Adventures in Film Marketing

Plus: a gothic assignment!

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Cards on the table: I’m incredibly excited for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. Yes, the film looks like a work of mad folly, of someone who has more ideas than common sense, who is finally free to work without the chafing restraint of a moneyman breathing down his neck because he is the moneyman. But mad follies are the best kind, and I’m always in favor of filmmakers going a little bit nuts. I mean, just watch this trailer:

Once you get past the quotes, the images here are both striking and portentous, the whole thing a giddy swirl of excess and pomposity and digital trickery and high-caliber acting talent. I’ve described this movie as “Francis Ford Coppola’s Sucker Punch”—a reference to a much-maligned film by Zack Snyder that I happen to think is both an interesting failure and a work of mad genius composed by a visionary whose reach exceeded his grasp—and I meant it as a compliment.

The quotes are why we’re here, though. In part because I actually kind of admire a filmmaker striking back at critics. I’ve long thought filmmakers and critics have gotten a little too chummy thanks to social media and the endless junket cycle combined with the fact that filmmakers don’t want to alienate the people who create the Tomatometer score. Critics should be able to write without fear of alienating sources while filmmakers should be able to point to the scoreboard when a critic gets it wrong. It’s all fair play.

What’s not fair is inventing quotes and attributing them to critics to dunk on them. And that seems to be precisely what happened here. Watching the trailer I was … well, surprised to see the Pauline Kael quote, since she famously raved about The Godfather. And I was a little surprised to see John Simon’s quote about Apocalypse Now attributed to National Review, which he would become a critic for but not until a few years later; a text from a friend who would know confirmed the timeline there was off. But I didn’t think much of it; certainly, the folks at Lionsgate wouldn’t just, like, make up some quotes?

Except, uh, oops. Turns out they did. Bilge Ebiri was the first to do the legwork and actually try to track down the quotes; he couldn’t do it. Shortly after that, Variety had an apology from the studio:

“Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for ‘Megalopolis,'” a Lionsgate spokesperson said in a statement provided to Variety. “We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry.”

I am extremely curious to find out what really happened here. The guess on social media is that some intern, having coasted through school by getting ChatGPT to write all of his essays for him, probably plugged “negative quotes from famous critics for The Godfather [et al]” into some AI program and just copied down the phantom nonsense it spit out. This conforms to both my generational and technological prejudices, so I’ll allow it is, at the very least, entirely plausible. Indeed, I have trouble imagining another alternative. A funnier, though less likely, option is that they did literally just make up the quotes knowing someone would track down their provenance and turn it into a scandal. But I rarely choose to believe the nefarious explanation when simple incompetence is possible.

Either way, the campaign was a big success since it got lots of people talking about Megalopolis! I have no idea if the film is any good or not, but it looks like a wondrous mess of a movie, and that’s, generally, my favorite kind.

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Before we get to the links, I just want to give a special heads up for folks in the Dallas area: on tomorrow’s episode of The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, I’m interviewing a young filmmaker named Valentina El Harizi about her short, “Behind the Scenes,” which is playing at the DIFF Shorts Film Festival on Saturday, August 24, at 3PM at the Angelika Film Center Dallas. It was an interesting chat about her film—a fiction short about the difficulties of balancing online and real life—and what inspired her to make it; I hope you give it a listen. If you’re in town and want to see some young filmmakers demonstrating their talents, I highly recommend checking it out. Tickets appear to be free! Can’t beat that price!

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Links!

This week, I reviewed Blink Twice, which feels very much like a movie conceived in 2017.

Speaking of Blink Twice and awkward marketing, the Amazon/MGM team tweeted a trigger warning for the film yesterday, warning of the themes of sexual assault within it. There are three semi-distinct (and escalatingly cynical) reasons to tweet something like this.

The least cynical reason is that you are genuinely concerned about the mental health of the people seeing the movie rated R for “strong violent content, sexual assault, drug use and language throughout, and some sexual references” and want to dissuade them from seeing the film. The moderately cynical answer is that this is just another piece of marketing, hence the inclusion of the release date on the image with the trigger warning. And the most cynical—and I think, most likely—reason to tweet this out is the hope of sparking a culture-war argument about the foolishness of such trigger warnings in general, one in which someone rightly points out that you don’t need to slap trigger warnings on R-rated movies while someone else rightly points out that this hurts no one, and everyone feels smugly righteous about their stance while screaming at everyone else.

Make sure to listen to this Friday’s bonus episode of Across the Movie Aisle about the Alien franchise. I’m fascinated by the series’s shift from one about Ellen Ripley to one that almost explicitly makes the Weyland-Yutani corporation the focus of the series.

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Assigned Viewing: ‘The Crow’ (Prime Video and Paramount Plus)

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There’s a new version of The Crow hitting theaters; I haven’t seen it, but it looks terrible. The original remains a touchstone of goth filmmaking and you have to admire Alex Proyas’s weird vision for the movie. You should probably just stay home and watch the original if you’re thinking about seeing the remake.