Posts Tagged ‘Add new tag’

The media post mortem following Michael Jackson’s death, which shows no signs of abating, has unearthed some astounding observations. With the tearful tributes, the questions about cause of death, the demand for a second post mortem, potential custody battles over his children and the absence of any will and testament, I can’t help feeling that the greatest tragedy in this whole sad affair, is the unadulterated exploitation of a man who was clearly disturbed and at the mercy of a number of charlatans.
Of course show business is exactly what it claims to be – business – and it’s always been the same for stars. Very few have had real control, whether you’re talking about Buster Keaton, Judy Garland or Marilyn Monroe. But there’s usually a team of people behind the star who know how to make money and keep the brand going, but with Jackson he seems to have been constantly exploited, either by those in his entourage or by his family.
The word is that the pressure on Jackson to perform fifty dates at the O2 arena contributed to his untimely death. Wouldn’t his fitness to perform have been checked in a medical before the ten dates turned into fifty. Surely the heart would be the major organ to feature in such medicals?
It’s been suggested that the sharp rise in the number of dates was also responsible for Jackson losing his nerve, another issue that needed treatment from his “private” doctor. But why was Jackson playing fifty dates at the O2 when he could have played eleven dates at Wembley Stadium to the same amount of fans. The o2 holds 20,000 and Wembley Stadium holds 90,000. Weighing in at only 8 stone, with a suspected pill habit, why did Jackson’s advisors think it beneficial for him to do fifty dates instead of eleven?
It seems that Wembley has been overtaken as the definitive rock venue by the O2, which is hoovering up all the gigs. But there was a time, a few years back, when you couldn’t pay anyone to set foot in the place; now it’s the mecca for rock music, made cool by the likes of Led Zeppelin and Prince. The turn in fortune for the o2 was partly down to Rob Hallett, the head of the o2’s programming who was purportedly the man behind the increase in the number of Jackson dates. He was backed by Randy Phillips who heads up AEG worldwide- both parties no doubt benefiting extensively from this business deal. The statement released this morning that AEG intends to treat the Jackson fans with as much respect as Jackson himself did is rather jarring considering the statement was accompanied by a calculated publicity stunt.
This must be the biggest single event to be cancelled – ever. The tickets have been sold internationally, via internet sellers, through agents and touts and on ebay, making a vast network of ticket owners. The idea, then, that AEG is offering the fans a choice of a refund for the ticket price or the concert ticket itself as a souvenir, which could be worth something in years to come, is a stroke of (obvious) PR genius.
The cost of a paper ticket will have been a fraction of the price of the ticket value, and a large proportion of those fans will probably opt for the ticket rather than a refund as it will be one of the last items of Jackson memorabilia available to them. Handy really for AEG, as it turns out they are apparently only insured for ten Jackson dates. If, however, they are hoping that people will go for the ticket as a possible investment, the people who booked tickets should be aware that there are 1 million of them and this doesn’t make for much of a limited edition. AEG might have done better to promise some of the money to a Jackson-friendly charity.
Jackson was surrounded on both sides by people draining him – by fans on one side, who drooled over his every word and on the other by people making money out of him who kept him divorced from reality. He always surrounded himself with sharp operators who were top-notch at short-term brand work – but no one who could play the long game, which would explain all the difficulties that dogged throughout his life. I worked with him once, briefly, a long time ago, and his people always had their own agenda. I was unable to work with his entourage as I was just a pawn in a multifaceted chess game. Jackson, however, was just a puppet in the middle.
The same is true in death; the scrum to loot Jackson’s brand is underway and, like the beat, it will probably go on and on. The Jackson brand will never be laid to rest.

Now, people are free to turn Michael Jackson into what they always wanted him to be; the perfect pop prince who will be spotted living on the moon with Elvis one of these days, humming a few bars of Thriller. Death cleanses people like Jackson; all the negative copy has been laid to rest on the man himself. Instead it is being directed at the sharks gathering at his coffin side, the whole dysfunctional family, who have come to loot what they can. AEG are benefiting, albeit inadvertently, from Jackson’s death, but many others are cashing in on the Jackson brand whether it be via merchandising or creating DVDs from Jackson’s upcoming show rehearsal clips. Jackson’s father, however, is using this time to launch a record label as a method of mourning.

Jackson is, simply, worth more dead than alive – his death allows his life to become the Disney fairy tale he always wanted it to be. And, like a Disney fairy tale, all the really strange and unfortunate aspects of Michael Jackson’s life have been excised.

He will be buried at Neverland, the palace he built to try and contain his long-lost youth, after being carried through the streets of LA in a glass coffin placed on a carriage drawn by white horses and followed by a motorcade and doubtless hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people will come to watch. This was the family’s idea of a special send off

Jackson is being Dianified. And on top of that I have it on good authority that there are plans already afoot to create holograms of Jackson that will, effectively, keep him as a ‘living’ presence for evermore. Imagine it – Michael Jackson, permanently fit unless there’s a powercut, playing Vegas forever. It really wouldn’t surprise me if holographic technology were brought forward by decades just to achieve this.

Put any misgivings about Jade Goody’s Barnumesque three-ring Circus sideshow to one side for moment. Instead, focus on the silver fox who has been the undisputed ringmaster of recent events in her life; Max Clifford.

He may not be attired in a garish ring suit, but Max Clifford is clearly visible as the man, centre stage, pulling the financial strings. This is not written as a genuflection to the cult of Clifford, more as an explanation of the reality; he is doing something more than a mere job – he is reacting to the peccadilloes of the age.

Clearly it is necessary for him to either not care about Jade or refuse to be paid to do that job; to carry it off, he has to place himself into a zone devoid of any emotion. Max remains calm, confident and never flustered despite the slings and arrows aimed at him. His style of delivery has been criticized but it is deliberate, matter of fact. Max is a spokesman; he is doing a job that few can deliver. Reminiscent of a river pilot steering his charge through dangerous and congested waters, Max vigilantly avoids all the sandbanks that might scupper the good ship of any celebrity brand he is steering. Max has always functioned in the wasteland between public merit and clandestine vice, creating content for the curtain-twitching masses–none of whom will ever admit to their trivia addiction.

This weekend was a high water mark in the celebrity-obsessed world we have allowed to prosper. The enduring picture we have taken away from Jade Goody’s wedding, however, was not the pitiful Goody forcing a smile through the pain; it was Max, surrounded by a sea of microphones and flanked by camera lenses. Like an effortless high wire act juggling nine clubs, he kept the media audience outside and inside the big top entertained in a style that few understand, measuring each sound bite for maximum effect.

Waspish bourgeois media dinner parties, I am sure, have a curt point of view regarding Clifford’s modus operandi. But they fail to comprehend his skill. Yes, he has enemies but he knows the power of collateral. For decades he has not compromised his style; he knows what works and the power of his personal business relationships. He’s happier to operate openly, on the phone and in the flesh. His skill can’t be replicated by a miracle app. Max has not bowed to the digital age and his instinct, shaped by decades of experience, is impossible to learn without years in the foxhole. Despite operating in the age of time compression, Max confounds the 24-7 swirl. His telltale grey hair is an insignia, a livery, which indicates his membership of a unique Guild that few have the skill or stamina to join.

I have often observed his methods of dealing with each media ruck and marvelled at his deft hand-off passes, reminiscent of the Welsh wizard Gareth Edwards in full flow. He is an adept distracter who knows how to deliver up a sound byte in an utterly disarming fashion whilst keeping the uber-media paymaster happy. He’s more than aware that one false move, one slip, could lead to a chain reaction that could negate the final payment of the big check.

When the cameras stop rolling and Jade becomes a sad footnote in Celebrity-ville, Max will pop up again and again; he is a brand and he occupies a unique place in the media landscape. If you’re in the public eye and you need to exploit your 15 months of fame quickly, he is accessible. Max has his finger on the pulse.

It seems to me that his type of PR has been genetically engineered in the last 15 years to suit the times. But, despite this engineering, I do not see any Clifford clones or heirs to his throne coming up through the ranks. Is this because of the way PR is retrenching, underscoring the inability of the new breed to come to terms with the ever-shifting churn of media from both side of the fence? Or will the next few years create a world where celebrity will not be able to command the fees that a new Max can make a meaningful profit from?

There are a number of PR people out there who need to take a clear look at Max Clifford. These are the people who decry his tactics and lampoon his deadpan manner with the press, the people who are rushing headlong into the digital media age without any grounding in the skills that have made him such a success; most notably the 360 degree vision that allows him to spot incoming missiles before they hit, be they aimed at him or his clients. Regardless of what anyone thinks of him, there is much that can be learned from him.

To some, Max Clifford will be an apotheosis of the media and to others the rationale for moral intervention, but he is first and foremost a creation of the media and of his clients. His success in finding a continually crashing wave of “sordid human interest” stories for the tabloid press has been unparalleled over the last 20 years, a new age that has seen the boundaries of morality and taste shifting significantly.

He is a prime example of the squalor of the universal global media. Without modern media poverty, he could never have been successful. The future for Max is to help people amortize the moral morass because the morality compass was demagnetized decades ago and he is one of the few people still making it twitch.

Make no mistake, the floorboards of his office will creak under the weight of many more scandals for years yet.

As I mentioned yesterday, there’s a star name being attached to a possible Maynard Nottage biopic – and that name has been revealed in today’s Daily Mail, in Richard Kay’s column.

He says: “Uber PR Mark Borkowski’s rediscovery of Twenties Hollywood publicist Maynard Nottage has caught the eye of actor Dustin Hoffman, who wants to play the notoriously hard-drinking womaniser on screen.

“For his best-selling book The Fame Formula, Borkowski researched the life of Nottage, the Forrest Gump of his era whose talents stretched from touring with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show to indirectly helping the Nazis adopt black shirts and the swastika.

“Nottage, who died in 1965 as an outcast from the big Hollywood studios, had been largely forgotten when his granddaughter gave his collected papers to Borkowski.”

To read more, click here and scroll down the page.

It’s been a frenetic 48 hours, dealing with the Times’ article, printed today, which suggests that Maynard Nottage is a hoax. Well, he’s not. Or, as I was quoted in the Times, “Did I consider I was being hoaxed? Of course I did. But I don’t think so.”

The reason for my belief is this: Nottage’s rough collection of papers, the majority of which were written in hindsight in the 1940s and 50s, were handed to me after lengthy negotiation with his cautious family, just prior to writing The Fame Formula, at the beginning of 2007.

Nottage’s family was deeply ashamed of the drunk and bitter old man who was left in the cold by Hollywood for 35 years and it took some persuading to get them to give up his secrets, and they only did so with certain caveats attached, such as the assurance that I would not reveal the true name of Nottage’s grand-daughter, who appears in the book under the pseudonym Lynda Fairweather, and that I would not glorify Maynard Nottage.

From reading his papers, it is clear that Nottage had ten or so good years in the movie publicity industry in the very early days, when the media was in its infancy, and became such a liability by the early 1920s that he was excised entirely. Publicists were not held in high esteem by the rest of Hollywood; they were routinely dismissed until people like Henry Rogers and Warren Cowan made them a little more respectable in the 1950s.

As I say in The Fame Formula: “The past meant little in Hollywood, but the people who mattered had long memories.” And long knives, too. It is not hard to imagine people like Howard Strickling, Eddie Mannix, William Randolph Hearst et al wanting to suppress the anarchic, drunken Nottage, if only to make their professions seem more respectable and less prone to embarrassment. Nottage was certainly a difficult and at times unpleasant man and I believe I have portrayed him warts and all, as the family wished.

As to the stories that Richard Evans believes are a little too far fetched to be true, that may well be the case. I quoted them nonetheless, because they were in Nottage’s archive. There is much of Harry Reichenbach’s life that I had to take on trust also, and he is fairly well documented, albeit mostly in his own autobiography. It is far from easy to verify many of the stories he tells about his early life now.

Reichenbach, too, had until a few years ago all but vanished from the annals of movie history, warranting only a couple of mentions here and there, and he was the most successful publicist of the early silent era, the man who encouraged Disney to believe in Mickey Mouse.

It is the cautionary side to Nottage’s nature, and my intent to express his life as such, that finally persuaded his family to let me have his papers. It is interesting, also, to note that although a member of Nottage’s family actually spoke to one of the reporters at the Times, no mention was made of this conversation in the article.

Much has happened since the Times story went online, a lot of which has been reassuring. I have been sent any number of interested and supportive emails and have even received offers for a movie based on elements of The Fame Formula – of which, more later. It’ll be interesting to see just where this all leads. And, if I am to take a positive view of all that has happened, then at least the Frankfurt book fair is in full swing and the article’s timing will improve the book’s talkability there no end.

But most importantly, whatever Richard Evans (the freelancer who took the “hoax” story to the Times and who smugly congratulated himself for being the first person to raise this issue, despite The Scotsman beating him to it two months ago) may think, I stand by Maynard Nottage, a man who throws the publicity industry into sharp relief because he became so sucked into the fame industry that it destroyed him.

Thanks to http://www.radiobarking.com/ for turning me on to some rather good magazines
Girls and Corpses? “Well, if you’re like me –explains the author, writer Robert Steven “Corpsy” Rhine– you like two things: beautiful girls and rotting corpses. So, I thought, why not bring these two great tastes together in one magazine?”
Ahem!?
http://www.oddee.com/item_96476.aspx

I don’t believe it, Sarah Palin is on Twitter http://twitter.com/Sarah_Palin  Frankly I am more interested  in the fake Palin  http://twitter.com/FakeSarahPalin