Hours after releasing the second trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis on Wednesday, red-faced Lionsgate marketing executives pulled the asset after it reportedly contained fabricated snippets of unfavourable reviews of the filmmaker’s early canon.
“Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for Megalopolis,” a spokesperson for the studio said. “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.”
Megalopolis and Coppola have endured a rough ride ever since the dystopian epic starring Adam Driver was panned by American buyers at a screening prior to its world premiere in Cannes, where it earned mixed reviews.
Lionsgate acquired US rights to the film in the summer and, hoping for a critical reassessment of Megalopolis, began the trailer with a crawl of quotations purportedly from unkind reviews of prior Coppola films that eventually came to be regarded as masterpieces, like Oscar winners The Godfather and Apocalypse Now.
“True genius is often misunderstood,” a voice that sounds like Megalopolis cast member Laurence Fishburne intoned at the start of the trailer. The opening remark cued up what was positioned as a line from Pauline Kael’s 1972 review of The Godfather in The New Yorker that said the Mafia epic was “Diminished by its artsiness”. A line attributed to Andrew Sarris of The Village Voice declared it “a sloppy, self-indulgent movie”.
However neither phrase appears in the online version of those reviews.
Neither do Vincent Canby’s claim writing in The New York Times in 1979 that the war film Apocalypse Now was “hollow at the core”, nor Roger Ebert’s assertion in 1992 that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was ” a triumph of style over substance”.
All four critics have since died. However the trailer also contained a fabricated quote from film reviewer Owen Gleiberman, who said on Wednesday that he never described Bram Stoker’s Dracula as “a beautiful mess”.
It should be noted that some of these original reviews were complimentary of Coppola’s films. Kael was highly positive in her critique.
The trailer was pulled by the studio and remains online through third parties. For the record, Screen’s Cannes review is here.
Vulture first reported on the story, which has added to the general malaise surrounding the film. Coppola, who invested $120m of his own money into Megalopolis, has himself come under scrutiny for alleged questionable on-set behaviour, a claim others from the production have rebutted.
Megalopolis stars Driver as a driven architect who is locked in a battle with a mayor over the fate of a futuristic city. The cast includes Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, and Jon Voight.
Lionsgate will open the film on September 27.
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