It should have been the best weekend of his career. Christian Bale, the
British-born Hollywood megastar, was on home turf to promote his blockbuster
triumph The Dark Knight. But on Sunday night, July 20, just one day away
from his movie's UK premiere, the dream began to sour. After an alleged
fracas with his sister and mother in the Dorchester Hotel, Bale was reported
to the police. A media storm beckoned.
So did Bale do what any sensible Hollywood megastar would do in his position
and contact his publicist to conduct some damage limitation? Publicity guru
Mark Borkowski has his own theory about the sequence of events and Bale's
leisurely trip to the police station to answer questions the day after the
premiere. Borkowski thinks that “someone would have got involved with the
police at quite a high level and said, ‘Look, let's hold it [the story] for
48 hours.' And in that 48 hours the publicists seed the story to those
people that matter, the fans, and tell them what is going on.”
Whether that's true or not, for years PRs - that mysterious and dark breed of
fixers, stuntsters and arch media manipulators - have, for more than a
century now, been as fundamental to the Tinseltown fantasy as the Hollywood
sign itself. They are, according to Borkowski, in his new book The Fame
Formula, the hidden gatekeepers of the Hollywood dream machine “who guard
its formula, often to the death”. As recounted in his detailed analysis of
publicity through the ages, they are an invisible army of Machiavellian
schemers who were ferociously protective of thir clients. One arranged a
hasty abortion for Joan Crawford when she became pregnant from an affair
with Clark Gable. Publicists also covered up the fact that the sexually
rapacious Gable had apparently attended orgies with underage girls,
organised by the English actor Lionel Atwill. They hid Spencer Tracy's
alcoholism and his alleged affair with Judy Garland when she was only 14.
The sordid tales within the pages of The Fame Formula make Bale's alleged
indiscretion look inconsequential.
Even today, Borkowski, whose clients have included Michael Jackson, claims
that movie publicists are part of a powerful cabal who mostly go unnoticed,
who ruthlessly hold the media in their grasp and who “truly understand the
dark Conradian soul of man” (ie, our baser instincts). Some of the studio
publicists I approached refused to speak about their craft, while others
agreed to discuss it only anonymously.
The job is simply about being prepared, and being prepared to improvise, says
Charlotte Tudor, the vice-president of publicity at Walt Disney Studios
Motion Pictures UK and a veteran of the publicity business. “When talent
arrive in the UK for a press tour, they'll have an entourage with them of
anything from one to six people,” she says. “Our first job is to ensure a
smooth transition from plane to car to the hotel - where we've already got
the requisite blenders, running machines, masseurs and Kabbalah water in
place for their arrival.”
Over 24 frenetic hours, during which the “talent” will be interviewed, attend
a premiere and an after-premiere party, the publicist's resourcefulness will
be tested. “We book them dinners and shopping trips, we imagine what they
might want to see at the theatre and we book them tickets,” says Tudor. “We
organise dress alterations, sightseeing tours, and if they've got kids with
them we organise kids' activities. We've even been asked, at the last
minute, to find hair extensions for a big-name star who refused to leave her
hotel room to come down to the premiere until we got them - we went all
around London, through every hairdresser, until we found the right colour.
Those kind of requests stretch you.” Even after the after-premiere party,
she says, stars will announce that they want an after-after-party. “They say
they want to go to a club, and you've had to make sure you've made
reservations in three clubs in case they want to go to one of them.”
Until the very last minute of the tour, Tudor explains, the publicist is on
duty. “On one occasion a particular group refused, in the middle of the day,
to take off on their private plane until they had takeaway food from a very
expensive Chinese restaurant on board, even though the restaurant didn't
open till 7pm that night.”
In the midst of all this egocentric whimsy there is media exposure to be
accumulated. Tudor says that an internal study at Disney found that “the
estimated value of the Pirates of the Caribbean premiere, in print coverage
alone, was £1.4 million - ie, if you bought the equivalent space in pure
advertising it would cost that much money”.
Elsewhere, the coverage has to be gleaned the old-fashioned way - by sitting
down journalists in front of stars. Here, increasingly, the job of the
publicist is to tread the fine line between matching a “suitable” journalist
with the talent and choosing a craven sycophantic hack
who will play the promotional game. Borkowski certainly thinks that the latter
tendency dominates today. “Journalists have become an extension of the
industry,” he laments, “rather than a necessary foil.”
The bottom line is that you don't want a difficult interview, says another
publicist. “When journalists come in and ask dumb questions I'm very quickly
aware of it,” she says. “The talent will tell me immediately. And, of
course, I don't want regimented film coverage, but if somebody f***s me
over, then their publication is not going to get anything from us the next
time.”It's nothing personal. It's just a matter of getting the right
exposure and satisfying the PR's studio paymasters.
The battle between the media and the publicists, between what's desired and
what's on offer, has become more fraught in the information age. With the
fortunes of $100 million-dollar movies often resting on pieces of publicity
that can pulse around the planet in seconds, interviews are now
trouble-spots in otherwise uniform marketing campaigns. Thus, worried
publicists will terminate interviews mid-stream if their star is
floundering, or they will simply outline the subjects that cannot be
discussed before the interview begins (occasionally, this will be
accompanied by a signed declaration of intent).
In 1999, the US channel NBC's Today show fought the heavyweight Hollywood
publicist Pat Kingsley for the right to ask Calista Flockhart about her
weight issues. Kingsley refused and pulled Flockhart from the show; in
retaliation Today refused to interview any of Kingsley's clients. In the
book Borkowski relates that in the last interview Tom Cruise did for Rolling
Stone, his publicist turned down 14 journalists before agreeing on one.
But film publicists are not evil, says Borkowksi, or secretive or
Machiavellian. They are merely doing what they've always done - promoting
the dream. “It is what the public wants,” Borkowski says. “In a recession,
in a downturn, the movies will survive because people want to step inside,
into this world, and to be released. They want to be part of the fantasy.”
The Fame Formula by Mark Borkowski is published by Sidgwick & Jackson
(£16.99)
Five of Hollywood's biggest PR disasters
War of the Worlds
(Steven Spielberg, 2005)
Tom Cruise's couch acrobatics on The Oprah Winfrey Show (above) took the shine
off the release. Cruise's decision to sack his long-term publicist and
employ his Scientologist sister was blamed by many.
Empire of the Sun
(Steven Spielberg, 1987)
A 12-year-old Christian Bale decided that he had had enough and stormed out of
a press conference in Paris.
The Lost Weekend
(Billy Wilder, 1945)
Warner Bros publicist Jim Moran decided to promote Wilder's serious drama
about alcoholism by trying to get a hoot owl drunk, to test the American
idiom “as drunk as a hoot owl”.
Nine Months
(Chris Columbus, 1995)
On the eve of the release of his rom-com, Hugh Grant was arrested in Hollywood
for soliciting the services of prostitute Divine Brown. The story got Grant
acres of coverage - and Nine Months flopped.
Fahrenheit 9/11
(Michael Moore, 2004)
Moore arrived in Cannes to promote the film that went on to win the Palme
d'Or. Unfortunately, he behaved like such a prima donna that his PR team
resigned.
KEVIN MAHER and WENDY IDE
