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Anonymous publicity gears up with teaser trailer

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Rhys Ifans as Oxford in Anonymous

Yesterday Sony released the teaser trailer for Roland Emmerich's film, Anonymous, about the Shakespeare authorship question. The trailer features a montage of images from the film, voice-over by anti-Stratfordian actor Sir Derek Jacoby, and scoring of the Radiohead song "Everything in its Right Place". The teaser is everywhere on the web with several links on YouTube, citations in entertainment news magazines, and on several Facebook pages including Ben August's Edward de Vere -- Shakespeare page that has a growing fan-base of thousands. One demoralized Stratfordian blogger posted a message titled "Anonymous trailer" with only one line: "I'll just leave this here without comment."


Also several entertainment news sites posted articles this week claiming that Emmerich expects trouble from Stratfordian protesters. A site called Contact Music titled their report, "Roland Emmerich Expects Fury over Shakespeare Movie" , and quoted Empire magazine:
He tells Empire magazine, "I have serious doubts Shakespeare wrote his plays... I'm expecting to have people protesting outside my house. We knew there'd be so many attacks on the film, so we decided to make the film as authentic as possible."
Except the February 14, 2011 Phil de Semlyen article they are presumably quoting, "Roland Emmerich on ID4 Sequel" in Empire Online doesn't include any line about Emmerich worried about protesters. The Empire article includes Emmerich's comment about "attacks on the film" but nothing about protesters ouside his house:
Anonymous is set in the murkily-lit corridors of Queen Elizabeth’s court and gives its own skew on the Shakespearean authorship question – one in which Shakespeare didn’t actually write any of them. It’s a theory that can set mild-mannered English teachers to quill-brandishing murder, as Emmerich and his screenwriter John Orloff are well aware. “We knew from the beginning that they’d be so many attacks on the film, so we said that we’d have to be as authentic as possible. We looked at other films and realised that filmmakers, because of a lack of money or because of the time the films were shot, they’d use what they could get.
"It was mainly churches, but who lives in a church? So we said, 'Let’s not do that – let’s be as authentic as possible with the design costumes.' Because of that we didn’t use any original locations – we built everything, because there’s very little left anyway – and we had to do it for a budget.”
The issue of authenticity was addressed in a May 21, 2010 Empire article also by de Semlyen -- "Bard Target: a Visit to Roland Emmerich's Anonymous":
The authorship question is a fun route into a widescreen Elizabethan world Emmerich is recreating with impressive CGI and 70+ painstakingly hand-built sets. One, a full-scale replica of London’s Rose Theatre, rises imposingly above the low-rise surrounds of Studio Babelsberg, once home to Fritz Lang’s modernist metropolis and Robert Wiene’s monstrous Dr. Caligari.  
Now fans can get a teasing glimpse of what Emmerich has created.

Anonymous trailer at: 


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