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Is Armond a staffer, or freelancer? If the former, he loses no money on this.

I suggest going to a Thursday midnight show, turning around a review overnight and posting it on the paper's website immediately. Rotten Tomatoes will then have it up as soon as most others (accredited critics can add their own whenever they want).

And studios are dumb if they fear an Armond pan. Don't they know most readers do the opposite of what he recommends?

Cursory web searching demonstrates that White once opined that Baumbach's mother should have had an abortion. And why would anyone go out of their way to extend courtesy to someone so rude? Mr. White hasn't been bullied out of this film. He's bullied himself out of it. I may not like a movie, or director, but certain things are not the province of rational grown-ups, and it is fairly clear that line has been crossed.

Godwinning not once but twice, plus citing the first amendment? Whoever wrote this shouldn't be let near a keyboard again.

Hey, Margaret is coming out?

Seriously, the guy said NB's mom should have aborted him. At what point do we draw the line? Only half joking to say that AW's writing then falls into the "annoying speech" legal exception of the first amendment, if not constituting a "credible threat."

If you're going to write about this story, Dave, you should probably mention that White claimed he can tell Baumbach is an asshole just from watching his films.

White is a scourge on criticism as well as good taste. The guy should be blackballed from ALL advance screenings and run out of town.

Australian publicists are lovely. That is all.

Agreed. I see no problem with the director banning White. All critisism is OK, wishing a director did not exist and calling someone and asshole from just watching one of his movies is NOT. Poland, you really ought to update this post with additional information explaining why he got banned. As it reads atm White actually looks like the good guy. I hope Summit stands their ground.

"Now is the time for us critics to stand together" --Anonymous Critic

Also, I think this email writer means "comprehensible" or some other word than "comprehensive" in front of "sentence" there. The "make a better movie, you pussy" kind of stuff doesn't make much sense either -- assuming that there is some kind of objective good and bad and all that one needs to do to please a critic is "make a good movie." I work part-time as a critic, and I can tell you that's not particularly true. Critics have biases and hang-ups. Few moreso than White.

But as much as I dislike this poorly written email, banning a critic seems pretty silly to me -- even banning and sometimes unreadable Armond White, because it seems to confer way more power than I think White or any critic really has, at least as far as a Ben Stiller-led "big" indie goes. Maybe something like The Exploding Girl can get killed early in release by some prominent bad reviews, but as LYT mentions, that's not gonna happen with an Armond White pan. It's a tin-eared sort of reaction all around.

Banning a critic from an advance screening is NOT a violation of first amendment rights.

this is such a sad email. not just because they have no concept of the first amendment, but this rallying war cry couldnt fall on a larger collection of deaf ears.

solidarity among critics. tee hee.

you'd have a better shot at ending the israel/palestine conflict.

the new generation of 'critics' (the post internet age) are realizing that they can't just shoot their mouths off. the abortion line is an example of how polarizing online critics have become in order to try and seem relevant. it blew up in his face. fuck him.

this is a sad email. it will do nothing to help his 'cause'. it only serves to show how sad and desperate children can be when things don't go their way.

I can't believe you reprinted such a childish, amateurish e-mail. If it was written by somebody over 19, they should be tremendously embarrassed.

"Hail the first amendment." God, how stupid.

Should all critics get together and boycott Fox for not letting Drew McWeeny and Devin Faraci into screenings as well?

Armond says that Georgia Brown should have gotten an abortion. And yet he's a Bush supporter. Shouldn't that make him pro-life? I'm so confused.

That abortion stuff is SERIOUS hate. (I mean, even when I was raging at the proprieter of this site, I never suggested such a thing.) My theory is that it's the kind of hate that springs from imagined sexual rejection. See also White's contempt for an unnamed "snake-hipped scribe."

It's just a theory, but I'm kind of fond of it, and I'm keeping it.

@LYT: "Greenberg" is being released arthouse/upmarket, hence no midnight shows.

Armond White is definitely a troll. I didnt want to think that about him but you read some of his stuff and its clear he has tipped over the edge. He gets very personal in his reviews and i dont know why.

Also is he a Bush supporter? nothing wrong with that but he seems to hate everyone.

Glenn, which scribe is that?

You should check out his review for Fantastic Mr. Fox. Towards the end, Armond says any smugness in the story must come from the contributions of Noah Baumbach. Classic.

Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming is one of the best films ever made about post-college anxiety.

I've banned the loser liars from Dread Central from all coverage of any film I have anything to do with for life. If that meant that no critic would review Transformers 3, I do not think I could possibly care any less. David, I know you are concerned about the end of critics, but they brought it upon themselves and quite frankly will not be missed.

"solidarity among critics. tee hee.
you'd have a better shot at ending the israel/palestine conflict."
At least this line made me chuckle.
Really that bad, is it?

Getting to see early screenings is a professional privilege, not a professional right. You act like an unprofessional asshole to a filmmaker or studio, you make your own bed and have to lie in it. The way White has taken his reviews of Baumbach's films into a personal realm is completely unprofessional, hack worthy and pathetic.

Now that he gets to go see the screening, I anxiously await his hackneyed, played out diatribes about overprivileged white characters and their horrible existence. Zzzzzzz.

And KICKING AND SCREAMING is in my top 5 faves of all-time yet none of his other films even rank with me.

Ah. Don Murphy. Spreading sunshine wherever he goes. The most happy fella.

Does anyone have a link to Armond White's actual "abortion" quote? Googling around, it mainly seems to appear as hearsay in the comments sections of blogs.

James Rocchi - cursory web searches (I myself Googled "Armond White +Baumbach +abortion" in a 3 year period ending March 1st) turn up nothing of the sort. Anonymous comments in articles about White are not the same thing as an article with a byline.

Otherwise, some time next year someone will be claiming that James Rocchi sold his own sister into white slavery back in 1997 to settle a debt he accrued on account of his Viagra addiction and it must be true because of it being on the web...

Baumbach (or whoever) should have probably turned the other cheek and not stooped to Don Murphy-esque tactics here, but White gets no sympathy from me. Also, since he obviously has issues with the Baumbach/Brown family that go beyond the professional and into the personal, he probably shouldn't have been allowed by his editors to review this movie in the first place, right?

Also, while White is sometimes a very interesting thinker, he's a terrible writer.

I don't know, doesn't anyone else think White's shtick here is just kind of... funny?

Everyone here has to act all appalled because it defies the tenets of SERIOUS JOURNALISM or Hollywood propriety (HAHAHAHAHAHA!)... But it's just typical shock-jock humor; I have no love for White (though if he's a Bush fan, that's AWESOME), but for anyone who listens to hip-hop or Howard Stern, it's just standard boasting, taunting, needling and shock value comedy.

Then James Rocchi's gotta blow in like HAVE YOU NO STANDARDS ANYMORE, we are SERIOUS PEOPLE and MUST TREAT HOLLYWOOD FOLKS WITH UTTER JOURNALISTIC REMOVE AND RESPECT.

Please. You guys write about the richest, luckiest motherfuckers in the world; You cover Hollywood, not the Oval Office or the Vatican, so shouldn't all decorum go RIGHT out the window?

And, hey, now everyone's talking about Armond White.

Funny how half if not ALL of you guys are probably big Hunter Thompson fans or FEAR AND LOATHING fans, but when Armond White or some other critic does some wild-and-crazy guy showboating to get just a SLIVER of the fame -- that ALL OF YOU GUYS SECRETLY WANT or you'd be covering city council meetings instead of hobnobbing with Vince Vaughn!!! -- you find him heretical to your OH-SO-SERIOUS profession... OF WATCHING MOVIES AND INTERVIEWING PEOPLE you go home and masturbate to.

"@LYT: "Greenberg" is being released arthouse/upmarket, hence no midnight shows."

Here in LA, most everything gets a Thursday midnight...I'd be amazed if nowhere in New York followed suit...but I'll take your word for it.

jeff MCM- that's my douche! Don't ever change!

Don, I'd love to hear you elaborate on the finer points here, but I also don't expect it would be very productive. Don't you have a pile of money in need of swimming?

It turns out the "abortion" apocrypha is erroneous, but that White has said plenty of rude, hateful things independent of that. I apologize for furthering rumor when the record speaks plainly for itself.

What do you call 10,000 online film critics at the bottom of the ocean?

Boam: I don't know... What?

A good start?

Lex, for all that the actual validity of his points sometimes get lost amidst his personality and style of writing here, actually makes a solid point here.

As film critics, bloggers, film journalists, what have you, we frequently take ourselves WAY too seriously -- in how much influence we think we actually have, in what we think our place is at the Hollywood table, and in what we think we're entitled to. We are not covering the White House, or the health care crisis, or the war, or financial scandals. We're writing about movies, folks.

However ... Are advance screenings a privilege studios afford us as a favor? No, they aren't. Studios don't have press screenings, or even invite press to those freebie public screenings, because they like us and want to do us a favor; press are invited because we are a part of the PR machinery around a film's release, for better or worse. When a studio thinks it's likely to be REALLY for worse, they don't screen for press at all. Happens all the time.

Is it annoying? Sure, if you're expected to review that film for your job and there's not a free screening, and your gig won't reimburse the cost of your ticket (welcome to the world of the freelance film critic). Is it a violation of my First! Amendment! Rights! for a studio to not have a press screening for a given film? Sorry, but no, it's not.

In this case, we had a particular critic -- a particularly vocal and generally unctuous critic -- banned (and then unbanned) from a screening from one film. Thing is, White's reviews can stray from reviewing the film as a *film* and into the realm of the deeply personal attack, and this has been the case with his reviews of Baumbach's work and things he's said about Baumbach generally. If I were a director, and I felt that a critic was prone to attacking me personally and clearly NOT inclined to view my film with anything resembling objectivity, why would I want him to be one of the first people writing about my work?

Plenty of other critics have reviewed one or another of Baumbach's films unfavorably, but there wasn't some conspiracy here to ban all critics who've ever written a negative review of his films. This was about Baumbach and White and something that went beyond the realm of the professional and into the personal, not a freaking attack on the First Amendment. Perspective.

White can be interesting at times, but more often he seems to me to be a contrarian for the sake of contrarianism, which makes him annoying more than anything, even if he is occasionally interesting. There's any number of critics whose reviews, negative or positive, I'd spend my time reading over his.

Voynar, I don't even know if you know how much you ROCK. Yeah, you intimidate the hell out of me, but you are SO. COOL.

I hate to take issue with my friend James Rocchi...but just because a tidbit of info can't be found online doesn't mean it's apocryphal or erroneous. It could mean it's inaccurate. A reader, commenting at both my own blog and at Independent Eye, cites the letters-to-the-editor exchange between White and Brown in the Village Voice in the late '90s, and adds: "White would 'review' Noah Baumbach’s 1997 film 'Mr. Jealousy' by claiming that anything favorable written about it or any of Baumbachs films was just a favor to the filmmaker’s mother by her critic friends. Instead, he said the film called for 'retroactive abortion.'"

This review is not yet online. But there you have it.

Armond White really did call for Baumbach's abortion. Here's proof.

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2010/03/proof_that_armo.php

Glenn: A pleasure to be corrected by you, and good shoe-leather stuff on the Voice's Part.

This is just one reminder: As much as we now rely on the Internet, you won't find everything there. A few years ago, I went on-line to find a review I had written as a free-lancer back in the mid '90s for a weekly paper -- only to find that the paper had purged from its website archives everything written by free-lancers during that period. I, too, had to go to a public library to dig up the piece.

Thanks for following that up here, Glenn. I'd just questioned the accuracy because it was being widely recalled and reprinted without any specific source. If a publicist is going to accuse someone of something, and people are going to rerun that accusation, it just seems to me that all involved should verify it first.

(The Mr. Jealousy review is scanned and up here:
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2010/03/proof_that_armo.php)

Kim-

But see, "good" critics like you, Rocchi and many others can capably write a pan without becoming a raving asshole in the process. PR companies and studios have to respect that and I've never heard of a critics being banned for simply not liking a film and giving a bad review.

White said some horrible, personal things and earned his place in the persona non-grata of Baumbach screenings. It's a shame he cried and was permitted to see the film this week in fact. What's the point? He's going to hate it.

Anyone who's been banned from a studios screenings earned it by being unprofessional and/or a dick and that includes our buddy Eric Snider and his whole "World Trade Center" debacle. I admire Eric for calling it like he saw it but also can see why the studio would pass on inviting him to future events. I know Eric accepts that fate as well.

The day you or Rocchi or Glenn or DP get banned for being honest in giving a movie a bad review is the day things get troubling.

"What do you call 10,000 online film critics at the bottom of the ocean?"

Irrelevant bottom feeders?

A critical mass?

I give up.

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