“I got quite a shock yesterday,” Mad About Movies author Shawn Levy wrote early this morning. “Browsing the movie pages in the Sunday Oregonian, I saw an ad for Francis Coppola‘s Tetro and thought, ‘This is opening on Friday [and] we haven’t seen it yet?’ And then I noticed the phrase “now playing” in the ad and I felt a little sick. The film had opened? And we had missed it?

“I checked Friday’s A&E and found a ‘now playing’ ad for the film, and then i went online and checked the showtimes for the theater in question (the Fox Tower, FYI) and learned that, indeed, Tetro had opened on Friday, July 3 in Portland without anyone involved with the film telling the region’s largest media outlet about it.

“I consulted the film pages in the Portland Mercury and Willamette Week — our alternative weeklies — and their film editors seemed not to have heard the news either. Tetro had been released into the wild with no warning, no previews, and, of course, next-to-no chance to make a nickel from Portland moviegoers.”