Yesterday, I posted about Jamie Stuart’s In Spring, a video which had the filmmaker visiting the offices of THINKFilm and turning an interview with Werner Herzog (ostensibly occasioned by the impending release of Encounters at the End of the World) into––I thought––a brilliant piece of satire on the current state of indie film distribution in general and, unavoidably, the rumored struggles of THINKFilm in particular. It was also, on a not entirely subtextual level, about the thorny relationship between journalists and their subjects. Stuart has been doing meta festival coverage for awhile, but In Spring felt like a giant leap forward in his critique of the press process. In my post, I wondered how he was getting away with it. “What does he tell publicists he’s going to do?” I wrote. “Will any of them ever let him do it again?
By the end of the day yesterday, Stuart had removed the video from his website. He replaced it with a short video response, in which he explained that although THINK had no legal recourse against him, when they asked him to take the video down he complied based on the inference that somebody’s job was on the line.
I was away from the computer for most of yesterday afternoon and was kept abreast of the ongoing status of In Spring via emails and IMs on my phone. It wasn’t until today that I noticed that around the same time that Stuart was being pressured to remove the video––and just about when a FILMMAKER Magazine blog post about Spring was being removed––another blog post popped up, defending THINK’s right to protect themselves from negative reporting. Or, “reporting.”
A lengthy excerpt from Tom Roston’s piece at P.O.V. (which does not mention Stuart’s piece):
A lot of the “reporting” on the issue has referenced unnamed sources, and there’s been a notable lack of comment from Bergstein or ThinkFilm. It appears that some of the “reporters” didn’t even seek comment from the subjects. And lest we forget, a lawsuit is just a legal claim, not a statement of fact. Not that I’m saying there’s no truth in the matter, but I’ve just been bothered by how the rumors have surfaced as news when, really, there have been very few hard news stories (there’s been one Variety piece) covering the situation.
Roston goes on to slam the “blog-media-complex” and the “vile, insidious blog comments” it produces, so I assume that we can take “reporting” to generally mean “blog smearing,” and that Roston’s point is that if there was “real news” here, Variety would have covered the story more extensively. To nitpick: there have been at least three Variety pieces about THINK’s troubles published in the past month (May 12, May 29, June 1). Also, Roston calls out writers for failing to cite sources and seek quotes, without actually citing the guilty “reporters” (or, even, reporters) in his own piece. But I’m more interested in a quote that Roston obtains from THINKFilm’s exasperated president Mark Urman, of which this part is the eye-opener:
I am stymied as to why so many film writers are much quicker to cover our problems than they are to cover our films. (And don’t get me started on the attendant and anonymous “comments” that bubble up from the depths and attach themselves permanently to the journalism, or is that germ-alism, like carbuncles!)
If we take Variety’s May 12 story to be the beginning of this press frenzy, then THINK has, as far as I know, only released one film since this story broke. With 74% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, I think Stuart Gordon’s Stuck has attracted more positive attention from “germ-alists” than any B-movie about a hobo stuck in a drunk driver’s windshield could have reasonably hoped for. Calling journalists names and pressuring them to alter their coverage with the threat that you’ll fire the people who provide them access doesn’t seem to me like the obvious way to improve the tone and content of the coverage, nevermind encourage writers to focus on the films. But I do spend an awful lot of times down here in the depth with all you carbuncles, so what do I know…
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