Fin: The chilling threat against a movie theater by a Florida mayor

Fake movie news has consequences, way too many Boston sports docuseries, the Rizzler and Michael Corleone, and other items in this week’s notes column.

Almost exactly two months ago, I wrote about how when it comes to controversial movies, especially when they’re about some aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I am firmly on Team Show All the Films.

When there is an effort to cancel or block a one-off screening or an ongoing engagement of a film because of the content of the film or the position it takes on that particular conflict, I will always stand against it. This is true of the recent effort to cancel September 5 at the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn, the various efforts to cancel on-campus showings of the Israel-skeptical documentary Israelism, and numerous other such controversies, both before and since October 7.

On Wednesday night, I attended a preview showing for the Israeli Film Festival of Philadelphia for a story I’m writing for next week. In case you don’t remember, last spring, anti-Israel protesters picketed that festival and even got a showing of a movie canceled at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute before a court intervened to force the screening to go ahead. This festival is going forward this year, although at different venues.

While scrolling my phone while waiting for the movie to start, I noticed a truly horrifying news story out of Florida: Per the Miami Herald, the mayor of Miami Beach wrote a letter demanding a local independent theater called O Cinema pull its engagement of No Other Land, the joint Israeli/Palestinian film that just won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. The theater, to their credit, refused the demand- and now the mayor, Steven Meiner, is threatening to end the lease of the O Cinema, which is owned by the city and leased to the theater organization.

This is absolutely vile and crosses a line that none of the above-mentioned controversies has, into full-on government censorship. For a government official to attempt to dictate what a movie theater can and can’t show is Soviet stuff, the sort of thing that I thought First Amendment law had definitively made a thing of the past in America. I expect a court order to go against Meiner and put a swift end to the affair.

Beyond the legality, this is just plain anti-art. It’s book-burning. It’s attempting to suppress ideas you don’t like with government force.

The consequences of fake movie news

Just over a year ago, I wrote here about a particularly stupid bit of fake movie news: That Disney was eying Ayo Edebiri to star in a new reboot of the Pirates of the Carribean series. The sourcing for this rumor was almost comically thin- “noted scooper Daniel ‘DanielRPK’ Richtman” raised it on his paywalled Patreon, which was “relayed from beyond the paywall” by something called Hollywood Handle.