Are the publicists okay

Today in Has Anyone Checked On The Publicists Lately, Somebody Probably Should news, Lionsgate pulled the latest trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis because they got caught using fabricated quotes attributed to famous film critics in the trailer. 

Here’s what happened: Yesterday morning, Lionsgate, the US distributor for Megalopolis following its premiere at Cannes, released a new trailer for the film. But by the afternoon, Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri called bullsh-t, noting that the quotes used in the trailer from critics like Pauline Kael, Rex Reed, and Roger Ebert don’t actually appear in their reviews of Coppola’s previous films like Apocalypse Now and The Godfather. And then came the admission from Lionsgate that they “screwed up” with an “inexcusable error in our vetting process”. They then “recalled” the trailer, but as of this writing it can still be seen on IGN’s channel on YouTube.

The intent was not a bad idea—use negative reviews of Coppola’s celebrated works to show that he is often out of step with critics, that bad reviews have not always equaled bad movies in his canon. The problem is attributing fake quotes to real writers. 10/10 idea, 0/10 execution.

Here’s a sample of the fake quotes:

“Diminished by its artsiness.” – Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (The Godfather, 1972, especially interesting because Kale championed The Godfather)

“A spectacular failure.” – John Simon, National Review (Apocalypse Now, 1979)

“A triumph of style over substance.” – Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1992)

These quotes don’t seem so bad, except for knowing Kael praised The Godfather, and also knowing Ebert would never word anything as pedantically as “a triumph of style over substance”. When Ebert didn’t like a movie, you felt it in your bones (his excoriating review of North is legendary). But these quotes are just so…bland. None of these writers are bland, they’re such good critics and writers their reviews are art unto themselves. So where did these griege ass quotes come from?

Lionsgate is copping to a “vetting error”, but no word on how it happened, but I deeply suspect ChatGPT (or a similar app) is the ultimate culprit. Just to see, I went to ChatGPT and prompted “quote about The Godfather by Pauline Kael”. Here’s what I got:

“‘The Godfather’ is a beautiful but ultimately shallow movie. It creates an illusion of depth and complexity with its grandiose style and impressive cast, but it’s fundamentally just a slick, well-made melodrama.”

None of that appears in Kael’s actual review from 1972, except for the word “melodrama”:

“‘The Godfather’ is popular melodrama, but it expresses a new tragic realism.”

That’s a considerably different, much more flattering context for melodrama. I then asked ChatGPT to show me quotes from Roger Ebert about Dracula, which he gave 3/4 stars to in 1992, hardly a bad review. Here’s what I got:

“It is a visually stunning film that ultimately doesn’t hold together. It’s as if the movie is too enamored with its own style and ambition to pay much attention to storytelling or character development.”

Again, none of that is in Ebert’s actual review. He does, however, call it “an orgy of visual decadence”, which is how Ebert actually wrote, with high impact phrases and evocative language to match the films he’s critiquing. 

But there had to be people back in the day who didn’t like Coppola’s masterpieces. Dracula actually was divisive, so I went to Owen Gleiberman’s 1992 review in Entertainment Weekly, where he rated the film a B-. The Megalopolis attributes the quote “A beautiful mess” to Gleiberman, but that phrase does not appear in his actual review. He does, however, write: “The director has dressed up a classic tale in mesmerizing visual overkill without coming close to its dark heart.”

It took me less than 10 minutes to find and read Gleiberman’s review and choose a quote to include here. Multiply that by the dozen-plus quotes included in the Megalopolis trailer, and let’s say it would take a human being 60-90 minutes to pull all the quotes for the trailer. On the other hand, it took less than 90 SECONDS for ChatGPT to spit out some garbage to copy/paste. 

So, yeah, I’m chalking this one up to some AI bullsh-t. The idea for the trailer was good, and it would have taken a moderate amount of work to actually find some real negative quotes to use about Coppola’s previous films. But that was too much, apparently, or more likely, someone a little higher on the food chain thought it a waste of money to pay someone lower on the food chain to do this work, and so they turned to AI, which is not, in fact, intelligent, but IS good at lying. And so, we got a trailer made of lies. Someone send a fruit basket to Lionsgate’s publicists for having to write an apology for a movie trailer. Literally, they had to apologize for a commercial. It’s been a rough couple of weeks for movie publicists. 

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