Lots of people have been critical of Sacha Baron Cohen’s apparently underhand techniques to get people to participate in his film but he could have shot himself in the foot with Borat, reports the Los Angeles Times. Fox declined to distribute his next film, which features the campy-to-the-max Austrian character Bruno. The big question is whether Cohen is already so recognizable that he won’t be able to fool a representative sample of Americans to make his movie.

And, the costs associated with the deception of making the "mockumentary" could only add to this new distributor’s woes. Universal has promised to deliver the movie but there has to be a better way.

"He is going to have a real tough time making ‘Bruno’ and so is Universal," the attorney representing the ticked-off Romanians who filled in the glorious nation Kazakhstan. "The cat’s out of the bag," he tells the paper. I, for one, would not be terribly upset if people do know who he is and refuse to be taken in. Cohen is an equal opportunity attack.

There were plenty of sanctimonious red-staters skewered in the movie but, as I argue in this week’s Business Press, Cohen’s real target was middle America. We in Las Vegas were real lucky we didn’t get to be one of the movie’s victims.