The Reviewer Who Wasn’t There Sony Pictures, Columbia’s parent, was forced to admit last week that David Manning, a reviewer whose glowing comments about even the most lame Columbia films, is a fake dreamed up by the studio’s advertising department.

The real question is why Sony had to conceive the counterfeit critic to begin with, given the world of movie junkets, where normal reporting standards don’t apply.

Reading the glowing newspaper-ad recommendations for even the lamest movie, you might wonder if those quoted critics are real. Unlike Manning, they are. Many are habitués of the junket circuit, an all-expenses-paid gravy train where the studios give journalists free rooms and meals at posh hotels and the reporters return the favor with puffy celebrity profiles and enthusiastic review blurbs. Sometimes studio executives will suggest what kind of quotes they need, and even shape the reviews to suit the studio’s goals. If a studio wants its movie pegged as “This year’s ‘Alien’,” the reviewer delivers precisely that. No one complains, and bad movies end up with great quotes. The junket troops are a mostly anonymous crowd working for obscure outlets like Wireless Magazine and Inside Reel, which helps explain why nobody—even people within Sony and Revolution—noticed that Manning was a sham. MSNBC