Just playing Devil's advocate for a sec for the sake of conversation, if the whole Trank trashing Baton Rouge thing was real, I would think we would see blog posts and tweets amd facebook posts and news reports about it from extras and bystanders no? In this social media age you cant conceal a public incident like that, especially if it really was hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage, unless I guess if it was some sort of closed set with very few people there.
If, hypothetically, it were true, I would expect it to be fairly quiet. Those who have direct knowledge of it likely work for Fox and want to keep their jobs and want this film to do well. And even those who have left will not want to show themselves to be the sort of people who spread rumors (what other studios would hire someone like that?). People would also be concerned about liability issues for anything they say. And if there actually was a substance abuse issue involved, most people are not going to want to talk trash and destroy someone's career over something like that.
But we have seen reports from people in the area - just nothing directly from anyone who actually is working on the film.
On the other hand, if it weren't true (at least in part), I would expect Trank to say something. This is his reputation being smeared. I would also expect the studio to do something - they don't have to address it directly, all they would need to do is post a photo of Trank working on the film (we see these for other productions all the time, so it wouldn't be anything unusual).
If I had to speculate (and what else do we have to do around here?) I would say that there is a lot of conflict between Trank and the studio at this point ( probably related to a number of different items and all or most of the rumors could be false or exaggerated or taken out of context ). I suspect that his role has been greatly reduced, but he still may be active enough. And he is probably still collecting a paycheck so that the studio can claim he hasn't been 'fired'.
If the situation was better than that, I'd expect to see something to indicate that. The process of selling films for 2015 is in full swing, and every day that Fox doesn't do anything to promote this film ( and actually allows the information void to be filled with
extremely negative press ), is a day that they are losing potential film-goers.
Even if this is an absolutely great film, it's going to have an uphill battle surviving in this environment.
