, Actor Henry Wilcoxon, had left Hollywood to turn on the downpour in 25 major cities. With him was Pressagent Richard Condon, who planned the campaign, and luggage containing 400 pounds of promotion material and special gadgets. Wilcoxon's mission: to pour it on for six groups of "public opinion leaders" in each city--women's clubs, churches and religious groups, school officials, fashion designers, manufacturers and retailers, the press, radio and TV and film exhibitors.

In San Francisco and Seattle, where Wilcoxon made his first two-day stops, each group got the appropriate tea or cocktails, a recorded greeting from DeMille and a 40-minute spiel from husky, suave Henry Wilcoxon. The actor, who plays a military governor in the film and goes on drawing his $1,000 weekly salary while spreading the good word, promised them that the picture would offer not merely entertainment, but education, inspiration, food for thought--in short, just about everything but salvation. ("...A story of love and lust, brutality and kindness, despair and hope, strength and weakness...")

All this was just a starter. Other Condon gimmicks:

P: Sunday schools will get a 16-mm. film assembled from earlier uplifting DeMille epics, plus just enough of the new one.

P: A breakfast-cereal manufacturer will print "tens of thousands" of packages of "Samsonized" corn flakes.

P: Grade and high schools will get film strips, audio-visual materials, mimeographed throwaways, all with a soupgon of the Paramount gospel.

P: Leading Paris designers will create gowns of the Minoan period (the film's setting), and Seventh Avenue will turn them out to be sold by 600 stores through the length and breadth of the land. (Says Condon: "We've got more on Minoan culture than Arnold Toynbee.")

Paramount planned to shoot a cool $1,000,000 on the promotion, boosting total cost to $5,000,000. And for all anyone knew, it might even be a good movie.

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