The Curious Case Of The Fake Defamer 'Bruno' Title That Ate The Internets
One of the on-the-job hazards of being a composite industry blog/nonsense repository is that occasionally, something we may have intended as a puckish, lightly satirical jab—a joke, if you will—is misinterpreted as fact. One memorable instance had The Australian soberly repeating our take on Mel Gibson's pitch for an ABC Holocaust movie, featuring a "Braveheart-style battle with thousands of Jewish and Nazi combatants rushing at each other across an open field." In that vein, while researching a post on the release date of Universal's upcoming Bruno movie, we were taken aback to find that our proposed mock-title for the summer 2009 release—Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt—had been picked up by a vast array of sources, including:
JoBlo.com, Just Jared, Hollyscoop, Slashfilm.com, Cinema Blend, The Movie Blog, Contact Music, MovieVice.com, Film Junk, Filmonic, Chortle.co.uk, Blu-Ray.com, and Movies.com. Additionally, it went misreported by such traditional news outlets as The Sunday Mirror, The Daily Star, and The Guardian—who attribute the title to THR, though we can find no evidence online of that. We did, however, find the fake-title listed on Bruno's IMDb page, accompanied by the words "working title" in parenthesis. Could that be the source of all this confusion? In any case, we feel at this point the internet has willed the unwieldy name into existence. We'll take three points off the backend.
