The New Yorker Breaking ‘Girl With Dragon Stuff’ Review Embargo. Sony’s Cheesed.

Sony let some lucky swanky motherfuckers in to see The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo early. The caveat was that they had to hold their responses in their gullets until Sony’s proscribed embargo date. Seems pretty easy to me. Let me in Sony, fuck. It seems that despite initial  acquiescence  to the request, shit fecal matter is about to splatter the fan. The New Yorker reviewer David Denby is intentionally breaking the embargo tomorrow. This doesn’t sit well with producer Scott Rudin.

Hit the jump for some industry slap fighting.

Indie Wire:

The Playlist has exclusively acquired this morning’s email correspondence between Denby and ‘Dragon Tattoo’ producer  Scott Rudin. Suffice to say just because Denby’s review is reportedly a positive one, Rudin is still not happy that the embargo rules have been broken (though Deadline’s Nikki Finke — who reveals her favorite film critic is Denby — says, “fuck it, who cares?”). And whether or not the review is positive is beside the point. Denby agreed to an embargo date, and if he couldn’t or wouldn’t stick to it, he shouldn’t have stepped into the theater plain and simple. The justifications he proffers — that the year-end has too many movies or that he doesn’t seem to like “We Bought A Zoo” enough to run that review instead — don’t really wash. Moreover, the  New Yorker  editors also have to shoulder some of the blame for knowingly moving ahead with the review as well (though they’ll probably love the traffic and attention they’ll receive as the only review in town for a week). Read the exchange below.

—–Original Message—–
From: Scott Rudin
Sent: Sat 12/3/2011 12:08 AM
To: Denby, David
Subject:
You’re going to break the review embargo on Dragon Tattoo? I’m stunned that you of all people would even entertain doing this. It’s a very, very damaging move and a total contravention of what you agreed. You’re an honorable man.

From: Denby, David
Sent: Saturday, December 03, 2011 11:19 AM
To: Scott Rudin
Subject: RE:

Dear Scott:

Scott, I know Fincher was working on the picture up to the last minute, but the yearly schedule is gauged to have many big movies come out at the end of the year.

The system is destructive: Grown-ups are ignored for much of the year, cast out like downsized workers, and then given eight good movies all at once in the last five weeks of the year. A magazine like “The New Yorker” has to cope as best as it can with a nutty release schedule. It was not my intention to break the embargo, and I never would have done it with a negative review. But since I liked the movie, we came reluctantly to the decision to go with early publication for the following reasons, which I have also sent to Seth Fradkoff:

1) The jam-up of important films makes it very hard on magazines. We don’t want to run a bunch of tiny reviews at Christmas. That’s not what “The New Yorker” is about. Anthony and I don’t want to write them that way, and our readers don’t want to read them that way.

2) Like many weeklies, we do a double issue at the end of the year, at this crucial time. This exacerbates the problem.

3) The New York Film Critics Circle, in its wisdom, decided to move up its voting meeting, as you well know, to November 29, something Owen Gleiberman and I furiously opposed, getting nowhere. We thought the early date was idiotic, and we’re in favor of returning it to something like December 8 next year. In any case, the early vote forced the early screening of “Dragon Tattoo.” So we had a dilemma: What to put in the magazine on December 5? Certainly not “We Bought the Zoo,” or whatever it’s called. If we held everything serious, we would be coming out on Christmas-season movies until mid-January. We had to get something serious in the magazine. So reluctantly, we went early with “Dragon,” which I called “mesmerizing.” I apologize for the breach of the embargo. It won’t happen again. But this was a special case brought on by year-end madness.

In any case, congratulations for producing another good movie. I look forward to the Daldry.
Best, David Denby

From: Scott Rudin
Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2011 13:04:32 -0500
To: David Denby
Subject: Re:

I appreciate all of this, David, but you simply have to be good for your word. Your seeing the movie was conditional on your honoring the embargo, which you agreed to do. The needs of the magazine cannot trump your word. The fact that the review is good is immaterial, as I suspect you know. You’ve very badly damaged the movie by doing this, and I could not in good conscience invite you to see another movie of mine again, Daldry or otherwise. I can’t ignore this, and I expect that you wouldn’t either if the situation were reversed. I’m really not interested in why you did this except that you did — and you must at least own that, purely and simply, you broke your word to us and that that is a deeply lousy and immoral thing to have done. If you weren’t prepared to honor the embargo, you should have done the honorable thing and said so before you accepted the invitation. The glut of Christmas movies is not news to you, and to pretend otherwise is simply disingenuous. You will now cause ALL of the other reviews to run a month before the release of the movie, and that is a deeply destructive thing to have done simply because you’re disdainful of We Bought a Zoo. Why am I meant to care about that??? Come on…that’s nonsense, and you know it.

Interesting stuff. Like I said, let me in Sony. Not only will I not break the embargo, I’ll even share my fuckin’ popcorn. Solid dude right here. Solid. Dude.