He Lost It at the Movies

By RICHARD CORLISS

Caesar's wife wasn't a film critic, and Julius didn't run a movie studio, so Roman gossips never got to whisper that she was in bed with the moguls. Last week, though, at least one picture reviewer found it hard to be above suspicion.

Michael Medved, who rates movies on the PBS series Sneak Previews, stood accused of selling his services to movie companies. According to an Associated Press story, the critic "accepted money from studios to rewrite scripts and advised studios how to market their films." Medved angrily denies the charges: "I will plead guilty to writing some bad screenplays -- before I became a film critic. But I never worked as a marketing consultant. And I don't take money from studios."

True, false or in between, the charge raised ticklish questions of integrity for movie critics. How close should they get to the objects of their supposedly disinterested attention? Can they conscientiously review a movie made by a friend? Are they compromising themselves by feeding advance quotes to publicists or by working for a conglomerate that makes movies? Can they lend their expertise to a studio without selling out?

Early this month Medved was an expert witness at the trial in which columnist Art Buchwald was suing Paramount for his share of the loot from Coming to America, whose scenario Buchwald co-wrote. Medved testified on Paramount's behalf and was paid $8,000 to $10,000 by the studio's law firm. But the money was not the chief cause of concern; it was the critic's testimony about the favors he performed for major studios.

Such relationships have grown more complex in this dual age of the celebrity critic and the media conglomerate. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert are movie-star famous, chatting with Johnny Carson or being cartooned on The Simpsons. The Walt Disney Co. produces Siskel & Ebert; Paramount produces Entertainment Tonight, which runs Leonard Maltin's reviews; and yes, Warner Bros. is part of Time Warner, which pays the critics at TIME, PEOPLE and ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY. All these scribes insist that their criticism is not compromised by their employers. TIME panned Warner's 1991 smash Robin Hood, and Siskel and Ebert managed to carp about Disney's rerelease of Snow White.

Other critics have toiled in the movies. Penelope Gilliatt wrote Sunday, Bloody Sunday while a New Yorker critic; it was reviewed there by Pauline Kael, who later briefly worked for Warren Beatty. Jay Cocks, a TIME movie critic until 1977, has collaborated with Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese; he is co-author of Scorsese's current project, The Age of Innocence. TIME'S Richard Schickel, in his parallel life as a documentary filmmaker, has worked with George Lucas, Clint Eastwood, Kathleen Turner and others.

Cocks had, and Schickel has, the luxury of splitting assignments with another critic. If a film raises any perceived conflict of interest, the other guy gets the job. "In this area," says Schickel, "ethics is a matter of personal honor. This is a judgment call, not a universal morality." But who is to make that call when the critic is a moviemaker's friend? Says Medved: "It's wrong to review movies of friends."

But the charges against Medved are no judgment call. As he says, "We're not talking about questions of interpretation. We're talking about questions of the record." Fine, let's look at the record.

In a November 1991 deposition for the Buchwald case, Medved stated, "Several times this year, I had studios that have asked me to see films in advance, and to give them my opinion on their prospects long in advance. Some of these films have not been released. In fact, I urged the studio to maintain that unreleased status in some cases." Asked at the trial, "Have you had any other positions for motion picture companies?," he replied, "Occasionally in my capacity as a film critic I am contacted by motion-picture companies . . . to take an early look at sometimes a rough cut of a motion picture they are planning to release and to give them an advance indication of what my reaction would be and to attempt to predict how that motion picture will perform with the mass audience."

So Medved advised not only on the financial potential of a movie but also on whether a film should be shelved. He says he did all this "as a film critic, evaluating movies that I was shown in terms of their artistic success and in terms of their likely appeal or lack of appeal to the moviegoing public. That's what I do for a living."

There will always be reviewers who feed the industry with free advice or easy quotes. Some, like Medved, think they are doing their job. Others like to see their prose in 96-point type ("The Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies") or work for magazines that savor free publicity in a movie ad ("Peter Travers, Rolling Stone"). But in their little black hearts, ! critics know they have scant individual power. "In order to effectively buy critics," Schickel says, "a studio would have to buy 10 or 20 of them."

Get it? Because critics are beneath contempt, they think they are above reproach. And they may be right. Once, when a notoriously generous reviewer was accused of taking Hollywood money, a cynical colleague dismissed the charges: "Why pay for something you can get for free?"