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Brick No156: David Manning is dead
By Matt Weston, Thursday 18 August 2005 David Manning is dead His name was David Manning, and he just cost Sony $1.5m. Manning was a fictional film critic, fabricated by Sony marketers to review Sony movie releases. He didn't exist, but the Connecticut-based paper he supposedly wrote for - the Ridgefield Press - did. Sadly, his total body of work was limited to just four short blurbs: fake reviews of The Animal, Hollow Man, The Patriot, and A Knight's Tale - starring "this year's hottest new star", Heath Ledger. (If he was hot in 2001, he's not now.) But the moviegoers who sued Sony for a $1.5m refund shouldn't be that surprised - Trainspotting meets A Clockwork Orange! You can't take a movie blurb seriously, even one not credited to a DM, Connecticut. John Horn, the Newsweek reporter who outed Manning as the fraud he really was, also claimed that studios regularly used all-expense paid movie junkets to pamper critics in return for favourable blurbs. And even if you're sure the source is kosher, who's to say that the quote is taken in context? An example: Film | 16 Years of Alcohol Daily Star | "Trainspotting meets A Clockwork Orange!" Actual line | "This glum, violent drama about a Scottish thug ruined by drink is written and pretentiously directed by Richard Jobson whose approach - Trainspotting meets A Clockwork Orange - is bad enough to drive you to drink in no time." See more. In the past, if you had a substandard film (or product, or service), this kind of fakery might have worked. Blurbs - even taken out of context - used to give a clue as to whether a film (or product, or service) was any good. But the confidence of most moviegoers/ customers has been slowly eroded - not just by episodes like the Sony one above, but by experience. Increasingly we see no correlation between a good blurb and a good movie. A blurb or testimonial out of context is a red herring. And in five years time, the out of context blurb will be just as disbelieved as the corporate slogan. Increasingly, customers associate out of context testimonials with substandard products and services. A quote that uses ellipsis and is attributed vaguely to AB, Dorset does more harm than good. It isn't a clue that something is good; it's a warning sign of fakery. If you want to be believed, you need to put your quotes, blurbs, or testimonials in full context: don't edit - quote the whole quote, even the bad bits; reproduce original handwritten notes; give full names, and contact details. Post-script: (1) today's column wasn't about the movie industry; it was about every industry. But if you make movies, and happen to be reading this, here's an idea. Instead of quoting fictional reviewers, quote your score from www.metacritics.com - they use a fabulously complex metric to put scores in the full context. (2) An 11th way to fix The Film Shop (see Brick No133) - set up a display showing the best (and worst) 20 movies in store, as ranked by scores from metacritics.com. Remember to sign up: back to top |
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