Unaired Ad Gets Dixie Chicks Flick A Whole Lot of Ink

Cut to: Maines on a couch, reading Bush's comment about their feelings being hurt. " 'Have their feelings hurt'?!" she says, incredulously. "What a dumb --"

Before she can get out the last word, the picture cuts away and Voiceover Guy says, "Rated R -- select theaters this Friday."

When a small movie like this one gets a very limited release -- just four theaters this weekend -- with the intention of going wide after that, word of mouth is critical and that's when you often see stealth marketing campaigns, such as whipping the media into a froth over some angle on the flick to generate millions in free publicity. (The movie opens nationwide Nov. 10.)

Yesterday both NBC and CW noted Weinstein Co. hadn't actually tried to make a national media buy for the ads. So, they seemed to be saying, their comments about the ads are a moot point.

"While a spot was submitted to our broadcast standards and practices department for review and was rejected because it violated our policy of not broadcasting ads that deal with issues of public controversy, the Weinstein Company did not make a national media buy for 'Shut Up & Sing,' nor did anyone from the company inquire about buying time on the network," NBC said.

CW, which values brevity, merely said for the record that the Weinstein news release is "flat-out inaccurate. The whole matter is a mystery to The CW."

"We have lots of issues with commercials all the time," Alan Wurtzel from NBC told The TV Column. Wurtzel oversees the standards department in his capacity as president of research and media development of NBC Universal.

"NBC got back to the film company explaining the ads violated NBC's policy against taking ads that dealt with issues of public controversy, and one of the ways they were doing that was being disparaging of Bush. . . . We never heard from them again," he said.

"These are guys who know what the procedure is with respect to ads clearances -- they've done this for 20 years. Normally they'd be on the phone in a second saying either 'how do I fix it to make it comply?' or 'let me talk to your boss.' In neither case did that happen. . . . This leads me to believe they might have had another objective."

Asked whether he thought NBC had played into the film company's hand, Wurtzel said, "I will say there have been other instances in the past where [companies] get more publicity by having an ad rejected than run."