How to approach journalists about new sportsmovie..?

It can be difficult.
you have a lot of people in PR and marketing whose job it is to interact with the media, yet they really have no idea how the local radio stattion, TV station or newspaper functions.
You also have a lot media people who really don't know how PR CR, GR and marketing work.

You don't have to work at cross purposes. The press can maintain it's objectivity and traditional adversarial stance without the relationship being necessarily combative.
Like I said, there are natural points of overlap where my message intersects with their audience's areas of interest. That's what I'm trying to find when I'm pitching.
Further, when somebody insists I do a release on something that I don't think anybody outside of our organization will find interesting, I tell my boss. I send it out to the mainstream media, but I tell my boss it's a dog and I don't pitch. However, I might pitch it harder with industry and special interest media.

 

Clubhouse leader for line of the year.

 

Show somebody gettin' hurt. A groin injury.
Put a fuckin' map of Florida in the background. Get some tits in!
Put a "For Sale" sign on the bottom.

 

Gerald--Is this an American production or are you an overseas correspondent?

 

Don't you mean a Foreign Correspondent?

 

Go Fellini and have a lot of clowns and acrobats.

 

I do, but didn't want to offend. Assuming he isn't Canadian or Mexican, I went with overseas.

 

* Have a screening in the same city as the X Games DURING the X Games.
* Screen it in ski towns.
* Promote it on alt-sport forums and throw in a link to a trailer
* Enter it in Slamdance (which takes place in Park City during the Sundance Film Festival). It's very popular with youth

As for why you might not want to promote it as a sports movie...(1) otherwise most people will assume its just more surf and ski porn because that's what most of that genre is and (2) there must be some intersection between skicross and windsurfing that you're focusing on, and whatever that is, is probably the thing that makes the movie unique. Those are not big-market sports, so whatever the film is about, I'm guessing/hoping it has more to do with the characters than the sports. Sell the thing that makes it unique.

 

p.s. I suggest leaving this phrase out of your communiques with the press

 

Point well taken Ringer. I meant that in a positive way Seriously thanks for all the comments. It's helpful and there's some great ideas in there.

It's a production from Europe, but we travelled to many places for some of the filming. The strength of the movie is probably a combination of the concept and the storyline. Whether one will like it or not is of course a matter of taste, but I don't think there will be any denying it's original and unique. So maybe we'll try pitching in that direction. Especially since it seems everything has already been done nowadays.
And that Slamdance idea is most excellent.

 

I don't want any tits and I don't want any For Sale sign!