The movie banned for not starring Morgan Freeman
In 2011, Sarah Deming briefly became a minor celebrity when she sued the movie distributor FilmDistrict in relation to the Ryan Gosling classic Drive. Her complaint wasn’t just about the film, though. In fact, it was more about how the film was promoted.
Deming’s case was built around how the trailer for the film made the film look like it was going to be a high-octane action picture in the vein of The Fast and the Furious. Then, she went to see the film and found it to be a meditative slow-burn crime thriller. Deming filed a class action suit that sought to allow cinemagoers to take similar legal action if they felt misled by a movie’s marketing.
This action expresses a level of entitlement that could only come from a position of privilege. A film wasn’t quite to her expectations, and thus, she went to court over it. God only knows what she would have thought if she dug a little deeper and found the level of false advertising that goes on in films made away from the Hollywood studio system. If she thought that making Drive look a little more action-packed than it actually is was bad, I’m sure she’d flip her lid when she threw on the Uzbekistani action flick Daydi.
Now, granted, Deming is the kind of person who wanted Drive to be more like The Fast and the Furious, so it stands to reason that she probably wouldn’t want to look that hard for any kind of film. However, Daydi does have one thing going for it that might make a western audience look twice at it, which is the presence of the actual Morgan Freeman right there on the poster! Directly in between the two leads. If it’s got Red from Shawshank in it, surely it must be doing something right?!
Well, no. Because Freeman is on the poster for the film, but not in the actual film itself.
Why did they put Morgan Freeman on this movie poster?!
Obviously, the actual Morgan Freeman wouldn’t be in this micro-budget Uzbekistani action film, would he? I mean, it’s one thing for Eastern European action flicks to carpet bag John Cusack, Nicholas Cage or John Travolta for a scene or two, but this is Morgan Freeman we’re talking about. He was the narrator in March of the Penguins, for Christ’s sake. Yet, there he is, front and centre in the poster. He’s even in the trailer for a few seconds. So, what gives?
Well, it does look like this is nothing more than a publicity stunt from the film’s production studio, Timur Films. However, what the production studio didn’t seem to count on is the Uzbekistani film licensing board stepping in and investigating this little piece of “stunt-casting”. The smoking gun was that any use of Morgan Freeman’s likeness in the poster and the trailer was from a completely different film altogether, namely, his appearance in Transformers: The Last Knight.
The result was that Daydi was blocked from release until its production company removed all mention of Morgan Freeman from the promotional material. Considering that any scrap of PR material featuring the film also has a solemn-looking Freeman on it, it stands to reason that this was a film that never saw the light of day.
I’m sure Sarah Deming would be proud.