You’ve probably heard about the mysterious dead birds falling from the sky in Arkansas. While wildlife experts worked to unravel the mystery surrounding the deaths of 3,000 red-winged blackbirds on 12/31/10, reverend Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church immediately accused Arkansas of harboring a covert population of homosexuals, thereby incurring the wrath of God. I am not making this up.
It wasn’t until Monday morning, 1/3/11, when an unnamed movie studio in California admitted that the scare was part of a promotional campaign for the 2013 remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds.” A studio executive, on condition of anonymity, told The Bennington Vale Evening Transcript, “The stunt was a gross miscalculation. We were trying to help get audiences interested in the remake with a small scare. Unfortunately, the planes dropped the birds over Arkansas instead of Northern California where our marketing crews were waiting to hand out movie posters and swag bags.” Ummm…slight error in geography. As if embarrassment wasn’t bad enough, the governor’s office in Arkansas is promising legal action against the studio for the mishap.
As Kiran Aditham from MediaBistro puts it, “[this] further makes the case that Hollywood should end this remake plague and come up with some new ideas already.” Me? I can’t wait for PETA’s response to the story.
