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Joseph Farrell, Who Used Market Research to Shape Films, Dies at 76

In the 1987 film “Fatal Attraction,” a psychopathic woman terrorizes a married man with whom she has had a one-night stand, making more and more threatening gestures toward him and his family until her violent demise becomes inevitable.

The film originally had a rather arty conclusion, in which the woman, played by Glenn Close, commits ritual suicide as she listens to a recording of “Madame Butterfly.” Preview audiences rejected the ending as unsatisfying, however, and at the insistence of a marketing executive, Joseph Farrell, Paramount Pictures had the director, Adrian Lyne, reshoot it.

In the revision, Ms. Close’s character and her paramour, played by Michael Douglas, have a violent struggle in which she is nearly drowned in a bathtub and is finally dispatched by a gunshot fired by his wife (Anne Archer).

With the new ending, “Fatal Attraction” was nominated for six Oscars and earned more than $300 million in box-office receipts worldwide.

“Joe is the one most responsible for ‘Fatal Attraction’ becoming the gigantic hit it became,” Sidney M. Ganis, who was Paramount’s president for worldwide marketing at the time, said in an interview. “The audience told Joe this is a great movie until the end.”

“They didn’t want to see her do herself in,” he added. “They wanted to see her done in.”

It was a prime example of the influence of Mr. Farrell, who was widely credited with expanding the use of opinion-tracking strategies for all the major studios in Hollywood, thus helping to transform how the industry thought about audiences and inflaming the perennial battle in moviemaking between art and commerce.

Mr. Farrell died in Los Angeles on Dec. 7, his wife, Jo Champa, said. He was 76.

Mr. Farrell had been an executive at the Louis Harris polling firm before he founded a company to do market research on Hollywood films in 1978. The company, National Research Group, didn’t originate preview screenings or focus groups, but it refined the process of prerelease film testing and made it part of a formidable arsenal of marketing tools for movie executives.

As “a meddling numbers man,” as Mr. Ganis referred to him, Mr. Farrell was not initially welcomed by Hollywood’s old-boy network.

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Joseph Farrell was widely credited with expanding the use of opinion-tracking strategies for all the major studios in Hollywood.Credit...Walt Disney Studios, via PRNewsFoto

“He was different; he was intellectual,” said Mr. Ganis, a recent president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “He was a suit to the nth degree, highly educated, highly verbal, and with this questionable program that none of us at the beginning understood very well. We’d all been taught that it all begins with the gut — how you’re feeling about material, how a scene should look, how a movie should be marketed.”

Over 25 years, NRG, as the company was known, became the largest and most influential marketing consulting firm in the film industry. With a partner, Catherine Paura, Mr. Farrell provided studios with demographic analysis and tracking surveys to help them develop strategies for creating film trailers, advertising and scheduling release dates. NRG pioneered the idea of demographic quadrants, dividing the potential audience for a film into four parts: men and women under and over 25. A movie with the broadest appeal became known as a “four-quadrant film.”

Whether Mr. Farrell’s influence was positive or malign was debated. Ron Shelton, the director of “Bull Durham” and “White Men Can’t Jump,” complained to The Los Angeles Times in 1992 that Hollywood’s reliance on marketing “contributes to the lowest-common-denominator mentality and the proliferation of formulaic movies and genres.”

“I want to confound expectations in my movies, not cater to them,” Mr. Shelton said.

Mr. Farrell defended his work. “The film is the athlete; I just give it every training tip I know,” he said. “Filmmaking is a creative pursuit but must ultimately go commercial. Market research, a town meeting of sorts, lets the filmmaker know if he’s communicating effectively with the public.”

Mr. Farrell was not flawless in his prognostication of success, but he said he was “accurate enough.” Mr. Ganis said Mr. Farrell “was very rarely dead wrong,” though he recalled the time the two of them stood in the back during a screening of “Ghost,” the 1990 romantic fantasy that became a huge hit.

“Joe looked at me and shook his head,” Mr. Ganis said.

Joseph Nicholas Farrell was born in New York City on Sept. 11, 1935. His father, John, was a New York City policeman; his mother, Mildred, was a librarian. Joseph seemed headed for the priesthood, like his older brother Jack, but dropped out of the seminary at 18. He graduated from St. John’s University, studied sculpture at the University of Notre Dame and earned a law degree from Harvard. He was an executive for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund before going to work for Louis Harris and Associates, where he rose to vice chairman.

Mr. Farrell practiced what he preached. He was a furniture designer who sold his original pieces under the name Giuseppe Farbino. “Who wants to buy furniture from an Irishman?” he said.

Mr. Farrell also tried his hand at producing, serving as executive producer of the 1987 comedy “Mannequin,” in which a young man, played by Andrew McCarthy, falls in love with a department store mannequin who comes to life (Kim Cattrall). The film was made based on Mr. Farrell’s marketing principles. Though not a star, Mr. McCarthy was cast after tests of his movies showed that he strongly appealed to girls, the target audience.

“Mannequin” cost $7.9 million to make. It earned $41 million in the United States and Canada.

In addition to his wife, an actress whom he married in 1998, Mr. Farrell is survived by two brothers, Jack and Frank, and a son, Sean.

After selling NRG in 2003, he and Ms. Paura started their own production company, Farrell Paura Productions. Its film “Joyful Noise,” a musical about a national choir competition with Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton, , is to be released next year.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: Joseph Farrell, 76, Exponent of Film Market Research. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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