By now you’ve no doubt heard all the brouhaha over the New Yorker‘s David Denby deciding to break embargo on David Fincher’s adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by running his (positive) review eight days ahead of the embargo date he agreed to when he attended the screening. And as I’ve seen from the comments on The Hot Blog and a lot of other sites covering this story, many folks who do not work in the industry (and even some who do) do not seem to get why this is a big deal. It all seems very inside baseball, but hey — MCN is an industry website, so if you don’t want a little inside baseball, why are you here? So let’s break down why Denby breaking embargo actually is a big deal in our world. Because it’s really a pretty simple matter that’s being cluttered up by a lot of superfluous chatter unrelated to the actual issue at hand.

If you work as a critic, you are allowed — not entitled, allowed — to see movies earlier than the general public, for free, to allow you time in which to write your review. This is a courtesy afforded to press by the studio, at the studio’s expense (because it costs money to run a screening). It also benefits the studio to allow press to see a film early so reviews can be published, although if reviews are terrible and the film isn’t a “critic proof” thing like the Fast and Furious franchise, or Transformers, or what have you, it could potentially hurt it.

When you are invited to attend a press screening (or a promo screening to which you’ve been invited as press), you generally get an email from the studio/PR folks that outlines for you the conditions under which the screening is offered to you — specifically, they generally specify the “hold review” date — the date on which you are allowed to run your review of said film — along with an admonition that the screening is for “reviewing press,” meaning if you aren’t assigned to/actually planning to review a film, you aren’t supposed to attend the free screening. Denby attended an early screening of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for the NYFCC (held super-early to accommodate that group deciding they had to be FIRST! this year with their awards), and that screening had an embargo attached to it. Denby doesn’t dispute this, he openly acknowledges in the email exchange between him and Dragon Tattoo producer Scott Rudin that he is aware he’s violating the embargo by running his review early, but hopes no one will mind, since after all, his review is positive. And he writes for the New Yorker, which needs to run the review ahead of embargo to accommodate their printing schedule. Rudin, for his part, openly acknowledges that he’s pissed. And he has every right to be.

The only thing actually relevant here is this: Denby attended a screening that had an embargo attached. By attending that screening, he implicitly accepted the terms under which it was offered: to hold review until the date specified by the embargo. Period. Everything else — Denby’s protestations that the New Yorker has this big Christmas double issue to run, and he really really really didn’t want to write about We Bought a Zoo, and he really really really liked Dragon Tattoo, none of that matters. Whether David Denby is a Very Important Person or not — even if he was the single most important film critic in the entire history of film criticism, writing for the single most important print publication in the entire history of print publications — is completely irrelevant, too. And yes, whether anyone in the industry thinks Scott Rudin is a stand-up guy or a reprehensible asshole is also completely irrelevant.

So why does this matter? It matters because studios and producers invest many millions of dollars in both getting a film made, and marketing it such that the general public will buy tickets to see it, thus giving them a return on investment that allows them to make the next film, and the next film, and the next. Which, in addition to giving the general public movies to see every weekend, also happens to keep a lot of people who work in the film industry employed and able to pay their bills. Reviews running a week or two ahead of the film’s actual release date to the public DO hurt the film, even if they’re positive, because by the time the film opens, that positive review is old news, and the public’s short attention span has moved on to the next interesting thing. For a film like Dragon Tattoo, which is directed by David Fincher and highly anticipated, this may or may not impact the bottom line, but whether it does or not is also not germane to a discussion of whether Denby has a right to violate the agreement under which he was allowed early access to see this film. He does not have that right without the consent of the studio, no matter how important a critic he is. The studio owns the film, they have the right to determine who sees it, when, and under what conditions. End of line.

Now, we can certainly have an argument about whether or not embargoes are stupid, but that’s a completely separate discussion from the issue. Not only is Scott Rudin in the right in saying he’s going to ban Denby from future screenings of his films, it behooves him to actually DO so, because if he does not stick to his guns on this, he’s effectively telling Every. Single. Film Blogger. that the studio does not take its embargoes seriously, and then it’s just a free-for-all race to be FIRST! to get your review up after a press screening, agreements and embargoes be damned. If you’re going to have a rule that says, “You violate our embargo, we’ll kick your critic ass off our press list and deny you future early access,” that rule has to apply to everyone equally, regardless of the perceived or actual importance of individuals. It’s certainly within a studio’s right as the owner of a film to choose to grant some publications the right to run early reviews (although I could argue against that as well), but that isn’t the case here. Denby was not granted such permission. He didn’t even ask for permission, he just notified the studio that he and his editors had made a decision to just blatantly violate an agreement.

Really, what is there to argue about here? Pretty black and white, yes?