Sony Confesses Phony Patriot Plugs, Faces Lawsuit
June 15 -- Now that the skeleton of phony film critic David Manning has been yanked out of its closet, Sony's motion picture division is in something of a confessional mode. We anticipate full disclosures of the studio's participation in the Kennedy assassination and the Palm Beach ballot count next week; for the moment, all that's forthcoming is a flap over posed reaction clips used to advertise The Patriot last summer.
The ad in question is a Patriot promo that aired on TV stations nationwide last summer, featuring man-on-the-street interviews with ostensibly ordinary moviegoers who had presumably just seen the Mel Gibson Revolutionary War drama. According to Variety, two of the people shown endorsing the movie are — and were, at the time that they participated in the promo — actually employees of Sony's Columbia Pictures.
The phony endorsers are reportedly Tamaya Pettaway, an executive assistant to Columbia advertising VP Dana Precious, and Anthony Jefferson, who works in Columbia's finance division. In the clip, Pettaway faces the camera and declares that The Patriot is a "perfect date movie," while Jefferson looks on.
Reaction spots, as they are called inside the industry, are used frequently to encourage positive word of mouth among moviegoers, and the practice of paying actors to read lines in such ads reportedly is not uncommon. However, it is reportedly highly unusual for a distributor to use its own employees in such spots.
Precious, who supervised national marketing of The Patriot, offered the following explanation via a prepared statement: "Using actors, real people, or employees as spokespeople is not unique to the entertainment business, is not specific to Sony Pictures Entertainment, and is not something that is practiced only by me.
"That said, perhaps this is a time for all of us in the business of marketing to review the practices that have become an industry standard and to rethink and redraw some boundaries."
Making the entire incident seem uglier is the issue of Pettaway and Jefferson's ethnicity. Both are black, making them two of only three black people to be found among the promo's 32 participants. The Patriot was perceived to be a tough sell to black moviegoers, particularly after filmmaker Spike Lee lambasted its portrayal of Gibson's relationship with his black farmhands as a "whitewashing of history."
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