The Cobra.(Oliver Stone's "W.")

One night in mid-October, as the movie executive Tim Palen looked on with panoramic vigilance, a roar from jostling photographers seemed to freeze Josh Brolin's grin in place. Brolin plays George W. Bush in Oliver Stone's "W.," a Lionsgate film that was having its premiere, and he was making such halting progress down the red carpet outside Manhattan's Ziegfeld Theatre that he seemed to be still in character. Palen, who is Lionsgate's co-president of theatrical marketing--the studio's resident promotional genius--had been working for months to make people care about "W.," a film that didn't have an obvious audience; indeed, the film's subject, in the intense focus on the Presidential election and the economic crash, had all but disappeared. This evening would be a kind of sardonic resurrection: a few yards away on the red carpet, James Cromwell (who plays George H. W. Bush) was slyly telling an interviewer, "I play Dennis Kucinich," and Richard Dreyfuss (Dick Cheney) was posing in a green velvet jacket that made clear he was no Republican.

When Brolin spotted Palen, his fixed grin became a real smile. He mimed opening a magazine with an expression of amazement, then rushed over and gave the marketer a hug. Brolin and Oliver Stone had taped an appearance on "Charlie Rose" earlier that day, and Rose had surprised the actor with a photograph that showed him yawning, flamboyantly, across a full page of the latest Newsweek. Palen, an accomplished photographer, had taken the picture in a session that also produced the film's posters. Newsweek ran a lengthy essay about "W.," which concluded that the film was, "surprisingly, more or less fair." This had been Oliver Stone's goal--and was now Tim Palen's problem. His job was not to encapsulate the film's artistry but, rather, to insist to a busy, jaded, and suspicious audience that "W." would really stir them up. As Tom Ortenberg, Lionsgate's president of theatrical films, told me, he had said at a marketing meeting, "Who wants to see an evenhanded editorial think piece from Oliver Stone?"

Publicity is selling what you have: the film's stars and sometimes its director. Marketing, very often, is selling what you don't have; it's the art of the tease. A premiere lets the marketing and publicity teams join in a final effort to "eventize" a film, to move it to the top of the nation's long to-do list. Many premieres feel slack and dutiful, but this one had the fizz of a genuine event. Lionsgate, which, together with "W." 's other investors, spent about three hundred thousand dollars on the debut--three times its usual outlay--later reckoned that coverage on "Entertainment Tonight" and "Access Hollywood" and in dozens of other outlets was worth more than a million dollars in advertising.

Palen, in silence, watched the parade of stars until Thandie Newton, the British actress who plays Condoleezza Rice, came by and he reached out to clasp her hand. "I'm such a groupie," Palen sheepishly acknowledged after Newton glided on. "I'm a fourteen-year-old girl. But having a girl's viewing habits"--he is devoted to "The Hills" and "Project Runway"--"actually comes in very handy."

Palen, who is forty-seven, has a shaved head, a graying beard, and the bulging, tattooed arms of a steamfitter. Usually he wears jeans and a hoodie, but this evening he was in a black Prada suit, a black Prada shirt, and black Prada shoes: his premiere outfit. His uncommon mixture of traits--he is warm, incisive, competitive, loyal, and catty--makes him fun to be around, even at premieres, where he often feels anxious and out of place. When Michael Pitt, an actor who was in "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," ambled past in a ratty military jacket, Palen said, "I see he got dressed up. Headache and the Angry Itch."

You have to have some of that spitballer's attitude to do Palen's job; you have to love a ruckus. Even as movie attendance has dropped nineteen per cent from its peak of 1.6 billion theatregoers, in 2002, the number of films released each year since then has increased by thirty per cent. A dozen new films--three of them big studio releases--now vie for attention on any given weekend. To cut through the ambient noise, major studios spend an average of thirty-six million dollars to market one of their films. "Most of a movie's opening gross is about marketing," Clint Culpepper, the president of Sony Screen Gems, says. "You can have the most terrific movie in the world, and if you can't convey that fact in fifteen- and thirty-second TV ads it's like having bad speakers on a great stereo." At Sony, executives ask, "Can we make this seem 'babysitter-worthy'? Will it get them out of the house?"

Lionsgate, smaller, scrappier, and stingier than the six major studios, has released such distinguished films as "Crash," "Monster's Ball," and "Away from Her," but it has made its reputation with edgy, low-budget action and horror movies, particularly the five "Saw" films. In August, the company opened a new production division to make a broader range of films, including romantic comedies. The studio has also declared itself willing to make an occasional big-budget "tent pole"; it has cautiously begun to take on the big studios.