Eddie Egan, a very real marketing consultant, lost his gig with Lionsgate this week after the studio discovered that quotes he used in a trailer for Francis Ford Coppola‘s Megalopolis were fabricated, according to Variety.
The conceit behind the teaser, which Lionsgate recalled on Wednesday, was that critics had trashed Coppola’s masterpieces throughout the decades, so why trust them? Except that the critics quoted didn’t actually write any of the pith. A quote attributed to Pauline Kael that was said to have run in The New Yorker, claiming The Godfather was “diminished by its artsiness,” never ran.
It’s likely that the consultant used A.I. to generate information, a source familiar with the matter told Rolling Stone, who adds it was never the studio’s intention to fabricate quotes and said that when the studio realized there was a problem, it reacted immediately and apologized.
Variety reports that a prompt to ChatGPT for negative press around Coppola returned similar statements but that in reality Kael loved The Godfather.
Egan did not return Rolling Stone’s request for comment. Neither did a rep for Lionsgate.
Egan has been an independent contractor since parting ways with STX film group in 2019. While at STX and previously at Universal, Variety reports, that he worked closely with Adam Fogelson, who’s now Lionsgate’s film group chairperson.
“Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for Megalopolis,” the company said in a statement Wednesday. “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.”
Coppola’s Roman epic Megalopolis, which stars Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, and Nathalie Emmanuel, is set to come out Sept. 27.
Rolling Stone’s bona fide film critic, David Fear (also a real name), praised the movie when it premiered at Cannes. The following quote is verifiable, and you can fact-check it.
“Say what you will about this grand gesture at filtering Edward Gibbon’s history lessons through a lens darkly, it is exactly the movie that Coppola set out to make — uncompromising, uniquely intellectual, unabashedly romantic (upper-case and lower-case R), broadly satirical yet remarkably sincere about wanting not just brave new worlds but better ones,” Fear wrote. “Does it sometimes feel as if it’s distilling decades’ worth of book-club readings and coffee-klatch conversations into a tightly packed two hours? Yes. Was it worth the wait? Dear god, yes.” (Fear’s choice of Roman font, pun intended, and italics are also very real.)
