SCREENING PROCESS

Hooray for Warner Bros.! Although it is obvious that its current policy is desperately self-serving, how inspiring it is, at last, to see a major American corporation refusing to subject its products to commercial assassination before they have a chance to make their way in the marketplace.

I refer to Warners’ refusal to pre-screen many of its major pictures [including “Wrongfully Accused” and “The Avengers”] for the so-called “critics,” thus often pushing the published reviews back until the films have played their crucial opening weekend.

Is there anything more depressing in this town than to open the Friday Calendar section and find an enormously expensive and often beautiful advertising campaign undercut or demolished by a few hundred often ignorant and uninformed words only a page away? Would any other American business community except insular mainstream Hollywood allow its critical product launches to be critiqued simultaneously, almost invariably to their detriment?

CHARLES ZIARKO

Los Angeles