Tim Palen

Tim Palen
Nationality	American
Education	University of Colorado & Art Center College of Design
Known for	Graphic design, Photography

Tim Palen (born 1962) is an American photographer and motion picture marketing executive. During a seventeen-year tenure at Lionsgate, first as vice president of theatrical marketing in 2002, and ultimately as chief brand officer and president of worldwide marketing starting in 2015, Palen oversaw dozens of marketing campaigns. Palen set himself apart from his peers by using his own photography work in his campaigns; he has photographed more than fifty movie posters, including those for Saw, Precious, and W. While at Lionsgate, Palen shepherded marketing campaigns for box-office successes like The Expendables 2 and The Hunger Games as well as critically acclaimed films like Crash and Rabbit Hole.

Also at Lionsgate, Palen marketed all of the films in the Madea franchise, developing a fifteen-year working relationship with the series' creator Tyler Perry. After Palen left Lionsgate in 2019 to found his own company, Barnyard Projects, he and Perry announced a joint venture, Peachtree and Vine, a production company located in Atlanta and Los Angeles.

Palen has published three large-format books of his photographs. Guts (2007) is a collection of Palen's work revolving around the marketing of six horror movies, The Men of Warrior (2011) features photographs of Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton from the movie Warrior, and Tim Palen: Photographs from the Hunger Games (2015) showcases portraits of that film's characters. Palen's work has been exhibited at the Fahey Klein Gallery in Los Angeles, the Lehman Maupin Gallery in New York City, and the Leica Gallery in West Hollywood. He is the recipient of numerous awards for both his photography and marketing work, including multiple Clio Entertainment Awards, Golden Trailer Awards, and Hollywood Reporter Key Art Awards.

Palen's work has sometimes been controversial; he has challenged both the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the American Red Cross. Palen has advocated for the use of fine art and fashion to market movies. With Abel Villareal, his partner since 1988, Palen divides his time between his home studios in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree.

Early life and influences

Palen was the middle of five children and the only boy in a practicing Catholic family. His mother worked as an administrative assistant for a commercial cheesemaker, and his father ran a local Texaco station. Growing up in Northglenn, Colorado, Palen says he knew at an early age that he was attracted to other boys and felt destined for a life beyond the Denver suburb. In 2009, he told The New Yorker, "I always felt like a fish out of water in Northern Colorado...Uncle Jim had been Clark Gable's stunt double on The Misfits, and I wanted to be on that plan -- to get out."

Palen became interested in graphic art and design during high school, and studied advertising and journalism at the University of Colorado before leaving school to move to Los Angeles, where he first met his partner, Abel Villareal. Palen also studied some photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, although he says he is largely self-taught. Palen says his photography has been influenced by Mark Kessell, David LaChepelle, and Joel Peter Witkin.

Starting out in Los Angeles

Palen had experience in printing, typography, and paste up when he arrived at Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (formerly Columbia TriStar Home Video) as a creative director. There he was involved in innovations in VHS cassette packaging as early as 1994, treating the sleeve "as if it were a merchandising tool in and of itself" for films including Wolf, Johnny Mnemonic, The Indian in the Cupboard, and First Knight. As executive director of creative advertising in 1998, Palen took a hands-on approach to the company's recently revamped website, refreshing it regularly to help drive VHS sales. "When Air Force One came along...we made our normal 'virtual living room' the plane's presidential cabin," he said. "For As Good As It Gets, it was Jack Nicholson's living room with the little dog barking and stills from the movie on the TV set."

In July 1999, Destination Films hired Palen as vice president of creative advertising. His outdoor advertising campaign to sell Destination's horror movie Bats included paintings of bats in flight across Los Angeles buses. "We wanted to humanize the threat of bats," he told Hollywood Reporter, "and we made it kind of a 3-D threat." The bus ads print work earned Hollywood Reporter's Key Art best of show honors in 2000. While at Destination, Palen also orchestrated campaigns for films that included Drowning Mona, Eye of the Beholder, and Thomas and the Magic Railroad.

First years at Lionsgate

At the end of 2001, Palen left Destination Films to become vice president of theatrical marketing at independent studio Lionsgate Films, then called Lions Gate Films. Palen's first campaign there was for Monster's Ball. He saw the film as a perfect movie for the small, young company. "We're drawn to movies that notoriously have an edge to them," he told Variety. "A common marketing strategy is to sort of flatten everything out and make it apply to the broadest audience possible. We actually sharpen the edges." By embracing the potentially controversial, such as the interracial love story between the characters played by Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton, Palen said his team was able to create a unique brand identity for a previously unknown product in only four weeks and "with very little money." Rather than shy from the controversy, Palen's team emphasized the love story, with TV ads showcasing the interracial couple in bed that ran even in the south. Berry's performance landed her that year's Oscar for best performance by a leading actress, a historic first for an African American woman.

The first Lionsgate campaign poster Palen photographed himself was for the 2003 movie, Wonderland. "I'm really bad at sketching," Palen admitted, "and I fancy myself an art director in addition to a marketer, but I had this idea for a poster. I wanted it to look sort of like a Rolling Stone Sticky Fingers album cover, and I started to sketch it, and it was embarrassingly bad. On a Saturday, I asked my friend to come over and we went to Hollywood Toys and got a fake gun. We stuffed something down his pants, went into the backyard and took a picture. I presented it with a few other sketches to the director, and he said, 'That should be our poster.' I said we would have someone properly photograph it, and he said, 'No, that should be our poster.'"

In his first few years at Lionsgate, Palen steered the campaign for Fahrenheit 9/11, Lionsgate's first property to gross more than a hundred million dollars. After Saw's successful screenings at Sundance 2004, it was Palen who made the sudden suggestion to release it theatrically instead of going straight to DVD, then directed the campaign partially credited for the successful launch of the young studio's first franchise. Other movies Palen marketed included Secretary, Cabin Fever, Girl With a Pearl Earring and The Punisher. In November 2004, Lions Gate promoted Palen to executive vice president of theatrical marketing.

Palen said his team was able to get box office results, sometimes better than expected, with such different types of movies on limited budgets, by customizing tailored strategies for each movie. For Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Palen described a three prong approach: to first reassure the core audience that "it's a very special movie and we take it seriously," then to reach out to Tyler Perry's wider audience, and finally use Madea, the drag character, to "remind people that this is fun." For Crash, the team employed a multiple image visual campaign intended to evoke memorably touching moments from the film.

The tailored approach was effective for selling Saw. For its worldwide launch, the studio created a hub site that plunged visitors into frightening situations like those in the movie. The text on screen asked, "How fucked up is that?" "It really took off," Palen recalled. "The fans found it and it became sort of viral. It served to let people know that this isn't your run-of-the-mill exploitation movie. This movie delivers blood and gristle. There's a market for that." When marketing vice president Erica Schimick first proposed staging a blood drive, she says she meant it as a joke, but Palen and executive vice president of publicity Sarah Greenberg loved the idea. Palen shot the poster for the event in his backyard, with Schimick posing as a nurse with blood-smeared cleavage. Schimick praised Palen for allowing the team to "push the envelope with creative instead of hitting the default button."

One way Palen pushed the envelope was finding ways to evade censorship by MPAA, which is responsible for regulating promotional materials for motion pictures in North America. In late 2005, writing for Los Angeles Times, Patrick Goldstein reported that Lionsgate's risk-taking had been successful, dubbed Palen a "marketing legend," and said that he seemed to enjoy his adversarial relationship with the MPAA, releasing the most shocking campaign materials online, "ostensibly" for the international market beyond MPAA's reach. One such image, Saw: Severed Hand won the Hollywood Reporter's 34th annual Key Art award in the international film poster category.

When the studio streamlined its name from Lions Gate to Lionsgate, Palen led the team that designed the new company logo. When Hollywood Reporter reported the departure of John Hegeman as Lionsgate's president of worldwide marketing in December, it also reported that Palen had been "credited by many as the creative force behind a number of Lionsgate's successful campaigns." Weeks later, Palen was promoted to co-president of film marketing alongside Sarah Greenberg.

Teamed up with Sarah Greenberg

Even before Palen's and Greenberg's promotions to co-presidents of film marketing, Lionsgate was already recognized for the marketing team they led. Variety reported that Palen and Greensburg had "turned the selling of horror pics into an art form." For Saw II, Palen again relied on a guerrilla marketing campaign featuring in-house ads, under-the-radar online tactics, and a blood drive expanded to ten states. For Saw III Palen expanded the blood drive even further, and, seeking "the most authentic shade of red", he asked the film's star Tobin Bell to donate his own blood to mix with the ink for the poster, the first in the series to actually depict his character Jigsaw. After Hostel found its way to Lionsgate because Sony Pictures grew "skittish about the pic's macabre content" during post-production, Palen was inspired by the photography of Australian artist Mark Kessell, specifically one of a series of daguerreotypes called Florilegium, depicting surgical instruments. "All the pieces fell into place once I saw that image," Palen said. The daguerreotype, depicting a surgical clamp, became the theatrical poster. Hostel opened number one at the box office. For Hostel: Part II, Palen shot a poster image so gory, he had to provide the MPAA with the butcher shop receipt to prove the flesh was not human. Tasked with the release of The Last Exorcism in 2010, Palen, who by then had overseen the release of the two Hostel pictures and seven titles in the Saw franchise, commented, "This one is in our wheelhouse. And what we're trying to do is remind people that it's fun to be scared."

Lionsgate had become the largest remaining independent studio and, in addition to its growing horror catalog, was still pursuing an "eclectic" mix of urban and arthouse titles. One such title, Crash, acquired by Lionsgate on the film festival circuit in 2004, won the 2006 Academy Award for best picture, after an Oscar campaign orchestrated by Palen and Greenberg. Soon after Diary of a Mad Black Woman proved itself at the box office, Palen's team had already begun work selling the sequel, Madea's Family Reunion. "We got a script and were involved in preproduction," Palen recounted. "We actually shot a teaser trailer for 'Family Reunion' before they had even shot any film for the movie." The subsequent campaign attempted to motivate and grow Perry's large following. When the film opened to a thirty million dollar weekend, Palen said, "We knew we did it right." To promote the documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon, Lionsgate mounted a billboard campaign modeled after Lennon and Yoko Ono's 1969 billboards that said, "War is Over! If You Want It." Marketing executives met with Ono to prepare the campaign. Palen said, "We tried to use the same font and same spacing as the originals, so as to not take any liberties with their art form." Palen also created the Grudge Report, a parody of the Drudge Report, where visitors could access archival footage of Lennon and Ono's hotel room protest, "bed-in for peace." Palen said he enjoyed working on such a diverse range of films, recalling how working at a big studio "can be a little redundant." In November, Palen was named "Movie-Marketing Ninja" at the 2006 Behind the Camera Awards.

In 2007, Palen published Guts, a coffee table book compiling some of his photography associated with the marketing of five horror films: Bug, High Tension, Hostel, and Saw. The frontispiece says the collection "represents Tim's desire to...put the art back in 'key art'". Interspersed between the photos are letters from the MPAA and American Red Cross related to their respective disagreements with Palen. Also included in the book is a letter from Hostel director Eli Roth describing Palen's ability to capture the essence of his films in a single image, and a centerfold image of Roth with an oversized prosthetic penis entitled "Eli Roth has the Biggest Dick in Hollywood." A selection of photographs from the book were exhibited at the Fahey/Klein Gallery in October, with Sylvester Stallone in attendance to offer Palen an uppercut for the camera. Also on hand were gallery owner David Fahey, Saw producer Oren Koules, independent film producer Andrew Panay, Stallone's wife, Jennifer Flavin, Debi Mazar with her husband Gabriele Corcos, and Donovan Leitch with his daughter. Palen told the Los Angeles Times, "People are surprised I can work at a studio and take a picture. They think I'm an anomaly." In November, Palen was listed among Entertainment Weekly's 50 Smartest People in Hollywood.

To promote Tyler Perry's For Colored Girls, Palen shot eight 35mm portraits of the film's ensemble: Janet Jackson, Thandie Newton, Kerry Washington, Loretta Devine, Whoopi Goldberg, Anika Noni Rose, Kimberly Elise, and Phylicia Rashad. Palen used the portraits in the poster campaign and trailer. A gallery exhibition of the photos, Living Portraits, opened at the Lehman Maupin Gallery in New York City for a week in October 2010, with Janet Jackson hosting. Palen had previously directed Jackson's music video for her song "Nothing" from Perry's Why Did I Get Married Too?.

In December 2010, Lionsgate announced that Sarah Greenberg was leaving her post as co-president of marketing for personal reasons, ending Palen's four year collaboration with her.

Selling The Hunger Games and later years at Lionsgate

Palen began work on the campaign to sell Suzanne Collin's The Hunger Games in the spring of 2009 when he first met with executives from Scholastic. The campaign used traditional marketing approaches such as newspaper ads, posters and magazine cover stories, but its "centerpiece" was a "phased, yearlong digital effort" intended to connect with young audiences. This less costly digital effort enabled Palen to mount a successful campaign with a relatively small marketing staff and budget. Fans of the book were at the center of the campaign, but some of Palen's efforts were meant to encourage more people to read the books, because they understood, Palen said, that the more people who read the book, "the more people we could get to see the movie."

Marketing The Hunger Games was not without its challenges, including the difficult matter at the heart of the story: children killing children. "The beam for this movie is really narrow, and it's a sheer drop to your death on either side," Palen said. In the summer of 2011, as the studio decided how to handle the sensitive subject matter, Palen, now chief marketing officer, was concerned about pursuing the usual strategy of using images from the combat scenes to promote the film. "This book is on junior high reading lists, but kids killing kids, even though it's handled delicately in the film, is a potential perception problem in marketing," he explained. Palen proposed not including any scenes from the games in the marketing campaign, although those scenes comprised more than half of the movie. "There was a lot of,'You've gotta be kidding. I don't see how we can manage that,'" Palen remembered, but ultimately his proposal was accepted. "Everyone liked the implication that if you want to see the games you have to buy a ticket," Palen said. The team established other guidelines as well, preferring "only one wins" to "23 kids get killed", and never using the phrase "Let the games begin."

The Hunger Games opened in March 2012, with domestic opening weekend earnings of $152.5 million, making it the third biggest domestic opening of all times. "It was a perfect storm," Palen said. In what The New York Times called a "corporate twist on The Hunger Games", industry speculation surrounded Palen's future at Lionsgate that spring; Lionsgate had acquired Summit Entertainment in January, leaving the company with two chief marketing executives. Hollywood Reporter's coverage of the speculation noted that Palen had been the "artistic key to [Lionsgate's] genre successes. In October, Adweek honored Palen with a 21012 Brand Genius Award in recognition of his work on The Hunger Games campaign.

In August 2011, Palen published The Men of Warrior featuring his photographs of Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton, and other cast members as they appeared in the film Warrior. When Fast Company named Palen one of the most creative people in business that year, they reported that Palen had established a reputation as an artist as well as a marketing executive. Palen told the magazine that using his own photography in his campaigns had made his job "exponentially more rewarding," and shared an anecdote about being mistaken for two separate people, one who was a marketer and another who was a photographer.

Palen launched the campaign for the second film in The Hunger Games franchise, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, in November 2012, although this campaign was bolder and more colorful than the first. "This is the book and movie of color," Palen said. He created a mock online fashion magazine called Capitol Couture, alluding to the capitol city of the fictional nation Panem, and featuring Palen's own photographs of the film's characters, modeling what Variety calls "elaborate" looks, alongside colorful, stylized advertisements for fictional products from Panem, also shot by Palen, and used on billboards in Los Angeles and New York City. Palen also used this platform to launch a series of formal seated portraits of the eleven main characters meant to convey director Francis Lawrence's visual aesthetic. The studio shaped the release of each portrait into an event, after first teasing the reveal by posting images of an empty chair on social media. "This was dramatically different than anything we did on the first movie," Palen said. "It was brave of the filmmakers to agree we should be so bold." Author Suzanne Collins told Variety she was "thrilled" with the work of Palen and his team. "It's appropriately disturbing and thought-provoking how the campaign promotes Catching Fire while simultaneously promoting the Capitol's punitive forms of entertainment," Collins said. "The stunning image of Katniss in her wedding dress that we use to sell tickets is just the kind of thing the Capitol would use to rev up its audience for the Quarter Quell. That dualistic approach is very much in keeping with the books."

In June 2015, Palen published Tim Palen: Photography from The Hunger Games, featuring photographs of the entire cast of the movie.

External links

• Official website