As some kind of evidence that the studios are taking critics less and less seriously, or at least a certain kind of critic, there is the recent case of Eric D. Snider, a Portland, Oregon based internet critic who got in trouble with Paramount. This, along with the absence of a “critics screening” of  Snakes on a Plane, and several think pieces on critics in recent newspaper columns and around the internet, hint at coming harbingers of great change. 

By a complicated happenstance irrelevant to the results, Snider ended up attending the  World Trade Center junket held in Seattle, and then went on to write a devastating “insider’s” account of the experience at his website, a column which then became a national story when Media Bistro covered it.

Paramount struck back at Snider, first demanding that he take down the column, and then deciding that they could do without Snider all together, banning him from all future Paramount screenings. In addition, the company that represents Paramount in Seattle and the Northwest market went further, banning Snider from the other studios the firm represents, including Dimension, Miramax, and The Weinstein Company.

What with Willamette Week reviewer Becky Ohlsen pelted with a pie by a disgruntled theater operator, Portland is becoming the No Man’s Land of critic bashing. In this case, though, it’s not clear what Paramount has against Snider’s essay, beyond surprise at the fact that typical junketteers are rarely eager to bite the hand that so lavishly feeds them.

But still, if a studio invites a freelance writer, you open yourself to lumps of spice as much as lumps of sugar, and Snider’s  original column , “I Was a Junket Whore,” is at times wildly funny and insightful about the junket process (although the title should have been “I Was a Junket Whore for a Day”), while also mean spirited and a tad naive, and frankly, something that has been done before. Paramount may have been miffed at the fact that Snider names names, especially of lower level PR publicists who are simply doing their job, pens poison portraits of stars “off camera,” as it were, and talks about that most taboo of topics, money.

David Poland weighed in with some dire warnings about what Snider may have “done” to other freelancers, which was followed by a lively talkback with posters contributing both for and agin Snider (for more details on Snider and his interesting past, consult his Wikipedia citation ).

Worse for Snider is that he is presumably one of several potential candidates for the film reviewer’s job at  Willamette Week, recently vacated by David Walker, and where Snider is already a freelancer.  But as a recent column shows, Snider is  unrepentant. It is unclear how  Willamette Week will react to the prospect of a first string reviewer banned from advance screenings and publicity material for a fifth of the films released to the city, but who knows, they might like that kind of spunk. Perhaps Paramount should have just thrown a pie in his face. Lord knows it would have been an expensive one.

Snider’s case is only the most recent manifestation of the ongoing “crisis” in the movie reviewing world. Newspapers, themselves dinosaurs, are dumping some of their older critics, and studios are increasingly skipping the press screening stop in a film’s trajectory to the screen, the most recent example  Snakes on a Plane. In the past, you’d see maybe two or three films a year withheld from the press, “always a bad sign” to the reviewers that the studio at least thought they had a dog. Now, there, there is about one a month.

Well, I for one think that the studios should drop all critics and not screen their films for any of them. Let the critics pay and see the films the first weekend like everyone else.  Ban Snider, and all the rest of us, too.

I say this as a working reviewer. I have grown sick of the radio tie-in advance screenings anyway, and don’t go to them anymore. But I always secretly had reservations about the idea of the studios offering up free screenings in the hopes that we would write positive reviews.

Without that largesse, reviewers would be truly and unambiguously independent. And a newspaper or a web site’s owners could pay the ticket costs, so the reviewer wouldn’t be “losing” anything. Also, the reviewer would be seeing the film with people who really wanted to view it, not with passholes there only for the free t-shirt and bragging rights. Cost conscious studios would save millions a year by canceling these screenings and even dropping the junkets, although they would probably have a jones over the evaporation of puff pieces in every publication from Vanity Fair to Parade (whose reporters get special treatment, anyway).

And subtracted from the “news” angle of a movie’s release, reviews could be written and read more as thoughtful cultural criticism rather than rushes to judgment. There is an invisible divide of mutual contempt between film writers and the film industry and the average man on the street, who usually sides with “business,” i.e., the producers, rather than critics, who are interested, or should be, in art. These are two (or three) different sets of peoples, with different agenda, goals, and responsibilities, and they rarely truly interact. I say take this opportunity of a critical “crisis” to raze the promotion-industrial complex and start over.

 

 

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