Inside Llewyn Davis is a movie. Its producers ran a full-page ad (price: $70k!) in the NYT which featured little more than the above tweet, from critic Tony “A.O.” Scott.
Many found it eye-rollingly precious, but there was a worse problem: despite being carefully formatted to look exactly like an actual on-the-web tweet, it turned out to have been edited to remove some words inconvenient to the advertising message being crafted from it. The original posting follows.
The controversy has built to the point where it warrants a response from the Times’ Public Editor, Mary Sullivan. There are so many hypermodern issues to wallow in here! The juciest: Sullivan reports that Tony Scott was asked permission by the producer, Scott Rudin, to edit and run the tweet, but had explicitly refused permission. Here’s the response he’d sent.
Well this is a new one. I’d prefer though that my tweets not be used in advertisements. That seems like a slippery slope and contrary to the ad hoc and informal nature of the medium.
And changing the tweet is basically manufacturing a quote, something I avoid.
So I’m afraid the answer is no.
You know immediately what sort of person Rudin is from the fact that he asked for permission to run the quote, was told an unequivocal “no”, but did it anyway. Why bother asking permission? Perhaps, just for a moment, it felt like a connection to a human being.