Debbie Schlussel has discovered the hard way that you learn who your friends are when the chips are down and you need help.
Schlussel is a right-wing commentator who has her own website and frequently appears on Fox. She was recently dropped by Paramount Pictures from the list of critics who are given screenings of upcoming movies so that they can review them.
Schlussel said she suspected it was because she "went to town on" the documentary on education, "Waiting for Superman."
I was removed from the list because I did not fall in line with everyone else and gush profusely over “Inconvenient Truth” filmmaker Davis Guggenheim’s other BS documentary, “Waiting for Superman.”
Schlussel said she got the run-around when she tried to resolve the situation with the studio.
Paramount not only removed me from the screening list, but referred all of my questions about it to the studio’s Vice President of Legal Affairs. Not only would she give me no information, but Paramount didn’t even have the guts to say it was because of my negative review of “Waiting for Supe.”
That forced her to review movies by paying "to suffer through midnight debuts of Paramount movies along with the stoned college student masses."
Oh, the horror.
You'd think that her fellow right-wingers would jump to her assistance and decry this outrage against a conservative critic.
Nope. All she got from the right was the sound of crickets chirping.
It was ** gasp ** the evil, liberal New York Times that stood up for her by taking up the issue with Paramount.
Much thanks to New York Times reporter Michael Cieply, a true mensch, who wrote the article. In this case, it was the liberal New York Times and a couple of local liberal movie critics who helped me and took on the case, NOT so-called conservatives, like the fakes at Andrew Breitfraud’s Big (on Viagra) Hollywood.
Cieply's inquiry not only got her privileges restored. It got her an apology from the studio as well.
Queried about Ms. Schlussel’s banishment, Katie Martin Kelley, a spokeswoman for Paramount, looked into the matter — and reversed the decision, which, she said, had been made improperly by a local public relations representative for the studio.
“Proper protocol was not followed, and we sincerely apologize,” Ms. Kelley wrote in an e-mail to to The New York Times on Sunday. She said Ms. Schlussel would have access to Paramount movies in the future, but did not say why she had been dropped to begin with.