When Harry Knowles - the self-made critic whose Web movie news site, the Ain't It Cool Network, has become a must-read for Hollywood insiders - picked up his email two Sundays ago, dozens of outraged messages told him that something was wrong.
"Your credibility is zilch! You've become a pawn for Disney!" accused one reader. "You've got to be kidding," groaned another.
That morning, Knowles discovered that a curious honor had been bestowed upon him. Walt Disney Studios had lifted a quote from his site to run as the lead blurb in its print ads for a new satire of the industry called Burn Hollywood Burn - the first time a Web site has been tapped for a blurb by a major studio.
"An A+! It rocks! I can't wait to take my girlfriend," the ads quoted "Harry Knowles' Ain't It Cool Network" as enthusing.
The problem? Knowles - who spends 14 hours a day online tapping leaks in the entertainment industry for skinny about upcoming films and TV shows - didn't say that. He doesn't even have a girlfriend.
And, Knowles says, he only liked Burn Hollywood Burn "in a middle-of-the-road sort of way" - which is still considerably more than most other reviewers liked it. A People pundit called the film "gag-inducing," and a Mr. Showbiz scribe rated it "Amnesty International-grade torture," and slammed its author, Joe (Showgirls, Basic Instinct) Eszterhas, as an "unfunny script-belcher."
The quote had come from the site, however. Not from Knowles himself, who favors rambling personal reflections over one-letter ratings systems, but from one of the many pseudonymous correspondents who Knowles affectionately refers to as his "spies." The author of the blurb in question was one "Agent Apple Crisp," and it was Eszterhas himself, a fan of Knowles' site, who suggested using it in the ad.
It wasn't the first time the industry had taken notice of Knowles, a contagiously enthusiastic 26-year-old film buff in Austin, Texas, who has parlayed the enormous popularity of his site - which logs 300,000 readers a day - into a judge's seat at the Sundance Film Festival, invitations to gala screenings, a role in organizing a Quentin Tarantino film festival in his hometown with an appearance by the director himself, and media mentions from The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal to the Guardian in London.
The sheer volume of eyeballs surfing through Knowles' site each day is earning him more and more pull in the industry. In 1997, when Knowles posted design sketches for the killer bugs from Starship Troopers months before the film opened, Sony's legal department fired off a cease-and-desist order. Knowles posted the letter, which touched off a storm of protest; the film's producer wound up phoning Knowles to tell him it was OK to put the sketches back online.
Warner Bros. marketing chief Chris Pula considered Knowles' devastating review of an advance screening of Batman and Robin to be one of the buzz-killers that helped bury the film. Knowles even popped up on Entertainment Weekly's 1997 "Power 101" list of Hollywood heavies. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the marketers of the bongwater-soaked Half Baked paid Knowles a compliment when they concocted an ersatz fan site for the film, studded with Knowles-esque large-font caps and exclamation points.
"When people talk about people who have made their names on the Internet," Knowles says, "they talk about two guys: me and Matt Drudge."
The two rumor-millers share some history. In the pre-Lewinsky days of the Drudge Report, Knowles was such a frequent contributor of Tinseltown tips to Drudge's site that in January 1996, he ventured off on his own to create Ain't It Cool News. (Knowles, who first met Drudge in an Internet relay chatroom in 1995, says he thinks fame is giving his former collaborator "tunnel vision" as he focuses more and more on White House peccadilloes. "It's sad to see Drudge becoming a Limbaughian-type character," he says.)
Geoffrey Ammer, Disney Studios' senior vice president of marketing, points out that the text of the ad for Burn Hollywood Burn was typographically accurate, if easy to misread. That apostrophe after "Knowles" indicated that the blurb had come from somewhere on the site, he says, not necessarily from Knowles himself.
The fans who deluged Knowles with appalled mail that morning, however, missed the apostrophe. Now the ad has been changed to properly attribute the quote to Agent Crisp.
"The concept that Disney is quoting a pastry is wonderful for me," muses Knowles from his home, "especially for that film. They couldn't get a human to say anything about it. They had to get a baked good."
Despite the tsoris the initial citation caused him, however, Knowles is mightily pleased that the blurb was used in the ad, and sees it as a small milestone for the Web.
"They have my spy quoted as an equal to Jack Valenti, the Hollywood Reporter, and the L.A. Daily News," Knowles declares. "It's a very important step."
Ammer admits that he believes the attributions in an ad for a film like Burn Hollywood Burn aren't that important.
"When people are looking for a validation of an opinion of a film like that, they don't even really notice who's saying what," he contends. "They just glance at the ad and see five good quotes. People are so quick to make decisions these days. They have so much information about entertainment at their fingertips."
For "a very serious picture, like Kundun," Ammer allows, people might check "to see if it was Time or Newsweek who said something."
Part of the charm of Knowles' site is that he takes his readers' trust as seriously as Ammer takes Kundun, offering multiple critical perspectives in the interest of fairness, sharing the intimate details of his life, and assiduously avoiding revealing "spoilers" - the crucial plot-points in a review that can sabotage the wonder of seeing a film for the first time.
After years of doing the site as an all-consuming labor of love, Knowles is finally seeing some monetary returns. He has six ad banners running on the site, including one for Burn Hollywood Burn. Knowles' 15 minutes in the limelight have taught him one of Hollywood's most difficult lessons, however - that fame is no guarantee of material comfort.
"My car still doesn't run, my house doesn't have air-conditioning, and my bed still stinks," says Knowles. "But the whole press onslaught that I've been swallowing is actually quite a treat."
