Mercedes-Benz, legendary creators of elegant machinery seen flashing across screens in blockbusters for decades, has finally got behind the wheel of it's own Hollywood production. As part of a bold brand-enhancing strategy, Mercedes-Benz UK, with their new advertising agency Campbell Doyle Dye, has produced Luckystar, in conjunction with the critically acclaimed Oscar nominated director Michael Mann (Heat, The Insider, Ali), starring Oscar winner, Benicio Del Toro (The Usual Suspects, Traffic). Lucky Star, an action-mystery thriller set in a wild range of exotic locations across Southern California, is, in all reality, a feature film trailer which will run in cinemas across the UK and on the carmaker's website this summer.

Walter Campbell, creative director at Campbell Doyle Dye, in collaboration with Michael Mann, has created a media first - a trailer for a film that doesn't exist. The idea of promoting the non-existent but highly glamorous feature film with a 60 second trailer and extended director's cut is really to celebrate the elegance and mystique of the Mercedes-Benz brand and the recent launch in April of the sleek new SL class in particular, while delighting in the grandeur of high-production contemporary action cinema. Mercedes-Benz UK communications manager Richard Payne reflects, 'Where you see cars most dramatically and excitingly portrayed is in movie trailers. It's not a commercial selling that car, it's talking about the whole excitement and dynamism of the brand. I think where we can add to our image is with a little more youthfulness and a bit more dynamism, sportiness and excitement, and the SL class does all of that in spades.'

One of Campbell Doyle Dye's founding partners Caspar Thykier concurs, "What we're working for is to communicate the specialness of the Mercedes brand and really show a deeper aspect of it to consumers. To cut through, advertising has to be as good as the programming it interrupts. I think the advertising landscape for cars in particular is quite boring at the moment, particularly for luxury cars. What do you say about them? You can't talk about a car being a luxury product because then it's almost like you protest too much, especially if your car is already perceived as the benchmark. So you look at car ads and you think about where cars are most exciting and that's really in the best pop promos and great films, where these cars have a greater resonance, being integral to a deeper story line. 'In searching for the idea for the film best suited for a starring role for a Mercedes-Benz SL, Campbell Doyle Dye partner Walter Campbell decided to break the product down to its salient components. 'We started looking at the Mercedes and what the car was about and it's really something more than the sum of its parts. It wasn't any sort of particular detail or the multiplication of all the detail and all the work; it seemed there was another ingredient, sort of a hidden ingredient, and we started thinking about what that meant.' The notion of this mysterious but powerful advantage inherent in Mercedes machines became an inspiration for the 'movie' which led ultimately to Lucky Star, a movie about a man who is mysteriously, in essence, or in the perception of others, the luckiest person on earth. That we see him in a Mercedes SL is perhaps an aside or a sign off to his constant, unimaginable good fortune whether in an exotic casino, on a stock market trading floor, or in eluding the pursuit of powerful government agents seeking the source of his phenomenal success.'

Caspar Thykier expands a little further: 'Advertising has to strike a delicate balance between being entertaining, relevant and branded. The link back to the brand and the SL in the back story in this case is ever present but never overt. There is the reference in the film name itself, 'Lucky Star - the Mercedes Benz three-pointed star is in the top five most recognized brand icons in the world according to Interbrand. Yet we never overtly exploit this link. Then there is the notion of luck hinted at in the trailer. Here's a guy who seemingly defies the odds. But we sense that it is born out of the central character's control of his own destiny. One of the inspirations for the back story was the famous Gary Player quote 'The more I practice, the luckier I get' which was instrumental in Walt's
thinking behind the concept. It plays back to the innovative technology in the new SL
housed in a design classic befitting this car's history. It requires a lot of effort to make something so seemingly effortless like the SL, which is replicated in the actions of our hero and his car in the trailer.'

As this 'movie' idea developed, the creatives, setting sights on Hollywood's A-list production talent, sat down to agree their dream team. As Richard Payne put it, 'If we're going to go to Hollywood, let's do it with the best. Let's really have the credibility and authority that the best could bring to it. So very early on it was proposed that we work with Michael Mann. And the first name that came up for our hero was Benicio Del Toro. Just months ago we hardly dared believe that that plan would come to fruition, but amazingly it all came into place and we found ourselves actually working with both Michael Mann and Benicio. How lucky can we get?'

At 2am in the desert, on a short break in the night's Lucky Star location shoot, Michael Mann is asked why he was interested in this project and immediately grins. 'Well, the story, and working with Benicio, and then also this car! It reminds me of a 300SL that you'd see on the streets once in awhile when I was a kid in Chicago, and it's got a kind of romantic resonance.' In fact, on board early in the project, Mann took an active role in crafting the script for Lucky Star, bringing to it other factors that clearly have romantic resonance for him as well. 'The picture itself I can almost imagine as a complete motion picture. It feels like 'Kiss me Deadly" which was made I think in 1956. A kind of noir-ish private investigator Mike Hammer character.'

Another attraction for Mann was simply the notion of making the trailer for the film without making the film. 'What was interesting about the structure of a trailer is that it pulls pieces from many different parts of a two-hour narrative. So, by definition continuity is never the same. Each location is the polar opposite of another, so there's maybe five or six different counterpointed places and geographies and cultures that this takes place in.'

Finding and securing those many 'geographies' involved Mr Mann's seasoned feature film
team working with the same energy, and comparable volume they brought to his
legendarily atmospheric epics such as Heat and The Insider. Perennial Mann collaborator visual consultant Gusmano Cesaretti is again on board for Lucky Star: 'The exciting thing with Michael is that he likes to use real locations. Whenever we're going to a location like a Chinese casino, he wants to use the real gamblers, the real dealers, because how are you going to teach an extra to be a card dealer? They move their hands so beautifully, so fast. He goes for realism… SUPER realism.' In Lucky Star, along with the Chinese casino, our hero is chased through LA's real Koreatown by helicopters, finds solace in the arms of a lovely lady (Ana Cristina) in a fabulous house overlooking the LA basin, absconds with classified files from a mysterious laboratory in Valencia, and intriguingly firebombs an eerily derelict shack in the sprawling California desert while the sun sets into night. Our lucky star even encounters gang members in the notoriously dangerous 'projects' (council estates) of East Los Angeles. All these locations were, per Mann's credo, real. Location manager Rick Schuler remembers this scene in particular: 'There's definitely gang activity in there. So we hired security guards from the housing, and I think it's a Michael characteristic that we got real gang members to kind of be part of it. Since we were in their territory it's like we need to bring them on board.'

All of which helps bring a realism and impact to a world of Michael Mann's creation wherein a man with no name (referred to only as 'Mr H') and no clear origin or direction glides effortlessly through this scarily real planet of ours. Michael Mann: 'There's an anomaly about him and wanting to keep it mysterious. He's able to score and handle things he wants, big time, for some purpose that we don't know -- it's never gone into; that confounds a lot of people around him… at the end he says it's because he's lucky. We don't know where he's from, what he's doing, why he's doing it, but there's a mission that has an objective. His mind is on the details of an event, a job he's got to do, of some process he's in the middle of, and that's what attracted me to it, basically it was his character.' Benicio Del Toro seems to delight in his character's elusiveness: 'He's some guy who came from up ahead. And now he's hanging out way behind. If you really look at it
and listen to the story you'll put it together, but it's kind of subtle.'

Messrs Mann and Del Toro have so enjoyed exploring all this subtlety together that they have even joked about finishing the movie, according to Del Toro. 'I liked the story he put together. We're talking about it. It would be fun to do it and turn it into a movie. It'd be a first. First the trailer, then the movie. I'm not even considering this as a performance, we're just having a good time with a possibility of working together and a possibility for maybe a good story eventually. But we're just having a good time.'

The shoot, a brisk two days and three nights, focused on beautiful people and an engineering work of high tech art courtesy of Mercedes-Benz, was also infused with excitement about another cutting edge aspect to the project: the whole trailer is shot on high-definition digital tape, only just now in the global limelight as the format on which George Lucas shot the new Star Wars: Episode Two. This ultra-modern, high speed, high resolution format allows for a different kind of lighting, pacing and strategy in the production process, while delivering a substantially different look and texture to the end product. Lucky Star's High Definition Supevisor Bryan Carroll embodies the crew's enthusiasm about what this technology brings to the picture, and in fact the whole theme of the 'lucky' star: 'Ask the camera guys because that's one thing they love about this. How lucky they get with this camera! We get stuff you don't get on film. We see our luck on screen. The whole purpose of that car is to go fast and guide you straight forward into the future and that's just what this technology is.' Gusmano Cesaretti feels the same buzz: 'With high definition you actually have beautiful details in the sky, in the clouds, the moon, and still have details right here in the foreground, which is pretty amazing. Perhaps when you look at it you get a sense that this isn't really like it is, like a spy. Is this perhaps something to do with a strange being from another planet? It's just the Mercedes there, caught in this incredible story, you know, visual story, and that's a good excuse to shoot a car.' Asked how the cinema audience will perceive the effect of high definition on the big screen, Carroll concludes with a comment that seems eerily befitting a 'movie' about a man
whose great success eludes all analysis. 'They're going to know. it'll stand out, it'll have a look, it'll have a feel, but they're not going to know how we did it.'

Envisioning Lucky Star's arrival on the big screen amidst all the real film trailers this summer, Mercedes' Richard Payne explains: 'What's really interesting about this project is the broader context of the blurring lines between traditional marketing and commercial film production. This goes beyond product placement in film. We're product placing a car in our own trailer, and taking on the studios themselves in producing blockbuster trailers which have a life beyond the movie itself, like those for Spiderman or Star Wars Episode II. It's this type of innovation we strive for in our cars and want to replicate in the marketing support around the brand'

Caspar Thykier continues, 'To my knowledge, no one's ever made a stand alone trailer before a film. To live up to the expectations of this event we've also managed a media first. BJK&E, the media agency, along with Carlton Screen and Pearl & Dean have made it possible for us to run the commercial in the trailer section for forthcoming movies in cinema and not in the ad reel itself. While on the internet we'll be supporting the project on a dedicated Lucky Star website supporting the extended director's cut with the special features you'd expect from a film website created by Oyster Partners. It'll be interesting to see what people make of the whole integrated campaign. What would be really great would be if there was enough public interest in the trailer to get the real film made.'

Lucky Star will appear in UK cinemas in July 2002 and on TV, as well as on the internet with numerous interactive options and deleted scenes at www.luckyluckystar.com