The Twitters were twitting fervently Monday in response to the Federal Trade Commission’s new guidelines requiring online writers to disclose when they have received freebies in exchange for reviewing a product. But much of the uproar and indignation expressed by bloggers was unfounded, demonstrating a misunderstanding not just of the FTC’s new guidelines but of the underlying ethical principles, too.

Here is the relevant portion of the FTC’s press release on these new guidelines, which take effect Dec. 1:

The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers — connections that consumers would not expect — must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.

That’s from the press release about the guidelines. You can read the actual guidelines in PDF format here. On page 75, at section 255.5, “Disclosure of material connections,” is this:

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Two final updates on JeffWellsOxfordGate 2009 (see previous items here and here) and then I believe the matter is closed.

At the Oxford Film Festival’s awards ceremony Saturday night, one of the prepared comedy bits involved a category for Best Performance by a Local Actor in a Film Not Appearing in the Festival. These included two clips from actual films involving actual local actors, and then a third one: “Jeffrey Wells in ‘The Media Panel.’” This was accompanied by a graphic of an empty chair with a sign on it reading “Reserved for Jeffrey Wells.” It got a huge laugh.

I mention this in particular because Wells’ language in his last couple blogs and comments suggests it’s only his colleagues (“the cool kidz”) who think he did something wrong by ditching the panel, and that no one else minded. Believe me, that’s not the case. If nothing else, this joke is evidence that to the festival organizers, blowing off the panel was a big deal.

Wells posted what is presumably his final blog entry on the whole affair, and it is a masterpiece of deflection and justification. As it turns out, every single element of the ugly incident was someone’s fault other than his! That includes his grumpy refusal to go to the panel, which one of us ought to have prevented by talking to him when we saw him looking so downcast in the hotel lobby that morning.

I’m serious! Read his blog! That’s really what he says!

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Jeff Wells update! The festival provided a fantastic lunch yesterday at a local restaurant called City Grocery. It was for the filmmakers and the fest’s invited guests, including, apparently, those who had not actually done what the fest brought them here for. Wells was there, enjoying the free food and drink, and asking them to serve his lunch upstairs at the bar, instead of downstairs at the tables with everyone else.

That was all anyone saw of him yesterday. He didn’t show up at any of the evening’s screenings (at least not that we saw), or at the parties (he definitely wasn’t there). And then this morning he posts this:

The Oxford Film Festival cool kidz (Rocchi, Voynar, Yamato, etc.) are shunning me, or certainly not initiating contact. I guess yesterday’s cruddy wireless funk along with my subsequent disinterest in taking part in yesterday’s media panel was a factor. In any case this feels like high school all over again. The cool kidz didn’t hang with me back then either.

So he stays away from all public gatherings, then says everyone’s shunning him. Because he’s always the victim, you know. Everything is always everyone else’s fault but his.

But as it happens, yes, everyone in Oxford who knows what he did yesterday thinks he’s a jerk. The only person in the entire world who is informed on the details and still sides with Wells is Wells.

Today he sent an e-mail to Melanie, the festival organizer, and copied it to me, Weinberg, and other pertinent invited guests. Lacking his permission to print it in its entirety, I will paraphrase, with key phrases quoted directly:

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There is a film blogger named Jeffrey Wells, whose site, Hollywood Elsewhere, is fairly well read within the industry. He’s not a film critic, per se, though he does often express his opinions about movies. Mostly he writes about the whole Hollywood business, everything from behind-the-scenes deals to ad campaigns to distribution strategies.

He was one of the people invited to appear on the panel about film criticism this morning at the Oxford Film Festival, and I was eager to meet him. Though we’ve been attending many of the same festivals for several years, I’d never actually talked to him, and I was curious to learn whether he was as much of a condescending, humorless curmudgeon as he seems in his blog. Maybe it was all an act, or maybe in person it would be funny and not off-putting. I’ve certainly been misinterpreted before, so I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions about him as a person.

Our introduction was affable enough, and we chatted briefly at the opening-night party. My impression was that maybe he plays the role of the ever-offended grouch online because it’s interesting and is perfectly reasonable in everyday life.

And then he refused to appear on the film criticism panel because he couldn’t get wifi in his hotel room.

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The story so far: My website was an ad affiliate for the Peerflix Media Network, and my payments arrived regularly each month. Then Peerflix was bought by Live Universe, whereupon the checks immediately stopped coming. E-mails to my contact at Peerflix, who was now a Live Universe employee, yielded no answers. When she responded at all (about one response for every three e-mails I sent), it was to say she still didn’t know when I’d be getting paid.

With no way of contacting anyone else at Live Universe, and having no recourse short of filing a lawsuit, I wrote about it on my blog, here and here. I hoped that a little public shaming would spur Live Universe to action. This got a little bit of attention, but not much.

Last week, I set up a new website: www.Live-Universe-Owes-Me-Money.com. The idea was that people who were in the same position as me (and there are dozens, if not hundreds, of us) could tell their stories, and we’d keep a running tally of how much money Live Universe owed its affiliates. I posted my own story, got a colleague of mine to post hers, and then started sending out e-mails to relevant blogs and message boards, trying to get some more publicity.

On Friday, I got an e-mail from someone at Live Universe! Someone other than the worthless contact I already had, I mean. This guy wrote:

Just recently became aware of the situation of an outstanding balance with your site and Peerflix/LiveUniverse.

Want to work with you to better understand the situation & resolve it for you.

Can you please advise what the best # to reach you at on Monday is?

I wrote back and said, well, the situation is pretty easy to resolve: pay me the $600 you owe me. There’s not much to discuss. But sure, here’s my phone number, call me anytime Monday, etc.

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Here’s a puzzlement. Oliver Stone’s “W.,” a satirical biography of a fellow by the name of George W. Bush (haven’t heard of him), opens next Friday and is being screened for critics in most markets on Tuesday night. Yet it’s not screening in Portland at all.

One’s first instinct is that Lionsgate is trying to save money by only screening it in the largest markets. But that doesn’t wash: It is screening, for example, in Salt Lake City and Charlotte, N.C., both of which have smaller populations and fewer media outlets than Portland. So if they’re trying to save money by screening it in fewer cities, they’re choosing those cities strangely.

Maybe they’re not screening it in cities where they fear it won’t be received very well? Also illogical, given Portland’s famed liberalism and Salt Lake City’s (and possibly Charlotte’s) conservatism.

Whatever the reason, it’s got Portland’s newspaper film critics agitated. Our heaviest hitter, Shawn Levy, who writes for The Oregonian, told Jeff Wells that his paper won’t review the film at all — not an after-the-fact review, not review from the wire services, nothin’. He said our two weeklies, Willamette Week and the Portland Mercury, have issued the same decree.

Maybe Oliver Stone hates Portland because he knows it’s where I live and he remembers my article making fun of the press junket I attended for his last film, “World Trade Center”? Probably not. Paradoxically, the only person who could ever swallow a conspiracy theory that contrived and unlikely would be Oliver Stone himself.

Two items of possible interest:

At Film.com, I wrote “The Differences Between Nicholas Sparks and Shakespeare,” which was necessitated by Sparks actually comparing himself to the Bard. Seriously. He repeated it again in Entertainment Weekly last week. This guy needs to be punched.

And at Cinematical, Scott Weinberg interviewed me and Will Goss about our respective reviews of “An American Carol,” and the reaction they got. Will reviewed it for Cinematical, totally hated it, and got ripped to shreds. I reviewed it here, expressed milder feelings about it, and, um, also got ripped to shreds. Anyway, the conversation about the whole thing might interest you, if you like reading conversations about things.

So I was in the shower Wednesday morning, and I was thinking about the Rotten Tomatoes users’ unusually vicious responses to negative reviews of “The Dark Knight,” and you know me, I’m always looking for a little fun, so I thought, “I should post a negative quote on Rotten Tomatoes just to see if they wish fiery death upon me, too.”

And so I did. I wrote a “review” of the film that simply said this:

This is easily the worst Batman film so far, and I include “Batman & Robin” in that statement.

Just kidding. It’s fantastic. My real review will be posted Thursday. I just wanted to see if a negative quote on Rotten Tomatoes would get me the same kind of psychopathic comments that other negative reviews have gotten. If it does, I guess that means those idiots really are just going by the one-sentence quotes, and not actually clicking over to read the whole review.

At Rotten Tomatoes, I gave it a “Rotten” rating and posted the first sentence as my quote: “Easily the worst Batman film so far, and I include ‘Batman & Robin’ in that statement.”

(Didja know that the RT staff doesn’t assign Fresh or Rotten or choose the quotes, but that the critics themselves usually do it? I suspect the big-time critics like Ebert have interns do it for them, or maybe the RT people give them special consideration. But most critics — particularly those of us on the lower rungs — provide our own quotes.)

I did all of this just before 10 a.m. Within 45 minutes, there were 67 comments posted. You can read them all here. To my great surprise, almost everyone did actually click the link to read the whole review before they posted, and thus saw the joke and laughed at it. In fact, the sudden massive influx of traffic clogged my site for several minutes.

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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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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.

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