Vanity Fair Hollywood Issue Digest
I realize I’ve complained at length about Vanity Fair and the celebrity profile. But that doesn’t mean that Vanity Fair doesn’t offer the biggest, lushest, juiciest, and all-encompassing collection of Hollywood stories every year — and this year is no exception. As my brother has lectured me, VF is actually quite respected in all of their non-Hollywood reporting — especially the financial expose stuff that interests me far less than it probably should. And the Hollywood industry reporting, while not necessarily groundbreaking, is expansive, gossipy, and equal parts historical and contemporary. The choice of this year’s cover models has been a hot topic and thoroughly debated elsewhere, so I’m going to stick with what’s inside — and much of it is very, very interesting, and probably touches on aspects of Hollywood history and industry with which most are unfamiliar.
Having read the issue in its entirety, I’d like to alert you to the best of the bunch. I will say, however, that you should definitely fork over the measly $12 for a year subscription — this is a magazine that’s best consumed in print form, as the interwebs simple does not to do the luscious photography justice.
Which segues nicely into the most compelling (and visual) aspect of the magazine, This Year’s Hollywood Portfolio, which features compelling shots of directors and their actors. The pairing of Cameron with his camera is particularly hilarious, but I most love this one of Jeff Bridges and Crazy Heart director Scott Cooper.
If you’re interested in power rankings, this list of the Hollywood’s Top 40 will provide food for thought. Most interesting: that all three of the Harry Potter leads broke the top fifteen, that the director of 2012 (Roland Emmerich) gets to hang out at #4, and that Ben Stiller and Tom Hanks are both making ridiculous amonts of money and rounding out the top ten. Apparently I’m forgetting the fact that everyone else in America went to go see Night at the Museum.
Relativity Media-head Ryan Kavanaugh
But look at this smutty/industry-minded look at Relatively Media, the hedge-fund-funded production company headed by the “brash, glamour-loving Ryan Kavanagh.” The kid’s 35, he thinks big, imagines he has the business mastered, but also released some of the biggest bombs of the season, including State of Play, Land of the Lost, The Taking of Pelham 123, and this week’s The Wolfman But he’s also behind Paul Blart and Dear John, so he must be doing something right. Right? The piece starts out laudatory and subtly turns into a quiet study of hubris and its place in Hollywood today….fascinating.
The retrospective of John Hughes, building on the notes and scribblings of the late scribe and the comments of his sons, is interesting, if a bit fluffy. Die-hard Hughes fans will undoubtedly enjoy.
Ali McGraw
Best of the bunch, though, is this profile of Ali McGraw, who, for a brief moment in time, was the hottest female star in Hollywood. Studying for my comps led me to appreciate the brilliant marketing of Love Story, which was basically the Twilight of the early ’70s, only it featured a hot dying Ivy Leaguer instead of hot vampires.
To my mind, McGraw is as unique as she is fascinating: she graduated from Wellesley, worked as a stylist/photography assistant, and found her way into pictures relatively late. Her star burned bright and fast, quickly marrying Robert Evans, producer of Love Story and then-head of Paramount, before falling for Steve McQueen on the set of The Getaway and retreating from Hollywood. The interview doesn’t reveal as much of McGraw so much as what it must have felt like to be a gorgeous woman in Hollywood who was at once intelligence and romantic.
But the story that I really wanted to tell you about is unlinked and unavailable — a detailed if fawning history of how De Niro and Scorsese brought Raging Bull to the screen. Having spent many hours in the De Niro archive at the Harry Ransom Center — and certainly counting Raging Bull amongst my Scorsese pantheon — the story was delectable, even if it rehearsed many historical points with which I was already familiar. And perhaps that’s the function of the best pleasure reading: it reinforces things that you already know, yet fleshes out your understanding in ways that make you feel smart and informed and satisfied.
Because that’s the thing about this Vanity Fair Hollywood Issue: it’s not challenging, nor is it necessarily groundbreaking. But it’s the apotheosis of pleasure reading for a media scholar.
How to Make a Valentine's Day Movie in 10 Steps or Less
1.) Say you’re Warner Bros. You’re trying to revamp your New Line ‘brand.’ You witness international success of your Valentine’s Day movie from last year, He’s Just Not That Into You, which grossed $93.9 million domestic and $84 million international. You realize that the film simply involved a vaguely pre-sold premise (a popular advice book) coupled with a large handful of male and female stars, all in supporting roles and thus (relatively) cheap. Also realize that the quasi-British quasi-prequel to He’s Just Not That Into You from Universal, entitled Love Actually, grossed $246 million internationally on a $40 million budget.
2.) Ah! So maybe New Line should have He’s Just Not That Into You and Love Actually mate! Only this time around, let’s ADD EVEN MORE STARS! Like an exponential amount of stars!
3.) How many stars? Would ten be too many? No? Okay, let’s try NINETEEN BIG NAME STARS.
4.) Get the woman who wrote The Prince and Me (and The Prince and Me 2: The Royal Wedding) and many episodes of Lifetime’s Army Wives to write the script, because that is exactly the filmic tradition that this movie should continue. Also get Pretty Woman director Garry Marshall, who, after a string of big flops (Georgia Rule, Raising Helen) is available for cheap. But you can still put “Director of Pretty Woman” next to his name on all of the promotional materials. SCORE.
5.) Make sure that that script involves each and every one of the nineteen stars (plus some otherwise cute little kids or hot also-rans) either falling in love with each other, proposing to one another, or falling in love with themselves for who they are (they might also start “dancing like no one is watching.”) Each plot line should be heteronormative and affirm our generalized understanding of love as the universal language.
6.) Ensure that each of your 19 stars hits a crucial demo. Get the teen audience with Taylor Swift, Taylor Lautner, and Emma Roberts (featured very, very prominently in the preview); get the 20/30 somethings with Jessica Biel, Jessica Alba, Ashton Kutcher, Topher Grace, Anne Hathaway, Jennifer Garner, and Bradley Cooper. Get the amorphous middle-aged set with Julia Roberts and McSteamy AND McDreamy. Make sure you spread your appeal beyond the just-white audience (a point on which He’s Just Not Into You failed) through the inclusion of Jamie Foxx, Hector Elizondo, and Queen Latifah. Oh, and put Shirley MacLaine in there too! You need to make this movie simultaneously seem like a girls-sympathy movie (e.g. the type of movie that girls go see when they’re without a “valentine”) AND a date movie (for teens as much as for married couples). In other words, make sure it’s not too female-centric — or something that a guy would feel embarrassed walking out of.
7.) Create aesthetically pleasing interactive functions on the website that invite you to share your experience with love, as evidenced below. Co-mingle user-generated ‘love’ content with star-generated ‘love’ content, available via each star’s authenticated Twitter account.
(Oh look, mypersonalized make-out spot in Walla Walla! Just enter your zip code!)
Note the incorporation of the film’s stars’ Tweet “concerning love”
8.) Solicit incredible tie-up/product placement/endorsement deals with so many companies so as to thoroughly subsidize our own budget — not to mention ingratiate yourself with fans through association with the likes of “Warriors in Pink,” which manages to promote the film, Ford, the stars involved with the promotion, and, well, breast cancer awareness. (Ads for this are also all over the gossip weeklies).
Also make sure that all endorsement and tie-up deals are with companies that specifically target an audience of white middle-class women ages 20-50.
9.) CROSS-PLUG. Make sure one of your stars just happens to be the hottest universally-palatable music artist of the moment, Taylor Swift. Then make sure she records a song — to do with love — and pre-sell it on iTunes to build hype for the film and soundtrack. Then have that star sing that song on the Grammy’s (two weeks before the film’s release) and celebrate the fact that the single was the fastest-selling female single iTunes history.
10.) And if you haven’t made a perfect Valentine’s Day movie yet, why don’t you NAME YOUR MOVIE VALENTINE’S DAY.
(And you can watch the trailer here).
Now that you, too, can create your own Valentine’s Day Movie, I will addthat as transparent and potentially brilliant as this strategy might seem, it’s certainly been done before, most notably by Universal in the early 1970s with ‘star-fests’ The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, Airport, and Airport 1975, all of which were overflowing with old and new stars. However, those movies required the actors to interact with each other — making it necessary for them to be on set simultaneously. Genre revision and what Charles Ramirez-Berg has termed “the Tarantino effect” have made the splintered galaxy-style narrative format at home in both Love Actually and Valentine’s Day (not to mention Babel and Crash) not just popular, but conventional. And it’s cost effective: each star can come in for two or three days and shoot what will end up to be three or four vignettes for total screen time between 10-15 minutes.
Crucially, star value was under threat during the 1970s, just as it is today. As I’ve argued elsewhere on the blog (and has been reported by several other outlets) the studios are not only tightening their belts in general, but especially in the realm of star salaries, especially following the very public failures of star-studded film from last Spring and Summer. (Duplicity, State of Play, Year One, The Taking of Pelham 123) Even someone like Denzel is taking a pay cut in exchange for points off the film’s net, a common practice that can give a star a huge paycheck….but only if the movie is a hit. Which isn’t to say that stars aren’t still important — obviously, celebrity gossip is as successful as ever, and star faces ensure much larger international grosses — but that the studios have figured out, once again, that they don’t assure a hit movie. So they’re cutting salaries — and arranging things like Valentine’s Day, which uses stars, but only in very small doses.
I’ve been unable to find any budget info on the film (if you have it, let me know) but my guess would be that the top level stars were each paid anywhere from $200,000 - $500,000, and the second tier stars a little less. Remember: 15 minutes of screen time, people. 19 stars x approx. 250,000 = 4.75 million. That’s less than one big star. While it remains to be seen how the film will compete with Nicholas Sparks weepie Dear John (released the week before), my guess is that no matter how fractured or cliched the story, it will succeed. But what’s next year’s Valentine’s Day movie going to do, now that the only good name is taken?
Our Golden Globes Hangover
Today’s post features a roundtable of various scholars from the Twitter media studies universe, all of whom (myself included) are invested in the Globes for rather different reasons. Read on — and make sure to weigh on the question posed at post’s end.
Hollywood’s only shining moment of the night
Annie:
I’m going to go ahead and say it: this year’s Globes was a game changer. And while it isn’t in any way predictive of who will actually win the Oscar (or the Emmy), this year’s show was markedly different than those of past years. Different, and, in my humble celebrity opinion, worse. It was more transparently commercial — and the artists involved registered their cognizance of that commerciality (and the general practice of studio bribing) accordingly. (See Nikki Finke’s incisive take down here). To my mind, even though it aired from 5-8 on the West Coast, it had all the trappings of NBC primetime: unfunny, trite, and throwaway. The electricity and spontaneity the Globes historically connote: gone. Here’s a brief break-down of what went wrong.
1.) Gervais stunk. I’m sure we’ll elaborate on this further, but let’s just agree that his particular brand of humor did not lend itself well to the Globes format.
2.) At the risk of sounding elitist — and again, this is a point that we’ll have to discuss at length — several wrong things won for all the wrong reasons. The wins for Glee, Robert Downey Jr., Sandra Bullock, Up in the Air, or Avatar made this much abundantly clear. Now, I’m not saying that I don’t like Glee or RDJ, or that I didn’t appreciate most of Up in the Air, or that I don’t value the achievement and innovation of Avatar. Heck, I even kinda sorta like Sandra Bullock. But they weren’t the best in their categories — that much is near universally agreed upon. They’re popular and likable, but not the best. Which is why I repeatedly Tweeted that this year’s Globes were resembling The People’s Choice awards — not lauds from a group of critics. I’m particularly incensed by Bigelow and Mulligan’s losses.
3.) 90% of the celebrities were wooden. There was obviously not enough champagne drinking going on. Maybe it was the rain? The general spark and spontaneity generally associated with the Globes was gone, and I blame James Cameron’s massive ego for sucking all the oxygen out of the air. When Robert De Niro has the best and juiciest speech (okay, okay, rivaled by that of RDJ) you know something’s off. There was no Pitt Porn, there were few bitch faces (save that of Jessica Lange, who gave two excellent ones — one for Drew (who didn’t even thank her) and another for Cameron’s trite call to “pat ourselves on the back.”) There was one moment when it looked like George Clooney’s Italian Queen was perhaps giving him a happy ending under the table, but they cut away too quickly.
4.) No really. Nothing exciting happened. I thought we were headed for greatness when the now-skeletal Felicity Huffman went off the rails in the early moments of the ceremony, but hers was the last gaff of the evening. I also loved Julia Roberts vintage asshole behavior during the red carpet — with Tom Hanks by her side, she made fun of NBC and yelled “who’s Natalie?!?” when Billy Bush decided to cut his losses and leave them be. But shots of her flirting with Paul McCartney simply couldn’t salvage a dry night.
5.) And I blame the director. Of the broadcast, that is. There was a paucity of choice reaction shots. There were all sorts of opportunities to catch the stars reacting poorly — when Gervais was digging on writers, say — but there was a lot of rushed panning and random celebrities. Why couldn’t we have more shots of William Hurt’s beard? Like all the time? Enough of Julia’s smile and Meryl looking quietly bemused. Let’s get some extended Clooney nookie action, or at least Cameron passive aggressively looking out the corner of his eye at how hot his exwife still is.
It’s like a party where you drank a lot and know you’ll be hungover the next day, but didn’t actually get the feel the joyful and giddy pleasures of being intoxicated. And that’s just the worst. Almost as bad, that is, as Sandra Bullock winning Best Actress for a movie about white people saving black people.
Myles McNutt (Graduate Student, TV Critic/Blogger)
I don’t want to sound as if I’m speaking out in support of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, but I think it’s important to clarify that this is not, in fact, a group of critics. They are (primarily) members of the press and little more, closer to tabloid reporters than to a Roger Ebert (not to suggest that Ebert himself is perfect, but he is unquestionably a critic and not a reporter). Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent so much time in the past ranting about how the HFPA fetishizes the new, continues to elevate HBO over the rest of television, and somehow has never realized how inane their supporting acting categories are, but I’ve come to the point where I’m almost rooting for the Globes to go off in bizarre directions.
The problem is that, while most of us have written off the show, the industry has not: the Globes have an influence on the Oscar race (Bullock, for example, is now guaranteed an Oscar nomination), and every star (except for Robert Downey Jr., who revealed the “HFPA are nuts” line of argumentation in his speech) thanks the Hollywood Foreign Press Association as if they are a voting body that deserves to be recognized as a legitimate sign of a film/show/star’s quality. I don’t blame them for this, but I do always worry about providing the show any sense of legitimacy. I might, in a bubble, be fine with Sandra Bullock’s win in terms of the Globes being the only non-fan-voted awards show crazy enough to give her an award for making history as the only woman to topline a film earning more than $200 Million, but I’m not so fine with the idea that her performance could knock out a more deserving competitor (Mulligan is safe, I think) come the Oscars.
What’s convenient about viewing the show from a primarily television perspective, however, is that they have extremely little impact: their love for things which are popular or airing on cable means that few shows are going to be “rescued” by a Golden Globe win, and because there’s such a long gap before the Emmys (and because the Supporting categories are organized so differently) there’s really no correlation. So on that front, I’m sort of glad Glee won a Golden Globe, since its chances of coming close to winning an Emmy are slim; the Globes sit in that liminal space between popular and legitimate, and I think that defines Glee almost perfectly, so it feels “right” (in so much as it feels kind of wrong, but in a way that I’ve come to accept).
I agree with Annie that Gervais was a failure, and would argue it was a combination of both the format not being built for a host (too many categories, too little time to develop rhythms) and Gervais not bothering to try very hard (which I expand upon here). And while there may not have been much exciting happening in the ballroom itself, I thought there was some great banter on Twitter: without the online engagement, I probably would have found the show excruciating. In the end, though, I guess my expectations were such that what we saw felt almost comfortably precisely, and I guess my Golden Globes-related cynicism might finally be close to depletion.
Hopefully next year will provide a refill - I don’t like being the closest thing we might have to an HFPA advocate.
Noel Kirkpatrick (Graduate Student, Blogger)
This had to be the dullest, least surprising Golden Globes in…well…forever (was no one drinking?!). Which is odd, since the thought of Ricky Gervais hosting had all of us very excited. In fact, that Gervais wasn’t very entertaining was probably the biggest surprise of the evening. The Globes don’t have the leisurely pace of the Oscars, and Gervais has always taken over an awards presentation in a leisurely way. There’s no room for him to do his awkward comedy bits (with Steve Carell) when you have to move so briskly. It’s that scruffy, pig-nosed guy coming in from nowhere and tweaking the institution that makes us laugh, not him getting swallowed into it.
I’ve never been a fan of how the Globe organizes its dining tables, and it’s telling. The television folks feel scattered, sometimes way in the back, while the cinema folks are all very up front, easily shot for the cameras (though, the camera work in this telecast was ABYSMAL). It perpetuates this sense of stratification between cinema and television. Indeed, the telecast not only does it with its seating chart, but how it presents awards. The television awards are mostly up first, instead of scattered throughout. Why? To keep the audience, that they assume cares more about movies, watching to see who will win. (Even more telling is the presence of an award for lifetime work in film but not one for television.) This is a well stood upon soapbox, so I won’t belabor the point any longer save to say that people watch these award shows on TV, not on a silver screen and that matters. (Or it should matter more.)
Interestingly, however, I think this ties back into the elitism that Annie mentions. I can’t comment on most of the film winners simply because I haven’t seen most of the nominees, and neither did/could most of the people watching from home (How many people in the home audience saw An Education? My mother hadn’t even heard of The Hurt Locker). Yes, it’s not the People’s Choice Awards, but Bullock, Downey, Jr., and Cameron essentially, as Myles noted in the Twitter conversation, bought their Globes with box office dollars, not with merit. Perhaps in the face of sagging award show ratings, the HFPA decided to do the arty television (notice that we’re not really chiding them for their television votes (except for ignoring Neil Patrick Harris, c’mon people!)) and the mainstream movies to keep people viewing.
I personally always tune in for drunk celebrities.
Lindsay H. Garrison (Ph.D. student, blogger):
So the celebrities weren’t drunk, but the broadcast’s director could have been. So many shaky floor shots and awkward zooms - all for boring reactions and rushed walks to the podium. I’m with Annie: more of William Hurt’s beard, please.
The People’s Choice Awards Golden Globes were less than spectacular last night, with surprising wins that seemed more like picking the quarterback and the head cheerleader for homecoming court than the best acting talent or films. But I’m not sure I’d go as far as calling this a game-changer. While it’s easy to dismiss the HFPA for voting Avatar best picture along with Sandy B. and Meryl as best actresses (in a drama and comedy/musical, respectively), there were at least a few other head nods that didn’t seem like total celebrity suck-up: Best Original Song could have gone to U2 or Paul McCartney, but Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett took home the trophy for Crazy Heart. Jeff Bridges won over George Clooney for Best Actor. (Okay, that’s a stretch; Jeff Bridges isn’t a total ingenue, but his speech was great - who else thanks their stand-in?) Seriously, though. Yes, the Globes felt flat and too mainstream this year, but I’m not sure the Globes were ever really a truly magical event that their mediocrity is something I’m going to mourn for too long. I think their role as an Oscar barometer and box office nudger are still intact.
I mean, Avatar was already a clear front-runner for Best Picture; The Hurt Locker, Inglorious Basterds, and Precious have already made their Oscar mark with dominating wins at the Critic’s Choice Awards. I’m not sure this totally means Oscar failure for them or necessarily guarantees a win for Cameron and Avatar. Streep was already a front runner in the actress category, and yes, Bullock’s win does perhaps make her more of a stronger contender to Streep. So, we’ll see. But in the meantime, here are my thoughts on other parts of last night’s broadcast.
Notable TV win: Julianna Margulies for The Good Wife (in its first season on CBS). Margulies finally wins after being nominated six times for her work on E.R. (did you see her get a congratulatory kiss from George Clooney? Oh, Dr. Ross and Nurse Hathaway.) But The Good Wife is a show that intrigues me; there’s something about it that I really like, but something that keeps me from all-out loving it. Just renewed for its second season, its win here will hopefully allow Margulies and team to develop the show further and let it find its stride.
Most Wheels-Off Presentations: Harrison Ford looked like he hated being there and just wanted to go to bed (hopefully video will find its way online soon). Felicity Huffman could hardly get the words out of her mouth, and Taylor Lautner could hardly be heard over everyone still talking in the ballroom. Presenting the award for Best Comedy suited him well, but even on TV, it was obvious no one was paying him any attention.
Best Moments in Acceptance Speeches: My personal favorite goes to Julianna Margulies, who snuck a jab in at NBC (who was airing the awards show) when she thanked Les Moonves “for believing in the 10:00 drama.” Mo’Nique brought a tear to my eye in her heartfelt speech; too bad it was the first one of the night and seemed to be quickly forgotten. Scorcese gave a great speech in his win for the Cecille B. DeMille Award, captivating the room with his love for the art and desire to see it preserved. And James Cameron, G-d bless him, spoke a sentence or two of Na’vi while accepting the award for Avatar. (I know. Seriously).
Kristen (Phd, Late to the game blogger)
I can only blame CP time for why I’m late to this roundtable. But uh..I’m here. So here it goes.
First, I want to say that this whole section is in great part a conversation I had with some of my most trusted and respected bedfellows. So thanks IC.
Second, I disagree about Gervais. I thought he was a great host. Funny, smart, timely, and not afraid to state things the way they are and not the way publicists would like it to be. I’m not quite sure I want to return to the Hugh Jackman-esque/Billy Crystalitis that has been award show performers. I want someone who can make the celebs a little uncomfortable. They don’t just exist in that ballroom. They exist on the Pacific Coast Highway inebriated to the utmost and bedhobbing from star to star. Let’s not pretend like all is wel just cause you’re in some loaned pretty garments. And that is what I loved about Gervais.
I disagree with Annie on the being irate at the Golden Globes thing. In my opinion, to look to the Golden Globes as an indicator of “quality” like looking to the Nickeoloden summer awards to know who’ll be the next “it” person. A futil enterprise, indeed. I’ve said elsewhwere that I believe the Golden Globes are the Walmart of award ceremonies. Complete with Rollback prices. To expect anything LESS than populist award winners is problematic. As had been said about the “HFPA” (in scare quotes because if they’re journalists, then I’m Lady Gaga..and I ain’t), they are more concerned about partying with celebrities than about actually being concerned about awarding good films their due. Also, as I was reminded in an earlier conversation this move to the popular has slowly been emerging. Recall, the changes made to the Oscars to accommodate more populist movies by expanding the nominees from 5 to 10 selections in various POPULAR categories. Perhaps the Globes are following suit(especially since they can construct the winners as they see fit).
Which leads me to this point: I may sound a bit ornery but really, what is the point of televised award shows? Is it really to elect the “best” film? Is it really to appreciate and give praise to the films we won’t forget about by the time Memorial Day rolls around? No, as Laineygossip says, “it’s about style.” And, you know what, we need to be honest about that and admit that that is what it is. I will remember that Reese Witherspoon wore a fantastic gown and had fantastic hair and makeup. I will remember that Clooney and his Italian new young thang were there and she may have been entertaining him in ways untold underneath that tablecloth. I will remember that Julia Roberts needs to go ahead and retire because it’s over. I will not, however, remember The Hangover. I will not, however, remember The Blind Side (well, I might if it makes into my dissertation). Why? Because they will fade with time. And the things I remember are more about extratextual things rather than the films themselves. Think about it: Aren’t the less televised, lesser known critic circles really where we should be looking to determine what the worthy (that is, respectable, important, relevant, quality) cinema is? Televised award shows are placed in a set of boundaries that pertain to ratings and advertising revenue and popular acceptability. Forget Julia Roberts, “Who’s Natalie?!” deal. Insert into the masses’ mouth: “Who’s Kathryn Bigelow?!” I rest my case.
Finally, I really do think there’s something to minority actors and international actors acceptance speeches that functions to set the tone and generate some sort of appropriation device by which all other winners restate what the formers acceptance speech was. I’m thinking particularly about Mo’nique’s winning speech and Drew Barrymore’s “redo” of that. Drew don’t know Mo’nique. Probably won’t know Mo’nique. So for her to “shout out to her” in that way (despite Barrymore already being a nutter) is interesting.
Enough for now.
Kelli Marshall (UToledo, Unmuzzled Thoughts)
I think everything that can be said about this year’s Golden Globes ceremony has been said:
Ricky Gervais was less than thrilling. However, as some have pointed out, it’s not necessarily all his fault.- NBC (aptly?) was reamed throughout the ceremonies, e.g., “Let’s get going, before they replace me with Jay Leno” (Gervais); “Just want to say thanks to Les Moonves for believing in the 10 o’clock drama” (Julianna Margulies).
- The speeches of Mo’Nique (earnest), Robert Downey, Jr. (sarcastically amusing), and Meryl Streep (reflective) stood out.
- William Hurt’s beard was a highlight of the night. Just ask Noel Kirkpatrick.
- Witnessing The Hangover, The Blind Side, and Sherlock Holmes receive accolades prompted many to rename this year’s broadcast The People’s Choice Awards.
- Slow-talking Harrison Ford and eye-rolling Jennifer Aniston evidently did not want to be presenting.
- Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker were inexplicably shut out.
- De Niro and Di Caprio’s tribute to their mentor and friend, “Marty” Scorsese, was touching, funny, and well deserved.
- Upon accepting his award for Avatar, James Cameron spoke Na’vi. WTF?
My colleagues have already skillfully (and humorously) analyzed many of these events, discrepancies, and surprises. To this end, I will keep my analysis to a minimum, politely redirecting you to the above bullet points. I would like to mention, however, a bit about Twitter and its role in my Golden Globe experience this year.
Generally, I don’t watch award shows in their entirety. With TiVo remote in hand, I often fast-forward only to the categories that interest me (e.g., comedy/musical, drama, best film). This year, however, I decided to view the Golden Globes as they aired, tweeting while I watched.
Last night, my Twitterverse consisted of about 5 of 6 “film and media people,” grad students and professors, firing off tweets at each other about every 30 seconds. (Yeah, it’s hard to keep up!) Short statements about fashion (or lack thereof), awards speeches, winners, and losers flooded our Twitter accounts (apologies to my followers who had no real interest in The Globes). In 140 characters or fewer, we dissected the evening in real-time, cheering virtually for Dexter, Mo’Nique, and Glee, and booing virtually for Sandra Bullock, Sherlock Holmes, and Avatar. It’s a strange little community, Twitter. But it sure does make a three-hour event much more entertaining than it’s ever been before. Perhaps you’ll join us at the Oscars?
Annie Again:
Having slept on my earlier comments, I do agree that this year’s Globes was not as much as a ‘game changer’ as I’d like it to be. I want people to be weirded out by this Globes, but listening to the chatter online, in the blogs, and on the air, no one seems to think this was all that special. WHICH KINDA FLOORS ME. Am I experiencing selective amnesia? Between the show itself (boring) and the chose of awardees (populist), it still seems much different — a return to Weinstein/art-house backlash that brought us a win for Gladiator and The Lord of the Rings over at the Oscars. Thus, in conclusion, I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on whether this particular Globes signified as different or as par for the course….and, of course, your own favorite and least favorite moments. Let the roundtable continue.
James Cameron: Star Maker?
Cameron and His Raw Clay
James Cameron makes huge, monstrous movies. I’m not going to delve (too deeply) into the critical melee concerning his most recent film - I saw it; it’s tremendously striking and aesthetically pleasurable, it’s also ridiculously, embarrassingly ideologically f-ed. (You wonder why this film is doing so well internationally? Because it makes Americans look destructive, one-minded, intolerant, profit-minded, and controlled by roided-up guys with bad scalp scars. I’m just sayin’.) Jonathan Gray at The Extratextuals has a compelling take on Avatar’s ‘anti-fans’; Maria Bustillos at the always dourly and smarmily entertaining The Awl shreds the film’s progressive claims; I appreciate the balance of appreciation and critique at work in David Denby’s review.
But what few people are talking about — in part because they’re too busy arguing how Avatar will or won’t change the way that films are made forevermore — is the fact that James Cameron has further established himself not as a director, or an innovator, or a somewhat derivative writer, but as a tremendously skilled star maker.
Before we get to Sam Worthington, let’s take a trip in the wayback machine. Remember these kids?
Leonardo DiCaprio was sorta kinda a rising star when Cameron cast him in Titanic. That is, if you can call a head-turning performance in This Boy’s Life, an Oscar nom for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and a recurring role in Growing Pains credentials for the mantle of ’rising star.’ Remember: Cameron cast him before he appeared in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. Cameron knew what could happen with this kid. As for Kate Winslet, she was, at that point, pure arthouse. She had attracted attention for her roles in Heavenly Creatures and Sense and Sensibility (including an Oscar nom) and starred in Jude and Kenneth Branuagh’s Hamlet, but she was certainly no household name. She didn’t have a Cameron Diaz body; she didn’t star in action films; she wasn’t funny. And while Winslet has mostly kept with arthouse fare (Hideous Kinky, Smoke, Quills, Iris, Finding Neverland, Eternal Sunshine, Little Children, The Reader, Revolutionary Road, to name only half) and wouldn’t be trusted to open a film, she’s a hot prestige commodity. As for DiCaprio, following a few manic years of “Leo-mania” post-Titanic, he has managed to tread the line between action star and prestige commodity (not to mention Scorsese’s new muse).
Most importantly, Titanic — and Cameron’s selection of them to star in it — effectively made their careers what they are today.
Go back a little further and you’ll find Cameron’s most brilliant find: Arnold Schwarzenegger. See The New Yorker‘s profile of Cameron from a few months back for details, but suffice to say that Cameron not only convinced Schwarzenegger, then known only for Conan the Barbarian, to take the role, but also wrote the lines that would allow his particular enunciative qualities to endure in American culture for decades.
And then there’s Avatar. How can you make stars out of ‘Real-D’ digitally rendered characters? THAT ARE BLUE AND LOOK LIKE CATS? You don’t. But with a human component, you don’t have to make the cat smurfs themselves stars. The Na’vi and their likenesses can be synergistic moneymakers — can you imagine how many kids are going to dress as Na’vi next Halloween? — but Cameron also knew that he needed human bodies to make this film profitable. As was the case in Titanic, most of the roles in Avatar are purely utilitarian, put in place simply to advance the narrative: what do we know about the Colonel (Stephen Lang), the asshole corporate guy (Giovanni Ribisi), the pilot (Michelle Rodriguez), the nerdy scientist (Joel Moore) or the other nerdy scientist (Dileep Rao) other than clipped statements or actions that establish them clearly as good or bad guys?
Do you see Zoe Saldana here?
The character of Neytiri, voiced by Zoe Saldana and modeled on her facial features and body movements, is a unique case. Zoe Saldana herself has been a long struggling Hollywood actress — please recall both Center Stage and Crossroads — and is coming off a key franchise role in Star Trek. She has a handful of biggish movies in post-production; she’ll be in Neil LaBute’s Death at a Funeral and several action-esque movies that make ample use of her midriff. My guess is she’ll end up a star, if not a huge one — but not necessary because of Avatar. Her face is too absent from the film.
Sam Worthington, however, is another story entirely. Here’s a guy who, as has been well-rehearsed in publicity for this film and Terminator, was LIVING IN HIS CAR before he was cast in Avatar. He apparently went to an audition to an acting school with his then-girlfriend; he got in, she didn’t, they broke up. When he was 30, he wanted to “reboot” his life, so he sold all of his belongings, netted $2000, bought a car, and ended up living in said car. He tried out for an unnamed project with no director’s name attached; a few days later he received a call from Cameron, who wanted him to come in for six months of auditions. He eventually got the part. While Cameron was endlessly tinkering in post, he “sent” Worthington to McG, who was directing the fourth installment of Cameron’s former baby, Terminator. Granted, Terminator: Salvation was no tremendous success, but it put Worthington’s name (and face) on the map. In essence, Cameron was prepping the market for his new star.
Worthington, Terminator-style
With both Terminator and Avatar on his resume, Worthington was cast in three big films, each of which are now in post and scheduled for release within the year: espionage thriller The Debt (with Helen Mirren and Tom Wilkinson); quasi-rom-com Last Night (with Keira Knightly) and, most significantly, CGI-orgasm Clash of the Titans, in which 300 meets Avatar meets Grand Theft Auto. He’s basically establishing himself as a Matt Damon/Russell Crowe hybrid — equally adept at action, thrillers, drama, fantasy, and historical epics.
Worthington, historical-CGI-epic style.
I mean, the guy’s a babe. He has that sweet hint of Australian accent sneaking out in his speech (you can hear it distinctly in the voiceover for Avatar); he has big arms; he’s got that look of the innocent and the slightly busted and the huge-hearted, all of which are crucial to pulling off the action/heartthrob role. (See Daniel Craig and Crowe for exemplars in this vein). He kinda looks like Tom Brady, which is to say he kinda looks like he wants to be America’s hero; he’s genial in interviews; he has a fantastic ‘origin story’ (I mean seriously, living in your car? Only Hilary Swank can compete!); and he’s hungry. He appeals to men and women, which is, of course, crucial. Even older women like him, as emphasized by this fawning EW blogger.
Tom Brady's dimple-less doppleganger
He’s not as pretty as Leonardo DiCaprio, but he’s pretty enough. His muscles aren’t as big as The Terminator’s, but they’re big enough. He’s just unique enough to be interesting, but not crazy or volatile and thus uncastable like Colin Farrell or old school Johnny Depp and Robert Downey Jr.. His image was completely malleable going into the publicity for Avatar, which was exactly what Cameron wanted. Just as in the case of the technology he uses in his films, Cameron molds his tools — and that includes his stars — to fit his purpose. Worthington will most likely go on to huge success following this film. But he did it on Cameron’s terms, and Avatar will always be the ground note of his stardom. Cameron isn’t doing anything novel — star makers such as Selznick, Mayer, Henry Willson, and others have long practiced this sort of career manipulation.
Ultimately, it’s fascinating to me that we, as media studies academics, film critics, and informal industry observers, make such noise about everything to do with Cameron — his bombastic filmmaking style, his visionary use of technology, his insistence on playing by his own set of rules, his rejection of the maxims of contemporary conglomerate Hollywood — yet fail to see the very clear ways in which he operates very much like an independent producer, and star maker, of classic Hollywood style.
James Franco on General Hospital?!: Thinking about Stars and/in Soap Operas
Confession: It’s the week before finals. Not only am I still enrolled in two classes (the last two classes of my LIFE) but I’m also conferencing with 60 students concerning final papers. And giving a final. And packing up my entire life to move to Walla Walla, WA for the semester. So we’re going to have a few guest posts to tide us over — including the following, from the uber-talented Racquel Gonzales, a graduate student in the RTF Department and soap opera (and soap fandom) expert extraordinaire.
James Franco on GH (credit: ABC/Medianet)
In case you haven’t heard, James Franco of Freaks and Geeks, Spiderman, and Pineapple Express fame officially started his guest star stint November 20th on General Hospital, the long-running ABC soap. If you are scratching your heads, you are in great company with news outlets, gossip columnists, and arguably many Franco fans who just saw him in the Oscar-winning film Milk with a guest star appearance for 30 Rock. I’m not going to focus on James Franco’s reasons for temporarily showing off his acting chops in Port Charles because it has been exhaustively scrutinized, investigated, and rumored by almost everyone covering the story (including soap sites and fans in comment sections): Why is Franco acting on GH, a [insert dismissive, snarky comment regarding low budget/bad acting/cardboard sets]? Was it a bet gone wrong with Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow? Is he on drugs? Is it a school project? Why Franco why? Everybody wants justification as to why Franco, a movie star, would want to be on a soap opera, a supposed vast, vapid, bottom-of-the-barrel wasteland of entertainment and acting talent. I’d like to point out Franco has received ridiculously massive attention and publicity over this decision, possibly even more than garnered with previous projects. Ask not what Franco can do for GH, but what is GH doing for Franco?
I’d like to shed a little light on the other side: How did/do GH fans react to James Franco coming onto their soap? People not engaged in soap opera discussion or fandom may assume that viewers were verklempt and moon-eyed that a famous movie star came down from the heavens of Hollywood to guest star on their lil’ daytime show. While some were, I found other reactions a bit more complicated. As a media scholar, one of my research concerns is the negotiations between the contemporary daytime industry and fan communities online. I am still grappling with the potential differences between online and offline soap viewers, so I am speaking specifically about those fans that engage online. There were and continue to be varied reactions to the news. Understandably, there was a lot of confusion and dismissal of the news as a hoax because the story spread on soap message boards days before there were official blog entries confirming it on entertainment sites. How? A little tweet by Jillian Michaels about Franco coming on for two months. Who is Michaels to the soap world? Besides being a trainer on The Biggest Loser, she is also best friends with Vanessa Marcil. Some of you may know her from Beverly Hills 90210 or Las Vegas. If you’re a gossip follower, she is Brian Austin Green’s ex and mom to the little boy frequently accompanying Megan Fox in paparazzi pictures. However, GH viewers know her as Brenda Barrett, half of arguably the biggest supercouple of the 90’s and a third of the most popular soap triangle. A GH fan tweeted Michaels about Marcil coming back to GH, Michaels responded, and then the investigation started across several soap boards and on Twitter (including several tweets to a clueless Bob Harper, one of the other trainers of The Biggest Loser). Officially confirmation occurred after Steve Burton, aka GH‘s Jason Morgan, spilled the beans on Twitter. The contemporary gossip industry is always in a fight over breaking the news first. And in this case, online soap communities spread the story with each other even before soap gossip sites picked it up. I find this particularly interesting because calculated or not, it was a very successful way to get online fans invested in the news by way of a scavenger hunt.
Franco’s first day on General Hospital
Understandably, there was wide spread excitement and anticipation because there are Franco fans who are GH fans and vice versa. The lines between soap viewing, primetime show viewing, and film-going aren’t as strongly demarcated as they may appear though barriers are placed there. Based on some comments, Franco’s presence actually hooked lapsed GH fans into watching again—undoubtedly one of the goals of the ABC Daytime executives (Did I mention his character is named “Franco”? Just so there is no doubt about Franco and GH’s mutual exploitation of each other). However for others, there is annoyance and dismay, because Franco follows many recent guest star appearances on GH (see Bruce Weitz and Vincent Pastore) that typically result in stalled storylines across the canvas, a centralized focus on violence, and little to no long-term effects because these casting stunts are quick attempts to boost the ratings. Franco’s star power is more widely known than Weitz or Pastore, which prompted apprehensive considerations about how his character would affect other characters’ airtimes. Surprisingly, indifference seems to pervade fan debates about whether or not Franco is really that big of a star to merit such attention. He may be a good actor, but is he a star? On various forums, early shorthand for Franco was “that Spiderman guy” or “the dude from Freaks and Geeks,” which raises questions about how stars are defined in particular communities and points to a potential hierarchy in fan star-making.
James Franco as "Franco" the avant-garde artist (Credit: ABC/Medianet)
Believe it or not, the most talked about soap appearance within the last few months for GH was actually not James Franco, but the return of Jonathan Jackson as Lucky Spencer. This news was released days before Franco’s yet dominated conversation for several weeks. Why would this news rival the appearance of Franco? First, Lucky is the son of Luke and Laura, the soap supercouple whose 1981 wedding still holds the Nielsen daytime ratings record. They were not just a soap phenomenon, but a significant part of American popular culture. If you think Franco is a big deal for the soap world, keep in mind that Luke and Laura’s wedding featured Elizabeth Taylor as the guest star. Therefore, there are strong historical connections between GH fans and Jackson, who played Lucky from childhood to a young adult, allowing the audience to see him grow up on screen from 1993-1999. Some have been hoping for his return to soaps though he has moved on to larger projects like playing Kyle Reese in the now cancelled Terminator: Sarah Conner Chronicles. While Franco is a huge star, he and his character have no ties to the GH canvas like Jackson and the character of Lucky Spencer. The daytime soap industry has traditionally used viewing memory and nostalgia to reward (and exploit) fan loyalty and tap into their textual investment. The “return” has always been an important narrative choice in the serial medium because of its emotional resonance with fans who have long viewing histories with a show. You’ll find really memorable soap episodes often feature guest returns by former actors and utilize flashbacks like One Life to Live’s 9,999th and 10,000th episode celebration in 2007. Nathan Fillion endeared himself to the entire soap community by reprising his role as Joey Buchanan for these episodes as a way of honoring his show business start, rather than trying to hide it. For many viewers, watching Fillion’s Joey reunite with old cougar flame Dorian in the 2007 episodes during his grandfather’s funeral conjures up their viewing memories of a relationship that began in 1994 (do check out Fillion’s adorable early 90′s ‘do)
I bring up Fillion’s case because it highlights the complicated negotiation between soap operas and its stars like having multiple actors in a single role. Though a fan favorite, Fillion was one of six different actors to play Joey Buchanan on OLTL. His tenure was from 1994-1997 and the aforementioned 2007 return episodes, however he was the fourth Joey and not even the actor to have played the role the longest. But he is seen as the quintessential “Joey” and soap fans followed him to his subsequent TV and film projects. However, other roles occupied by multiple actors can end up being a site of contention among soap audiences. This division of fan loyalty is often referred to online as being a character fan first (characterFF), an actor fan first (actorFF), and even a couple and show fan first, delineating where your loyalities lie. Due to the long, serialized nature of soap operas, recasting is a necessity since characters can exist for decades on the canvas and sometimes outlive their portrayers. Fans often have hierarchies in their loyalties towards particular actors or to soap characters regardless who is currently in the role, though preferences are made known. Quite common, fans follow their favorite soap stars when/if the actors migrate to another soap or even primetime. Soap stars may make daytime their permanent home like Susan Lucci (Erica Kane on All My Children) or move from soap star to primetime TV or film stardom like Josh Duhamel (ex-Leo on AMC). There is cultural caché that circulates around soap message boards about “discovering” a star first or being a fan before an actor makes it big since soaps comprise the early careers of many actors.
Jonathan Jackson back as Lucky (Credit: ABC/Medianet)
This division is the core issue over Jackson’s return as Lucky and a central reason why the news overshadowed Franco’s appearance. Plain and simple, it was old fashion drama behind the scenes. Jackson’s return was announced while Greg Vaughan, the third actor to play the character, was still in the role and starring in episodes. Likewise, Jackson made his premiere while Vaughan’s face was still in the opening credits of the show. This is not the first time ABC has switched between the recast and original portrayer. For example, AMC’s “The Real Greenlee” ad campaign celebrated the return of Rebecca Budig, the role’s orginator, while the recast Greenlee was still occupying the role. While that campaign garnered a lot of online fan criticism, the Jackson casting news was particularly angering to some GH fans because Vaughan had played Lucky the longest (from 2003-2009). Soap loyalty is cultivated with an actor-character’s constant presence on a show. But on the flipside, there are fan loyalties for the actors who originated the roles. And of course, many fans were caught between their love of both Jackson and Vaughan’s Luckys due to viewing memories with both.
Adding fuel to the fire, Vaughan tweeted shortly after the news broke that GH had decided to go in a different direction, thus letting him go to hire Jackson. In contrast, GH and ABC’s official stance was Vaughan asked to be let out of his contract. Soap forums erupted in various heated conversations: which actor was the true/real/only/most soulful Lucky? Are you a LuckyFF or a GVFF or a JJFF? Is ABC telling the truth or Vaughan? And possibly the most curious, was Jackson told Vaughan was leaving or getting fired so Jackson could return? Twitter remained part of these discussions as current GH actors tweeted their personal reactions to Vaughan’s departure. In regards to Vaughan’s truthfulness, countless posters defended him by pointing to his steadfast performance of Lucky during what many fans claim to be the worst period in GH writing history. During Jackson’s years, Lucky was a core character and written in a completely different light than under the current tenure, where Vaughan’s Lucky was written as a low-level antagonist to the mobster heroes currently central. If what partly makes a star is the role or roles he/she plays, how do we deal with multiple actors in a single role? These debates about the true Lucky brought out comparisons of fans’ viewing histories and their personal attachment to Jackson, Vaughan, and occasionally Jacob Young, who played Lucky #2 from 2000-2003. While recasting upsets are prevalent in the entertainment industry, comparison is difficult due to the shifting in-and-out of actors in a constantly moving, decades-long story. I would be curious to see the online reactions if the next Bond film had an accompanying “Sean Connery: The REAL James Bond” ad campaign while Daniel Craig got booted. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if a “Who is the true James Bond?” discussion hasn’t already taken place for many fans of the franchise.
Greg Vaughan as Lucky (Credit: ABC/Medianet)
Throughout, Vaughan and Jackson’s personal lives and personalities were central to conversations. Fans shared personal anecdotes from meeting the actors and from reading about each from soap magazines and soap gossip websites. Soap stars are produced and consumed for and by soap fans in very similar ways to those of film stars. At the grocery store checkout, the soap magazines are right next to In Touch, US Weekly, and People. There are soap gossip sites (and some “hidden”) that deliver rumors, casting decisions, behind-the-scenes antics, and industry practices for fans to devour or refute. Historically, the boundary between soap fans and soap stars has been purposefully collapsed in many ways to foster personal relationships (or feelings of one) to ensure viewers. Fan investment is the key to a soap opera’s success and this is one way to achieve closeness to the text—through its stars. Soap magazines typically talk about an actor in contrast or comparison to their on-screen counterpart, blurring the lines between character and actor. Furthermore, news about former soap stars (like Duhamel getting married to Fergie) always make the soap gossip circuit as do blind items. With the exception of The Young and the Restless, opening sequences that feature character montages don’t display actors’ names so that character identification is priority.
The daytime industry, ABC especially, promotes fan interaction with soap stars at events like Super Soap Weekend. Every year, the official GH Fan Club holds Fan Club Weekend in Southern California where fans can meet their favorite GH stars and other fans for a healthy piece of change. These events allow fans to take pictures, get autographs, and talk with soap stars as well as enter auctions to visit and tour the GH set. Most uniquely, the Fan Club Weekend event and smaller meet-and-greets throughout the year allow fans to Q&A with their soap favorites about future storylines, their personal likes and dislikes, and voice their frustration or admiration about the direction of the show. In fact, myriad online defenses for Vaughan became personal fan accounts about his cordial nature at these events and his honesty about Lucky’s unfortunate story direction. Thus, it’s important to note that relationships cultivated with soap stars are both an emotional investment of time and viewing loyalty, but also an economical one as these fan events are not cheap when factoring in travel arrangements and club dues. All these situations work primarily to keep fans invested in the soap opera text regardless of whether or not they are currently happy with the show.
Looking at soap fandom can provide another layer to the question “how are stars made and disseminated amongst fans?” As an on-again/off-again soap viewer and soap scholar, I find that the internet has made the negotiations among soap fan, soap star, and soap industry quite muddled and dynamic especially with star identification. If you are curious for extra reading, I highly recommend C. Lee Harrington and Denise D. Bielby’s Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and Making Meaning in Everyday Life and Nancy K. Baym’s Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community. Both are great pieces discussing soap fans as well as core texts used in academic conversations about the fan-star relationships in general. Also, check out the upcoming The Survival of the Soap Opera: Strategies for a New Media Era (University of Mississippi Press, 2010), a collection of various scholarship on contemporary soap issues in the digital age, including a personal article about GH nostalgia, industry-fan negotiations, and critical discourse surrounding General Hospital: Night Shift.
Much appreciation and thanks to Annie for providing me the space and opportunity to talk about James Franco, Lucky Spencers, and General Hospital.
Sandra Bullock and Her Female Forever Fans
“I just love that Sandra Bullock.”
“Oh, I know! She’s so natural and perky and down to earth!”
“She was great in that one movie — oh, you know the one I’m talking about, that one with the guy, and they’re from the South, and oh, it’s just adorable. She’s just adorable.”
“Oh I know, I watch that one every year. She’s just great. I just love her.”
This is not an actual transcription of a conversation, but an approximation of one I’ve heard numerous times — at church potlucks, on airplanes, in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. Because WOMEN LOVE SANDRA BULLOCK. More specifically, middle-aged women, many of them members of the ever powerful minivan majority, love Sandra Bullock. They love her for her inoffensive humor; they love her natural, unexotic beauty. They love the fact that she ends up with normal looking, wholly likable white bread men in the movies (Bill Pullman, Harry Connick Jr., Hugh Grant, Benjamin Bratt, Ryan Reynolds) but they most especially love the consistency of her roles.
Normal looking nice guy makes normal looking nice girl happy!
Of course, these women are victims of selective amnesia: Bullock has attempted to complicate her star image with risky roles, including parts in Crash, Murder by Numbers, and the second of the two Capote films, Infamous. (She played the Harper Lee character.) But such roles have done little to alter her overarching image as likable, slightly madcap, and always the recipient of pure and genuine love.
For Bullock is no sex object. She’s a girls’ star — a Julia Roberts, a Meg Ryan. Men do not generally find her attractive, but girls want to be her best friend. The director of The Proposal explained “After I met Sandy for the first time, I remember thinking, This woman has been my friend for 100 years.” She has a beautiful body, skin, and hair, but such attributes are generally revealed through the course of a narrative — she starts out an ugly, somewhat masculine, awkward duckling, only to be transformed through the quiet yet strong love of a good, honest man. Indeed, she is often nearly asexual at the beginning of a film — see her business-minded superboss in The Proposal or her scorned, weepy break-up victim in Hope Floats.
You can tell she loves her career too much by the suit and the unmussed hair.
Bullock’s picture personalities is infused with promises and possibilities: you, too, fair viewer, can be transformed by the power of love. Not all of her films are makeover fantasies — indeed, only Miss Congeniality features an explicit makeover — but the most popular of films repeatedly position a non-glamorous protagonist as a site for transformation, both emotional and physical. Bullock’s presence in the lead encourages identification; she’s an awkward Jennifer Aniston, Julia Roberts with her makeup off and hair flat. She’s the supporting actor/best friend made central, and women love her for it.
Her extra-textual persona supports this image. In Glamour, she is described as follows:
Sandy loves her job but is not defined by it. And she knows how to have a life outside of Hollywood: She splits her time between L.A. and Austin, Texas, where she owns a popular bistro, Bess. She has a barn. She’s done a ton of good work for charities, like giving money to a New Orleans high school impacted by Hurricane Katrina. Hello, she even does her own home renovations, like tearing down walls with her bare hands! (OK, I might be exaggerating a bit.) But if I had to pinpoint what sets her apart, it’d be this: She’s humble. She’s real. It’s easy to lose yourself in this business, but Sandy hasn’t gotten swept up in any of it.
See! She likes people! She’d be friends with you! “She’s humble. She’s real.” She’s not a diva. She probably makes her own food and drives her own car and goes to the grocery store. Or so we are led to believe.
The other day, my friends and I were attempting to make a list of stars that our parents just love: stars who make them feel comfortable. Stars whose movies they’ll rent without any foreknowledge of plot; stars who will entice them to go to the movie theater for one of their 2-4 yearly trips. Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts made the cut. But Sandra Bullock was the most unanimous nominee: there’s something so wholly inoffensive and uniquely attractive about her, something that Julia Roberts has lost and Jennifer Aniston never really had. She makes 50 year-olds go see her fall in love with Ryan Reynolds. Her films make big bucks overseas. Her style and charisma translate. She appears virtually ageless, but not in an envy-inducing manner (Demi More) or as a grotesque (Nicole Kidman, Sharon Stone). She’s not stuck up (Renee Zelwegger/Aniston/Courtney Cox), she’s not intimidating (Jolie), she’s not perfect (Halle Berry) and she’s not too madcap (Roseanne).
Indeed, the only thing potentially controversial about Bullock is her choice of husband: motorcycle producer and heavily-tateooed Jesse James.
Bullock and Her Teddy Bear
Discursively, James has been constructed as the culmination of Bullock’s domestic fairytale. After being chased by many a prince (Tate Donovan, Troy Aikman, Ryan Gosling, Matthew McConaughey, Keanu Reeves) she settled with the least moviestarsish, least expected of the bunch — a man who simply made her happy. (And, coincidentally, recreated a narrative conclusion manifested in her most successful films).
In recent weeks, Bullock has been in the gossip weeklies — not to promote her upcoming The Blind Side or to apologize for the train wreck that was All About Steve, but because of her attempts to adopt James’ daughter from a previous marriage. In US Weekly, the article’s title declares her “Battle for Her Stepdaughter.” Bullock and James are attempting to receive full custody of James five-year-old daughter, whose mother, Janine Lindemulder, is a former drug addict, porn star, and general ne’er-do-well. The article is smattered with pictures of a dressed-down, casual Bullock carrying and holding hands with the young girl. Bullock’s image is placed in sharp contrast with the girl’s porn star birth mother: she is everything this blonde bimbo is not. Bullock is quoted declaring “My greatest joy is…being a good wife, a good stepmom.” She loves this child - and that’s what she’ll fight for. (Again, sounds mysteriously similar to the storyline of one of her films — only The Blind Side involves a black male high school student, not a cherubic blond girl).
Bullock says she doesn’t want to do rom-coms anymore — in fact, with something like The Proposal, she’s attempting to forge a path for the ‘female Judd Apatow film.’ Whether or not this is true is beside the point. For while The Blind Side is certainly not a rom-com, as evidenced by the trailer, it most certainly is a family melodrama. As such, the film caters to virtually the same demographic as the rom-com: females, both single and married, between the ages of 20 and 60. (Did you hear The Fray in the background? Yep, they’re talking to you, Grey’s Anatomy fans. Selfsame demo).
With that said, Bullock does not pull in the lower echelons of that demo. She’s got what I’ve termed her Forever Fans — the 30-60-year-olds who will always see her films, like our mothers — but she has failed to attract a younger demographic. Part of this is merely a matter of age — Sandra Bullock portrays 30-somethings and mothers, not teens and post-grads — but I’d also posit that it has something to do with her star image and its particular resonance. Her particular brand of spunk, quirk, Southernness, and romance seems very 1990s to me. Just as The Blind Side appears to be a remake of every film that’s ever told the story of white people saving black people, so too does Bullock’s star image seem to function as a reactivation and deradicalization of a certain type of female star: she’s Bette Davis without the teeth, Joan Crawford without the snarl. Davis and Crawford often ended their films happily coupled, but just as often they ended them alone — sometimes in tears, but nonetheless triumphant. Bullock’s characters never end unhappy; they rarely weather a storm without a silver lining already firmly in view. Bullock is soft, quick to weep, and quicker to give in, where Davis, Crawford, and even Stanwyk (especially in Stella Dallas) are steely, with a fierceness belied by their porcelain faces. These women were also points of identification, but the women in the theaters at the time were hard-bitten by the times — hungry, over-worked, exhausted, and oftentimes, due to the demands of The Depression and World War II, without even the dream of the help of a man or romance. The endings provided by the ’30s and ’40s melodramas emphasized a female independence that wasn’t simply a madcap act, neutralized by film’s end: it was a way of survival, a way of life.
Joan Crawford might eat Sandra Bullock alive…
Indeed, the ‘softness’ and heteronormatively-coupled endings of Bullock’s films have everything to do with 1990s in general: I could describe most of Julia Roberts’ films using the same language I’ve employed to describe Bullock. These films’ tone and conclusion likewise speaks to what women — and 30-40 year-old women in particular - imagine for themselves: how far they can reach, and what that place, and its potential splendors, might resemble.
Judging from Bullock’s recent films, happiness and fulfillment can come in the shape of a younger man, a retreat from strict professionalism, or venturing out of suburbia to participate in first-hand philanthropy. To me, all of these choices seem to present female self-reliance and independence as a hollow promise; that those women who sacrificed marriage and family for professional development will realize, sooner or later, that they too need a man, a cause, something greater than themselves. We can view this as selfless and a form of sacrifice…or as a troubling message that cultivating oneself, and one’s own desires, will never truly provide fulfillment.
I don’t dislike Sandra Bullock. I like her (early) films. But I do think that those who fail to understand her and her tremendous draw — as most clearly evidenced in Richard Rushfield’s perceptive yet reductive answer to “Why is Sandra Bullock Still a Star?” over at Gawker — they also demonstrate their lack of understanding of a key, if sometimes quiet, demographic. Middle aged women may not ‘open’ a film at number one, but they certainly can keep a film going strong when everyone else is off Megan Fox getting chased by giant robots. Media observers often express surprise when a film like The Proposal goes on to grosses $300 million international (on a budget of $40 million, no less). Those very same observers — oftentimes male — simply forget the tremendous power, however ‘unglamorous’ it may be, of neglected demographics.
This post explicitly concerns Sandra Bullock, but I’m also writing it as hundreds of thousands of girls and women head to the theaters to screen New Moon, which is now headed for a ridiculously huge international opening gross. Industry critics keep patting Summit Entertainment on the back for their luck in optioning the teen text, yet to attribute it to luck is to miss the point: someone at Summit realized that the text wouldn’t just exploit the teen girl demographic, but the adult female one as well. For The Proposal opened big ($33 million), but New Moon will open with $80 million domestic, if not more. Why? Women. Some of them already Forever Fans.
To answer Rushfield’s question, Sandra Bullock is still a star — and will remain a star — so long as her forever fans keep consuming. Her movies cost relatively little to make; even a bomb like All About Steve will not compromise her consistent palatablity. And with small costs and a built-in audience, she’s a much more reliable bet than Angelina Jolie or the over-priced Julia Roberts. The challenge for execs is how to cultivate new stars, equally inoffensive and socio-temporally resonant, to take her place in the years to come. Who will be our Sandra Bullock? Is it Jennifer Aniston? Gennifer Goodwin? Isla Fischer? Kate Hudson? Regardless, it’ll most likely be someone who men disdain, hot cultural critics ignore, and studios relegate to counter-programming.
Sandra Bullock matters, and is still a star, because women and their pocketbooks do, in fact, matter — and no number of billion dollar grossing smashfests will alter that fact.
The Politics of Twilight Web Traffic
Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart Caught in the Act — And now they’ll give me web traffic!
(Image from Pop Sugar; originally nabbed by X17)
FACT: Talk about Twilight, and you will get web traffic.
FACT: Passionate, angry, and upset fans may attack you based on your post, but you will still have web traffic.
FACT: Simply by posting the image above — the first “irrefutable” evidence of a romance between the two stars of Twilight — I will up my daily web traffic by as much as 1000 visitors a day. Some arrive simply to view the image, but many stay and read the article that surrounds it. I know because their comments continue to accumulate.
FACT: Academic blogs (like this one) may not be fueled by numbers of visitors, but for-profit ones most certainly are.
FINAL FACT: Twilight posts, sneak peeks, trailers, gossip, and speculation have turned into a self-perpetuating phenomenon: even if people don’t necessarily care about them, and even if there’s not really news, if you post it, the fans will come. And the fans will continue to come as more information is promised — as my friend Nick recently posited in our co-authored forthcoming article on celebrity twittering, “there can never be enough information on a star; therefore, more information is always needed.” The fan hopes for one crucial piece of info — a picture, a quip, a video snippet — that promises provide access to the authentic kernel of the star. In the case of Twilight, the revelation of the apparent Pattinson/Stewart relationship only further expands the desire for more information: now that we’ve seen them touching, can’t we see them kissing? Won’t that tell us everything we need to know? About them, our own hopes invested in their romance, and love in general?
Of course not. But the promise of fulfillment continues to guide the currents of web traffic. In many ways, the phenomenon isn’t that different from the dilemma facing magazine publishers every week: if a magazine puts Pattinson on the cover, as Vanity Fair did this month, they will come.
But with so much celebrity discourse and photo/video evidence available for free online, they may not buy. Which is exactly why Vanity Fair pulled the brilliant (if obvious) move of not only putting its Pattinson story behind a pay wall, but also leaking excerpts early and promising additional photos to further encourage ‘hard copy’ purchase.
But there’s something slightly different at stake when it comes to internet traffic. Print journalists — especially those associated with long established magazines such as People, US Weekly, or Vanity Fair — love a high sell-through number, but they aren’t individually tasked with cultivating a sustained readership for a particular internet site. In the fickle world of internet traffic, readers are sometimes loyal, but rarely. If they are loyal, it’s often to a syndicater — a home blog that links regularly to sites of interest, such as Perez Hilton, Huffington Post, Jezebel, etc. Thus the impetus is both on the syndicater (to find links) and the satellite blogs (to get linked).
The ultimate goal: go viral. And while very few stories or pictures go as ‘singularly’ viral as, say, The JK Wedding Video or “Dick in a Box,” you still want your particular story to be widely linked. Some sites, including the Gawker Media Family, have historically based their pay scale on the amount of hits garnered, thus encouraging authors to post the most salacious, scandalous, or outrageous material possible in hopes of going viral. (Gawker has supposedly since ceased such practices).
Well-paid bloggers have a particular impetus to garner massive amounts of hits. Take, for example, Nikki Finke. As Anne Thompson recently reported, Finke is frustrated by the pressure to regularly pull in large numbers at her new home with mail.com, regularly forefronts what she names “shameless plug for Twilight traffic,” as evidenced below:
Of course, Thompson herself courts Twilight traffic from her new home at Indiewire — she’s posted her one-on-one (and admittedly adorable) video with Pattinson twice in the last week alone (while also hyping the new V.F. cover, including a sneak-peak excerpt). And while Lainey Gossip declares a general dislike for the saga, she nevertheless has cornered the market on on-set filming updates from her home base of Vancouver, B.C.
But Twilight fuels more than just blogs like Deadline Hollywood Daily, Thompson on Hollywood, and Cinematical. It also drives traffic to social networking and corporate sites; indeed, following the premiere of the New Moon trailer on the MTV Movie Awards, Finke declared the traffic stats “astounding“:
Summit Entertainment has a count of 4.2 million views for the New Moon trailer from MySpace, and another 1.6 million from MTV.com, so that’s 5.8 million combined views in the first 24 hours from its two domestic online launch partners. By comparison, the 3rd (and last) trailer for Twilight received 3.2 million views in its first 48 hours on MySpace, piddling compared to viewership for the sequel’s trailer.
The hype — and monetary potential — is huge. In a tight market, Twilight content has emerged as one of the few sure bets.
Which is also why Twilight drives the content of small and middling blogs, including this one. While I honestly did not write my post “Why Kristen Stewart Matters” with the intent of garnering massive attention, part of me certainly did know that such a post was more likely to get picked up by the likes of MovieCityNews, which had previously linked to several of my star-based posts. And yet, as I’ve explained before, I had no idea that a small blog post could spread — or be valuable — to as many readers as it did. It was Tweeted and re-Tweeted, Facebooked, posted on a dozen Twilight blogs, discussion boards, and Livejournals. When Lainey Gossip linked to me, the traffic went through the roof — over 12,500 hits in a single 24-hour period. I’m still regularly receiving new links to the original post (and the meta-post on Twilight hate mail that followed).
And then there’s the photos. One of the photos I posted of Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson has already garnered 40,000 hits. It’s nested in the piece, of course, but people get there via some sort of image search — which means that such hits do and do not count. Some stay and read the piece; most are just looking for a picture of them touching each other in magic hour lighting (see below).
KStew and RPattz's Money Shot (at least as far as my blog goes)
Of course, since I’m a non-profit blogger, hits have very little financial value. But what happens when I attempt to use my blog as a proto-academic achievement? How do I emphasize the reach of my posts and the blog in general? Are hits an appropriate measure? If they are, shouldn’t I just switch the entire topic of this blog to Twilight? Alternately, if I want to use advertising to pay off the student loans accrued while attending an academic institution that insists on paying its Ph.D. students beneath the poverty line while requiring us to pay up to $1000 per semester in ‘fees’ (n.b., I have no qualms in outing our university, especially since state law prevents us from unionizing and thus challenging exploitative labor practices), hits certainly do matter.
Which is all to say that content — ‘professional,’ ‘journalistic,’ academic, gossip — is motivated by trends and results. It’s not necessarily rooted in what’s happening in the industry (although Twilight and its production company, Summit, are certainly indicative of currents in the industry as a whole) but in what audiences are most motivated. This is why some shows with small but vocal (and motivated) fan bases can compel certain shows to stay on the air: not because networks are necessarily sympathetic to pleas of ‘it’s quality TV,’ but because they recognize the potency of the show’s fans. And Twilight fans, like those of Gossip Girl and Vampire Diaries, are female, between the ages of 12 and 40, and ready to spend. On spin-offs, for info, for premiere tickets, to see sneak preview footage. They pay with actual dollars, but they also pay with their time: through internet searches, repeat trailer viewings, and gossip site searches.
Richard Corman’s famous “Peter Pan Theory” stated that you should always pitch a movie to a 19-year-old boy in order to get the broadest audience. The enormous summer gross of Transformers 2 certainly proves the thesis true. But Twilight, whose four books have dominated the New York Times best seller list for the last two years (and, with New Moon, is poised to become one of the top advance ticket sellers of all time) is proving that the cross-mediated text — and its enormous potential for exploitation — should cater to the girls.
You Lookin' at Me? Robert De Niro and the Cult of Anti-Stardom
A rare De Niro Candid
Do you realize how difficult it is to find pictures of Robert De Niro? Obviously I could find dozens of De Niro as Travis Bickle, or De Niro as Jake La Motta, or De Niro as Jack Byrnes in Meet the Parents. Unlike 95% of stars and famous actors, De Niro not only shelters himself (and his family) from paparazzi attention, but poses for precious few profile photos, period. Indeed, nearly all of the images readily available were screen caps, publicity stills, or a small handful of un-posed shots from Tribeca and other mandatory public appearances.
An even rarer De Niro Paparazzi Shot
In other words, sticking with our understanding of a star as an actor whose private life has become equally, if not more, important to his/her image as his/her actual film roles, De Niro is no star. He’s perhaps our greatest living actor, but his private life has always been — and remains — almost wholly unknown.
Of course, his biography can be recited — it’s right here on Wikipedia, filled with details of his childhood, his early theater roles (his first role was as the lion in The Wizard of Oz), his subsequent work with the Actor’s Studio, and the eventual move to film and long-term collaboration with Scorsese. But apart from the fact of his parents’ occupations and the milieu of his childhood, the available details are all work posturing as intimate knowledge. We know nothing of De Niro other than the facts of his marriages (he has had two), children (apparently he has fathered four and adopted one, although the details are unclear). His first wife, Diahnne Abbott, had appeared in Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. He had a son in 1998. But again, these are facts, not stories. He owns a large amount of real estate in TriBeCa; he co-owns hot-spot restaurants Nobu and TriBeCa Grill; he started the up-and-coming TriBeCa film festival. He has directed two films, both to moderate praise (A Bronx Tale and The Good Shepherd). He is said to spend a fair amount of time dining in his restaurants and Jay-Z even name drops him in the recent hit “Empire State of Mind.”
De Niro’s image, then, is built on a series of highly iconic roles and business decisions. He has a distinct “picture personality,” to borrow from Richard DeCordova — as in very early cinema, before the studios realized they could up the demand for their actors by releasing tidbits of their private lives, audiences strung together their conception of De Niro through knowledge of his various roles. In other words, our knowledge of his supposed ‘personality’ is predicated on his actual ‘pictures.’ You, dear readers, support this very conclusion: when I queried my Facebook and Twitter followers as to their immediate associations with De Niro, the answers either explicitly invoked film roles, (“You Talkin’ to Me?”/The Godfather/shooting Bridget Fonda in Jackie Brown/Ben Stiller rolling off a roof/Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas/A Bronx Tale), his financial moves (Tribeca), and his physical appearance (short guy/’yummy’/DILF/mohawk/Italian).
Interestingly, one reader responded with “smirking. smarminess.” I find this particularly fascinating in light of the clip below, which purports to be an outtake from a promo shoot for Tribeca. (Thanks to Peter Alilunas over at Manvertised for directing me to it.)
As you can see, the persona reproduced here matches well with the ‘new De Niro’ — as if the psychosis and abjection of his early characters (especially in the Scorsese films) had been sublimated into the agitated portrayals of middle-class, middle-age men (in Meet the Parents in particular, but one could also argue for Analyze This and Analyze That as well).
This rare glimpse of the ‘real’ De Niro seems to authenticate the image of him gleaned from his roles — unlike a similar glimpse of the ‘real’ Christian Bale on the set of Terminator (and the alleged ‘abuse’ of his mother/sister) which usurped his image as a class-act/family man/forever-Laurie from Little Women. The clip is two years old and has been viewed under one million times, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work — it simply means that its existence is no revelation (it confirms, as opposed to compromises, our established understanding. Scandal — or massive YouTube hits — erupts when what we thought was true turns out to be false.)
Which brings us to the idea of De Niro as caricature. Several respondees (granted, most of them cinephiles or media aficionados more generally) indicated that De Niro primarily signifies as a parody or caricature of his former self, as he’s poured all his energy and resources into profiting off his mere presence in films co-produced by Tribeca Productions, most notably Hide and Seek, Righteous Kill, and What Just Happened. Righteous Kill was particularly (un)remarkable, as it paired De Niro with another acting legend of a similar age — Al Pacino — to lackluster effect and dismal reviews (21% on Rotten Tomatoes). The pairing could have been explosive (think of their few shared moments together in Heat) but this was the wrong movie, with the wrong script, wrong dialogue, and a premise that depended too heavily on both De Niro and Pacino’s iconic images.
Importantly, these ‘late’ De Niro roles are working with a subdued and defanged version of his early characters. Think of his role in Goodfellas as Jimmy Conway, when he’s been unnaturally aged — silver haired, reading glasses. That was 1990, and he was made to look the way he does now in films. But something violent and precarious undulated beneath Jimmy Conway’s aging exterior: when he attempts to show Karen Hill (Lorraine Bracco) a warehouse full of furs, you are terrified of what he might or might not do.
De Niro as an older Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas
I would argue that part of the magic of De Niro’s early performances was rooted in his cult of anti-stardom. Because we didn’t know anything else about him, he very well could have been as fearsome as the characters he so fully inhabited. Looking at his papers in the Harry Ransom Center here at the University of Texas, I’m struck by a man so devoted to his characters that he would edit an entire version of a script (as he does in the files for Casino) as if Ace Rothstein himself were reading the script and commenting on his own portrayal. (I’m also interested in the motivation for the donation of his papers to the HRC in the first place — apparently he was inspired by Scorsese’s donation of his personal files to Wesleyan, and he received no payment, unlike, say, Paul Schrader. He’s even funding a number of research fellowships, and apparently loves the idea of students thinking through his performances. It’s as if he acknowledges that those roles are out for public consumption, and people can know about his acting and ‘work’ as much as they’d like. It’s the non-acting side of his life he keeps close.)
In some ways, the mystique of De Niro’s anti-stardom has been evacuated by these late roles. But then again, what are his choices? One can only imagine the tremendous toll of thirty years of playing the likes of Travis Bickle, Jake La Motta, and Max Cady (terrifying in Scorsese’s Cape Fear). While I obviously know nothing of De Niro as a man — other than what I have been able to glean from the very work-centric papers at the HRC — I imagine that these late roles are a mellowing of sorts. Look, for example, to the trailer for his forthcoming family drama Everybody’s Fine with Drew Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, and Melissa Leo, in which he plays a widower attempting to reconnect with his grown children:
Who’s to say this role is any less method acting than that of, say, Jimmy Doyle in New York, New York? He may not have learned to play the saxophone for the role, but I oftentimes think we’re too keen to award and overvalue acting that is either bombastic, ugly, manic, or different in some ways. Playing serial killers, social misfits, and general victims = good, hard acting. Playing normal guys with subtle problems = not work. The files on De Niro’s latest films have been slowly trickling into the HRC, and it’ll be fascinating to see how his process manifests differently on Hide and Seek (a horror film with Dakota Fanning), his voice work on Shark Tale, or when he’s behind the camera on The Good Shepherd.
Ultimately, I do agree that De Niro’s ‘picture personality’ has changed. But he’s supposedly working with Scorsese again, and I look forward to seeing him act off Rockwell and Leo. I like old, sad men — and what can De Niro do with quiet grief? It could be disappointing, but it could also be beautiful.
I suppose that with so many voices saying he’s washed up, I still find him — and his choices, including his continued anti-stardom — fascinating and compelling. When and if he comes to the HRC, his aura will overwhelm me, no matter how many Little Fockers he makes. Some stars stop working altogether and arrest their images, whether by choice (Garbo) or by death (Dean, Monroe). But even those who do not — who, like Brando, appear in Superman for a ludicrous sum of money and retreat to their South Pacific island — remain powerful in our minds. De Niro and Brando are very different, especially since Brando’s personal life became such a fundamental part of his star image in later years. I can’t imagine the same happening in any way for De Niro. But both men offered performances that remain touchstones of American cinema and dramatically altered our understandings of what masculinity and a masculine body and mind could resemble. So let De Niro pay for his kids’ college funds and cultivate film and filmmaking in New York. I’ll be watching Everybody’s Fine with the subconscious fear that he’ll pull a Rupert Pupkin (from The King of Comedy) and kidnap Jerry Lewis and highjack late night television at any moment. Such is the power of past performance — I’m not thinking of who his kids are, or what jacket he wears when he goes jogging, but of his actual body of work. And it’s something, especially when we think about the division between ‘actors’ and ‘stars,’ and whether it’s possible to maintain that division in an increasingly intolerant market for actual acting and storylines, for us to consider.
Nikki Finke vs. The World
Nikki Finke, as imagined by The New Yorker
I’ve previously posted at length on Nikki Finke and her divisive role in New Hollywood — see also Alisa Perren’s nice take on the strife (and lack of public attention) around the war between Finke, Variety, and industry bloggers David Poland (The Hot Blog), Sharon Waxman (The Wrap), and Kim Masters (The Daily Beast).
My earlier post was incited by a short by succinct article on Finke by The New York Times. Yesterday, The New Yorker went live with a new article, available here (don’t worry, it’s not behind the pay wall), that has incited a bit of a Hollywood shitstorm, most of it fueled by Finke’s own incendiary rebuttal.
The article was authored by Tad Friend, a NYer staff writer who often pens the “Letter from California” or “Letter from Hollywood” section of the magazine. The article, available on newsstands today, is part of the magazine’s annual “Money Issue” — and explains why the piece takes the tact that it does, reporting on Finke’s leverage within the industry of Hollywood (as opposed to, say, a gossip columnist’s leverage in celebrity culture).
For me, there are several salient points of the article:
1.) Nikki Finke is not, or at least is no longer, a journalist. She feels no need to heed journalistic ‘ethics,’ however one defines them.
2.) Nikki Finke is not a gossip columnist.
3.) Nikki Finke does not care about movies, per se.
4.) Nikki Finke cares about power, reputation, and melodrama.
In other words, the comparison between her and the “unholy three” gossip mavens — Friend enumerates them as Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper, and Sheilah Graham — is, like the New York Times‘ comparison to Walter Winchell, off the mark.
We love to tell stories — and write profiles — by evoking the personas of others: George Clooney is the new Cary Grant (I did that one myself); Lady Gaga is the new Madonna; Angelina Jolie is the new Elizabeth Taylor. Journalistic profiles especially take this tact: either by photographing the celebrity/persona in a manner evocative of other historical figures (one of Annie Leibowitz/Vanity Fair‘s favorite traditions) or dropping specific allusions throughout the article.
But such comparisons leave much to be desired, especially as all four of the classic gossip columinsts were working in classic Hollywood — and the stakes, not to mention the ‘rules’ — were incredibly different. Winchell dealt with New York cafe society and, to some extent, Hollywood; the others were concerned with the studios and the stars employed by them.
By contrast, Finke writes about money, agents, deals, and massive media conglomerates with international holdings across film, television, print, new media, and hardware. The old school columnists wrote for the public at large; Finke writes specifically for the industry — and does not deign to modify her style to an Entertainment Weekly/Tonight-style industry news.
Finally, Finke is ridiculously brazen. So were the other columnists, but none would have dared to have posted the following:
I’m too superficial to read The New Yorker because it’s so unrelentingly boring. Even the cartoons suck these days. So back in 2008, soon after the writers strike ended, I said no when The New Yorker first approached me to cooperate for a profile. Fast forward to this summer, when the mag was desperate to liven up this week’s dullsville “Money Issue” with some Tinseltown mockery.
Or further indict the publication for collusion/hypocrisy:
I found Tad Friend, who covers Hollywood from Brooklyn, easy to manipulate, as was David Remnick, whom I enjoyed bitchslapping throughout but especially during the very slipshod factchecking process. (Those draconian Conde Nast budget cuts have deflated the infamous hubris of this New Jersey dentist’s son.) But I wasn’t the only one able to knock out a lot of negative stuff in the article without even one lawyer letter, email, or phone call. I witnessed how The New Yorker really bent over for Hollywood. NYC power publicist Steven Rubenstein succeeded in deleting every reference to Paramount’s Brad Grey. Warner Bros and Universal and DreamWorks and William Morris/Endeavor and Summit Entertainment execs and flacks and consultants also had their way with the mag. (They were even laughing about it. When I asked one PR person what it took to convince Tad to take out whole portions of the article, the response was, “I swallowed.”)
Or, for that matter, drop the C-bomb — first by putting the word in Weinstein’s mouth, and then by appropriating it herself:
At Harvey Weinstein’s personal behest, his description of me as a “cunt” became “jerk”. (Then the article would have contained two references to me as a “cunt” in addition to its four uses of ”fuck”. Si Newhouse must be so proud…) And so on. Now remember, readers: you, too, can make The New Yorker your buttboy. Just act like a cunt and treat Remnick like a putz and don’t give a fuck.
Of course, all of this is, as my former adviser and secret gossip aficionado Michael Aronson pointed out, part of Finke’s own plan to a.) direct massive amounts of traffic to her site and b.) reify her image. She’s already known within the industry as cutthroat and crude — the article, and her response to it, simply amplify that image, making it available for (quasi) popular consumption.
Finke will never be Perez Hilton, but she does live and report on Hollywood, which has enjoyed a long and spirited feud with New York. Indeed, as Anne Thompson, Finke, and others point out, Friend’s “Letter from Hollywood” only highlights how out of touch even a reporter tasked with knowing the business really is. He’s an outsider — and will remain so. A tourist on sunny vacation, believing what’s whispered in his ear as truth.
Interestingly, I think both Hollywood (embodied by Finke, Thompson, Variety, and all the other industry bloggers and journalists) and New York (represented here by The New Yorker) are suffering from inferiority complexes, perhaps rooted in the fact that neither industry (Hollywood or New York Publishing) have figured out how to monetize their old media forms in the new media environment, perhaps best evidenced by Variety‘s plans to move back to a pay wall, The Hollywood Reporter going from a daily to a weekly, and today’s announcement that Conde Naste was eliminating Gourmet. Even Finke, who sold her site to mail.com for a reported $10 million, gets relatively little traffic — granted, most of it is very loyal, but we’re not talking huge ad dollars.
This brings us back to Alisa Perren’s interesting observation about the non-hoopla over the ‘brawl’ between these entities — sure, Finke, Thompson, Variety, and all these other players hate each other; sure, Ari Emanuel colludes with Finke and alienates other parts of Hollywood; sure, Finke said she ‘bitchslapped’ the editor-in-chief of one of the nation’s long-established high brow weeklies.
But does any of it matter when T-Mobile’s Sidekick service is down, one of the Real Housewives of Atlanta’s ex-fiance was murdered, and there’s sweet zombie movie in theaters? This is great gossip for those of us interested in the machinations of Hollywood and media more generally, but rather banal for everyone else. That’s why Finke is not Winchell, Hopper, or Parsons: those columnists had loyal audiences numbering in the millions. Their subtle insinuations may not have always been legible to those not ‘in the know,’ but their gossip about clothes, romance, and betrayal was still readily consumable and spurred discussion in circles outside of The Ivy.
The question, then, is if Nikki Finke swears up a storm and no one, or at least relatively no one, really hears her, does it even make a sound? I suppose the answer would be yes: posts Finke writes and deals she scoops have real ramifications on the types of media that we consume. But I’m still dubious as to whether or not Finke is a gossip so much as a power-hungry, popularity-obsessed instigator. She doesn’t make public appearances, but that simply ups her rep. Again, I’m tempted to make the comparison to Lew Wasserman, who eschewed publicity and, like Finke, had but one or two photos of himself in public circulation — and still controlled Hollywood for much of the postclassical period. But Wasserman was an agent, actually making deals and profiting off of them — and Finke is just writing about them and calling names. Which doesn’t necessarily make her less influential — of all people, I celebrate and appreciate the tremendous power of discourse — but does, in some ways, put her in perspective.
Transformers Crew REALLY Hates Megan Fox: "She has the press fooled."
Megan Fox and Transformers Director Michael Bay
Megan Fox has been doing heavy promotion duty for Jennifer’s Body, which is currently screening at TIFF. As she has been wont to do (see my previous post on the cultivation of her image), she made an offhand, outlandish quip, only this time she compared Transformers director Michael Bay to Hitler, and then some:
God, I really wish I could go loose on this one. He’s like Napoleon and he wants to create this insane, infamous mad-man reputation. He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is. So he’s a nightmare to work for but when you get him away from set, and he’s not in director mode, I kind of really enjoy his personality because he’s so awkward, so hopelessly awkward. He has no social skills at all. And it’s endearing to watch him. He’s vulnerable and fragile in real life and then on set he’s a tyrant. Shia and I almost die when we make a Transformers movie. He has you do some really insane things that insurance would never let you do.
The press picked it up, threw it around a bit — Cinematical and Nikki Finke made fun — and then this bombshell from three anonymous crew members from Transformers. It was initially posted on Bay’s website, but has since been taken down, as I’ll explain below. It’s long, but I’ve highlighted the juicy parts.
This is an open letter to all Michael Bay fans. We are three crew members that have worked with Michael for the past ten years. Last week we read the terrible article with inflammatory, truly trashing quotes by the Ms. Fox about Michael Bay. This letter is to set a few things straight.
Yes, Megan has great eyes, a tight stomach we spray with glycerin, and an awful silly Marilyn Monroe tattoo plastered on her arm that we cover up to keep the moms happy.
Michael found this shy, inexperienced girl, plucked her out of total obscurity thus giving her the biggest shot of any young actresses’ life. He told everyone around to just trust him on his choice. He granted her the starring role in Transformers, a franchise that forever changed her life; she became one of the most googled and oogled women on earth. She was famous! She was the next Angelina Jolie, hooray! Wait a minute, two of us worked with Angelina – second thought – she’s no Angelina. You see, Angelia is a professional.
We know this quite intimately because we’ve had the tedious experience of working with the dumb-as-a-rock Megan Fox on both Transformers movies. We’ve spent a total of 12 months on set making these two movies.
We are in different departments; we can’t give our names because sadly doing so in Hollywood could lead to being banished from future Paramount work. One of us touches Megan’s panties, the other has the often shitty job of pulling Ms. Sourpants out of her trailer, while another is near the Panaflex camera that helps to memorialize the valley girl on film.
Megan has the press fooled. When we read those magazines we wish we worked with that woman. Megan knows how to work her smile for the press. Those writers should try being on set for two movies, sadly she never smiles. The cast, crew and director make Transformers a really fun and energetic set. We’ve traveled around the world together, so we have never understood why Megan was always such the grump of the set?
When facing the press, Megan is the queen of talking trailer trash and posing like a porn star. And yes we’ve had the unbearable time of watching her try to act on set, and yes, it’s very cringe-able. So maybe, being a porn star in the future might be a good career option. But make-up beware, she has a paragraph tattooed to her backside (probably due her rotten childhood) — easily another 45 minutes in the chair!
So when the three of us caught wind of Ms Fox, pontificating yet again in some publication (like she actually has something interesting to say) blabbing her trash mouth about a director whom we three have grown to really like. She compared working with Michael, to “working with Hitler”. We actually don’t think she knows who Hitler is by the way. But we wondered how she doesn’t realize what a disgusting, fully uneducated comment this was? Well, here let’s get some facts straight.
Say what you want about Michael – yes at times he can be hard, but he’s also fun, and he challenges everyone for a reason – he simply wants people to bring their ‘A’ game. He comes very prepared, knows exactly what he wants, involves the crew and expects everyone to follow through with his or her best, and that includes the actors. He’s one of the hardest working directors out there.
He gets the best from his crews, many of whom have worked with him for 15 years. And yes, he’s loyal, one of the few directors we’ve encountered who lowered his fee by millions to keep Transformers in the United States and California, so he could work with his own crew.
Megan says that Transformers was an unsafe set? Come on Megan, we know it is a bit more strenuous then the playground at the trailer park, but you don’t insult one of the very best stunt and physical effects teams in the business! Not one person got hurt!
And who is the real Megan Fox? She is very different than the academy nominee and winning actors we’ve all worked around. She’s as about ungracious a person as you can ever fathom. She shows little interest in the crew members around her. We work to make her look good in every way, but she’s absolutely never appreciative of anyone’s hard work. Never a thank you. All the crewmembers have stopped saying hi to Ms. Princess because she never says hello back. It gets tiring. Many think she just really hates the process of being an actress.
Megan has been late to the sets many times. She goes through the motions that make her exude this sense of misery. We’ve heard the A.D’s piped over the radio that Megan won’t walk from her trailer until John Turturro walks first! John’s done seventy-five movies and she’s made two!
Never expect Megan to attend any of the 15 or so crew parties like all the other actors have. And then there’s the classless night she blew off The Royal Prince of Jordan who made a special dinner for all the actors. She doesn’t know that one of the grips’ daughters wanted to visit their daddy’s work to meet Megan, but he wouldn’t let them come because he told them “she is not nice.”
The press certainly doesn’t know her most famous line. On our first day in Egypt, the Egyptian government wouldn’t let us shoot because of a permit problem as the actors got ready in make up at the Four Seasons Hotel. Michael tried to make the best of it; he wanted to take the cast and crew on a private tour of the famous Giza pyramids. God hold us witness, Megan said, “I can’t believe Michael is fucking forcing us to go to the fucking pyramids!” I guess this is the “Hitler guy” she is referring to.
So this is the Megan Fox you don’t get to see. Maybe she will learn, but we figure if she can sling insults, then she can take them too. Megan really is a thankless, classless, graceless, and shall we say unfriendly bitch. It’s sad how fame can twist people, and even sadder that young girls look up to her. If only they knew who they’re really looking up to.
But ‘fame’ is fleeting. We, being behind the scenes, seen em’ come and go. Hopefully Michael will have Megatron squish her character in the first ten minutes of Transformers 3. We can tell you that will make the crew happy!
-Loyal Transformers Crew
Whew. In the few hours since this was posted, Bay took down the letter and issued his own statement:
I don’t condone the crew letter to Megan. And I don’t condone Megan’s outlandish quotes. But her crazy quips are part of her crazy charm. The fact of the matter I still love working with her, and I know we still get along. I even expect more crazy quotes from her on Transformers 3.
So what’s going on here?
As Finke points out, crews lashing out at stars is not unprecedented: Bruce Willis once complained about crew salaries, blaming them for the rise in film costs (while he himself was netting $15 million a film). According to lore, he came to the studio lot the next day, parked his car, and returned from a meeting to find it absolutely blanketed in spit.
To my mind, the most significant part of the entire tirade isn’t the bit about her being pissed about visiting the pyramids, or even the suggestion that she become a porn star. Rather, it’s the truly scandalous idea that there are two sides to Megan Fox. The crew members’ disclosure establishes a very obvious bifurcation: there is a ’real’ Megan Fox (the one who’s a bitch on set, untalented, and ‘dumb as rocks’) and the ‘fake’ Megan Fox, who tells crazy stories to reporters and poses like a porn star.
Crew members are often figured as sources of authenticity: during Julia Roberts’ heyday in the early ’90s, almost every profile about her gushed about how fantastic she was with the crew, threw them parties, etc. etc. (And, not suprisingly, Roberts ended up marrying a member of the crew when she was working on The Mexican). Friendly to the crew = friendly to the ‘little people’ = friendly to us! Julia Roberts would be our friend! Such discourse was especially helpful when Steven Spielberg accused her of unprofessionalism on the set of Hook: Spielberg may have had a problem, but the crew — the stand-ins for her fans, and, in essence, for her audience — they were on her side.
But that’s not all. They also specifically address the idea of star and image production: by highlighting the fact that she was ‘plucked from obscurity’ by Bay, they gesture to the ways in which individuals (and, in this case, unknown individuals with nice bodies, who will require little salary but attract many boys) are molded and crafted for stardom. Of course, Fox was not in total obscurity when cast for Transformers, but her image coalesce into its current form following her casting in the film.
They also make explicit mention of her comparisons to Angelina Jolie….and declare her lacking. Lacking professionalism, specifically. Yet they are also implicitly suggesting that Fox cultivates the comparisons, and that they — the ‘real’ people, speakers of truth — find her derivative. She can’t act, she’s not a nice person, she’s ‘dumb as rocks,’ and has no future in the industry. Basically, she’s a fake, and you should feel duped if you thought anything else.
Now, whether or not such a prediction comes true is somewhat inconsequential. I’ll be fascinated, however, to see how this bit of information is picked up outside of the industry. Right now, I’ve read it on industry blogs and seen it mentioned in passing in various newspapers, but I want to see if the gossip mags do anything with it (and if you see it — please send it my way, even if it’s just a gossip blog).
The stakes are somewhat high: if this disclosure is further circulated and authenticated in mainstream discourse, it’ll significantly alter what ‘Megan Fox’ signifies. Put differently, it’ll change what her image means. So many already suspected her of fakeness: of constructing and cultivating her own image. In many ways, proof of such construction is the kiss of death — we love to think of stars as seamless, natural creations, regardless of the fact that all public personalities — whether Obama or Kim Kardashian or Meryl Streep — are in the business of image cultivation. But to let those seams show: that’s poor form. That’s sloppy publicity. Truly unprofessional, as the crew might say.
