Anatomy of a Smear Campaign aka Reasonable Doubt

I’ve really been enjoying the Carpetbagger’s coverage of this year’s Oscars. It is different from David Carr’s take – it is much more removed, I think, than the usual coverage of the Oscars and therefore, to me, it is always like reading what a “normal person” might make of it all. Not to say Melena is normal, but you get the idea. She gets it that when she goes out in the world and brings up the Oscar race most people are just not interested. Today she digs into the whole smear campaign thing – or probably the better way to put it is whisper campaigning.

It is more often than not that this stuff goes on. Publicists will tell media folks, bloggers who need the traffic, and journalists who need the work, and they will put it forth as either news or rumor (I have been guilty of both). It is difficult to know just at which point you’ve been spun; no one is immune, particularly where one’s own bias is concerned (as in, “I liked The Hurt Locker so I won’t report that bit,” or “I hated Avatar and so I will report that.”) But read Matt Damon tell it to Melena Ryzik and you might get a better idea of how it all works. As usual, Damon exhibits intelligence on the whole ugly game:

“My first experience with that was ‘Good Will Hunting,’” Mr. Damon said. “The week of the voting there was a story that came out in Variety that Ted Tally had written ‘Good Will Hunting.”

Mr. Tally, a screenwriter who won an Oscar for “Silence of the Lambs,” and Mr. Damon eventually worked together on “All the Pretty Horses,” but at this point they hadn’t met.

“And Ted Tally, to his credit, he called up Variety and said, ‘I want to go on the record and just say I didn’t write that movie, I wish I did but if I had written it I’d take credit for it,’” Mr. Damon said. “It kind of put the thing to bed but I remember getting called for a quote and I said I’m not gonna” – charming colloquialism – “comment. Are they calling Woody Allen and asking him if he wrote the script? They want to come look at my hard drive? I’ve been working on this script for, like, years. And then it was explained to me, that no, it’s not actually about that. It’s about just putting enough doubt in voters’ mind that they would go, ‘oh, I heard something about that movie, I’m not sure if those guys actually wrote it. What’s that – Oh, I liked ‘As Good As It Gets.’”

So, Mr. Damon’s people explained to him, “it’s the ‘As Good As It Gets’ camp,” he said. “And I was like, come on, you must be kidding me. You’re telling me it’s Jim Brooks,” the director of that movie? “’No, Jim Brooks would never do that. It’s the camp!’ Like, what does that mean? It was so stupid. I was just flabbergasted.”

All that sturm and drang, he added, adds up to not very much. “It’s literally to just put doubt in somebody’s mind because ultimately, what it comes down to is somebody is gonna take a pen and write a name on a line. That’s all it is. And so what does it actually take to change that? You don’t have to make people think they don’t like ‘The Hurt Locker,’ you just have to make them think something about ‘The Hurt Locker’ that would make them write ‘Avatar’ or ‘Up in the Air’ or whatever it is. It’s not life or death, you know what I mean?”

And of course in his case it didn’t mean anything; Mr. Damon and his co-writer, Ben Affleck, went on to win the Oscar for best original screenplay anyway. Having gone through this experience, he wasn’t eager to repeat it. (As for his own chances as a best supporting actor nominee this year for “Invictus,” Mr. Damon didn’t have high hopes, but did want to go enjoy the show with his wife Luciana Barosso, who has never been.)

More at the Carpetbagger.