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.

Continue reading…

Every time there is a controversy about a movie, this topic arises again: Can you have a valid opinion about a movie you haven’t seen? The answer is mostly no — which should be obvious, but I guess it isn’t.

The only way you can form an intelligent opinion on a film without seeing it is if you’re basing your opinion on elements of the movie that are factual and not subject to interpretation — who the actors and filmmakers are, how many F-words it has, things like that.

For example, maybe you don’t like movies set in the Old West. If a movie is set in the Old West, that is a matter of fact, not opinion, and you can easily find it out from watching the ads or reading the reviews. Armed with that knowledge, you can determine whether you would consider it a “good” movie or a “bad” movie (with the goodness or badness here determined by that specific criterion).

Or maybe it’s the objectionable content that helps you decide. Several websites count and list the instances of profanity, nudity, sexual activity, and violence in movies, and you can use that information — all of it more or less quantifiable and not subject to much dispute — to form an opinion on whether the movie is right for you.

But when we get to a movie’s theme, or its message, or its point, now we’re talking about interpretations, and those can vary from person to person. If you and I watch a movie and count the F-words, we’re going to come up with the same number (assuming we don’t miss any). But we could watch the same movie and come out with entirely different interpretations of what its message was.

The only way to form a valid opinion on a movie’s point, message, or theme is to watch it. Period.

Continue reading…

If you know anything about me, you know that I LOVE CRAZY PEOPLE. They are the spice of life. They make dull things interesting.

One of the craziest people I’ve ever encountered is Tim Nasson, whose awkward, poorly syntaxed writings appear at Wild About Movies. I first wrote about him last year when I told you how he’d been misquoting people he interviewed. Then, this past summer, I talked about his new trend of pretending to have interviewed people he had not, in fact, interviewed. Then I had to tell you about some funny lies he told about me on his site, and then I figured, what the heck, I might as well publish the e-mail correspondence I had with him. Why should I be the only one who gets to enjoy his hilarious delusions?

And now I am honored to report that Tim Nasson has posted a comment on this very blog! In the last entry I mentioned, another reader was talking about problems he’d had unsubscribing from Nasson’s mailing list. This prompted Nasson himself to chime in and post this:

you are such a [swear word]
hope you get burned by the FBI for harassing Wild About Movies
We have records of not only your IP address the 30 times you registered for promos but also your physical address, which you inputted into our system, 30 times. GoDaddy, and everyone else you emailed laughed when we provided them with ALL of the information and think you’d be better off locked up in a loony bin with Eric D Snider.

Check out his www.alexa.com rating - his site’s, then www.wildaboutmovies.com Don’t think any movie studio has called him lately, asking to buy his site. Nuff said. Anyone who reads this site is obviously pathetic, like poor little, or rather should I say, poor ugly Eric. I should add that he emailed me wishing me to die of AIDS. I am not stupid enough to post anything about his site on my site because, as you know, there is no such thing as bad publicity, and publicizing his name or site in any way would give him free attention.

Continue reading…

After all these years, I can finally say I’ve been published in the Deseret News! I never really wanted to say that, but hey, a byline is a byline.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a byline at first. The Des News inadvertently took part in a wee bit of plagiarism — a situation that has now been rectified with much apologizing, I assure you.

At the paper’s website, they have a feature called LDS Newsline, a blog-like collection of items of particular interest to Mormons, who make up approximately 70 percent of Utah and approximately 100 percent of Deseret News readers.

An occasional feature there at the Newsline is “Mormon Lite”: “Sincere (but occasionally feeble) attempts at LDS humor.” They are submitted by readers. An Erik Hyer of Layton, Utah, submitted this one, about a Mormon-themed chain of restaurants.

About a dozen sharp-eyed readers have e-mailed me in the last 24 hours, alerting me of this article’s existence, and of its uncanny similarity to a “Snide Remarks” column I wrote way back in 2000.

I was alarmed by two things. One, I had no idea my readership overlapped so much with that of the Deseret News. How can I change that?

Two, why was the Des News reprinting my column without attribution?!

Continue reading…

I’ve been hanging on to these e-mails for almost a year, wondering if there would ever be a good time (and a good reason) to post them. And now there is!

This takes us all the way back to my first contact with Tim Nasson last August. Enjoy!

* * * * *

On Aug. 7, 2006, I posted a blog entry detailing the appalling journalistic tactics of one Tim Nasson, of Wild About Movies. Essentially, he was writing articles full of celebrities’ “quotes,” except they weren’t actual direct quotes. They were paraphrases (often with erroneous details) around which he had slapped quotation marks. And you can’t DO that in professional journalism, not even entertainment journalism.

I had brought the situation to his attention privately, but he dismissed my claims and ignored me thereafter. So I posted the blog entry exposing him to the world (well, to the parts of the world that visit my website). This resulted in a lengthy, hilarious exchange of e-mails between us….

Continue reading…

My last post was about Tim Nasson of Wild About Movies and his “Movie Junkets Exposed” feature. Somehow I missed that at the end of that piece, he has a few paragraphs about me! I could have sworn the feature originally ended after the part about Sony, and that the stuff about me was a later addition. Maybe it was. Doesn’t matter.

Anyway, here’s what he says!

A ‘one time junketeer,’ whom will not be named, that attended a junket during the summer of 2006 in Seattle, WA, threatened to ‘expose’ Wild About Movies as a site publishing ‘fake interviews.’ While we will not be giving this sniveling creature’s name any publicity, suffice it to say, every movie studio banned him not only from junkets, but also, press screenings because he wrote about the one junket he attended in such a way that he seemed to be a complete psychopath.

Continue reading…

[Part 1]
[Part 2]

July 24, 2006, “I Was a Junket Whore”: Fifteen minutes of Internet fame — oh, and it cost me a job, too.

This one earned me 15 minutes of Internet fame, but it had far more lasting repercussions than that: If it weren’t for this column, there is a very good chance that right now I would be the full-time film critic at a major weekly newspaper. Yep, this column cost me a job.

I had been freelancing movie reviews for Portland’s Willamette Week for several months when the paper’s full-time film critic, D., called to see if I wanted to go on this junket. It seemed like it would be fun to do once, just so I could say I did it, and I made the arrangements with Paramount Pictures.

My understanding was that I was going as a freelance writer, not as an official Willamette Week representative, and that WW would buy my story when I got back. The story would be your basic interview feature, incorporating the conversations I’d had with Oliver Stone and his actors.

Meanwhile, D. had announced that he was leaving WW, and the paper was seeking his replacement. The other writer who had been freelancing for them wasn’t applying for the job, which meant I was the only applicant who already had a foot in the door. D. indicated that if it were up to him, I’d be his replacement. He put me in touch with K., the features editor, and I went in for a job interview. It went well, K. liked me, I liked her, she was less interested in my past (I’d been fired from a newspaper a few years earlier) than in my ideas for the future, and things looked good.

Later that same day, July 19, I flew to Seattle for the junket.

Continue reading…

[Part 1]

Jan. 23 & 25, 2002, “Towed You So” and “Gus Mileage”: A two-part series on tow-truck drivers earns the wrath of an entire profession.

My editors and I fielded many angry phone calls and letters when the first of these, about a bad experience with a towing company, was published. Naturally, the column to elicit the most wrath we’d had in years would be a two-parter, and my bosses were not exactly thrilled at the prospect of getting more angry calls and letters after part two was published. So we had to tone part two down quite a bit, more or less ruining it but successfully staving off the torch-wielding mobs.

These were published in January. In September of that year, I bought a new car at Provo’s Kia dealership, trading in my old Hyundai. (You thought there was nothing lower than a Hyundai, but that’s only because you had forgotten about Kia.) Unfortunately, I accidentally locked my keys in the Hyundai there at the dealership, right at the end of the business day. I had to leave in a hurry to get to Salt Lake City for something, so I didn’t have time to wait for someone to show up with a slim jim and unlock the car. Technically, the car now belonged to Kia anyway and was their problem, not mine, and they were friends with a local towing company that they figured could come over and unlock the car for them. They sent me on my way in my new Kia and said they’d deal with the Hyundai. Just come back tomorrow to get your personal belongings out of it, they said.

Continue reading…

The cause of your children’s sudden interest in cross-dressing.

Is there anything funnier in this world than people flying off the handle because they misunderstood a joke? I think not!

The Illinois Review is a conservative blog that I was unfamiliar with until Defamer pointed out a recent entry entitled: “Shrek: A Strange Setting to Promote Transgenderism.”

The writer, Fran Eaton, says she’s reluctant to sound like an ogre herself by spoiling everyone’s fun with “Shrek the Third,” but “there was [an] issue raised in the movie that I’ve seen no one yet address.” Of course, the reason no one has yet addressed it is that it only exists in Fran’s imagination. The issue? Cross-dressing. Specifically:

It’s the awkward inclusion of a transvestite and the uselessness of the character himself (herself?) in the story that is troubling.

Right in the midst of a warm “traditional family” setting, the film writers place a man dressed as a woman in with Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White (the good gals).

Continue reading…

I am flattered to have received today an e-mail from Gary Larson’s people with regard to my using a Far Side cartoon in this “Snide Remarks” column from last year. Apparently my reprinting of the comic infringed on their copyright (which was not news to me) and they noticed (which was news to me) and wanted it taken down. So it’s gone, replaced with a Ziggy that serves the same purpose in the context of the column. You can read the cease-and-desist letter in the “Comments & Reaction” section of the column.