Free Slick by Daniel Price Page B

predicted that X-Men would open between twenty-eight and thirty-one million, our forecast said fifty-four-point-five. It opened at fifty-five point-one. Was it exact? No. But compared to everyone else, that’s like throwing a key in the keyhole.”
    “But how can you be sure?”
    “We’re only eighty-two percent sure,” I stressed. “But that’s still more than the NRG can give you.”
    The National Research Group, the child of a Dutch media conglomerate, was the current prognosticator of choice for all the major studios. Their methods were ridiculously archaic. Three times a week they phoned a sample of four hundred people and bothered them with intrusive questions: How old are you? What’s your skin color? What’s your income? Have you heard of Battlefield: Earth ? Okay. Do you think you’re, um, planning on seeing it in theaters? Why not?
    What the pollsters who steer this country don’t want you to know is that phone surveys, by their very nature, suck. They rely on the feedback of two kinds of people: those who enjoy talking to telemarketers and those who enjoy lying to telemarketers. Neither group speaks well for the rest of us. To give the NRG credit, their system was created solely to measure audience awareness of upcoming films. But the studio suits, nervous about where to blow their last-minute ad budget, began using those four hundred participants/liars to project box-office numbers. The results were usually in the ballpark, if you include the parking lot, but the methods were piss poor when it came to predicting the tastes of kids, genre nerds, and African Americans.
    For each future release, Move My Cheese employed over two hundred different variables, everything from box-office grosses of all the actors previous works to the number of cleavage shots used in trailers. But the real genius was in the calendar program, which factored in considerations like holiday trends, TV schedules, even local weather patterns. It retrieved much of this information off the Internet, automatically adjusting its math to fit vicissitudes. The NRG was a crude Magic 8-ball. The Cheese was just magic.
    Of course it wasn’t without problems. For starters, there was an extraordinary amount of data entry involved, not to mention educational guesswork. In the hands of Ira, it was a precise instrument. In the hands of a sloppy marketing intern, it would be no better than tea leaves. It would require at least two weeks for Ira to train the MGM staff to properly use his Ouija. That part worried me the most. The software, like Ira, was user-hostile.
    Still, the numbers were hard to ignore. Keith was so impressed that he was willing to pay seventy-five hundred dollars for a trial run. Our meeting was officially a success, and my part in the project was over for now.
    We threw in fifteen more minutes of obligatory shop talk, then I paid for lunch. As the three of us left the restaurant, Keith took my arm.
    “Listen, Scott, do you have time to take a ride with me?”
    “Sure. You want to drop me off in Marina del Rey?”
    “No problem.”
    I gave Ira the keys to my car and told him I’d meet him at the Ishtar . Although I didn’t show it, I was excited. Keith wouldn’t have taken me aside like this if he didn’t have PR work for me. And since his wife, Hayley, was a vice president at my old firm, Tate & Associates, that meant the work was too covert for them. I loved covert projects. They always paid big, always under the table. And as ominous as they sounded, most of them were actually nice and simple. Drama-free.
     
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    “This goddamn school shooting,” he muttered, tapping his cigarette out the window of his BMW Z8. “I thank my lucky stars that it’s more rap-related than film-related. But it’s still gonna hurt Hannibal when it opens next Friday. The movie’s not exactly an after-school special. If you read the book, you know.”
    “I know.” I hadn’t read the book. Just the reviews.
    “Man,