Trapped in the Blurbs

Scott Dickensheets

Thursday, Aug. 27, 1998 | 9:57 a.m.

Amazing. Three thumbs up. A roller-coaster read. Hmm, not quite right. There must be a better way to hype this, the feel-good movie-blurb story of the summer. Wait -- AMAZING!! THREE THUMBS UP!! A ROLLER-COASTER READ!! Ah, much better.

Of course, it takes more than a cap-lock key and a fast pinkie with the exclamation point to craft ideal movie blurbs, those excitable snippets of hyperventilating praise adorning film ads. It also requires adjectives. Not many -- the thesaurus listings under "amazing" and "hot" should suffice. It helps to be able to say something nice about "The Avengers" against all evidence to the contrary.

Legitimate film critics naturally eschew such tactics, opting instead for reasoned, informed opinions of the movies they're reviewing. Sure, that's OK for the readers but it's sometimes problematic for the blurb-hunting studio publicist.

"Over the years, I've been told that my reviews are hard to excerpt for ecstatic blurbs, which I've always taken as a badge of honor," says Gene Siskel, Chicago Tribune critic and the skinny half of "Siskel & Ebert." "Of course, one nice thing about using the thumbs up or thumbs down evaluation is that it's pretty hard for someone to misquote you."

Moviegoers routinely assume that movie ads involve creative editing -- for instance, lifting the word "amazing" from a critic's phrase "amazing in its stupidity" -- and sometimes that indeed happens. Rod Dreher, chief critic at the New York Post, says that shortly after his March arrival at the paper, a studio blurbed a bit of an otherwise negative review -- he can't recall of which film -- for an ad. It was accurately quoted but completely out of context. Dreher was SIZZLING!! "I called the studio publicist and said, 'This doesn't reflect the spirit and tone of the review.' And they took it out of the ads." But that sort of egregious fudging hasn't been the norm, he adds. "That hasn't happened to me a lot. Most of them have been pretty accurate."

Marshall Fine, a reviewer for Gannett News Service, remembers being taken badly out of context only once in recent memory. He'd praised the acting in "Stanley and Iris" but hadn't liked the movie much. A subsequent ad, naturally, excerpted just the good stuff, which bothers him a bit.

"If you're quoted in a movie ad, it's taken as an endorsement of the entire movie," he says.

Should a studio misrepresent Dreher's views again, rest assured he'll be on the phone. "I want my readers to take me seriously," he says. "So I don't want to get into the habit of rolling my eyes and saying, 'There go those movie publicists again.' Because that's my credibility on the line."

Outright quote-doctoring is probably less common than the sly picking and choosing typified by Fine's experience. Consider a recent ad for "How Stella Got Her Groove Back," which quotes Time's Richard Corliss ("Angela Bassett smolders and glows") and Rolling Stone's Peter Travers ("This movie delivers ...").

In his piece -- actually a mini profile of the actress -- Corliss expressed mixed feelings about the film itself, but praised Bassett's performance. A more accurate blurb would have been this, from the same story: "Bassett just has to get used to being better than her movies." For some reason, the 20th Century Fox marketing people passed on that one. Handy tip: When a blurb focuses on the actor's performance, it's often a cue that the reviewer had little positive to say about the film itself.

Travers, meanwhile, actually wrote, "The movie delivers guilt-free escapism about pretty people having wicked-hot fun in pretty places." Not a particularly damning assertion, but it does dismiss the film as sun-screened fluff -- hardly what you want for a cineplex-packing movie ad. Thus the chop job and the ellipsis. Travers reserves his most excerptable writing for sentiments that will never see blurbdom: "You've heard of a beach book," Travers concludes. "Well, 'Stella' is a beach movie."

Dreher isn't bothered by blurbs that repeat his praise of one aspect of the film, even if he panned it as a whole. "A friend in Miami called and said (ads for the movie 'Blade') were using a quote from me," he says. "Well, I liked the movie. It wasn't a great movie, but I did praise Steven Dorff's performance, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's the quote they used. I don't mind that. I think that's fair." Just don't twist phrases out of context, he says.

A Siskelian resistance to easy quotation is understandable. Dreher speculates that frequent blurbing threatens a reviewer's credibility. Spy magazine, for example, frequently derided the oft-quoted Travers as "the movie publicist's friend."

When your Siskels and Eberts, your Marshall Fines, your Time and Newsweek reviewers don't blurble appreciatively enough, the enterprising studio publicist isn't out of options. Far from it. "They'll quote anybody," Fine says.

"If (studios) have a movie that warrants getting good reviews from David Ansen of Newsweek, Janet Maslin of the New York Times or Kenneth Turan of the L.A. Times, then they'll go with those," says Anne Thompson, West Coast editor of the film magazine Premiere. If not, there's a raft of lowlier reviewers -- critics at provincial broadcast stations, website operators, self-syndicated providers of hyperbole, always ready to give good blurb.

"Those are people more than happy to give blurbs because they like to see their names in ads," Fine says. "They don't have much credibility," Dreher says.

A recent ad for "The Negotiator" featured FIVE ACTION-PACKED BLURBS!!, complete with all caps and many exclamation points, from such critical luminaries as Joanna Langfield of The Movie Minute, Susan Granger of SSG Syndicate, Jules Peimer of WKDM Radio, Jeff Craig of Sixty Second Preview and Matt Levitz of Leg Productions.

"I don't know if there are 'blurb mills,"' Fine says, "but there are people we call 'quote whores,' people who will willingly tailor a quote for an ad. I've heard that there are people who literally call the studios and ask, 'What do you want me to say?' I've actually heard reviewers, as they're leaving a screening, say, 'Call me in a half-hour and I'll give you a quote."

When an ad is festooned with quotes by nobodies, "it's always a tip-off that it's not a very good movie," Fine says.

Who are these people? "I don't know," Thompson admits. Take Jeff Craig of Sixty Second Preview. An Internet search turns up a bunch of his blurbage, but little information on Craig himself, his credentials or where, besides in ads, his quotes appear. Susan Granger at least has a website; from it one gathers that movie reviewing is an adjunct activity to her main business of motivational and public speaking. Her credentials? More than 25 years as an "on-air television and radio commentator and entertainment critic," with articles appearing in Playboy, Redbook and the New York Times.

(However, it must be said that she doesn't appear to be a typical quote whore. Of the five reviews posted on her site this week, four were harshly negative.)

Still, she's undoubtedly a blurb of last resort.

"I think the average moviegoer really does recognize real quotes and, let's say, the easier-to-come-by quotes," Thompson says. People are perfectly capable of taking into account the type of movie, the style of blurb, and the prominence/obscurity of the reviewer, and drawing from that an accurate conclusion about the movie's hype. "At least I'd like to think so," Thompson says.

Dreher believes so. "I think people are savvy to how blurbs are misused by publicists," he says.

Studios, then, must feel damned if they blurb and damned if they don't. On one hand, an ad without quotes looks naked -- couldn't they find anyone to blurble anything about "The Avengers"? On the other, are you really going to rush to "The Negotiator" based on a reviewer's assertion that it's "THE MOST INTELLIGENT THRILLER SINCE 'DIE HARD'!"?

"It's like grade inflation," Fine says. "Every movie has blurbs. But I don't think moviegoers outside of New York and L.A. pay any attention. They're more driven by who's in it."

If so, then perhaps Warner Bros. is heralding a brave, new, blurb-free era in its recent ads for the already familiar "Lethal Weapon 4." No quotes, no exclamation points, no heavy breathing by some movie guy to distract from the images of stars Mel Gibson, Danny Glover and Chris Rock.

Wait, no blurbs? AMAZING!! HOT!! THE FEEL-GOOD IDEA OF THE YEAR!!

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