Who killed "Expelled"?

It was going to be the Religious Right's answer to Michael Moore. It was going to be a blockbuster that blew open a whole new front in the culture wars, and not so incidentally made the producers a hefty stack of cash in the process. Take that, liberals!

And then it just went pop like a soap bubble.

No riots, no fighting in the streets, no angry mobs with torches, and -- worst of all -- no profit.

At the close of its fourth weekend, down to about a third of the screens it was released on, the total box office for "Expelled" has just inched over the $7M mark. Given a production budget of $3.5M and a publicity budget described by the producers as "multiples" of that, we're probably talking about at least $11.5M at bare minimum to make and market the thing, including the literally million-dollar expense of making over a thousand prints for such a wide release.

In other words, our friends the creationists have, despite all their attempts to rally their own troops, taken a multi-million dollar bath.

Isn't that nice?

So that naturally brings up the question, "Who killed 'Expelled'?" Was it the nefarious nabobs of Big Science and the Librul Media? Or was it you? Read on.

Marketing failures killed "Expelled."

There were, according to industry stories, four separate publicity firms engaged by the producers to market the movie, the best-known being Motive Marketing, the folks who did the faith-based marketing of Mel Gibson's movie, "How Those Pesky Jews Killed Jesus."

The marketing goal was not just to get butts in seats, but to get secular butts in seats; if the movie was only seen by creationists, then the whole propaganda exercise would be pointless — not to mention the severely diminished opportunity for profit. So they tried to make the movie a media event by leveraging the only resources they had: church groups and money. If the film seriously exceeded expectations in its opening weekend and did Michael Moore-style business, they figured, then its success would become a story in its own right, bootstrapping the publicity campaign into a national marketing juggernaut the way the Mel Gibson movie "The Anti-Defamation League Should Pound Sand" did. So they did everything they could rally the troops, with the order: "don't wait — see it RIGHT NOW, opening weekend, or else it will drop out of the theaters before it can change America."

In order to do that America-changing scale of business, of course, they also had to decide on one of the widest releases ever for a documentary, over a thousand screens in the first weekend (hence the need for so many expensive prints). I believe there was also a "spontaneous" campaign of letters to newspapers, and another "spontaneous" campaign to mass-uprate the movie on movie websites.

Well, despite all their discounted tickets and church kickbacks and other forms of bribery — at my local theater they were offering a free Coke if you bought a ticket to "Expelled" and a popcorn — the first weekend came and went with about as much "bang" as you'd get from a documentary about the manufacture of toilet paper. And with that the marketing plan fell to pieces, and so did any possibility of a profitable release.

Movie reviewers killed "Expelled."

Outside the church press, the movie was utterly savaged for having the lightness of touch of a sledgehammer dropped from a tall building. It doesn't matter whether or not you're thought-provoking; we're talking the same entertainment-seeking audience that that just spent $100M in one weekend on Robert Downey, Jr. updating the Tin Man. (Good movie, by the way.)

The message of the reviewers was, "No matter what you think about Darwin, this movie just isn't any fun." Even if you're convinced that Intelligent Design is actually a secular science (it's not), why go to a movie that's a chore just to prove it?

Ben Stein killed "Expelled."

There are plenty of criticisms I could make about the film — many have been made here, but the most important one is this simple contradiction. The film spends its first half arguing that Intelligent Design is a purely secular scientific field, and that it's not inherently religiously motivated. The film spends its second half trying to prove that Darwin causes atheism.

Can anyone explain the grotesque contradiction that splits the logic of this movie in two as surely as the Wall split Berlin? Anyone? Anyone?

Basic ethical considerations killed "Expelled."

The movie slanders scientists across the globe by claiming that evolutionary science was somehow responsible for the Holocaust.

Eeeeeeewwwwwwwww.

Make a movie that doesn't stink like a sulphur-flavored sweat sock, Stein, and maybe people will actually go see it.

Copyright infringements killed "Expelled."

Yoko Ono — and yes, I'm a Yoko fan — sued the producers over their unwelcome and unpaid use of John Lennon's "Imagine" in the movie's soundtrack. The producers' argument was tht they had used a small enough bit of it that it fell under "fair use" criteria. Ono disagreed and her legal time filed for an injunction to prevent the movie from being further distributed. But — and here's the key thing — she did it after the movie was already out for a couple of weeks, by which time the movie had already foundered. So the media story wasn't "Desperate, panicking liberals try to stop movie release from destroying Darwinian hegemony," it was "Here's another way the 'Expelled' clowns screwed up."

Google the phrase "Defendants Premise Media Corporation" for details. But it comes down to this: right now the producers are enjoined from sending the film to any new theaters anywhere, and they are enjoined from manufacturing any DVDs, even one-offs for reviewers, until there have been a series of hearings to determine the legal framework under which "Imagine" has been used.

Now, a stinker sinking as quickly as "Expelled" isn't going to be particularly hampered by an inability to open in new theaters — it's not likely that many second-run theaters would be interested it, considering how badly it tanked first time around. But not being able to make DVDs, that's a real problem. And one would expect there are very few things that Ono's lawyers would be more interested in than protecting copyrights to "Imagine," so that lathing sound you hear is quite a stockpile of hardballs being carved by the proverbial Passel of New York Lawyers. Before the "Expelled" crew make even one DVD for home sale, they'll have to go to court, where they are all but guaranteed to have their equilibrium punctuated.

Bill Dembski et al killed "Expelled."

The second biggest force killing "Expelled" is just the sheer ridiculous of the Intelligent Design movement. They tried to portray themselves as secular movement for legal reasons — the Supreme Court having banned creationism from public schools for its religious content, ID was the attempt to slap a lab coat over that Bible and pretend it's a whole new creature.

One of the prettiest of ID's pretty faces, William Dembski, is a classic exemplar of the duplicity of the creationist ID movement. Like all but one of the Discovery Institute people in the film, you're not told that he's a DI shill. You might not know that he was scheduled to be an expert witness for the defense in the Dover creationism case. He canceled only hours before he was supposed to appear, however. Something about the annoying fact that the other side would ask him questions and he would have to actually, you know, answer them rather than just dancing around them like the friendly audiences he prefers allow him to do.

My grandfather was a professional photographer, and one of his favorite aphorisms was this: take a picture of a cow, and you get a picture of a cow. If the "Expelled" crew made a bizarre and unconvincing mishmash of a mulligan's stew, maybe because that's the only way a documentary about Intelligent Design can come out.

You killed "Expelled."

Everyone of you who had money in your pocket and decided to leave it there rather than hand it over to the "Expelled" squad — or decided to spend it in some way other than to subsidize the creeping destruction of science education in this country: You killed "Expelled," and I am so grateful!

Edit: How To Fight Creationism

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