Just hours after it premiered on Wednesday morning, the first trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Megalopolis is being scrubbed from the internet.
Initial praise for the trailer’s stick-it-to-’em attitude quickly turned to confusion as social media users began to point out that a segment made up of scathing quotes from critics about Coppola’s previous masterpieces seemed to have absolutely no basis in reality.
There is no evidence that The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael said The Godfather was “diminished by its artsiness,” for instance, and while the Chicago Sun-Times did once use the phrase “a triumph of… style over substance,” it was talking about 1989’s Batman, not Coppola’s Dracula.
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It wasn’t long after New York magazine critic Bilge Ebiri published a piece questioning the quotes that Lionsgate evidently shifted into damage control mode.
“Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for Megalopolis,” a studio spokesperson said in a statement to Variety.
“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.”
The spokesperson did not elaborate on the origin of the fabricated quotes, nor whether anyone at the studio raised questions about them ahead of the trailer’s premiere.
The Megalopolis trailer also featured fake quotes from famed critics like The New Republic’s Stanley Kauffman, The Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris, the New York Daily News’ Rex Reed, and Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman.
It amassed more than 1.3 million views on YouTube on Wednesday before it was taken down.
Megalopolis, Coppola’s self-financed, decades-in-the-making dream project, was always destined to divide critics. When it premiered at Cannes in May, reviewers alternately hailed it as a masterpiece and blasted it as an overwrought, self-indulgent fever dream.
The critical cacophony paled in comparison to the controversy over allegations about Coppola’s on-set behavior, however. Within days of the Cannes premiere, The Guardian published a report quoting anonymous sources who accused the filmmaker of trying to inappropriately touch and kiss female extras.
Coppola denied the allegations at the time, telling The New York Times that he was “too shy” to be “touchy-feely.”
In late July, Variety published cellphone footage that did appear to show him trying to kiss women on his set. But things took a turn for the confusing when Deadline in short order put out an oddly catty report about Variety’s story—which it said had been “published for clicks” and “did not get much traction”—quoting one of the extras who allegedly appeared in the video.
“He did nothing to make me or for that matter anyone on set feel uncomfortable,” Rayna Menz told Deadline. “... That someone had video of that is just ridiculous and super unprofessional.
Variety then tracked down another female extra, who said Coppola’s behavior had shocked and disturbed her.
“I don’t appreciate anybody speaking for me. I would never speak for that actress,” Pagone said of Menz. “I’ve kept my mouth shut. I’ve kept quiet. But it’s frustrating that she’s putting out there, ‘Hey, it was great for everyone’ when she doesn’t know what other people were feeling. You can’t speak for anyone but yourself. My experience was different.”
Megalopolis will hit theaters on Sept. 27.
Read it at Variety
