The whole brouhaha about the on-line leak of an unfinished copy of Wolverine is continuing to mess with minds and inspire bloviation in both the real world and the Internet community, and now it's started denting careers. In the wake of Fox News entertainment blogger Roger Friedman's posting a "review" of the version of the movie that appeared online, News Corp, which is the parent company of both Fox News and 20th Century Fox (which is releasing the movie), has announced that Friedman has been "terminated" as an employee. In his review, which appeared last Thursday (and which included a testimonial to how fast and easily he'd been able to download the contraband entertainment), Friedman wrote that "I am, in fact, amazed about how great Wolverine turned out. It exceeds expectations at every turn." 20th Century Fox was quick to release a statement indicating that they couldn't have cared less whether he'd liked it or not: "We've just been made aware that Roger Friedman, a freelance columnist who writes Fox 411 on Foxnews.com -- an entirely separate company from 20th Century Fox -- watched on the Internet and reviewed a stolen and unfinished version of X-Men Organs: Wolverine. This behavior is reprehensible and we condemn this act categorically -- whether the review is good or bad." (Please note: the full title of the movie is X-Men Origins: Wolverine. That "X-Men Organs" is, for once, not our typo: that's how it appeared in the press release as it was reprinted in Variety. We didn't have the heart to fix it because it seems like a pretty appropriate title anyway.) As Variety pointed out, "Calling Foxnews.com an entirely separate company from 20th Century Fox was an interesting choice of words, given that they're sibling companies."
Friedman seems to have fallen victim to one of the perils of being a cog in a modern multi-media conglomerate, where everyone is connected somehow but nobody is sending out hourly memos to make sure that everyone has the synergy strategy straight. Whether or not Friedman thought he was doing the studio a favor by plugging an illegally distributed, incomplete version of their product, he seems to have assumed that Fox News would have his back, and his first reaction to reporters to asked him about news of the firing was to assure them that, in fact, he still had his gig. The blog itself was still chugging along through the weekend--though the offended review disappeared from sight--and Fox News would only say that Friedman's status was "an internal matter" and not for public discussion. Maybe Friedman expected Fox News president Roger Ailes, a notoriously prickly and territorial alpha-male, to save his job as a way of asserting absolute control over his domain. But Monday, after a meeting between Friedman and Fox News executives, it was announced that the company and its blogger had "mutually agreed to part ways immediately."
The whole Wolverine fiasco has really brought out the soul-searching copyright scholar who, it turns out, has been lurking inside many a high-profile film blogger. One of the funniest things about this mess is that it was the corporate shill with at least one well-shod foot in the film industry who chose to play the role of gonzo wild man--albeit a wild man who writes like Peter Travers in full-on blurb whore mode--while all the "independent" bloggers have been urging restraint and caution and denouncing piracy while professing concern for the rights of the filmmakers to have some control over how their work is released. As Scott Von Doviak reported here last week, Korey Coleman's lively site Spill.com also ran a review of the bootleg at the same time that the front of the site was editorializing against piracy. Much as it pains us to mention Spill and Fox News in the same breath, the similarity between the two incidents points up that if there's one thing a major coporation and an online watering hole for termite talents may be likely to have in common, it's that one hand might be up to something that the other hand is barely dimly aware of, which can result in charges of carelessness at best and hypocrisy at worst.
Piracy is an old issue, but the leaking of a first-rate-looking version of a hotly awaited major release movie and making it available to just about any interested party with access to a computer--that's new. Ethical standards are being adjusted and newly minted as events develop, and it may be that some of the bloggers who have come down hardest on the very notion of piracy are expressing their own internal battle over the right way to handle it; people are sometimes most passionate about their convictions when they're trying to convince themselves. Public attention is hard-won on the Internet, and it speaks volumes that someone like Friedman was able to get so caught up in his lust for a high-profile scoop that he couldn't take a breath first and wonder what the ramifications would be for his career. No doubt the debate over how to handle these situations--and no one thinks that this one is going to turn out to be an isolated, once-in-a-lifetime incident--will grow only more intense now that it turns out you can lose your job over it. The next big question is bound to be, can you lose box office over it? 20th Century Fox has already started rehearsing its speech about how the movie, which opens May 1, would have done better in theaters if it hadn't been for the bootleggers. (If the movie does terrific business, don't hold your breath waiting for their speech about how much they owe the thieves for having helped generate interest in it.) And, lest you think that nobody at the FBI takes this seriously, at some point we'll get to discover the answer to the last big question regarding high-profile Internet piracy: how much time do you get for it?
