Director’s Mission: Hyping ‘Moulin Rouge’ Oscar Hopes

In his quest to spread the gospel of “Moulin Rouge,” there has been almost no promotional gimmick too outlandish for Baz Luhrmann, the film’s director.

In Dallas, the 39-year-old Australian allowed himself to be crowned with a cowboy hat and hoisted on an elephant at midnight. In Bombay, fireworks were shot off in the theater during a screening.

He has staged live cancan extravaganzas from Cannes to Sydney, lectured to students from Oxford to Yale, and spent countless nights trolling through nightclubs across Asia, bestowing special awards on the joint that best re-created the anything-goes spirit of the original Parisian nightclub Moulin Rouge.

Lately, his journey has centered on the rarefied watering holes of members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences--the folks who vote for the Oscars.

For Luhrmann, a best picture Oscar, or even a nomination, would not only boost the box office but help in what he sees as his larger mission to resuscitate the musical to its former stature in the Hollywood canon.

By relentlessly promoting “Moulin Rouge” around the world, Luhrmann aims to establish his film as an international phenomenon--the kind of film that academy voters see as best picture material.

The pursuit of Academy Awards has become increasingly fierce in recent years. But “Moulin Rouge” may have the first truly global Oscar campaign, and it surely won’t be the last, as America becomes a smaller portion of the international box office and as the industry incorporates elements of other cinemas, from the spread of kung fu kicks into Hollywood action films to the awarding of the best actor Oscar to Roberto Benigni for his performance--in Italian--in “Life Is Beautiful.”

It’s perfectly conceivable that when the Academy Award nominations are announced Tuesday morning, Ron Howard will be the only American director nominated for an Oscar.

The best picture award is the most coveted--the industry’s one enduring badge of artistic respectability. A best picture endorsement can add $30 million or more to a film’s coffers, and these days, studios are spending close to half of that just to get into the derby. Estimates are that spending on Academy Award advertisements is running 20% ahead of last year.

For Twentieth Century Fox, which released “Moulin Rouge,” the stakes are particularly high: The studio hasn’t won a best picture award for almost 30 years.

So Fox sent the articulate, personable Luhrmann on the road like a presidential candidate on a primary run. The bouncy, affable Australian would certainly win the Bill Clinton award for sheer indefatigability, having spent more than six months crisscrossing the globe. Where other studios used TV spots and newspaper advertisements to push their Oscar hopes, Fox relied heavily on Luhrmann and his cast to get its message across.

When “Moulin Rouge” was released in May, its Oscar chances seemed dim. Set in the gaudy, decadent underworld of a turn-of-the-20th-century Parisian nightclub, the film is a brash, colorful, tragicomic musical, with its stars (Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor) warbling a pastiche of pop songs--everything from the “Sound of Music” to Nat King Cole, the Beatles, Madonna and Sting.

It’s an extravagant jukebox of a film borne full-out from Luhrmann’s head; the film has been dubbed everything from divine to demonic, or as Luhrmann ruefully paraphrases his critics, “anti-cinema.”

The two-hour film, which was released on DVD in December, definitely polarizes critics and audiences. Recently, one Time critic anointed it the second-best film of the year (after the Afghan drama “Kandahar”), while another labeled it the year’s worst, a film that critic Richard Schickel said “made my tortured viscera beg for mercy.”

Before its debut, the film was considered so risky from a marketing point of view that Fox initially tried to obscure the fact that the $50-million film was in fact . . . a musical.

“You know, we weren’t allowed to use the ‘M’ word, let alone the ‘O’ word, opera,” said Luhrmann, who has recently spoken at the headquarters of the writers, directors and screen actors guilds as well as the American Cinematheque, at events that lure Oscar voters. “Now, with the campaigning in the awards season and the re-release, it’s all about ‘We’ve reinvented the musical!’ ”

In its latest ads, Fox trots out endorsements from such musical legends as Stanley Donen, who directed “Singing in the Rain,” and Robert Wise, who directed “The Sound of Music,” names that might be unfamiliar to younger audiences but which resonate with the traditionally older academy crowd.

The studio has certainly bought its share of trade and newspaper ads, but it’s stressing the personal approach. The film’s most effective spokesman and agitator remains Luhrmann. Almost never has an art film director so thoroughly embraced the promotional machine.

“We consider marketing and promotion as our responsibility,” said Luhrmann, whose design team (led by his wife, Catherine Martin, the film’s production and co-costume designer) generated most of the images used in the advertising campaign, and who personally produced the best-selling soundtrack, which introduced the film to the MTV generation.

“We’re like the circus. We travel around, and then collapse on the jet,” he said.

“Baz won’t give up until he dies of consumption. He must be living a life of jet lag. I don’t think he knows which way is up anymore,” said McGregor, who traipsed around Europe with Luhrmann.

Still, the director, who recently exchanged his silver-maned Mozart coiffure for a sprightly post-Beatles bob, is philosophical about how much one can do to influence the academy. “You can’t change people’s mind. The only thing you can do is put light on your film and try to encourage them to actually put it in the DVD player.”

If Luhrmann is leading the charge, he’s been backed up by a studio with something to prove. Although Fox initiated and co-financed the 1997 Oscar juggernaut “Titanic,” a good portion of the film’s bragging rights ended up with Paramount, which was the domestic distributor. Indeed, the last time the studio won best picture solo was in 1972 for “The French Connection.” Moreover, in recent years, it’s been criticized in the industry for bungling Oscar campaigns for such films as last year’s “Cast Away.”

Fox appears to have approached the phenomenon with a long-range game plan, allowing the film to stay in theaters for weeks all summer, building on its word-of-mouth. In the fall, Fox decided to re-release the film in key cities, complete with a chic soiree at co-chairman Tom Rothman’s house, to which some academy members happened to be invited.

Still, the odds remain long. Once the mainstay of Hollywood filmmaking, no musical has won best picture since “Oliver” in 1968. Moreover, the academy has a firm tradition of opting for the safe, conventional choice over the daring, perhaps more memorable film. In 1980, the academy bestowed best picture on “Ordinary People” instead of “Raging Bull.” In 1965, “My Fair Lady” won over “Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” In recent times, Hollywood has tended to favor costume drama, preferably with an epic bent, honoring such films as “Titanic” and “Gladiator.”

By either of these standards, the award for best picture should go to “A Beautiful Mind,” with its familiar tropes of triumph over adversity, or the super-sized “Lord of the Rings.” Yet, Luhrmann keeps plugging.

“What I’m praying for is the day that it’s done, and I know that we have done everything we can do, so basically I feel that I’ve paid back all those who believed,” he said from his bed in New York, where he had finally collapsed with a cold.

Although the Oscar is supposed to reward artistic merit, in truth, no film ever wins one without at least some box office appeal.

Luhrmann had a proven commercial track record with risky fare, most notably his 1996 pumped-up rendition of “William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet,” but there was plenty of trepidation that “Moulin Rouge” might die on opening weekend.

According to the studio, the early test screenings indicated that the audience reaction would be sharply divided, and that the film’s natural constituents were the young and the artsy--two components of the moviegoing public that don’t often overlap.

The $50-million film has so far earned $57 million in America, a respectable enough number, bolstered not so much by its critical reaction, but by the endorsements of taste-makers from other fields, such as Oprah Winfrey and MTV, which featured Christina Aguilera and Lil’ Kim singing “Lady Marmalade” on the awards show.

More significant was its embrace by the rest of the globe, where the film doubled its domestic box office.

“I can see people are thinking what’s the conspiracy about how this film that wasn’t loved when it was given birth to has become embraced,” said Luhrmann, ever one to see the meta-implications of any phenomenon. “It’s been an individual passion by certain individuals . . . not to see this one chance of the musical being put back in its rightful place in the terms of cinematic language and form be destroyed. I wouldn’t say we never got a break, but it’s never been easy.”