So About That Green Lantern Movie Hoax Article From The Mid-1990s



Thanks to the power of the Internet, the author of a hoax article on a Green Lantern movie sent me e-mail late yesterday morning, as per my wondering-out-loud request. I had this memory of sitting in Gary Groth's office waiting for him to get back for lunch and reading one of the newspaper he had lying around, with an article that claimed a Green Lantern blockbuster movie was being made on the sly in Texas to be sprung upon unsuspecting theater-goers later that year.

I don't think I finished the article, I certainly never saw it again, and I knew even at the moment of reading it that the whole scenario was unlikely to a powerful degree. But I remember enjoying the notion that a blockbuster would be kept secret so as to get a publicity boost out of suddenly appearing from nowhere.

With a new Green Lantern movie on the horizon, this time being hyped from before final casting of its lead, I thought of the article again.

The article was written by a Paul T. Riddell, who actually found a copy of it on-line here. He gave me an explanation as to how it came about, and its context in terms of things like local Dallas-area film industry desires and gossip. He also let me know that it's a part of the book pictured above, Greasing the Pan: The "Best" of Paul T. Riddell, published three months ago by Fantastic Books. I'm going to buy one, and I hope you'll consider it.

Here's Paul in his own words:

Apologies for the intrusion, but Scott Edelman of Sci-Fi Wire just let me know about your request, and thought I might be able to help. I have a lot of information on the article, as I was the guy who wrote it. For the record, it was for the April Fool's Day issue of "The Met", a long-dead Dallas weekly (best known as "The Paper By SMU Brats For SMU Brats") that ran from 1994 to 2000. Just before its first anniversary in 1995, "The Met" decided to try running a hoax story that gave no hint that it was a hoax until the last paragraph. In 1996, since the editor was at a loss for a similar article, I talked to him and suggested the GL piece.

The funny thing about the article wasn't just how it coalesced: I was working as a film critic at the time, and was constantly inundated with queries about this or that film that was nothing but blue-sky rumor but that the fan knew was coming out that summer. The summer of 1993, I had one Cat Piss Man running a local comic shop so certain that a GL movie was coming out the next year that I finally told him "Yeah, and it's starring Lyle Waggoner as Hal Jordan, Damon Wayans as John Stewart, and Vanilla Ice as Guy Gardner" just to make his head explode. That's when I learned that no matter how outrageous the casting, you'll have at least one fan who'll believe the whole thing. Combine this with Dallas's insecurity about its place as "the third coast" of the film industry (at the time, the Dallas Film Commission was still throwing fits about how letting Oliver Stone bend over the entire city for the filming of "JFK" was going to bring in all sorts of productions), and we had an article.

The article itself brought a lot of interest, as the circulation manager let me know that more copies moved of that issue than any other issue of "The Met" to that date. That weekend, my now-ex-wife had a poetry reading at a local bookstore, and all anyone wanted to talk about was that article. (I spent my time trying to explain "It's all a hoax," and I was still asked "I know, but when's the movie coming out?") My best friend posed in a horrible fright wig as director Edgar Harris for the photo shoot, and he actually got a date out of it. The resident "humor" columnist lost his shit over the mail, seeing as how it wasn't about his column. I went to a job interview in San Jose a month later and was told that apparently "Entertainment Weekly" found the article and reported on it as a real event. (I have yet to track down that article, and I suspect that it doesn't exist, but you don't accuse a potential boss of making things up during an interview.) Two years later, when I was working as a columnist at Sovereign Media's "Sci-Fi Universe", I had a very old friend, whom I hadn't seen in nearly a decade, come up to me and ask me breathlessly "So have you heard about the Green Lantern movie?" Best of all, the article joked about Denis Leary playing Guy Gardner, and he's apparently still nagged about it.

Well, I hope that helps. In the meantime, I came to my senses and quit writing at the beginning of the decade, but it's really good to know that some of the gibberish I put together still has some staying power. If you need any further information, please let me know.

I'm not sure that I wouldn't want to see the film Paul described more than the one we're going to get. Although I think what we're going to get will be preferable to the one that might have been actually in the works at time of Riddell's article. My thanks to Scott Edelman for putting Paul in touch with CR.


 
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