Within hours of its appearance, a glitzy trailer for Megalopolis has been withdrawn by distributor Lionsgate after its quotes from film critics were discovered to be made up.
Given how divisive Megalopolis’s Cannes premiere was, the decision to make its mixed reception a part of its marketing must have sounded like a bold one. The only problem was, mere hours after the latest trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s fantasy epic emerged on Wednesday (21st August), people began to notice that the quotes from critics included in it were almost entirely fabricated.
In response, Lionsgate has taken the unusual step of withdrawing the trailer from the web, and has even issued an apology for the whole situation.
“Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for Megalopolis,” the studio wrote in a statement sent to Variety. “We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry.”
With a voice-over by Laurence Fishburne, the Megalopolis trailer opened with the words, “True genius is often misunderstood,” and preceded to show titles from Coppola’s work dating back to 1971. The Godfather's name flashes up, followed by a quote purportedly written by Andrew Sarris of The Village Voice: “A sloppy, self-indulgent movie;” “It doesn’t know what it wants to be.” The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael supposedly wrote it was “diminished by its artiness.”
According to the trailer, Vincent Canby of The New York Times dismissed Apocalypse Now as “Hollow at the core” while Daily News’ Rex Reed panned it as an “epic piece of trash.”
These are, you’ve probably noticed, some of the most well-known and respected names in US film criticism, which means that tracking down their reviews and verifying the quotes is relatively straightforward. Bilge Elbiri over at New York Magazine did just that, and discovered that none of those lines attributed to the likes of Sarris, Reed or Kael actually existed.
In fact, Pauline Kael was fulsome in her praise for The Godfather and certainly didn’t write that Coppola’s crime epic was “diminished by its artiness.”
(Given the trailer’s subtext – that film critics are worthless and don’t know what they’re talking about – it’s sort of ironic that its demise was brought about by a film critic.)
The intention, clearly, was to establish Coppola as an auteur whose work is so ahead of the cultural curve that isn’t immediately understood. Why Megalopolis’s marketers decided to essentially fabricate a load of quotes to support that argument is currently a mystery; presumably, Coppola himself would have signed off on the trailer, given how personal the film is to him (he’s literally sold a chunk of his winemaking empire to fund it).
There’s the outside possibility that it’s intentional – essentially a publicity stunt – though that seems unlikely given the questionable legality of attributing fake quotes to respected film writers.
Whatever the truth is, the copy-and-paste nature of the internet means that Lionsgate’s history-rewriting trailer is still out there if you want to find it. Away from those bogus quotes, it’s full of imaginative, arresting and downright weird imagery, and a worthwhile primer for Coppola’s $120m sci-fi drama. Adam Driver leads a starry cast in a vaguely Ayn Rand-like fable about a genius architect (who can, incidentally, stop time) and his attempts to reimagine a devastated city.
Written, directed and produced by Coppola, Megalopolis laboured through a difficult production, while the filmmaker has since been accused of sexual misconduct. The film’s debut at Cannes was greeted by a truly mixed set of reviews, with some critics praising its visuals and ambition while others have described it as a ‘mess’ and an ‘expensive vanity project’. Given the amount of money the film will have to make just to break even, this latest controversy is a distraction it could probably do without.
Megalopolis is out in UK cinemas on the 27th September.
