Levy
These days, selling a film like "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" might not seem too great a challenge. Film it, and they will come.
But that wasn't always the case. Before they were tentpoles, past and present franchises like "Transformers," "Shrek" and "Back to the Future" first had to benefit from a marketer canny enough to convince millions that they wanted -- nay, needed -- to spend their afternoons watching fighting robots or portly Scottish monsters or Christopher Lloyd.
For decades, Marvin Levy, film marketing guru and longtime publicist for Steven Spielberg, has been that marketer. So it's appropriate ShoWest should have to create an award to honor him.
After eight years as vice president of advertising, publicity and promotion at Columbia (a tenure that included work on "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "Kramer vs. Kramer"), Levy joined Amblin in 1982, and moved to marketing and communications for DreamWorks when the company was created in 1994.
A glance back through the campaigns on which he's worked -- from "Jurassic Park" to "Minority Report," to the aforementioned franchises -- reveals an arresting number of box office successes, as well as Oscar winners like "American Beauty" and "Saving Private Ryan."
With "Indy" opening this spring, Levy looks to notch another.
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