Way back on July 3rd (three days ago!) Movieweb.com‘s B. Alan Orange, which sounds to me like a fake name, passed along a possibly valid but nonetheless curious (i.e., possibly INSANE) allegation from “an anonymous source deep within the Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice production.” The tipster claimed that an alleged shooting script (which contained “four new villains alongside Lex Luthor”) which had recently surfaced on Badass Digest is (a) fake — an alleged attempt to hoodwink the fanboy community or otherwise throw them off the scent of the real, still-under-wraps Batman vs. Superman script, and (b) was written by none other than Kevin Smith.

There are two…actually three things wrong with the alleged tipster’s story. One, the idea of a studio actually investing time and serious money to produce a red-herring “foiler” script is beyond ridiculous…a bunch of high-ranking, studio-connected nerds in black lace-ups who’ve crawled so deeply into the ass of their own mythology that they’re actually playing tradecraft fake-out games with lower-ranking nerds who then pass along the bullshit to even lower-ranking nerds?…WHAT? Two, I can’t imagine that Smith would accept a fee to write a fake anything (remember the humiliation that George C. Scott‘s General Patton felt when Allied command was using him to try and trick Germany into thinking that D-Day invasion would happen at Calais?) as this violates the Sacred Artist’s Code — i.e., lie to no one. And Three (and most tellingly), the fact that the Movieweb.com tipster refers to Warner Bros. marketing honcho Sue Kroll as “Susanne Knoll” obviously casts doubt upon the whole story.

Nothing is “real,” everything is fake…all of it. Batman vs. Superman is fake, Zack Snyder is a fake director, “Susanne Knoll” is fake. 90% of the tentpole movies that Warner Bros. is invested in making are, after a fashion, “fake.” Perhaps B. Alan Orange (a name drawn from the same well as B. Traven) is a fake, or perhaps a double or even a triple agent? Is Devin Faraci “real” or a genuine guy (he was when I spoke to him at Cinemacon but you never know) or semi-compromised? Did these conspirators all meet secretly at Kevin Smith’s home last night to suss this out and split up the cash? I know that Drew McWeeny is real but perhaps I’ve been reading and responding to McWeeny’s “double” for years while the real McWeeny — unmarried, no kids, built like Christian Bale‘s character in American Psycho — drives around town in a ’73 Camaro with bags of $20 bills in the glove compartment and a pile of fast-food wrappers collecting on the back seat?