Update with link to the review, which Variety finally restored:
Update on Thursday March 4:
The hilarity continues in the the comedy of errors that is the ill-conceived Oscar campaign of "Iron Cross" and the bid by Variety to help the indie film achieve its aims.
In the wake of the post below noting that Variety published, then made disappear, a negative review of the drama, I have been reliably told that in fact the producer promptly cancelled the $400,000 campaign. So it's not clear that Variety made any money on this project. I was further told that a lawsuit was in the works.
Apparently that's true. Gawker's John Cook again turned up Joshua Newton, the producer of "Iron Cross," who -- he told Cook- - (hilariously!) "We are currently reviewing our options. I can't comment on the legalities, but suffice it to say -- how can I put this? There are issues. There are valid issues."
I'm sure there are. The advertising contract must have read something like, "Variety will not disparage 'Iron Cross' in its editorial space." Otherwise, what kind of case could they have?
He explains: "We weren't just simply advertisers," he says. "We did a joint venture with Variety to promote 'Iron Cross.' It was not a decent thing to do."
Oy. I'm not sure which is sadder in this story -- the rube who thinks he has a "joint venture" with a trade that covers his movie, or the trade that goes after an easy advertising mark using its screening series and editorial as faux validation, then loses the account when the editorial goes off message.
Earlier:
I'm starting to think of Gawker's John Cook as the official "gotcha" man for Hollywood media.
Mere months after uncovering Nikki Finke's hilarious rewriting of history by tracking her diametrically opposed versions of the box office performance of "This Is It" (the movie went from "an extraordinary start" to a "disappointing" opening - whoops!), he discovers that Variety has mysteriously erased a negative review of the independent movie "Iron Cross."
That would be an enduring mystery, but for the fact that the trade had booked $400,000 in Oscar season ads from the producers behind the movie, a sum that these days Variety would be hard-pressed to jeopardize with unwelcome editorial ... candor. It's a Nazi-era revenge tale starring Roy Scheider in what turned out to be Scheider's last film, one that the producers badly wanted to see recognized for an award.
This is Hollywood trade journalism at its most embarrassing: it appears that Variety quashed the review to mollify an angry customer.
And it didn't take long for the angry customer to confirm the fact that Variety deleted the review.
In an email written by the film's director Josh Newton (the date must be wrong: Cook says the email was written in December, but Robert Koehler's review wasn't published until January 20) he complained that reviewer Koehler managed to "sneak" his pan into print. It's
