publicity copy

A few publicity copies went out, including to The Times.

This sounds more like publicity copy than criticism; what it expresses is the impression the studio hopes the film will have on an audience.

The word derives from the Latin for nephew, and Wyler's uncle happened to be Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Pictures, who hired young Willi to write publicity copy.

'We feel that the book should be entered into evidence without the jacket because we are concerned here with the contents of the book itself and not with the publicity copy on the jacket, which does not represent what Jadway has written.'

Actually, my words bore on the novel only insofar as I facetiously observed that its publicity copy, telling us that Mr. Gangemi had been born in Scarsdale and attended the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was more interesting than anything in the novel itself.

I wish I could say that the experience left me a better person, or that, in the favored idiom of studio publicity copy, it "changed my life forever," but by the end I was tempted to go off in search of some industrial scaffolding and a shallow river of my own.