Politics is entertaining and, more often than we realize, entertainment is political. What happens “inside the Beltway” and what happens “inside the studio” are surprisingly similar. Drop a Capitol Hill staffer into a Hollywood conference room and he would find the room remarkably familiar, just without the Brooks Brothers suits and stiff formality: the talk would be of campaigns, tracking, target audience, media spends, messaging, and field staff.

Political campaigns have one objective: get millions of people to do one thing on an single day — cast a vote. Entertainment campaigns have one objective, too: get millions of people to do one thing on a single weekend — buy a ticket. Both must get busy, distracted people to do something together, en masse, at the same time in a way that doesn’t directly or immediately benefit themselves.

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The biggest issue facing publicity is something no publicist can pitch or spin their way out of: the massive crumbling, consolidation, and chaos of media:

When once major media powerhouses are auctioned off for a dollar …

and media companies’ names read like your spacebar is broken …

and bloggers have more readers than daily newspapers …

and there are less outlets with less influence …

Clearly this is a problem for anyone trying to get attention in the most cluttered and noisy marketplace in history. Publicity, then, must take on new forms. No one can successfully argue that night show appearances and gossip site entries, airline magazine features and radio interviews are enough to drive action at the bookstores or box office. Just look at the box office or billboard charts for examples.

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A very different film – “Another Earth” – made its way to 4 theaters in NY and LA (though notably on 7 screens, as both the Lincoln Center and Sunshine theaters in New York and Arclight in LA had “Earth” in 2 different showings). The result was a $78,413 gross, averaging a decent $19,603 per theater (though per screen it would only be $11,201).

“Earth” was written by Cahill and Brit Marling, who is also the film’s star and generally regarded as one of 2011’s big indie breakouts. Marling plays Rhoda, a twenty-something on the brink of getting accepted to MIT.  Just as she overhears on her car radio that a new planet has appeared in the sky, she inadvertently crashes into a van and kills two-thirds of the family on board.  Cut to four years later, when Rhoda is released from jail and seeks out the one third of that family that remains in the midst of news that Earth is sending visitors to the new planet.