A colleague brought a gossip column from yesterday to my attention that suggests all kinds of completely legitimate issues.
I was supportive of Fox's rage over an online review by a projectionist who watched Fantastic Four: Rise of The Silver Surfer from the booth during an exhibitor's screening and wrote about the film in depth on the web. The rage, which led to the kid being fired, caused a lot of anti-fox backlash on the web. But I agreed. A company hiring a screen for a private showing has the reasonable expectation of privacy, from the exhibitor renting out the screen and providing a projectionist most of all.
Cut To: A major News Corp investment of well over $100 million, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, illegally gets released onto the web a full month before release. The film is widely available to most internet sites as a result, but most sites, as well as most mainstream media, stay away from either admitting having seen the film, much less reviewing the movie based on this unfinished, illegally leaked work print.
And so, the question... if the kid who reviewed the film he only saw because the studio was paying the exhibitor - and him in turn - for a completely private screening was fired... shouldn't Roger Friedman be fired for reviewing Wolverine?
It shouldn't matter that he wrote a glowingly positive review, right? It's the principle of the thing.
So, in conclusion, if Tom Rothman, et al, do not at least push hard and publicly to have Friedman fired for publishing this review of their film, illegally downloaded, and by his efforts, encouraging others to download the film and other films, then they have to be held up as hypocrites.
It doesn't work both ways. Either piracy is bad or it is good. Piracy can't just be bad when it works against you and okay when it works in your favor.
(Full Disclosure: In my long-held opinion, Roger Friedman is not only a hack, but a wretched human being who should have been fired from any job where his embrace of play-to-play gossip is not the acknowledged company standard.)
Read the complete post at http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2009/04/a_firing_offens.html