Well, this has delicious potential: Deadline Hollywood
Daily’s Nikki Finke is reporting that… well, that would be too much
of a gloss, really. Straight to the point, she’s obtained an email from Hollywood-Elsewhere blogger/columnist Jeffrey Wells to 3:10 to Yuma director James Mangold, in which Wells
shares his thoughts on the movie and then solicits the filmmaker for nude and/or scantily-clad photos of Vinessa
Shaw, who shares a Yuma love scene with Russell Crowe. He even kind of pleads for said pictures, actually.

Tone and intent are the great mysteries of many Internet correspondences, having the ability to send everyone scuttling back to high school days of yore, when across-classroom glances and askance looks were dissected with a combination of fervor and fretfulness. So here the intent (at least from one side of things) is pretty clear, but without comment (yet) from Mangold and further context, the nature in which this was received is a bit hazy. Still, there’s the matter of professionalism (a perhaps silly notion when it comes to self-published entertainment journalists, I know), and while a quid pro quo is never explicitly proffered (nor, in my mind, really hinted at), at the very least this email seems exceptionally stupid and probably a little bit unethical to boot, because you’re asking a director to violate his trust with an actor and/or enlist others (per the email: “as one good hombre to another … you don’t have to be the guy who
passes along the stills — just tell the still photographer or the editor
or whomever caught her as she posed”) in a conspiracy to do the same.

Wells’ balls-on-table email response from the Toronto Film Festival, in which he sarcastically calls Finke’s post a brilliant, Earth-shaking exposé, leads with, “It
was seriously scummy of you to have run an off-the-cuff,
one-guy-to-another letter about wanting to get a jump on photos of a
hot actress that may or may not turn up on Mr. Skin a few weeks or months down the road,” and is reproduced in full under Finke’s original post.