Please, please let this story be true, because it’s just too delicious. As some of you may know, Fox News film critic, Roger Friedman, was fired a couple of months ago, ostensibly because he’d downloaded an illegal pre-release version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine that had leaked onto the web, and then posted a review of it on the Fox News website. It really was a case of shitting where you eat, as, of course, Fox News is owned by the same company as 20th Century Fox, which produced the X-Men movie, and which was desperately trying to do damage limitation after the workprint was leaked.
Understandably they wern’t impressed that one of their colleagues seemed to be suggesting it was okay to go off and get the film for free before it hit cinemas. And so Friedman was fired.
Fair enough you might think, but the New York Daily News is now saying that Friedman is suing his former employers for wrongful termination, and best of all he’s saying it’s part of a bizarre Scientologist conspiracy! Friedman says the X-Men story was just a cover because the management of Fox News was getting pressure from the likes of Kelly Preston and other top Scientologists to fire him. She’d allegedly referred to him as a religious bigot and leant on Fox News to can him for many months before his actual termination.
Friedman claims he was also banned from writing about the death of John Travolta’s son, Jett, and asked to lay off the Tom Cruise flick, Valkyrie.
Other sources say that one of the conditions of Tom Cruise agreeing to appear in the upcoming Fox flick, Wichita, alongside Cameron Diaz, was that Friedman got fired.
It’s all utterly over the top and should make a great court case, although it should be pointed out that everyone from Tom Cruise to Kelly Preston has called Friedman’s claims ridiculous. And to be honest, who cares what the Scientologists were doing, surely he can’t really have expected to keep his job after downloading an illegal version of a movie produced by the company he works for and then writing about it publicly?
If we were him, we’d go on the defence that apparently before Friedman’s piece was posted, it had to be read and approved by at least four other people in the newsroom. We know news is meant to be independent, but you’d have thought somebody might have realised that posting the story wasn’t a good plan.