Look, I get it, we’ve now spent far too much time covering the Jane Got a Gun story*. But I’m always fascinated by the lengths people in the film business will go for even the most trivial of positive spin. These are people who do seem to truly believe that everyone in the world reads Nikki Finke. Which brings us to Jane Got a Gun producer Scott Steindorff, who’s been giving quotes to Deadline all week about how shocked he was when director Lynne Ramsay dropped out of the movie. SHOCKED! And she left with nary a reason, I’m sure. And now, apparently, Steindorff has his assistant emailing people to get more positive comments on the story.
“My boss will kill me if it’s not at least 40 comments!”
Sounds like a perfectly reasonable guy who’d never lie about a work feud, right? “Hurry up, you guys! Star those dog pics my boss put up on instagram or he’s going to start flipping over tables! I’m telling you, he’s craz– OH GOD HE’S IN THE ROOM!”
DISCLAIMER: I was forwarded the email from a tipster, so obviously I can’t completely verify that it was sent or written by the person it purports to be. Obviously. But I did do a cursory search, and the name listed as sender does work with Scott Steindorff. So at the very least, if it was a fake tipster out to smear a guy none of you had even heard of yesterday, at least he did his homework. As for posting the email, hey, they did say to pass it on to their friends. I mean, I do have a conscience, I’d feel really bad if the assistant got in trouble over this, but I feel like people should know what her boss is like, especially when he’s going around town trashing someone else.
*The short version is that Lynne Ramsay supposedly walked off the film on the first day of shooting and was replaced by Gavin O’Connor, but not before co-star Jude Law bailed too. Deadline covered the story from the beginning, always with lengthy quotes from producer Scott Steindorff, who is obviously Deadline’s source for the story, and Steindorff painted it as if it was all Lynne Ramsay’s fault for being unprofessional, irresponsible, and/or crazy. Surely there was more to the story than that, but we don’t know, because Ramsay hasn’t commented.
[picture source: TopNews.In]
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Like anybody takes Deadline comments seriously anyway. They’ve deleted every comment I’ve ever posted there. I suspect they delete everything which doesn’t fit whichever positive/negative extreme Finke wants. If you check the comments under any article, note how clearly forced the narrative is.
Meanwhile, Vince leaves spam comments up and highlights them in Comment Of The Week.
Choosy degenerates choose Filmdrunk.
That’s exactly it. Every opinion there is ridiculously extreme in either direction, you’d be fooled into thinking this was an actually important story if you had just suffered a massive brain injury and the part of your brain that assigns value to information was destroyed.
Scott Steindorff’s assistant has some pretty good friends.
Sometimes when I see a tipster I imagine water boarding him with a PBR or choking him out with a keffiyah.
Sometimes I use a shemagh and an Olympia lager.
When Filmdrunk’s URL starts redirecting to JaneGotAGunDrunk.com, will it retain its meaning that one is drunk ON Jane Got A Gun, or will we then move to the more dual “One is drunk WHILE covering Jane’s Got A Gun”?
Just think of all that cocaine wasted in trying to make this movie happen, it breaks my heart
I hope you know that by posting this you most likely got the assistant fired.
If so, that’s on her boss, not me.
Pretty sure the assistant’s life is better off for it.
It would honestly bum me out. But it’s not my job to protect assholes because they have innocents working for them.
They’re plucky, they’ll be fine. Everyone knows that when a young underappreciated assistant is fired for failing to perform one of the miracles that their megalomaniacal control-freak boss has commanded, they just spend a weeks-worth of montage moping around the apartment watching cartoon network, eating sh*tty chinese takeout and drinking during the daytime. At the end as the music fades and they wake from their hangover, a steely resolve washes over their face and they jump up to battle the world anew, direction and ambition fully recharged! And right about this time as the old door closes, a window opens up on a new opportunity probably involving a cute, quirky neuvo-geek chick with quaint black-rimmed sunglasses and a mildly impressive rack.
Who isn’t then? By that logic, you could blame the director, the producer, the assistant and the assistant’s friends, Uproxx and Al Gore for inventing internets.
I’ve worked with a few crazy television/film producers but on a different end (I’m an asst editor) and I can tell you this.
The assistant’s biggest mistake was sending an email out saying something that could be negative about his/her boss and also sending it out to people who could sell you out. If you want to stay in your job you never say anything like that in an e-mail. Steindorff clearly is desperate to save this movie’s press, and that Asst. is so fired.
That being said, there are a lot of batshit crazy Producer’s out there to work for, and being an assistant is a shitty job, if you can’t put up with their craziness you don’t belong there. You pay your dues if you want to move up.
Vince,
It pretty much is on you because you chose to reveal the actual text of the e-mail. You could’ve just simply wrote that some sub-idiot from Boss Idiot’s office is sending out ________.
By posting what the assistant wrote word for word has surely caused some serious trouble for his/her’s life.
Filmdrunk has a great format and I’m confident that the highly recognized and talented bloggers and the support team at Uproxx will pull the blog together.
(is sad Keanu safe from a photoshop beating now?)
It wouldn’t be the first time Vince indirectly got somebody fired.
TRUE STORY FOR REALZ!!!
I used to work at the American Red Cross as a lab tech. Vince put up a story last year about a Chinese zoologist eating out a monkeys butt to save its life. I pulled up the story during one of my breaks, co-worker didn’t believe me, showed the story on work pc. BOOM fired 2 weeks later, for “Sexual Harassment,” (several co-workers and I were laughing at the hilarious kommenters) and “visiting inappropriate sites with work computers.” But its all good in the hood Vince, I don’t hold a grudge…….so you live in SF?
So I typed “filmdrunk Chinese zoologist eating out a monkeys butt to save it” into Google and it gave me this:
[filmdrunk.uproxx.com]
Enjoy.
Aww I miss Crapbasket.
He was around for the Miss Teen Delaware/Big Foot thread last week.
For peeps who missed out on the the first Pacific Rim (job) jokes.
[filmdrunk.uproxx.com]
One of the best posts on FD in the last couple years.
I see your rim job, and raise you Vince’s best photoshop ever.
[filmdrunk.uproxx.com]