9 June 1999

For a film lover, it sure is fun to be part of making a movie by inflicting yourself on the process. But here is my ultimate conclusion. Who the hell asked you? If you left moviemaking up to majority opinion, you wouldn't get good movies, but rather, the worst of television. It's an old saw that critics should be forced to make one movie to see how hard and complex a process it really is. That's never been truer than in the case of Internet gossips. Do you know what a journalist's opinion of "draft whatever" of a screenplay means to the process of making that movie? Nothing! If it ever has any effect, it is to cause the people who don't have the courage of an artist to try to make the project more boring or mainstream to protect their backsides. If you absolutely need to know what is in a screenplay (and I think the real audience for that form of torture is about 1 percent of moviegoers, if that), find a way to read the screenplay. Come to your own conclusions. And then, shut up. Not all of us want to hear about it. A movie is a movie, not a screenplay! But, I digress.

If you have chosen to take on the responsibility of being called a journalist or a critic, dear God, please come to your own conclusions. Not based on rumors. Not based on innuendo. Not based on unnamed, unreliable, clearly skewed sources who are just trying to get their point of view across. To paraphrase yet another fiction character, Jack Stanton. "Any idiot can burn down the village." Being negative about a movie is easy. More than 80 percent of them will suck. But journalism is not a percentage game. It's supposed to be about truth.

So, in closing, here's a little truth. Harry Knowles did the right thing on Tuesday. He ran a retraction of a false story about Universal killing their all CG Frankenstein project. He didn't apologize for his unkind abusive rant against the studio nor did he clearly indicate that he was retracting the original story with the same fan fare that he brought to the original, which sat on front page of his site for 4 or 5 days. But at least he did something. I foolishly had assumed that he had to at least be right about the fact that the film was cancelled. He was not. But what was most interesting to me (and this is the part where I become a journalist and not a note taker) was that Universal did not scream about the false story. Harry sat in his own gravy of false information and bile for almost a week before he admitted that "Apparently a couple of employees at ILM that were let go of in the post-Phantom Menace fray mis-interpretated (sic) their reason for leaving." Angry former employees are always skewed sources. Anyone knows that. Apparently, Harry didn't care or chose not to think about that. Universal knew. And they knew enough to let Harry swing in the wind. I assure you that there is some lazy journalist somewhere writing a story about how Universal dumped Frankenstein for the wrong reason. So who's the fool? And who made a fool of them?

On the flip side, Harry had a really great source on the X-Men project at Fox. How do I know? Because Harry made a mistake and gave up his source by printing part of the e-mail on which he based his casting story. Harry opens with, "I found out what is going on with X-MEN at the moment" and goes on with the details. What was left at the end was the text of the e-mail that he got from either Bryan Singer or a friendly producer on the film. You can't still see that because someone must have called Harry and now, it is gone. But it said, " However, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I'm getting quite happy with things and it looks like I'll be heading up to Toronto July 6th for a September 13th start date. And what will probably be a December 20th 2000 release date, though that is not confirmed. As for casting, the only actors confirmed are Ian, Patrick and Dougray. And yes, Tyler Mane for Sabretooth. There are a couple of others I'm negotiating -- and still looking for a few more. The reason we pushed back was to accommodate Dougray's schedule on Mission 2. And to protect us from cross-over if they're delayed. As for those strange rumors -- no Iceman in the basement, though it gave us all a chuckle. And Fox has never cut my budget. It is, as it has always been, around 75 mil."

The question that this raises is, if Ain't It Cool News is all about finding the truth behind the lies of the studios, why not just print a letter from Bryan Singer? There can be two reasons. One, Fox hates AICN and Bryan doesn't want to incur their wrath. If that's the case, yet another journalist has screwed you unintentionally, Bryan. Choose more carefully. The other option is that Singer and Fox are using AICN as a promotional tool for their movie. (I vote for that one!) The only proprietary information that the e-mail gives away is the budget and that information defends the honor of Fox against others who claim that the budget has bounced all over the place. Why the secrecy? Because secrecy is "cooler" than truth. The mystery of AICN is what keeps it alive. But the real secret is that the media has built itself a national watercooler it can quote so it doesn't have to take the extra step of doing the truly hard work of the job.

The glory of the Internet is that it gives a person like Harry Knowles a forum that the traditional media would never afford a self-proclaimed fat kid from Austin. Give me a place to read Harry's reviews of movies and I'll go because he brings a point of view that I can't get here in L.A. I salute that. Journalists should use Harry as a "voice of the geek crowd." He's earned that. But when we take blind items and pretend they are news because we agree with them or because it's easier than coming up with quotes from sources who have faces, we give up our right to be called journalists. And if it doesn't stop, we will destroy the value of all entertainment coverage. And this area of journalism wasn't exactly flying high before Harry arrived. It's simple. Anticipated news is not news. Write it down. Make a sampler. Don't be kind to yourself. And go back to the Internet watercooler if you want to. I know it's fun. I'll be there too. But when you go back to your work, please do your job and don't let someone else do it for you. The truth is counting on you.

E ME: I know you have something to say. Say it.