The best quality of the internet is that anybody with malicious intent can pretend to be somebody else, I think we’d all agree, right? (Sarcasm mode turned up to 11 here.)

So what if I told you that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was involved in a stone-age version of what would later become the internet’s bestest feature: someone sounding off with their views ESPECIALLY under an assumed name?

A little background first: I’ve related on here before that I began writing for the Muncie Evening Press newspaper when I was still in high school. I was originally the “teen” columnist. When I graduated from high school and began college, the newspaper editors found other things for me to freelance for them. That started out as movie reviews but later grew to include live performance reviews, record album reviews and news, entertainment-related interviews, a little bit of everything.

I was young and they paid me maybe $10 or $15 per piece, so there wasn’t much I wouldn’t write for them.

In April 1978, in the early days of my freelancing for them and independently of me, the newspaper editors started a weekly column called “Muncie Rates the Movies,” in which moviegoers could sound off on what they thought of movies playing at Muncie’s four (I believe) movie theaters.

How did they sound off? The newspaper placed a “Muncie Rates the Movies” ballot box at the concession stand at each theater. Some newspaper staffer had to go around to each theater once a week and open the ballot boxes and collect the ballots/movie opinions that had been deposited over the previous week. (A pad of ballots was located next to each box so people could come out of the theater and fill one out.)

A lot of the opinions were pretty simple – “That Sally Field is beautiful” – and some were more complex and included some thoughtful reviews – or at least as thoughtful as could be written in pencil in the blanks on a ballot.

Around March 1979, the editors assigned me to oversee the “Muncie Rates the Movies” column. I became the person who went from theater to theater each week to pick up ballots, then sort through them and write a column based on the thoughts of local moviegoers. (An editor, although I don’t remember who, had done this for the first year and wrote the column under the pen name “Harley Wood.”)

This early example of crowdsourcing was usually pretty easy. I had my choice of dozens of ballots each week and knew which ones not to quote in the column. (Opinions that included vulgar language, of course, but also obviously ballots that were not germane, like rants about Dwight Eisenhower – no I don’t remember any about Eisenhower, the former president; but. you get the idea.)

The best intentions of the editors who created “Muncie Rates the Movies” ultimately came crashing down around the head of your humble narrator.

In February 1981, one of the movies that moviegoers reviewed via our ballot boxes was “Altered States,” director Ken Russell’s earnest and odd science fiction film that might have been the trippiest film since “2001.”

One of the reviews that week (and published but not under my byline) noted about “Altered States,” “Convinced me of Biblical falseness and scientific truth regarding evolution.”

And that comment was signed by a person – no, even nearly a half-century later, I’m not going to cite him by name – who was director of secondary education for the city school system.

And, to add insult to injury, this man also taught a Bible literature class.

The correction that ran four days after what turned out to be the final “Muncie Rates the Movies” column was short and to the point and noted that the respected educator on matters Biblical had not seen the movie and didn’t express an opinion of it. The newspaper went on to express regret for any embarrassment that might have arisen from the column.

The column was discontinued – as a freelancer in my early 20s I was not part of that discussion – and hopefully the educator got over it.

And to the prankster who submitted the phony review: I’d like you to know that you cost me 10 or 15 bucks a week for who knows how many more months?

You’ve somehow stumbled upon the latest of more than 1,100 posts on keithroysdon dot com, stretching back to the early 2010s. Books, writing, movies, TV, obscure pop culture, Halloween, snark and more snark. I’m the author of crime novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, co-author of four true crime books including the award-winning THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS and hundreds of short stories, news articles and pop culture pieces in spots like CrimeReads, Daily Yonder and elsewhere. You can contact me by leaving a message anywhere on this site or by hollering at me on one of my too many social media outposts.