Red-Faced

Still blushing over misquoting TIME magazine in its now-pulled Scarlet Letter movie ads, Disney’s Hollywood Pictures may have yet another gaffe on its hands. The television commercials for the steamy Demi Moore movie, which grossed an underwhelming $4.1 million its first weekend, exclaimed that the Nathaniel Hawthorne masterpiece was the most controversial novel of its time. Not so, according to Hawthorne expert Richard Rust, a professor of English at the University of North Carolina. ”It was praised warmly by critics,” says Rust, adding that according to the definitive edition of The Scarlet Letter there were a mere 13,800 copies printed at the time of Hawthorne’s death in 1864, hardly enough to incite a scandal. Yale University English professor Ian Duncan agrees that the statement is ”an exaggeration. He didn’t have a huge popular-reading audience the way someone like Harriet Beecher Stowe did. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was more visible and scandalous. The Scarlet Letter was not particularly radical. He didn’t invent the theme of sexuality in Puritan domestic culture.” Disney has no comment.