The Screengrab : korey coleman

"Wolverine" Decapitates Fox News Blogger

Phil Nugent — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:30:00 GMT

The whole brouhaha about the on-line leak of an unfinished copy of Wolverine is continuing to mess with minds and inspire bloviation in both the real world and the Internet community, and now it's started denting careers. In the wake of Fox News entertainment blogger Roger Friedman's posting a "review" of the version of the movie that appeared online, News Corp, which is the parent company of both Fox News and 20th Century Fox (which is releasing the movie), has announced that Friedman has been "terminated" as an employee. In his review, which appeared last Thursday (and which included a testimonial to how fast and easily he'd been able to download the contraband entertainment), Friedman wrote that "I am, in fact, amazed about how great Wolverine turned out. It exceeds expectations at every turn." 20th Century Fox was quick to release a statement indicating that they couldn't have cared less whether he'd liked it or not: "We've just been made aware that Roger Friedman, a freelance columnist who writes Fox 411 on Foxnews.com -- an entirely separate company from 20th Century Fox -- watched on the Internet and reviewed a stolen and unfinished version of X-Men Organs: Wolverine. This behavior is reprehensible and we condemn this act categorically -- whether the review is good or bad." (Please note: the full title of the movie is X-Men Origins: Wolverine. That "X-Men Organs" is, for once, not our typo: that's how it appeared in the press release as it was reprinted in Variety. We didn't have the heart to fix it because it seems like a pretty appropriate title anyway.) As Variety pointed out, "Calling Foxnews.com an entirely separate company from 20th Century Fox was an interesting choice of words, given that they're sibling companies."

Friedman seems to have fallen victim to one of the perils of being a cog in a modern multi-media conglomerate, where everyone is connected somehow but nobody is sending out hourly memos to make sure that everyone has the synergy strategy straight. Whether or not Friedman thought he was doing the studio a favor by plugging an illegally distributed, incomplete version of their product, he seems to have assumed that Fox News would have his back, and his first reaction to reporters to asked him about news of the firing was to assure them that, in fact, he still had his gig. The blog itself was still chugging along through the weekend--though the offended review disappeared from sight--and Fox News would only say that Friedman's status was "an internal matter" and not for public discussion. Maybe Friedman expected Fox News president Roger Ailes, a notoriously prickly and territorial alpha-male, to save his job as a way of asserting absolute control over his domain. But Monday, after a meeting between Friedman and Fox News executives, it was announced that the company and its blogger had "mutually agreed to part ways immediately."

The whole Wolverine fiasco has really brought out the soul-searching copyright scholar who, it turns out, has been lurking inside many a high-profile film blogger. One of the funniest things about this mess is that it was the corporate shill with at least one well-shod foot in the film industry who chose to play the role of gonzo wild man--albeit a wild man who writes like Peter Travers in full-on blurb whore mode--while all the "independent" bloggers have been urging restraint and caution and denouncing piracy while professing concern for the rights of the filmmakers to have some control over how their work is released. As Scott Von Doviak reported here last week, Korey Coleman's lively site Spill.com also ran a review of the bootleg at the same time that the front of the site was editorializing against piracy. Much as it pains us to mention Spill and Fox News in the same breath, the similarity between the two incidents points up that if there's one thing a major coporation and an online watering hole for termite talents may be likely to have in common, it's that one hand might be up to something that the other hand is barely dimly aware of, which can result in charges of carelessness at best and hypocrisy at worst.

Piracy is an old issue, but the leaking of a first-rate-looking version of a hotly awaited major release movie and making it available to just about any interested party with access to a computer--that's new. Ethical standards are being adjusted and newly minted as events develop, and it may be that some of the bloggers who have come down hardest on the very notion of piracy are expressing their own internal battle over the right way to handle it; people are sometimes most passionate about their convictions when they're trying to convince themselves. Public attention is hard-won on the Internet, and it speaks volumes that someone like Friedman was able to get so caught up in his lust for a high-profile scoop that he couldn't take a breath first and wonder what the ramifications would be for his career. No doubt the debate over how to handle these situations--and no one thinks that this one is going to turn out to be an isolated, once-in-a-lifetime incident--will grow only more intense now that it turns out you can lose your job over it. The next big question is bound to be, can you lose box office over it? 20th Century Fox has already started rehearsing its speech about how the movie, which opens May 1, would have done better in theaters if it hadn't been for the bootleggers. (If the movie does terrific business, don't hold your breath waiting for their speech about how much they owe the thieves for having helped generate interest in it.) And, lest you think that nobody at the FBI takes this seriously, at some point we'll get to discover the answer to the last big question regarding high-profile Internet piracy: how much time do you get for it?

Spilling the Beans on “Wolverine”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:00:00 GMT

As you’ve probably heard by now, an early rough cut of Fox’s big tentpole movie Wolverine leaked onto the intertubes. “In a case of piracy that some analysts called unprecedented, untold thousands of people watched a version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine online Wednesday, a full month before its scheduled theater release,” The New York Times reported. According to the New York Daily News, many top film sites took a stand, refusing to review the leaked version of the movie. “‘You're doing yourself a disservice if you see the film this way,’ said Jeremy ‘Mr. Beaks’ Smith, West Coast editor for Ain't It Cool News.’[The fans that download it] are going to make their judgment on what they see, and that's not how the director ever intended for the movie to be screened.’”

A CNN report on this story, however, has drawn some unwanted attention to a worthy but lesser-known movie site. As you can see in the clip - which I can't seem to embed despite CNN's claims that I can - a blogger’s review of Wolverine appeared on Spill.com, a site that features animated roundtable reviews by Korey Coleman and friends.

The Spill gang isn’t too happy to be showcased in this way for a large national audience, particularly considering that Spill member Carlyle had already posted an anti-piracy rant on the issue. “So let me get this straight...FOX isn't happy with the film and sets out to make it better and some internal douchenozzle steals the old version, puts it up online without any explanation of what people are going to see and tomorrow the internet will be awash in REVIEWS of the new X-men film? Um. Yeeeeeeeeeeeah…People are being cheated. And before you say ‘Couldn't happen to a nicer guy’ about FOX, keep in mind it is ultimately the movie and the filmmakers who will get shortchanged, not the execs.”

Coleman has now posted his reaction to the CNN piece. “Of course we don't condone what happened with Fox's property and support them in any course of legal action they take against the person or persons responsible for the leak. I guess that sentiment isn't easily resonated, though, when your page appears behind the quote of someone who illegally downloaded the film and publicly gave his opinion on the pirated copy… That said, let me be forthcoming and tell you I knew about the blog containing the movie review, and made it clear I didn't want it featured on the front page. In retrospect now maybe I should've deleted the post, maybe I should've thought more about the repercussions of such a blog.”

I’m a little biased because Korey and some of his cohorts are friends of mine, but I’m going with the “no such thing as bad publicity” theory here. The Spill reviews are often hilarious and insightful, and if this CNN report leads more movie fans to discover that for themselves, that’s all to the good.

Related:
YouTube Film Critics: Spill and the Reel Geezers
Korey Coleman Salutes Charlton Heston's Big-Head Ass

Korey Coleman Salutes Charlton Heston's Big-Head Ass

Phil Nugent — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In the last couple of days, we've seen a lot of memorial tributes to Charlton Heston (starting with our own Paul Clark's fine obituary for the Screengrab), but so far, our favorite may be this short animated personal essay by Korey Coleman of Spill.com, which deftly balances its appreciation of Heston's accomplishments as a movie star with the most honest, sanest reaction yet expressed to his impassionaed public espousal of his late-life politics: "Even if you didn't agree with him, you were like...damn!" It's convincingly loving and funny as hell, too. I imagine Heston grimly nodding in approval.

YouTube Film Critics: Spill and the Reel Geezers

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Newspapers have been shedding personnel at an alarming rate in recent months, and those of us who earn our beer money writing about movies are no exception. As the Hollywood Reporter notes in a piece about small independent films being overlooked by major newspapers, “Critics have recently been laid off, bought out of their contracts or left and were not replaced at the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, New York Newsday and more than 15 papers around the country.”

This presents a problem for you, the film consumer. Where to go for a diverse array of informed opinion on the motion pictures of the day? Well, once you’ve read all the latest news and reviews at the Screengrab, you might want to click on over to YouTube, where the time-honored Siskel & Ebert format lives on in two very different web series.

Spill.com is the latest permutation of Korey Coleman’s long-running Austin cable access show The Reel Deal. Coleman, his friend Martin Thomas, and a rotating cast of co-hosts conducted a loose, funny and very low budget roundtable discussion of the current cinema for over a decade before relocating to the internet. A cartoonist and filmmaker (his indie film 2 A.M. played SXSW in 2006), Coleman decided to take on a new creative challenge and animate webisodes of The Reel Deal (podcasts of this version of the show can be found here). The show proved so popular, it was bought out by a New York company and reemerged as Spill.com. Aside from Korey, the rest of the Reel Deal crew took on new personas for the revamped version, but the irreverent humor and down-to-earth vibe remain intact, as you can see in this review of The Mist:

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the Reel Geezers. If you ever wanted to recreate the experience of listening to your grandparents bicker about movies, this is the show for you. Lorenzo Semple Jr. (screenwriter of Papillon, The Parallax View and 16 Batman episodes) and Marcia Nasatir (a former agent and producer of The Big Chill and Ironweed) give the octogenarian viewpoint on the latest releases, which is particularly helpful when it comes to a movie like Superbad: