How my negative review of Legend was spun into movie marketing gold

I didn’t really care for Tom Hardy’s Krays biopic Legend. In my two star review, I called it “disappointingly shallow” and “cartoonish”. I then made the seemingly-safe assumption that Studio Canal, the film’s UK distributor, probably wouldn’t be laminating my work and calling me for a quote.

But in a stroke of brazen genius, the marketing department tasked with selling the shoddy true crime tale decided to embrace the mediocrity of my review and found a devious solution. Note: focus between the ears.

There’s something maddeningly brilliant about this promotional sleight of hand. Technically, there’s nothing dishonest about the use of my rating. I gave it two stars and there are just two stars on display. I’ve been trolled and I’m totally alright with it. The word “chutzpah” has been used a lot on Twitter.

The blinkered process of selling a film that hasn’t been universally praised is rather like creating a dating profile that understandably focuses on the expansive travelling and love of animals over the crippling loneliness and weird sex thing. A film poster tends to exist in a shiny, happy universe where people say lovely things about lovely people who have done lovely things on a lovely set. I get the process and I appreciate the objective, especially in the face of adversity.

But, given the columns of bile that are often stacked against new releases (by a wider set of critics than ever before), marketeers are forced to utilise an added level of creativity. Just recently, I was part of a blanket email sent to a range of film journalists asking if someone could please attribute their name to the pre-written quote “A non-stop action classic” for the DVD release of a middling thriller. It’s not an unusual tactic either as companies have often tried to desperately steer journalists to like their film in exactly the way that they want them to like it. But after a number of publicised cases which exposed some shady tactics, marketing teams have had to ensure they’re at least attempting to avoid intentional wrongdoing.

In 2000, Sony executives decided it would be smart idea to invent a critic who would miraculously always love all of their movies. David Manning, aka thin air, thought that Hollow Man was “One helluva scary ride!” while Rob Schneider’s critically loathed comedy The Animal was “Another winner!”. It resulted in a payout to those who had seen the films in question. Around the same time, it was revealed that Sony had also used employees to pose as moviegoers in a TV spot for Mel Gibson’s The Patriot. One of them described the violent drama with implied rape threats as “a perfect date movie”.

While my two-star inclusion on the poster for Legend was, in my opinion, quite a smart move, other times a careful massage of the truth has often turned into something closer to outright fabrication. Earlier this year, AV Club film editor AA Dowd wrote a fantastic open letter to the company who released David O’Russell’s tortured comedy Accidental Love after they included a quote from him on the back of the Canadian DVD release attributing him with the words “A comedic masterstroke”. Given Dowd’s status and the critical mauling of the film, it seemed a tad unlikely. But here’s exactly what he said:

To be fair to whoever refashioned Accidental Love from the abandoned scraps of Nailed, there’s little reason to believe that the ideal, untroubled version of the material would have been a comedic masterstroke.

It’s a shady tactic but one that’s still rather prevalent. The TV spot for Gone Girl included a quote from Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers, who called it “the date-night movie of the decade”. It failed to include the second half of his actual quote which finished with “… for couples who dream of destroying one another”. The etiquette for using quotes in marketing is usually a friendly email asking for permission from the critic but it doesn’t always happen this way. Legally speaking, it’s a foggy area.

For some writers, they’re more than happy to help. “Many of these [critics quoted] don’t always even write an actual review,” Roger Ebert once told USA Today. “The extent of their writing on the film is the blurb which appears in the ad.” This is a practice that hasn’t tired. Self-promotion and vanity have led to a pool of quote-happy journalists, eager to see their name on the side of a bus. The ballad of Earl Dittman is one that sums up the mutually beneficial relationship that can exist between movie studio and journalist. Dittman became infamous for featuring on the posters for films that everyone else hated, blessing him with the title of “one of the top 10 movie quote whores of 2005”. He called Catwoman “100% pure fun and excitement”, Spider-Man 3 “The best Spider-Man yet!” and Boat Trip was “One crazy and daring romantic comedy”.

Dittman’s publication was Wireless magazine, a company that had no website and limited distribution. During his reign as professional quote-giver, many journalists tried to get to the bottom of his “success” with little to show for it arguing that he was often flown around the world by studios. While Dittman and “Manning” might have disappeared, studios have found a new way of selling bad movies. Real people. You know, the ones you see on the street doing real things. The recent DVD release of Jennifer Lopez’s tawdry thriller The Boy Next Door decided to avoid using quotes from critics (“ends up getting more laughs than many comedies” could have worked from the New York Post) and opted for tweets from fans such as “Bloody brilliant” from @SagheerC93.

Ironically, for a film that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone bar Tom Hardy completists, my unimpressed review has actually helped Legend go viral just as it receives its UK release. My tweet has been shared over 11,000 times and seen by over 1.4m people. The “story” has been covered by sites including the BBC, Buzzfeed, TIME and Mashable. Looking at the majority of tweets, the main take-out has been one of sly admiration for Studio Canal. I might still dislike Legend but I like its marketing team. If only they could have written the script ...