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It may be Oscar worthy, but will it fill theaters?

Eight weeks into the movie awards season, the half-year regarded in Los Angeles as show-prep for the Oscars, Hollywood is already littered with smoking ruins.

While Malibu was burning last weekend, Ben Affleck and Miramax Films watched Gone Baby Gone do the same. The crime drama opened sixth at the box office with US$5.5 million in domestic ticket sales and little promise of much more to come.

Three spots back, behind the umpteenth rerelease of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, Reese Witherspoon and New Line Cinema did even worse with Rendition. This heavily promoted political drama took in just more than US$4 million.

As for Things We Lost in the Fire from Benicio Del Toro, Halle Berry and the DreamWorks unit of Paramount, why bother to torture the metaphor? The love-and-death drama took in US$1.6 million.

Putting aside questions of art -- not too many years ago, Marcia Gay Harden won an Oscar for her performance in Pollock, which took in less than even these films are likely to make by the end -- all three pictures, and a dozen more headed to the marketplace by Christmas, share a common business problem. They are what film marketers in their private moments call "movies for no one."

That doesn't mean they're bad pictures. It means they have no obvious appeal to any of the four big demographic groups at which Hollywood has typically aimed its wares: males 17 to 24 years old, males 25 to 49, females 17 to 24 and females 25 to 49.

The industry's more nuanced movies must work to find an audience. And the audience must work to figure them out.

But you can't blame a potential customer who can't see the difference between In the Valley of Elah from Warner Independent Pictures and Grace Is Gone from the Weinstein Co. Both are about dead Iraq veterans. At a glance, it can be just as hard to tell what separates Reservation Road, by Focus Features, from The Girl in the Park, a Furst Films product that popped up last month at the Toronto International Film Festival, the traditional starting gate for the annual awards race. Both explore a parent's obsessive grief over a lost child.

And if the movie business is to keep making these smart little dramas in which ambitious actors and prize-hungry filmmakers take their annual shot at the gold, it will have to start doing what car makers and packaged-goods companies have always done: Sharpen the message and narrow the targets.

"Clearly, there's room to do market positioning and concept testing research on every single movie," Chris McGurk, the chief executive of Overture Films said of the need to do something more than size up the effectiveness of ads that have already been created.

Overture is one of several newly funded companies, also including Summit Entertainment, United Artists, the Film Department and Groundswell Productions, that are about to make things tougher by flooding Hollywood's already crowded middle zone with still more pictures.

One of the film industry's dirty little secrets is that its nearly obsessive reliance on testing of movie trailers and ads has been undercut by the relatively primitive methodology of some research techniques. Studio marketing departments, for instance, have often relied on samples of 300 in testing materials, whether online or by other methods.

If that sample is divided equally into the four usual demographic quadrants, the response to a particular query in each group has an approximate margin of error of plus or minus 11 percentage points, as explained by Vincent Bruzzese, senior vice president of OTX, a market research company that handles much of Hollywood's testing.

Thus, a response in which 61 percent of men under 25 are revved up by a trailer is statistically the same as one in which only 39 percent like it. Even doubling the sample to 600, as OTX often does, yields a margin of error of plus or minus 8 percentage points by Bruzzese's reckoning.

That's still a pretty wobbly basis for deciding whether the high-stakes marketing campaigns, which routinely run to US$10 million or US$20 million for smaller movies, are actually getting through.

In the last few months, Bruzzese's boss, Kevin Goetz, president of OTX's worldwide motion picture group, has been working Hollywood's lunch tables and office suites with a novel proposition: that companies vastly increase the size of groups on which it tests promotional materials for its "movies for no one," a step that could put things in perspective for less than US$200,000, about the cost of four or so focus groups.

By using a sample as large as 10,000, Goetz contends, the distributor of a film like Rendition or Things We Lost in the Fire could pinpoint with great precision who might respond to a movie, "not just demographically, but behavior-graphically or psychographically."

In other words, they would identify inclinations of a possible customer. Then, instead of relying on instinct and experience to design and disseminate their message, marketers could follow a closely defined pool of likely buyers to their favorite Web sites, cable channels, magazine pages and stores, and reel them in far more efficiently than they do now with billboards, bus ads and full-page ads in the local newspaper.

To date, Hollywood has been wary of what sounds like common sense. But another few weekends as awful as the last one may change some minds.
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