Academy Rains on ‘Rain Man’s’ Parade

MGM/UA’s decision to jump the gun by running an advertisement touting “Rain Man” as an Academy Award nominee before the nominations were officially announced has prompted a complaint from academy President Richard Kahn.

“We regard this as a serious matter and we have communicated our concern to (the studio),” Kahn said in a prepared statement Friday, without providing further details.

An advertisement for the film appeared in Los Angeles and New York newspapers Wednesday morning--as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was announcing its nominees--with the words “Academy Award Nominee” above a photo of its two stars, Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise.

The appearance of the advertisement immediately provoked speculation in Hollywood about the academy’s security system.

“It came as a major shock to everyone,” said an academy spokesman. “Everyone wanted to know if it was a fix.” In fact, the academy spokesman added, “there was no way anybody could know” about “Rain Man’s” eight nominations before the announcements were made at 5:30 a.m. Wednesday.

MGM/UA distribution president David Forbes told The Times this week that the advertisement’s boast was added intentionally because nominations for the popular film “seemed like a pretty sure thing.”

“We’re mortified,” Barry Lorie, MGM/UA’s senior vice president of marketing, said Friday. “It was a mistake, we admit. We did not intend to damage the credibility of the academy. I don’t know what we can do except apologize.”

For nearly half a century, the academy has prided itself on an airtight security system designed to prevent early leaks of the names of its nominees. At 9 p.m. Tuesday, Frank Johnson and Dan Lyle, two senior partners from the accounting firm Price Waterhouse, arrived at the academy’s Beverly Hills offices carrying the names of the nominees in a briefcase.

At that point, said the academy spokesman, the building’s doors were locked and its phones were turned off.

“No one could even call home,” he said.

During the night, about a dozen academy employees and public relations officials labored to prepare press materials on typewriters, rather than computers. As an added security measure, the typewriter ribbons they used were immediately destroyed.

Johnson and Lyle will each carry lists of the final winners to the Academy Award ceremonies March 29, but they will take different routes to the ceremony to guarantee that at least one of them arrives at the designated time.