“MEGALOPOLIS” TRAILER PULLED AFTER USING FAKE QUOTES FROM CRITICS ABOUT OTHER FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA MOVIES

"We screwed up. We are sorry," a rep for Lionsgate said.

Lionsgate pulled the trailer for Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis after journalists and social media users discovered fake quotes from critics at the beginning of the video.

In a statement provided to Entertainment Weekly, a spokesperson for the studio wrote, "Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for Megalopolis. 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."

Lionsgate is handling the American distribution for the film, which was self-financed by Coppola and his production company American Zoetrope.

Megalopolis' first trailer, which was released Wednesday morning, opens with a voiceover from Laurence Fishburne saying, "True genius is often misunderstood," with pull quotes from legendary critics that express negative sentiment toward Coppola's previous projects, including The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Among the quotes: "Diminished by its artiness," attributed to the late Pauline Kael in a New Yorker review of The Godfather; "Doesn't know what it wants to be," attributed to the late Andrew Sarris in a Village Voice article on the same film; "Hollow at the core," attributed to Vincent Canby in a New York Times critique of Apocalypse Now; and "A triumph of style over substance," attributed to the late Roger Ebert in a Chicago Sun-Times piece on Dracula.

Social media users and journalists like Vulture's Bilge Ebiri and Siddhant Adlakha quickly noted that upon cross-referencing those critics' reviews of those films, the pull quotes were nowhere to be found. A quick perusal of the aforementioned reviews also highlights that some of these critics were largely positive in their evaluations of these other Coppola projects — Kael begins her piece by asserting that "If ever there was a great example of how the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art, The Godfather is it;" while Ebert wrote in his three-star review that Dracula "is an exercise in feverish excess, and for that if for little else, I enjoyed it."

One of the trailer's quotes states that former EW critic Owen Gleiberman, now a critic for Variety, wrote that Dracula is "A beautiful mess" upon its release in 1992. That phrase is not present in his review, though he did write that "Coppola fails to deliver" and that the movie is "mesmerizing visual overkill" in his B- verdict.

Gleiberman discussed the situation in Variety. “Even if you’re one of those people who don’t like critics, we hardly deserve to have words put in our mouths. Then again, the trivial scandal of all this is that the whole Megalopolis trailer is built on a false narrative,” Gleiberman said. “Critics loved The Godfather. And though Apocalypse Now was divisive, it received a lot of crucial critical support. As far as me calling Bram Stoker’s Dracula ‘a beautiful mess,’ I only wish I’d said that! Regarding that film, it now sounds kind.”

The idea, it seems, was to invoke other negative criticism of prior Coppola projects that are now widely considered masterpieces (though Dracula remains more beloved within insular cinephile circles), presumably as a way of preemptively defending Megalopolis from the divisive critical reactions that emerged from its Cannes premiere. The film currently has a 59/100 score on Metacritic and a 53% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, so it theoretically makes sense to frame the film as a work of genius ahead of its time that critics aren't yet wise enough to recognize as such.

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This isn't the first time that scandal has encircled Megalopolis. The Guardian reported claims of Coppola behaving inappropriately on set of the movie, which is his first directorial film since 2011's Twixt. That initial report alleged that the filmmaker kissed and groped topless female extras to get them "in the mood" for a scene. Variety later published a video that purported to capture Coppola in the midst of that behavior. This led to one extra, Rayna Menz, defending the director from the accusations in an Instagram story, while the extra who Coppola allegedly kissed in the video, Lauren Pagone, told Variety, “I was in shock. I didn’t expect him to kiss and hug me like that," noting that "You can’t speak for anyone but yourself. My experience was different.”

Coppola confronted the allegations while speaking to The New York Times, saying, "My mother told me that if you make an advance toward a woman, it means you disrespect her, and the girls I had crushes on, I certainly didn’t disrespect them," he said as part of a response the outlet described as "rambling," later adding, "I'm not touchy-feely. I’m too shy."

In addition to Fishburne, Megalopolis stars Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, and Dustin Hoffman, among others.

Megalopolis is set to release in theaters on Sept. 27.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.

2024-08-22T00:54:02Z dg43tfdfdgfd