This is my invite to the Snakes on a Plane premiere. It arrived via DHL, courtesy of the New Line Interactive Publicity Department, earlier this week.

I am not going to use it.

I don't know, maybe I'm crazy. From talking to friends about this over the past week, I'm starting to think I might be. But ultimately, my decision not to go stems from a combination of corporate policy, and my own good old fashioned distrust of the Hollywood publicity machine. Let me go back to the beginning. Last summer and fall, when I was running Cinematical, we wrote a few stories about this wacky film that we heard was in production. It had a stupid title. It was funny. Early stills were released -- evidence that the stupid title was, however improbably, meant literally. We had a caption contest, which brought in more comments than any other post to that date (at the time, Cinematical was five months old, and was doing about 20,000 page views a day; a year later, its audience is about 5 times that size). Before long, we realized that we were just one of many blogs making fun of the thing.

Thinking back to those heady days, Snakes felt like any other story. We were just going to mock it incessantly, until we got bored, because that was our lifeblood. Hollywood makes inexplicably silly decisions, and film bloggers mock them for it. That's just what we do. There was no pow-wow where a hundred of us got together and decided, based on a single Sam Jackson interview and a handful of lame stills, to turn Snakes on a Plane into the internet joke of the year.

The studios (and especially mid-level mini majors like New Line) make a lot of films that, in terms of comparative budgets, casts, and over all concepts, look a lot like old fashioned b-picture guilty pleasures. Why did this one blow up? I guess we could point to a number of elements, but I don't think that there's any doubt that New Line's decision to embrace the internet buzz played a key role. New Line has not always been the most blog friendly studio; I remember struggling with their publicity department just to get into an all media for Wedding Crashers. They now have an internet marketing division, which first came out in full force earlier this year during the promotion of Take the Lead. On the one hand, New Line were rightly commended for reaching out to teens by inviting them to create online mashups of footage and music from the film; on the other hand, eyebrows were definitely raised when their publicists started sending out invites to a "blogger junket" -- an all-expense paid trip to Los Angeles, where attendees were shown the film and given "face time" with the stars. The form letter invite that I got explained that Cinematical "stood out of the pack as one that was particularly well done - connected, well written and into the latest trends...[we] can see that you are an influencer among your peers."

A lot of people have looked at New Line's recent efforts to reach out to the blogging community as a good thing -- finally, a studio is taking their audience seriously! I agree with that, to an extent. But it's also clear that this kind of offer would never be made to the New York Times -- and even if it was, one can't imagine Manohla Dargis taking them up on it. I guess if you're blogging for yourself, this just sounded like a cool offer. But Cinematical has always been a for-profit endeavor (that is, its content is not produced impulsively or spontaneously -- its writers are paid for their services), and, for the past nine months, it has been aligned with a major media conglomerate. The blog lives in a grey area between social journalism (ie: amateur) and "real" journalism (ie: professional/mainstream). And the company that birthed the blog, Weblogs, Inc, has a strict ethics policy: No pay-for-play. An all-expense-paid trip to LA at the invitation of a publicity department violates that rule, so we declined the offer.

Fast forward to July. I went to ComicCon last month to produce coverage for Netscape. Cinematical did not send anyone this year, so I agreed to do some coverage for them. We sent a member of our team to a SoaP roundtable, and I took some pictures of their booth. A week or so later, as a "thank you" for our coverage, New Line invited me to the SoaP premiere. I initially agreed, because a) they weren't going to pay for my travel, and b) they're not press screening the thing, so I figured I could go, see the film, and hustle a review up by morning.

Then, about a week after I RSVPed, New Line sent me an email offering to give me a free Treo -- so I could "blog from the red carpet". I checked with my bosses before declining the offer, although I really didn't have to -- I knew accepting a $500 phone from a publicist would be an egregious violation of any ethics policy. More details started to filter in about the premiere -- they wanted us to speak on camera for the DVD extras, but they weren't willing to give us an on-camera credit; the publicists were planning to escort the bloggers en masse down the red carpet, ostensibly to manage our communication with the "actual" journalists covering the event. I then heard an (unsubstantiated) rumor that New Line was actually paying airfare and hotel for at least one of the bloggers who would be attending. Basically, it became clear that if I accepted the invitation, I would in no way be able to legitimately cover the event -- not only would I become implicit in the promotion of the film, I was likely to become part of the mainstream media's story about the premiere. After talking to my boss and my team about it, I decided to back out.

This probably sounds incredibly sanctimonious, but I don't really mean for it to be. The world of blogging encompasses a lot of different people with a lot of different intentions, and as I said above, if you're blogging for leisure, outside of the confines of a corporate or professional institution, of course something like this would sound like a super-cool opportunity, and accepting it would have no professional repercussions. But if they're targeting mostly "fan" blogs with this kind of promotion, I almost feel like that's ickier than targeting pros. All journalists get pitch letters and invitations to junkets; good journalists ignore both. If most blogs are operating outside of conventions that would lead them to automatically decline such invitations, that opens the door for publicity companies to, at best, buy off a handful of consumers, and at worst, buy off a handful of extremely influential consumers who basically function as critics/journalists in the eyes of their readers.

I don't know. I'm actually flying to Los Angeles today for personal reasons, so I'm thinking about this probably a little more than I should be. And though my general instinct says that what New Line's strategy is misguided, I still have a lot of respect for their attempts to bypass the (usually hostile) traditional press and speak directly to their consumers. It's just that, for better or for worse, I consider myself more a member of the press than a consumer.

What do you think?