Must be a case of spring fever at the trades this weekend. Both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter posted head-scratcher stories that prompted extreme reactions. First, Variety, under the guise of something called “Hollywood and Swine,” labels Sharon Stone the prime suspect in the recent rash of jewel thievery that got so much press during the Cannes Film Festival. It was meant to be a silly parody–the report said that Stone reenacted her famous interrogation scene from Basic Instinct, only to be told by authorities that nobody has wanted to see that since in the 1990s–but it got picked up straight-faced by Yahoo and the Chicago Tribune, among other outlets that took Variety’s good name as reason to trust a report that Sharon Stone is a suspect in a robbery. Yikes. Stone actually has been a longtime ardent supporter of AMFAR, so there is every reason she would be at Cannes. This dispatch wasn’t funny and it’s clear that media around the globe expect Variety to be a seed bed for accurate entertainment news–and not knee-slapping guffaws at the expense of an actress with a good name and a clean record.
THR went in an even stranger direction, hiring a former Scientologist named Marc Headley to review the Will Smith movie After Earth. He claims that some of the dialogue comes from the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard, and notes–GET READY FOR THIS SMOKING GUN–that a volcano depicted in the movie looks very much like the volcano on the cover of Hubbard’s Scientology treatise Dianetics. Now, THR doesn’t say exactly why it is using an ex-Scientologist who’s not a movie critic to provide that service, other than to cite some reviewers who suspect Scientology tenets find their way into some of the dialogue. Are they inferring that Will Smith or M. Night Shyamalan are members of that church who are trying to subliminally win converts? They don’t go that far. Can we expect this guy to review every sci-fi movie because Hubbard wrote science fiction? One thing THR probably didn’t expect was to receive 681 reader comments. I read through a few of these and they are the most hateful, racist, sexist, horrible things you’ve ever laid eyes on. When you run a questionable story like this, you need to be sure to police the comments, particularly the most vulgar missives about interracial sex acts and the kind of racist rants you expect to hear at a Klan rally.
Or here’s an idea: how about covering actual Hollywood news and leaving it at that?
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