I’m getting ready to see a four-hour Tom Petty documentary directed by Peter Bogdanovich (yes, seriously) so I’ll have to be brief, but bits of news are trickling out that indicate Warner Brothers has essentially sabotaged its already half-assed wide-ish rollout of The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford by making it nearly impossible for critics in mid-size cities to see the thing. The evidence follows after the jump; if you’ve seen/heard similar stories from your part of the country, do post links in the comments.

AJJ (as it’ll be known in this post from here on out) wasn’t even on the Portland release calendar two days ago. But then, on Monday, says Shawn Levy,

Yesterday after lunch, a regional WB publicity rep e-mailed me in a panic with the news that Jesse would be opening in Portland THIS FRIDAY and needed to be screened for the press here immediately. As it is an epic of 160 minutes, and as films were already slotted for the regular screening times last night, this afternoon, this evening and tomorrow afternoon, it seemed impossible to work it in before A&E’s late-Wednesday drop-deadline.

Levy says a screening time was finally worked out, but still, he “can only respond with scorn to the spectacle of Warner Bros. treating their film with such dismissiveness and disdain.” And it doesn’t make sense, because, as we know, “The reviews have been favorable from both critics and audiences. IT’S GOT BRAD PITT IN IT, for pity’s sake.” Levy then sums it up with what we in the “Jesus Christ, what is WB DOING?” camp have been fearing all along: “With this butterfingered, half-hearted, dead-brained stealth release, they’re making their film impossible for audiences to find…Maybe it would’ve done well here; maybe not. But it’s got no shot now. None.”

Many more details on what a full-on publicity ball-dropping like this does to a film, here. Also, Jeff Wells reports that film will not screen AT ALL for critics in Arizona, and quotes a rather astonished local critic: “A Brad Pitt picture with some Oscar buzz, a couple of amazing performances — even if you don’t like the movie overall — and they’re treating it like a one-weekend horror turd.”

Earlier yesterday, AJJ’s dismal weekend box office provoked a conservative-blogger-baiting screed from Wells, in which he shamelessly branded the “moviegoers of this country” as “unwashed junkies, walking around looking for quick-fix,” and then drew a straight line from AJJ’s failure to the prognostication that “it’s going to be Hilary Clinton vs. Rudy Giuliani in the Presidential race.”

Meanwhile, Casey Affleck is dodging questions about Jesse Jackson.