Movie seeks to capitalize on missing Alaskans

0Josh • 2nd Sep 2009 • blog entries

We all remember the “Blair Witch Project” which is now famous for it’s shaky camera antics that produced hundreds of parodies in a pre-YouTube era. What most of us aren’t as quick to remember was the creative way in which the movie helped pioneer viral marketing. The Blair Witch Project was quietly, and slowly sold as a true documentary about a film crew. By the time the movie came out it wasn’t taken with much skepticism when it presented itself as using real footage from the making of the documentary. Eventually we all learned it wasn’t real – none of it….

NBC Universal is hoping to fool Americans into theaters again this fall by releasing another movie that is trying to virally bill itself as being a true story, when really its all made up once again. “The Fourth Kind” starring Milla Jovovich comes out in November and according to the recently released trailer “dramatizes actual events” surrounding disappearances in Nome Alaska….blaming the disappearances on alien abductions. Jovovich even introduces herself at the beginning of the trailer as an actress and tells the camera that “every scene in this movie is supported by archived footage.”

It’s true that there have been a handful of disappearances in Nome, and its true that they were investigated by the FBI a few years back – but the problem with this movie is that tragic stories, often of Inupiat and Siberian Yupik villagers from neighboring communities are used to fool the audience and these true stories are distorted into events that never happened. Melanie Edwards a Vice president of the regional non-profit Kawerak, which helped push for the FBI investigation into 50 years of disappearing Native Alaskans in Nome tells the Anchorage Daily News that “It’s insensitive to family members of people who have gone missing.”

I’d encourage you to read the excellent ADN article by Kyle Hopkins, here are a few highlights:

• Despite an FBI conclusion in 2006 that no serial killer was to blame, emotions over the missing and dead are still raw in the region.
• The movie trailer shows victims as being all caucasian, when most unsolved cases in Nome usually involve Native Alaskans.
• The film is framed around a psychologist named Abigail Tyler who interviewed traumatized patients in Nome. But state licensing examiner Jan Mays says she can’t find records of an Abigail Tyler ever being licensed in any profession in Alaska. No one by that name lived in Nome in recent years, according to a search of public record databases.

Additionally it appears that NBC Universal is planting evidence on the internet to persuade anyone who is skeptical of the film’s premise and tries to google search for some clarity.

• The websites: http://alaskapsychiatryjournal.org/, http://alaskanewsarchive.com/, and http://www.knomarchive.com were all been registered on Aug 13th (the day the trailer came out) to anonymous organizations and have posted bogus articles pertaining to the plot of the movie.
• One article on alaskanewsarchive.com appears to be an archived “Nome Nugget” piece written by editor Nancy McGuire, however she tells the ADN that it’s baloney and she never wrote it.
• Ron Adler is CEO and director of the Alaska Psychiatric Institute. Denise Dillard is president of the Alaska Psychological Association. They said this week they’ve never heard of the Alaska Psychiatry Journal.

Finally, as Kyle Hopkins points out, the movie which is supposedly full of “archive footage” is clearly not even filmed in Nome, in fact IMDB says it was shot in Bulgaria.  Having lived in Nome it was one of the first things I noticed, it didn’t look anything even close – producers probably haven’t even been there!  Houses looked way too nice, and trees….. Nome doesn’t have trees!

If Universal was planning on this type of viral marketing for “The Fourth Kind” and posting fake news stories on the internet to begin with, they should made the *entire* thing up not just most of it. Instead they are intentionally exploiting the unsolved mysteries of real people in a real community and are attempting to deceive the rest of the country at the same time.