The Hot Button

By David Poland

THE UGLY: The line between news and gossip continues to bend. And as is so often the case, I can’t blame the ‘Net for this one. Mr. Showbiz picks up a piece off the Web about Dogma. They get it from newsaskew.com, a Kevin Smith dedicated site that Smith contributes to as if it were his personal site, which is great for his fans. So newsaskew.com has become the clearing house for Kevin Smith info and Dogma info with it. Okay. Mr. Showbiz picks up on newsaskew.com’s feeling that Dogma is not going to be released by Lions Gate as has been rumored for months. The problem is, the Lions Gate deal was always a rumor in that the deal was never finished. Right before Lions Gate, the rumor was that October was picking up the film. Now, newsaskew.com is floating a rumor that New Line will pick up the film, but admits in big red lettering that “THIS IS JUST A RUMOR!!!!” Mr. Showbiz cites that reservation, but prints the rumor anyway and then cross pollinates it with an absurd bit of an Entertainment Weekly story about the transition over at Warner Bros. that asserts, foolishly, that Jerry Levin stayed purposefully away from Mike DeLuca and Robert Shaye for the Warners job because they are “the family rogue.”

DUH! New Line is the “family rogue” because they have independent financing so they don’t have to answer to Time-Warner anymore in the same way that Warner Bros. does. I have long been of the opinion that DeLuca or Shaye would be driven nuts by the corporate culture at Warner Bros. and willalways be happier doing as they want at a smaller company that can distribute wide…in other words, at a company that looks just like the one that they have built New Line into. But beyond that, the idea that New Line picks stuff up just to be rebels is absurd on its face. New Line has outperformed Warner Bros. and a number of other majors in the last years doing as they like. There is nothing to prove by championing Dogma, unless their real goal is to move Kevin Smith away from Miramax and into New Line.

In any case, I have no problem with speculation. Even idle speculation. I just added some in the last paragraph. But what scares me is the blur. What is a rumor-driven Website and where is Mr. Showbiz and where is Entertainment Weekly and how do we all keep rumors from reading like fact if you can’t tell the sources without a scorecard? Even this past week, I ran a story that the X-Men producer had said on a panel at The San Diego Comicon International that X-Men was moving to fall 2000. But that same day, I heard back from Fox that his assertion was wrong. And given the timing, I think it’s clear that Fox never actually moved the film. But now the story that’s going around, started by Variety, is that the movie was being moved “back to summer.” But it never moved! The start date did, which started speculation, but a month shift in a start date would always be unlikely to move a film from summer into fall. The price might rise by $10 – $20 million to get all the effects done on time, but interest on a movie this expensive for the extra six months before release is near $5 million, effectively thrown away money. Anyway, the spin ran both ways. Cinescape worried about whether the film could be completed. And TV Guide Online runs the story as “Fox executives are so high on the project that they’ve moved up the release date from Christmas 2000 to summer 2000, Variety reports.” Meanwhile, the real story is that there was no story…until there was a story. But no one can wait three days in this game anymore. Makes for some bad journalism.