Every once in a blue moon, a story so confounding it defies easy description drifts along the roiling waters of the internet and washes up on our shores here at Film.com. This… is such a story.

It involves a newly-minted newspaper editor in Buffalo, New York and an e-mail he sent to a well-respected film critic regarding “Snow White and the Huntsman” and a whole boatload of misogyny. This woman-hating, Hollywood-chastising fiend sent the e-mail, the critic quit and sent an eloquent piece about it to Roger Ebert. Ebert gave it two thumbs way up and posted it on his site for all the world to see.

Here’s how it all went down…

The Players

Michael Calleri – A freelance movie journalism vet for nearly two decades, known for his work on Buffalo radio, television, and particularly his weekly film column for print paper Niagara Falls Reporter. After seven years of churning out his column, he recently made the hard decision to quit the Reporter after the new owner/whackjob made it clear that his bizarre definition of manliness was the criteria for which films would be judged.

Roger Ebert – The Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times/all-around awesome cinephile who gave Calleri an outlet to publicize perhaps one of the most bats**t insane letters a U.S. employer has ever sent to an employee outside of the CIA’s MK-Ultra program.

Frank Parlato – This is the guy, ooh boy. There are a multitude of C-words that could be used to describe Parlato, but he is most definitely a CHARACTER. Another C-word is “controversial,” as in this man is a controversial figure in the upstate New York real estate scene, where his family was banned from doing business with the government after a series of housing scams in the ’90s, and where he was also arrested for building code violations in 2006. He most famously developed the glass structure One Niagara, which on one of his MANY websites he recalls, “the failed AquaFalls project had left a literal hole, to match the figurative one, in the center of the city’s tourism district. Parlato filled that hole on both accounts.” One hole Parlato could not fill was his lubed-up lust for yellow journalism, so he sold One Niagara in 2010 and bought the Niagara Falls Reporter from founder/editor Mike Hudson. It was there that he eventually began his war against Snow White…