Hollywood is de grote droomfabriek die ons jaarlijks voorziet van grote blockbusters tot indie films. Deze hebben allemaal één ding gemeen, dat ze gemaakt en uitgebracht worden door de film industrie die bestaat uit een hoop bedrijven. Maar er zijn dingen die ze graag in het donker houden, want deze industrie heeft zijn nodige geheimen die je niet mag weten. Daarom heeft de website Filmschoolrejects deze lijst gemaakt, met dingen zoals:

4. Fake Reviews

Have you ever seen a trailer for a shitty movie on TV and it has one of those blurbs that's like "...stunning...," and maybe a soothing voice reads it aloud? You may joke with your friends that the rest of that quote is "a stunning pile of horse shit." Turns out, that actually happens. It's not a joke at all. Marketing departments just plain don't give a fuck. For example, one critic's review of Live Free or Die Hard got shortened from "hysterically overproduced and surprisingly entertaining" to "hysterically... entertaining." Sometimes they'll even take the blurb from parts of the review where the critic was referring to a different movie entirely or the genre as a whole, like when a blurb used for Definitely, Maybe turned out to be from the critic's description of the romantic comedy genre as a whole and not his actual thoughts on the film.

Another fun trick Hollywood likes to use is trying to woo critics with free screenings, food, set visits, and other goodies. The people who take the bait are called quote whores. If your film needs a good review, they're there to give it. One of the most infamous is a critic named Earl Dittman, who is the film critic for a publication called Wireless Magazine. You've probably never heard of Wireless, and that's because they apparently have zero subscribers and no web presence, and yet that doesn't stop film studio marketing departments from using his blurbs like they're gold. In fact, Dittman was the center of a lot of controversy when an e-mail he sent to Fox contained not one, but ten different blurbs for the movie Robots and instructions for the studio to pick and use whichever one they liked best. But at least Earl Dittman's a real guy.

David Manning, however, is a different story. In 2000, Sony Pictures created the fictitious Manning and claimed that he worked for The Ridgefield Press, a real newspaper. Unfortunately, they didn't foresee someone actually asking the paper if they'd ever heard of the guy, because, you know, they hadn't. All of his blurbs were concocted by Sony Pictures' marketing department. Fox pulled similar shit, using footage of employees pretending to be ordinary movie-goers for promotional material.