Francis Ford Coppola is hardly the first director to make a movie about the tension between past and future, but he might be the first to release a trailer that accidentally explores those themes at his own expense. In a Megalopolis trailer released on August 21st, film footage brackets derisive quotes from critics who had apparently missed the point of Coppola’s masterpieces — except, as Vulture discovered, those critics never said that stuff. Words attributed to the late greats Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Vincent Canby, and Roger Ebert were either made up or taken from the wrong review, leading to questions like: Where did the quotes come from? Who thought this was a good idea? And did you guys use ChatGPT? Because you know it hallucinates, right? Right?
Unless Coppola or his representatives make a statement, we won’t be able to definitively prove that the quotes were chat bot-generated. But in a brief and hilarious experiment, Consequence asked ChatGPT to “collect negative reviews of Coppola classics.” Sure enough, it hallucinated quotes from Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Vincent Canby, and — you guessed it — Roger Ebert similar to the ones featured in the trailer. If prompted again, ChatGPT fabricated totally new quotes, in the process re-arranging which critics panned which films.
In one iteration Kael, who in truth loved The Godfather, was made to call it “hollow in terms of emotional resonance.” Internet sleuths have found similar results with their own experiments.
As a hater myself, I love that Coppola held onto these grudges for decades. Dunking on those critics in the Megalopolis trailer would have been a career highlight, if it hadn’t turned into an own-goal. At the very least, the incident proves the old Abraham Lincoln quote, “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.” But it might be something more tragic, almost beautiful: It might be an old man who is so stuck in the past that he didn’t realize a new technology had set him up for humiliation.
As ChatGPT Pauline Kael said in her review of the Megalopolis trailer, “His ability to stop time couldn’t save him from himself.”
Lionsgate, which is distributing the film, announced that it was pulling the trailer late Wednesday. “Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for Megalopolis,” the studio said in a statement. “We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry.”