Just Win, Baby . . .

Dave Manning wasn’t the first fake critic to make a splash in the movie business. More than a decade ago, Spy magazine ran a column called “Blurb-O-Mat” whose fictional author, Walter Monheit, penned hilariously obsequious reviews of movies he’d never seen. Of the Barbra Streisand-directed “Prince of Tides,” Monheit gushed: “Time and ‘Tides’ wait for no man--except a little gold-plated feller named Oscar!” He raved about the Robin Williams comedy “Cadillac Man,” saying, “Eight-cylinder, sedan-tastic, luxury-car har-dee-har-hars that rocked my chassis like a speed bump!”

The real Walter Monheit, who was pictured in the column wearing an ascot and monocle, was an elderly messenger at Spy who’d been a fabled New York party crasher in the 1970s. But the column was written by several smart-aleck Spy staffers, including Bruce Handy, now an editor at Vanity Fair, who said the idea was inspired by the gushy new TV critics whose blurbs began appearing in movie ads in the late ‘80s. “We deliberately picked the worst possible movies of the year and always said someone in the film deserved an Oscar,” recalls Handy. “We always had a secret hope that someone would pick up one of the quotes and run it in an ad someday.”

In 1990, their wish came true. In dire need of a good quote, Orion Pictures ran Monheit’s made-up blurb for “Cadillac Man” in an advance ad for the film in the New York Times.

It’s been a Walter Monheit kind of month at embattled Sony Pictures. The studio has been scrambling for explanations after being rocked by a pair of embarrassing revelations: Its marketing department invented Dave Manning to lavish praise on studio films and used Sony employees on camera to tout its 2000 summer release “The Patriot” in a testimonial ad. The studio has been in full damage-control mode ever since, slapping two marketing staffers with 30-day suspensions for the phantom critic stunt.

Since then, rival studios have acknowledged hiring actors to appear in testimonial ads too. And just days after bragging about the veracity of its “Sexy Beast” ads, Fox Searchlight was exposed by Variety for passing off an executive as an enthusiastic moviegoer in a testimonial ad for “Waking Ned Devine.”

There’s been considerable speculation that these shenanigans have not gone unnoticed by the top brass at Sony in Japan. In fact, one of my sources leaked me a top-secret memo from a Hollywood crisis-management consultant hired by the parent company to investigate the mess. I can guarantee this memo is as authentic as a Dave Manning review.

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To: Nobuyuki Idei., Chairman Sony Corp.

From: Sammy Glick, Top Spin Management.

As requested, I’ve been looking into this fiasco with an eye to ways we can staunch the bleeding. But before I make any recommendations, I think it’s important for you to understand the behind-the-scenes forces at work here.

There’s no getting around the fact that the knuckleheads in your film marketing department make the Three Stooges look like the Brothers Karamazov. But look on the bright side. Sony hasn’t gotten this much brand recognition since it gave Jim Carrey $20 million to do “Cable Guy.” And frankly, your marketers got a bum rap.

I know you come from a culture that honors scruples and accountability, but that’s not how it works in showbiz. In our world, the mantra is: Is your movie a hit and did you make your quarterly numbers? If not, you end up like Disney’s Peter Schneider, who’d rather take his chances on Broadway than put up with any more grief from Michael Eisner. In Hollywood, it’s not how you play the game, but whether you opened at No. 1. It’s the American way. Win, baby, win. No one would have to cut corners if every movie were “Gladiator” or “Erin Brockovich” (alas, not your movies) but when you have “Joe Dirt” or “The Animal,” there are a lot of corners to be cut.

It works the same way in Washington. To build support for the president’s tax cut, the Republican leaders in Congress cooked up their own testimonial ad--a made-for-TV rally to show support for the legislation. Needing bodies as a visual backdrop, they sent a memo recruiting their lobbyist pals but instructing them to leave their Armani suits at home. “We need bodies, but they must be dressed down, appear to be real worker types,” the memo said. “We’ll have hard hats for people to wear.” It worked--the tax cut passed.

Our ads would work just fine too, except we have one tiny irritant--the tony film critics who interfere with our message by trashing most of our movies. If they had their way, Hollywood would only be making “Traffic.” Here’s the problem: Critics are adults, and until 1975, movies were made for adults. Then Steven Spielberg made “Jaws” (alas, not for Sony) and the summer movie was invented, which is when studios discovered they could get millions of people to see the same movie on the same weekend. By the late 1980s, shows like “Entertainment Tonight” hit the air, which were giant free plugs for new movies.

Soon every TV news show had its own movie “critic” who was basically a one-man testimonial ad, showing clips from the new movies and saying things like, “If it were any hotter, I would’ve burst into flames!”

By the 1990s, movie marketers had invented the best free plug of all: the movie junket, where no-name reviewers for TV and radio outlets that sound like CIA fronts (Northwest Cable News and Launch Radio Network) caravan around the country, wined and dined on the studio’s dime, and--surprise--come up with plaudits for all sorts of embarrassingly bad movies. The critics’ names don’t mean anything, just the blurbs they wrote. Look at the ads for Paramount’s “Tomb Raider.” The reviewers’ names are in a color that blends in with the background--they don’t even care if you see the names.

Studios started sending out memos with suggested quotes for critics (“In three words: funny, funny, funny!”). Soon there were so many scams going that you needed a bunco squad. Miramax once ran an ad for “54” with a rave from the Los Angeles Times, saying “Mike Myers could get an Oscar for his brilliant nuanced portrayal of club owner Steve Rubell!” But the quote didn’t come from a Times critic, it came from a partygoer interviewed at the “54” premiere. When Disney had a dog of a movie, “Jungle 2 Jungle,” it ran ads with ecstatic blurbs like “Heartwarming!,” “Hysterical!” and “The Perfect Family Film!” You had to read the small print to discover the blurbs were all from the same critic.

But as I said, the real people at fault here are the highbrow critics, who are old enough to know the difference between “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “The Mummy Returns.” They are the very critics who’ve been marginalized by this blurbapalooza, which has created such a high level of cynicism among moviegoers that they don’t trust any critic anymore, whether they work for the New Yorker or 60 Second Preview. Movies, especially in the summer, are made for teenagers. But most of the critical elite are middle-aged--At the Movies’ Roger Ebert, the New Yorker’s David Denby, Time’s Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel, Newsweek’s David Ansen, the Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan, the Today Show’s Gene Shalit. So they’re getting older as moviegoers get younger. It’s no wonder one top executive calls them “the grumpy old men.” If I was 55 and had to review “Tomb Raider” and “The Animal” (alas, one of yours), I’d be grumpy too.

It’s that culture gap between 15- and 55-year-old tastes that has encouraged studios to pump up the blurbmeisters. Dave Manning was just a way of cutting out the middle man. In a way, your marketers did just what your animators did with the star of “Final Fantasy.” They created a virtual film critic who churned out virtual film reviews, which is a lot cheaper than sending a jetload of puffballs on a junket to Hawaii.

So here’s my recommendation: Don’t rock the boat. The media storm will blow over. Getting caught is the cost of doing business, if that’s what it takes to open a movie at No. 1. Remember, this is America: We love capers and chicanery. Hustlers, con men and gangsters are the heroes of our culture. It’s why the big hit on Broadway is “The Producers,” a musical about guys who cheerfully defraud their investors. It’s why the big hit on HBO is a mob drama whose hero whacks a guy while taking his daughter to see a nice Ivy League college. It’s why everyone watches “Survivor,” the ultimate winner-take-all show, the winner of course being the person who most ruthlessly cons and manipulates his fellow man.

So do the right thing. Tell the marketing folks that if they can get a big weekend opening for “America’s Sweethearts,” you’ll give them a big raise and a trip to California Adventure (I hear Disney’s paying people to go there now!).

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* “The Big Picture” runs each Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.