Details
"David Manning" was named after a friend of Matthew Cramer, the Sony marketing executive responsible for the insertions. Manning was credited to The Ridgefield Press, a small Connecticut weekly. During an investigation into Manning's quotes, Newsweek reporter John Horn discovered that the newspaper had never heard of him. Horn disclosed the truth about Manning in a June 2001 article in Newsweek, which emerged at around the same time as an announcement that Sony had used employees posing as moviegoers in television commercials to praise Mel Gibson's The Patriot. These occurrences, in tandem, raised questions and controversy about ethics in movie marketing practices.
On the June 10, 2001 episode of Le Show, host Harry Shearer conducted an in-studio interview with David Manning. The voice of Manning was provided by a computer voice synthesizer.
Some time after news of the hoax became widespread, actor Bryan Cranston, then a lead in the U.S. television sitcom Malcolm in the Middle, took out a print advertisement in entertainment trade papers recommending his work to Emmy Awards voters. The ad featured positive comments from Mr. Manning as a joke.
On August 3, 2005, Sony made an out-of-court settlement and agreed to refund $5 each to dissatisfied customers who saw Hollow Man, The Animal, The Patriot, A Knight's Tale, or Vertical Limit in American theatres, under the impression that it would be a great movie due to Manning's reviews.
Read more about this topic: David Manning (fictitious Writer)
Famous quotes containing the word details:
“If my sons are to become the kind of men our daughters would be pleased to live among, attention to domestic details is critical. The hostilities that arise over housework...are crushing the daughters of my generation....Change takes time, but men’s continued obliviousness to home responsibilities is causing women everywhere to expire of trivialities.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Working women today are trying to achieve in the work world what men have achieved all along—but men have always had the help of a woman at home who took care of all the other details of living! Today the working woman is also that woman at home, and without support services in the workplace and a respect for the work women do within and outside the home, the attempt to do both is taking its toll—on women, on men, and on our children.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)