Yahoo Lifestyle Chris Pula Remembered, As Movie Marketing Maven Is Laid To Rest Today In Massachusetts
Film marketing maven Chris Pula was laid to rest this morning at a funeral held in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. A memorial for his Hollywood friends is being arranged for down the road by friends who worked alongside him in the heyday years at New Line. When Deadline revealed the marketing maven‘s passing in a New Year’s Eve post, the outpouring from the community was exceptionally strong. Especially considering Pula blazed his trail helping to create success for blockbusters from Home Alone to Dumb and Dumber, The Mask, The Sixth Sense and Se7en. And then leaving town abruptly and never looking back.
Whether one is directly part of Hollywood or orbit it as a scoop-chasing journalist, this is an all-consuming industry and we all run hard on our individual versions of a hamster wheel. One can’t help but wonder occasionally what it might be like to simply step off. Thom Biggert, Pula’s partner since they met in grad school in Atlanta 46 years ago, has an easy answer. He watched up close Pula’s highs and lows at New Line, Disney, and Fox, and the traumatic exits from each and generous settlements that gave him enough money to leave Hollywood to buy a spacious guest house — with four rooms for rent — on the water in Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod. They called it the Merry Meeting House, where the same lodgers would show up year after year.
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“Chris was a huge personality as you know, but I think he was just as happy greeting guests and making beds as he was in Hollywood,” Biggert said. “We lived in four different places, Atlanta, where we met in grad school, New York where we started our careers, LA, and then Provincetown. So those are four distinct chapters. They’re all very different. And I think we both felt like when people asked what was your favorite place, well, each place was perfect for where we were at in our lives.”
Not that Pula didn’t have regrets, and that doesn’t seem to include a love a good beer that probably contributed to the liver disease and cardiopulmonary failure that took his life.
“He would have turned 70 on March 6th, and so for two years, he’s been talking about turning 70, 70, 70, 70,” Biggert said. “I’ll probably hold something, because it was so special and important to him.”
Pula is remembered as a larger than life character, but serious and outspoken when he felt strongly about the best way to fill seats in theaters. But he was also playful and a strong mentoring influence to staff under him, whom he treated the same as the filmmakers used to being shown reverence. That was evident when Pula was at the height of his professional prominence, making the rounds at Cannes.
“He would call everyone goofy,” Biggert recalled. “Hey, goofy. And I think we were at the Cannes Film Festival and all these folks thought this was his special name for them. But then they realized he called everyone goofy, goofy, goofy. Hey, goofy. So he changed it to the more generic, honey. Hey honey.” Only some figured out the reason: “It was because he couldn’t remember their names. Filmmakers, he certainly did, but a lot of people, he didn’t try very hard, so he’d just call everyone goofy. He definitely didn’t have any filter.”
Pula more or less transferred that personality to the East Coast.
“He was very generous with friends here, picking up dinner tabs all the time,” Biggert said. “He loved to make muffins and he’d pass them out to neighbors. He did that every week, twice a week. He’d make blueberry muffins and he’d put too many blueberries in, and they’d sort of fall apart. But they were fabulous. And people loved them.
“He was always generous of soul. He’d be in the store, and he would know everybody. And he was loud. You probably remember that, how loud he was. People would say, well, I know Chris was in the store, I heard him, but I couldn’t figure out what aisle he was in. He knew he never met a stranger, just like his mother, he would just start talking to whomever, and when they walked away, he’d just start talking to whoever else. He just never stopped talking.”
In Hollywood, that wasn’t always a virtue.
“He jumped around more than I thought he should have,” Biggert said. “There would be an offer, and maybe a little better title, and he jumped at these things. And I don’t know, I think he could have stuck around a little longer at each job myself, and he got fired a few times. I don’t know all the details, but when he got fired at Warner Brothers, I know Bob [Daly] and Terry [Semel] at the exit interviews said, ‘you talk too much.’ I’m sure he did; he never shut up at the marketing meetings. He would command the room and he just wouldn’t stop. But like I say, it’s always more complicated. But he had a knack for crystallizing the message on a movie. On The Sixth Sense, he included the line ‘I See Dead People.’ He was really proud of that too. And this was one of his major Hollywood battles, to put that line in the marketing materials. The producer, and his boss, they thought that was a terrible idea, because they wanted that reveal to come during the movie.
“Chris put it in anyway. And that’s why he got fired, basically. And that movie went on to make millions, and I don’t know how many people would have seen that movie, without that tagline ‘I see dead people.’ Bruce Willis, his career was, he wasn’t really the top biller that he used to be, and there was no one else in it. What else could you sell, except for that?”
Pula’s superpower, Biggert said, was being able to boil down the appeal of a movie to an image, a concept, and his favorite part of the job was designing the one-sheet poster that was a key component of selling a movie and getting an opening weekend. One could have watched an early cut of Home Alone and seen it as a live-action Road Runner v Wyle E Coyote cartoon, but Pula leaned into a different audience tug. He saw the potential for it to become a Christmas film with perennial potential.
“He was most proud of Home Alone, I think,” Biggert said. “Someone the other day mentioned A Christmas Story to [Pula], when it came on TV recently. He said to them, Home Alone was a much better movie. And I won that battle. That’s the best Christmas movie of all time. You see so many Christmas movies at this time and everyone’s rating them. Is Die Hard a Christmas movie or not? There became no doubt that Home Alone was a Christmas movie. And I think what he meant was the marketing of Home Alone, as opposed to, say, A Christmas story, made it a more successful movie as a result.”
Pula flourished in his early days at CNN when the news network was finding its footing. He would draw over the shoulder illustrations; Ted Turner insisted newscasts end on uplifting stories, and Pula would quickly draw up the visuals. That got him io Grey Advertising, working on brands like TV Guide, and finally the launch of Beverly Hills, 90210. It was that success which prompted Barry Diller to recognize Pula’s worth and bring him to Hollywood at Fox. Pula then found a niche at the freewheeling New Line Cinema as that studio moved from genre films to blockbusters, and he made his mark on films like Se7en, The Mask and Dumb and Dumber. But his penchant for outspokenness led him to be shown the door a number of times.
“The politics in Hollywood wasn’t so bad, but then when he got into the bigger studios, it was terrible,” Biggert said. Each sacking brought a generous settlement, and at some point, Pula decided to leave before he wore out his welcome.
“He thought, well, he’d already been at every studio and no one was going to hire him back,” Biggert said. “And also then the whole consulting thing, he said, ‘I don’t want to do consulting. They bring a consultant in when there’s a problem, and then you got to fix the problem and everyone on the staff hates and resents you.’ I think he just had had enough. He was ready to just let it all go. He wasn’t too sentimental about it and I don’t think he missed it that much,” Biggert said.
“He was not bitter. He didn’t feel like he wanted to go back to work in Hollywood, and it was great for him to have a change of scenery and move to Provincetown. It’s a really a beautiful historic place, where the pilgrims first landed, even though everyone thinks that was Plymouth. It’s a small town. In summer it becomes a big town, and then it goes back to me a small town. So it’s the best of both worlds and Chris really loved that.”
In Hollywood, Pula would hound colleagues to take home the toiletries at the hotels they stayed in, and he would collect them and disperse them to organizations that helped the homeless. In Provincetown, he and Biggert redirected the philanthropy to the Soup Kitchen in Provincetown, where they volunteered for decades. Perhaps it was there that Pula was happiest.
“He loved the soup kitchen,” Biggert said. “We’ve volunteered there since we got here, so that’s almost 22 years. He just loved doing that. And instead of being in the kitchen, he would be out on the floor busing tables. He didn’t care that this is lowest level job in the place. He would talk to everybody. And he had this thing where he would just, out of the blue, just sing at the top of his lungs that song, ‘Everybody Dance Now.’ He would sing the first two lines, just out of nowhere. He did it probably every time he was there. And oh, people would laugh at that, and join in. They would say, ‘Oh, there’s Chris. They knew he was there.”
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