Fake Quotes Controversy Shows Broken System

This week, Lionsgate released — and then promptly recalled — an audacious trailer for “Megalopolis,” an ugly yet undeniably ambitious late-career monstrosity from Francis Ford Coppola.

Normally, trailers come padded with hyperbolic quotes from less-than-credible critics — “quote whores,” we call them — plucked out of context and punched up with exclamation marks (a form of punctuation seldom if ever used by critics in print, but ubiquitous in movie advertising).

“An edge-of-your-seat thrill ride!” (“Any Given Sunday”)

“The best Western since ‘Unforgiven’!” (“3:10 to Yuma,” “Hostiles” or “Bone Tomahawk,” depending on who you ask)

“Two Thumbs Way Up!” (professional enthusiasts Siskel and Ebert on more movies than you can count)

In the case of “Megalopolis,” the marketing team tried a different strategy. Instead of quoting reviews out of the Cannes Film Festival (where the critics were across-the-board disappointed, with a few charitable exceptions, who contorted themselves into pretzels, trying to find something positive to say about the movie), Lionsgate lied.

Whoever oversaw that trailer seemed to be working on the assumption that you’ve already heard that “Megalopolis” is a disaster, so they set out to discredit the critics … by making up negative reviews of past Coppola triumphs. The trailer quotes Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael sniping “The Godfather,” and references pans of “Apocalypse Now” by John Simon and Rex Reed, en route to making the argument that The Critics Were Wrong on those films.

“One filmmaker has always been ahead of his time,” intones a voice that sounds like Laurence Fishburne’s.

There’s just one problem: Those critics didn’t write the nasty words featured in the trailer — which is not to say they weren’t tough on those films. Rex Reed tore “Apocalypse Now” a new one, calling it “a gumbo of pretentious twaddle,” while John Powers complained, “the casket of its genius contains not a jewel, not even a peach‐pit, but vapors.” (Sarris and Kael were snide in their coverage of “The Godfather,” which, from their reviews, clearly came all but pre-anointed when they reviewed it in 1972. But they appreciated its genius nonetheless.)

So what happened here? If the trailer could have made the same point with real quotes, why invent them instead? I have a hunch: This smacks of what happens when lazy students use ChatGPT to do their homework. Let’s say the copywriter on this trailer knew those movies had been panned in their time, but didn’t have time to go to the local library (or the wherewithal to find the actual reviews online).

Ask an AI assistant to find them for you, and the algorithm will do what any good language model is programmed to do: It will generate something that sounds plausible. To test the theory, I asked ChatGPT, “What were some of the meanest things film critics said about the movies ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’?”

Out popped this:

While “The Godfather” is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, some critics were initially less than enthusiastic. Here are a few of the harshest criticisms:
Pauline Kael (The New Yorker):
• Kael, though generally a fan of Coppola, had mixed feelings about “The Godfather.” She described it as “a long, slow, uninflected story,” criticizing its pacing and suggesting that the film was more focused on its own grandiosity than on engaging the audience emotionally. She also implied that the film was somewhat overrated, with its popularity perhaps exceeding its actual merit.
John Simon (New York Magazine):
• Simon was known for his biting reviews, and he was unimpressed with “The Godfather,” dismissing it as “a glorification of the Mafia and a valentine to violence.” He also criticized the film’s portrayal of Italian-Americans, feeling that it perpetuated negative stereotypes.

It also “quoted” Renata Adler’s review for The New York Times (even though she left the Old Gray Lady in 1969). That’s what programs like ChatGPT do: They tell you what you want to hear.

Others have suggested that whoever made the trailer invented the quotes themself, which could also be true (perhaps they were placeholders that made it through the process). That was the excuse given back in 2000, when Sony released a series of trailers quoting someone named David Manning, who always had nice things to say about their movies.

“The producing team of ‘Big Daddy’ has produced another winner!” he said of Rob Schneider abomination “The Animal.” And he called Kevin Bacon invisible-man movie “Hollow Man,” “one hell of a scary ride!” Except, David Manning didn’t exist, and the studio was obliged to offer $5 refunds to anyone who’d been suckered into seeing those movies based on false advertising.

The truth is, nothing goes further to undermine film criticism than when studio marketing departments clip and contort our words to sound like hyperbole. They’ve been doing it for decades, and any savvy moviegoer knows to take the “critics are raving” strategy with a grain of salt.

Personally, I think of my role as a film critic a bit like the proverbial Beefeaters of the English court: We sample the dish first, to make sure it hasn’t been poisoned or otherwise spoiled. If it’s safe to eat, we’ll tell you as much. That’s the consumer-guide aspect of our jobs, though there’s far more to it than that: We also evaluate and analyze a film’s artistic strengths, and we offer insights into how an imperfect artwork might have been improved.

Admittedly, critics have a long tradition of turning up their noses at garish, big-budget productions like “Megalopolis.” In 1979, Canby complained of “the lack of restraints on the artist” and faulted Coppola for risking his own fortune on such a “grandiose scale” in his “Apocalypse Now” review. A few years later, critics took cruel delight in heckling Michael Cimino over his titanically over-budget “Heaven’s Gate.” And the press treated James Cameron’s “Titanic” as a colossal miscalculation (why would anyone want to see a movie when they already knew the ending, went the jokes) until it broke box-office records and tied “Ben-Hur” for the most Oscar wins of all time.

But that doesn’t mean critics will be proven wrong in this case. “Megalopolis” is a mess. Sure, it’s crammed full of big ideas, which Coppola has been nurturing for a quarter-century, but the garish execution suggests that the master director has forgotten everything he learned.

What’s strange about the “Megalopolis” trailer is the implication that Lionsgate couldn’t find enough positive blurbs to make it look better than it is. Studios have been doing that for decades, since prospective audiences may be skeptical of quote whores, but they’re even warier of a movie that opens with zero endorsements.

Over the years, studio marketing departments found ways to manufacture the blurbs they wanted without making them up entirely: For example, in the early 2000s, rather than trying to sway serious critics, why not invite fanboys — the bloggers and online press who were predisposed to hyping “G.I. Joe” and superhero movies — and let them run their reviews first, then cherry-pick the gushiest reactions for your ads?

Today, they do it with influencers, forgoing all-media screenings (advance showings routinely provided for press) in favor of special promo events, where folks with TikTok followers are offered free cocktails and encouraged to share their reactions on social media.

The strategy nearly always works on newbies who aren’t used to being courted by studios. The most notorious example I can think of was the time Sony flew Ain’t It Cool News! founder (and self-professed “geek”) Harry Knowles to New York to attend the premiere of Roland Emmerich’s 1998 “Godzilla” reboot, for which they received an enthusiastic endorsement in return.

But old pros fall for it too, especially junket press: semi-serious movie journalists who are obliged to provide their “reactions” after screenings, which can then be featured in movie ads. Lately, awards consultants have started courting Oscar pundits, inviting them in early and shaping the awards campaigns around their reactions. Both are quid pro quo arrangements with obvious conflicts, as nobody wants to be disinvited from such access.

A handful of critics see getting blurbed as positive publicity for both themselves and their outlets. That used to be the case with Shawn Edwards, Peter Travers and Pete Hammond (back in his Maxim days), who all benefited from long-lead access, which they repaid with ridiculously inflated raves.

If you’re a self-promoter looking to get quoted, here’s a quick tip: Smack an “—ly” adverb directly in front of a punchy adjective (e.g. “bracingly original” or “astonishingly derivative”). That construction is catnip to marketing departments, who love phrases that sound positive (like the word “potboiler”), even when they’re not.

The “Megalopolis” trailer isn’t the first time movie marketers tried to turn bad reviews into an asset. In the early days of John Waters’ career, the prankish low-budget director relished scathing notices and slapped them on posters (“Pink Flamingos” quotes the Detroit Free Press review: “Like a septic tank explosion, it has to be seen to be believed”). Trailers for David Lynch’s “Lost Highway,” Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!” and the original “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” all used negative reviews to their advantage.

At Variety, we deliberately write in such a way as not to get taken out of context. The blurbs you see in ads have been personally signed off on by the critics who wrote them. It’s company policy that critics don’t give their reactions until the review runs, as experience has shown that those comments can be turned against the critic — say, if a producer gets wind that the critic didn’t like the movie, or the marketers use that seemingly off-the-cuff response in the campaign.

Still, there are plenty of times when Variety reviews are quoted in ads, which makes a certain amount of sense. The trade paper makes a point of reviewing as many movies the moment they premiere into the world as possible — at film festivals like Sundance, Cannes and Toronto — and we cover dozens of movies that may not get reviewed at all by most outlets.

To keep my critic friends humble, I have a long-running tradition of gifting them a custom T-shirt the first time one of their reviews gets blurbed on a poster or trailer. Each shirt says “QUOTE WHORE” across the chest, and features the offending phrase on the back.

There’s nothing wrong with being accurately quoted (however rarely that actually happens), and I don’t want to discourage new critics from championing deserving films. But I find it somewhat perverse when a film critic’s name appears in larger type of a poster than the filmmaker or stars, and I find it helps to remind that your words can and will be used against you.