For readers unfamiliar with the saga of the Paramount ban, I will recap it briefly before moving on to the surprising recent developments.

In July 2006, I went on an all-expenses-paid press junket for the film “World Trade Center.” I then wrote a column making fun of the whole shady practice, in which “journalists” are essentially wined and dined in exchange for fluffy, favorable coverage.

Paramount got mad at what I wrote and banned me — not just from future junkets (which I had no interest in anyway; this was a one-time thing), but from its press screenings, too. Press screenings are held, for most films, a few days before they open theatrically. All film critics in the major U.S. markets are invited to attend them. I was now removed from this list.

Now, the way these press screenings work is that they are handled in each market by a local public relations or advertising agency. In Portland, where I live, Paramount is handled by the Seattle office of Allied Advertising, which has branches around the U.S., most of which focus on film publicity. No one from Paramount ever contacted me directly. Instead, they had their Seattle publicist at Allied tell me I’d been banned. It was this Seattle office that had set up the junket I attended.

This Allied publicist also said that, in solidarity with Paramount, they were banning me from their other clients’ screenings too. Luckily, besides Paramount, Allied in Seattle only handled the Weinstein Company and Miramax. The other big studios were handled by other Seattle agencies, and none of them cared. (One of the other publicists even called me to say how funny and dead-on she thought the article was.)

So ever since then, my understanding has been that Paramount was mad, and that Allied in Seattle had removed me from their press list entirely. I kind of assumed that Paramount had strong-armed Allied into the latter decision.

But now new facts have come to light.

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