Update:

Apparently this was all the result of a misunderstanding involving Oracle, who talked to Marvel and was planning a similar screening, and a lack of communication with Paramount. Too bad — I was hoping to see Mike and Marvel go toe-to-toe on this one :-)

Original post:

In yet another example of how not to do customer relations or PR of any kind, Mike Arrington has a stunning exhibit from a lawyer representing Marvel, the comic powerhouse whose Iron Man character has become a major motion picture. Mike wanted to put on a social event for TechCrunch fans, so he booked a theatre and planned to show the movie for free — although he asked for $1 per ticket to cut down on the no-shows. Wham! That is apparently verboten, according to Marvel’s lawyer.

“You have not been authorized to exhibit, sell tickets to, nor invite the public to an Iron Man screening.”

As Mike points out, the whole process began with a phone call to the number listed on the official Iron Man movie website for “group sales.” So what is the Marvel guy’s problem? Hard to say. Obviously, movie studios and content companies like Marvel have an interest in holding publicity premieres, etc. and also have relationships with movie-theatre chains, who don’t want to see just anyone rent a theatre and go into competition with them. But still — is that any way to handle such a thing? It just makes Marvel look stupid, and mean.

If you’ve ever watched the Western classic High Noon and wondered what it would have been like if the bad guys were robots and the guns shot death rays, wonder no more. Not unlike a Star Trek episode, as it turns out. But a pretty cool one.

Aspiring filmmakers have all kinds of trials and tribulations to overcome — balky actors, nervous financial types, a bad script, etc. — but very few have to put off filming because their mom is afraid the crew is going to burn their house down. That’s just one of the many hurdles the young filmmakers behind a movie called Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark: An Adaptation had to confront. Why? Because they were 11 years old at the time, and they were trying to film the Nepalese bar scene from the movie in star/writer/director Eric Zala’s basement.

By now, the story of how a troupe of pre-teens from Mississippi made a shot-by-shot remake of the classic adventure film from George Lucas and Stephen Speilberg in the 1980s is pretty well known — the young filmmakers, who are now in their 30s, have met the two directors and have even touched the actual idol prop used in the original film, during a visit to Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch. But the movie itself has only been seen by a chosen few, at film festivals and special events (like Sprockets in Toronto), in part because it is an obvious copyright violation.

More recently, copies of the movie have started popping up on BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks, but they are hard to come by. As a taste, here’s the first 10 minutes of the movie — thanks to a link from Panopticist.com (turn the sound up, because it’s very faint through most of the clip). And remember that these kids are 11 and 12, that they made or bought all the props, and that they dug tunnels for months in order to film the opening scene. Even the storyboarding for the movie took over a year (and making the boulder took four).

More than one filmmaker will sympathize with Zala, who said that the first thing he felt after looking at the “rushes” or footage from the first summer of filming was disappointment because “we worked so hard and the end results looked so crappy.” But the group kept filming, and eventually finished their 100-minute remake for a total cost of $5,000. They showed it to some friends in an auditorium at a local Coca-Cola plant in 1989 and then put the tape away for 15 years, at which point a copy somehow made its way into the hands of Harry Knowles from the movie fan site Ain’t It Cool News and the story started to filter out.

It might be too much to ask for a major studio, but with the new Indiana Jones movie coming out, what better time to show the world’s greatest fan tribute film (in terms of sheer effort at least) to the world?

Planning to watch a David Lynch movie on your iPhone? Fine — but please keep in mind that the director hates you.

I haven’t decided whether to go and see Jerry Seinfeld’s Bee Movie yet, but I expect I probably will, considering my kids really want to see it. But I don’t really feel much desire to see it, even though I loved the old Seinfeld TV show and I think Jerry is generally very funny.

So why don’t I want to see the movie? Because the non-stop advertising and marketing for it has driven me up the wall — and according to the Movie Marketing Madness blog, I’m not alone. The stunt back in May with Jerry in the big bee suit at Cannes was kind of funny (although I didn’t need to see the clip a thousand times), but it’s been an unrelenting parade of Jerry and the bees for six months now.

Like TV Squad, the final straw for me was when NBC went Bee Movie-crazy and changed its on-screen logo to NBeeC, and dressed various cameramen and other staffers in bee costumes, and generally just went insane. New York magazine isn’t impressed either. I realize that Jerry is a much-loved comedian, but really — let’s get a grip.

It reminded me of the incessant popups and flashing banner ads I associate with really cheesy websites. So is that NBC’s fault or Jerry’s fault or the marketing team’s fault? It’s everybody’s fault, as far as I’m concerned. And I think it has probably hurt the movie rather than helped it.