I was sitting in one of the hundreds of thousands of millions of 
starbucks in Los Angeles when a group of let’s say about three or 
four high school nerdy kids came in passing out fliers. These 
weren’t just flyers, I mean your regular "come to this club, at 
this time, at this address" sort of flyers. These were different 
because they were cut out in the shape of little… well, it’s hard 
to explain what the shape was… it was all red and it appeared to 
be a man about to jump off a chair to hang himself. I turned the 
little flyer or cut-out over and there it was, a simple reminder 
of the 80’s tagline on t-shirts that were so popular: hang loose!

This made absolutely no sense. There was no date, no website, and 
absolutely no information as to what exactly they were 
advertising – if anything. This may just have been a bunch of 
kids who didn’t have anything else to do with their day than pass 
out little tickets that would amuse only them as part of an 
inside joke, perhaps a bet.

Two days later, as I was walking down the Market Place in 
Burbank, California I saw another group of high school kids 
passing out the same flyers. This time, I really couldn’t contain 
my curiosity so I approached one of them and forced her to 
confess the big joke. As she excitedly clued me in on what was 
happening, I realized that this was no joke at all. This may have 
been the most ingenious marketing scheme for a movie that I had 
ever heard about. I had been fooled years ago by the Blair Witch 
Project scheme to get people in the movie theatres, and since 
then I told myself never to be a sucker at the mercy of studio 
greed.

This was the reason why I boycotted such films as Napoleon 
Dynamite which I heard was the more boring and senseless film. I 
avoided War of the Worlds, Spiderman, Revenge of the Sith and 
every other movie that brain washed half of its audience to go 
see it just to become another statistic.

I will cut the suspense. The film that these kids were marketing 
was Machiavelli Hangman. I had heard about it over the internet 
as the film that would bring to light the virtues of digital 
editing. The first film to be shot on a bare-minimum budget 
and be nominated for the Oscars.

The filmmakers had brilliantly decided not to take the usual 
studio marketing routes, but instead do something that was 
referred to as "grass rooting." This technique implies that you 
need to start within the community, many individual communities 
and advertise the film through word of mouth.

The energy with which these children were standing out there and 
raving about this film that they hadn’t even seen inspired me so 
much that I went home and researched the film to find that there 
was a whole following of fans that had began on the internet. 

Even though a release date is still uncertain for the film, these 
kids definitely gave me the jitters and even though I’m not one 
to admit this, I am curious about the mystery of the hangman. 

Daniel Wexler is a movie reviewer. 
He is talking about the upcoming movie 
Machiavelli Hangman
http://www.hangmanmovie.com