Francis Ford Coppola is not the first director to make a film about the tension between past and future, but he might be the first to release a trailer that inadvertently explores these themes at his own expense. In a Big city Trailer, released on August 21, contains mocking quotes from critics who apparently did not understand the essence of Coppola’s masterpieces – except how vulture As it turns out, those critics never said that. The words attributed to the late greats Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Vincent Canby and Roger Ebert were either made up or lifted from the fake review, which leads to questions like: Where did the quotes come from? Who thought this was a good idea? And did you use ChatGPT? Because you know it’s hallucinating, right? Or?
Unless Coppola or his representatives issue a statement, we cannot definitively prove that the quotes were generated by chatbots. But in a short and hilarious experiment Consequence asked ChatGPT to “collect negative reviews of Coppola classics.” Sure enough, it hallucinated quotes from Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Vincent Canby, and—you guessed it—Roger Ebert that were similar to those in the trailer. When asked again, ChatGPT invented entirely new quotes, reordering which critics panned which films.
In a repetition, Kael, who in truth The Godfatherwas led to describe it as “hollow in terms of emotional resonance.” Internet sleuths have found similar results in their own experiments.
As a hater, I love that Coppola held onto that grudge for decades. Dunking at those critics in the Big city Trailer would have been a career highlight if it hadn’t been an own goal. At the very least, the incident confirms the old Abraham Lincoln quote: “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.” But it could be something more tragic, almost beautiful: It could be about an old man so stuck in the past that he didn’t realize that a new technology was setting him up for humiliation.
As ChatGPT Pauline Kael writes in her review of the Big city Trailer: “His ability to stop time couldn’t save him from himself.”
Lionsgate, the film’s distributor, announced late Wednesday that it was pulling the trailer. “Lionsgate is recalling our trailer for Big city“, the studio said in a statement. “We sincerely apologize to the critics involved, as well as to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope, for this inexcusable error in our review process. We messed up. We are sorry.”
