John Ottman

THE EVILS OF THE INTERNET

Its hard enough to work on a challenging project that's actually shaping up to be a good film - and then read an alternate universe being concocted on the web and media. In the end, I had a real awakening about the state of "legit" media and modern "journalism", and, of course, the insidiousness that can be the Internet. Much of what was being said about Valkyrie was utterly mind-boggling to read or hear about, and yet to say anything to dispel the misinformation publicly would have been stooping to that level and fanning the flames. Biting our tongue was a daily discipline. It's difficult to keep it bottled up and to allow the fiction to flow freely like a forest fire with no fire trucks in sight. And it did. Soon it got to the point where the film's destiny was threatened to be pre-determined by fantastical negative rumors and outright hate.

Who Makes This Stuff Up? And Who Believes It?

We owed a couple scenes we never got around to shooting in Berlin – namely the scene in Africa where Stauffenberg gets injured. Because it was an expensive sequence to shoot, the studio decided we wait until we had a cut of the film to determine whether we really needed the expensive scene. (Even though those of us in the trenches knew we'd need it.) We tried many versions without Africa and another scene (one in a church). It was finally determined that it would best serve the story to finally shoot the two scenes. But now that we were back in LA, this would involve planning, funding and tinkering with the script pages to make sure the scene did the job. Might as well get it right. We realized all this would take too long for the film to make its release date. Granted, when a film gets pushed, you assume the worst. But soon came the "reports" that the film was a disaster and "half of it had to be reshot." This was laughable enough. But the rumors persisted like an infection until there was an accepted notion that the film was a huge bomb – DOA. Soon there were "inside scoops" that we had disastrous test screenings where people were "rolling in the isles." Of course, at that time we had no test screenings of the film. But this fabrication was, of course, believed, and worse, soon being reported by mainstream websites like Fox News. This is when I took real pause about the state of journalism, and was saddened. Legit reporters, from newspapers to cable, were using information from gossip sites like Perez Hilton, of all places, as their source material. I remember ranting to my fellow cohorts that true reporting and investigatory fact checking was dead. When there's an intense agenda for something to crash and burn, made-up or contorted truths will spread. (I see it all the time from "news" shows on "certain" networks). It was like the Twilight Zone - I experienced one reality in the editing room and saw another on the tabloids in the supermarket check out stand, if you know what I mean. Celebrities are used to it, but witnessing it from the inside was sobering. Truly, nothing is at it seems. It sort of reminded of a moment many years ago. I had a Dukakis bumper sticker on my car and pulled into a gas station. The attendant looked at the sticker and said, "That's the guy who let's the murders out of prison, right?" At that moment I realized the campaign was over. The distortion-of-facts smear campaign against him was believed (when in reality the furlow program had been created by the previous governer). As history shows, once a lynch mob fuse is lit, it's hard to extinguish.

Anyhow, months later, we decided to really test screen the film in Henderson, Nevada. It's sort of like trying to find a non-tainted jury pool for a high profile murder. So, despite the fact we knew we had something special, tensions were high. But during the screening, I got the same good feeling I had during a Suspects screening where I could sense the audience was on board. But you never know. ... Then the test numbers confirmed it. And this was an audience as general as they come - a blind test. Normally you pack the theater with your core audience – in this case it would have been heavier in males and slightly older ages. But this screening was the entire spectrum. We then did some tweaks and had another screening a couple weeks later with an audience closer to our demographic. Again the test was a huge success. Elated, UA decided that releasing the film earlier in December would make more sense than Valentine's Day, of all weekends. Predictably, this good news was instantly spun as propaganda - that the move to December was simply a stunt. I thought I'd read it all.