Posts Tagged ‘fame formula’

A pal sent this snap to Borkowski Towers. I am excited and delighted to have discovered evidence of the person who bought my book – now, I wonder who she is?

I hope you’ll forgive me a brief bask in the news that The Fame Formula has crept back up the Amazon charts and is currently at number 4 in the Film and Performing Arts Bestseller list, as well as moving slowly back into the running in the overall chart.

It certainly seems like the Fame Formula is finding a life of its own again – I’ve recently received a number of emails and tweets from people who like the book. I’m humbled by their praise – and intrigued by one tweet that insists that the book has more to say about the ad industry than most books actually about the ad industry.
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I’ve had a dose of New Year cheer after yesterday’s blog – I’ve just learned that the episode of Eric Schwartzman’s wonderful weekly podcast On the Record, covering all the latest issues in the world of PR, in which I discussed The Fame Formula, is the second most popular download of last year. Most cheering of all, the interview was recorded in August 2008!

If you never heard the podcast, it’s still available by clicking here. It’s also well worth subscribing to the On the Record podcast – there’s always something interesting to listen to…

It’s been interesting to be following pre-Christmas sales on the internet for the last three or four days, for two reasons. One reason is personal – my book, The Fame Formula, has leapt up the Amazon sales chart by several thousand places in the last three days. The other reason is that I’ve been watching Rage Against the Machine’s 17 year old track, Killing in the Name Of, consistently outselling the X Factor winner’s song – an instantly forgettable motivational ballad from the Hannah Montana movie – thanks to the Facebook campaign set up by a couple bored with the ubiquity of Simon Cowell’s vision of music.

I have a theory that the two are connected, intellectually at the least. The Fame Formula is, under the surface, an antidote to fame, a prick in the bubble of modern celebrity. I am certain that the same sort of people who are downloading Killing in the Name Of are buying The Fame Formula simply because they are tired of prefabrication and relentless hype on a foundation of sand.

The Fame Formula examines the degredation of fame carefully and uses examples from history to expose the weak foundations that modern celebrity has been built on, where talent has been hoovered out leaving only a husk of toxic fame. The book celebrates the icons of the past who built, with the assistance of canny publicists, a lasting fame propogated by extraordinary talent; it also offers a view on how to achieve that today. It does not say the past is better – the aim of the book is (as it is with the Rage Against the Machine campaign) to offer alternatives for the future, using great moments from the past as a basis, a springboard.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if people wanting to overturn the Cowell vision of pop were buying the book to stock up on ideas. At last there seems to be a consensus of opinion agreeing with George Santayana, who said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” There seems to be a hunger for using the past to positively influence the future, at least in popular culture. If this is the case – and I hope it is – I’d say (with a little bias, admittedly) that The Fame Formula is a good place to start looking for ideas to adapt from.

If Rage Against the Machine’s refrain, “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me”, is the sound of Christmas this year, I hope people take courage from it and use social media and networking in ever more creative cultural (and social and political) interventions in the coming years. And if my book can help it happen, all the better.

I spoke on the BBC’s World Update yesterday about a 19 year old Wisconsin man who sold his name to an online Finnish electronics retailer via eBay. I discussed the pros and cons of this old idea – dating back to Jim Moran and Maynard Nottage, who both persuaded people to change their names to help promote clients in the early 20th century.

It may not be a wholly original stunt, but it is a clever and effective one for the internet age – it allows the Finnish company to get search engine optimisation in the run up to the festive season and keeps the newly unpronouncable man from Wisconsin in ready cash for a while. I think it’s a tremendous PR scam designed to get the public conversation going about the company in time for Christmas.

Here’s the MP3 version, if you’d like to hear more.

 

 Mark on BBC world update: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Our publicist which art in Chinawhite
shallowed be our names.
Thy quick-fix come,
thy stunts be run
in Heat as they are on Popbitch.
Give us this day our daily big-ups
and forgive us our coke deals
as we forgive those who report our coke deals to the press.
Lead us not into the Priory
and deliver us from journalists
for thine is the Twitter, the spin-cycle and the story
for fifteen months and forever.

Amen.

Adam Horovitz

Written after hearing that a chain of hotels frequented by celebrities, which are to be featured in a reality show, have asked to use The Fame Formula as a replacement for the Gideon’s Bible – something for the down-at-heel Z Lister to turn to for inspiration.

I gave an interview for Austrian radio last week on the nature of fame in the 21st Century. The podcast is available now but I am posting up the extract of my interview on this site.

Click here to listen to my comments on Fame on Austrian Radio or, to hear the full podcast, click here.

What do ex-pop star Dane Bowers and the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, have in common? They’re both publicity predators, prowling at the fringes of big news and ready to leap in and attach their teeth into the rump of a story that will get them attention.

Griffin is all over the news at the moment, attaching himself to the coat tails of the BNP’s London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook, who was invited to Buckingham Palace for a garden party and sought to bring Griffin as his significant other to the party. But Griffin, in true publicity predator style, has now consumed the story entirely.

According to the Daily Mail: “The leader of the British National Party yesterday pulled out of the Royal garden party following a public outcry over his invitation. Nick Griffin said he had ‘no wish to embarrass the Queen’ by attending Buckingham Palace on July 21.”

The far right have always been good at propaganda and at getting ink – Goebbels was an astonishing propagandist who turned the swastika into the world’s most recognisable brand logos. Griffin’s trick, learned from pop stars and the 24/7 news cycle, has been to insert himself into the soap opera of the news cycle. Soap, as we know, demands a rich mix of people and always rewards the most Machiavellian characters with big story lines.

You just have to look at Dane Bowers for proof. Bowers is back in the life of his ex, Katie Price aka Jordan, determinedly reinserting himself into the ongoing soap opera that is the Pete’n’Jordan bust up, calling her as his alibi after being arrested for drink driving outside her house. It’s a guaranteed method of reclaiming fame – this fresh injection of notoriety should last him a good fifteen months, even if he and Jordan are not an item again after all.

Griffin’s predatory ambitions are – at the moment, anyway – much more short term. He’s hoping to turn his ‘noble’ gesture to the Queen into votes at next week’s local and European elections. If that works, then the long game begins and Griffin the publicity predator will be red in tooth and claw.

In the meantime, both Griffin and Bowers are successfully writing themselves into the news-soap. For proof, all you need to look at is the reaction of Middle England. Right now, Griffin and Bowers are the names on a huge number of people’s lips.

The frenzy of moviedom and publicity that is the Cannes Film Festival is upon us again. Publicity stunts play an enormous part in the festival, however much the BBC’s Victoria Lindrea may protest that this year “really is all about the films“. Certainly there’s a great selection of serious filmmakers showing at this year’s festival, but if “organisers are casting off celebrity gimmicks in favour of a vintage line-up of classic filmmakers” this year, as Lindrea asserts, I’m certain that determined stuntsters and publicists will creep up and surprise us from nowhere – publicity stunts at Cannes, as I told the Independent’s Rob Sharp (see below), help films get noticed in a busy media world.

“Whether it’s Pamela Anderson in a tight leather top, or Jerry Seinfeld in a bee costume climbing to the top of a building, one thing’s for sure – Cannes doesn’t do understatement. With thousands of studios, independent filmmakers and hangers-on all scrabbling for publicity, you really have to push the yacht out to get noticed.

“‘A film festival would not be a proper festival without a plethora of grandiose, delightful, ludicrous and attention-grabbing stunts,’ says PR consultant Mark Borkowski, author of The Fame Formula, a history of Hollywood publicists. ‘They help the films leap from the screen into the collective consciousness of the public.’

“The media circus is fuelled, in part, by the Hot d’Or, an alternative film festival held a mile down the road. This is to pornography what Cannes is to art-house cinema. In 1995, it first brought Lola Ferrari to public attention. She turned up at the festival with just two claims to fame: her 51in breasts and a pending lawsuit from the Italian sportscar manufacturer for infringement of its brand name (the press pack did the rest). The same year, when Miramax tried to publicise a Hugh Grant movie, The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain, the studio built a 20ft mountain, which Grant was supposed to climb, on Canne’s Majestic Beach. As Grant was about to begin his ascent for his photocall, a Russian porn star appeared from nowhere, climbed to the top and began disrobing.

“‘Our efforts to remove her achieved far wider coverage than the movie might otherwise have expected,’ says Graham Smith, of the film’s publicists DDA.

“The studios are guilty of the odd dirty trick themselves. In 1992, muscle-bound combat heroes Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme were walking down the red carpet to promote their film Universal Soldier when they became embroiled in a slanging match. It almost descended into violence before they were pulled apart.

“In recent times, the publicity-seeking has become much more overt. In 2007, Jerry Seinfeld climbed to the top of the Carlton Hotel, dressed in a bee costume, to promote Bee Movie. Thirty minutes after checking his gear, Seinfeld slid down eight storeys, across the Croisette, to the beach below, before repeating the stunt again. Last year, Jack Black arrived by speedboat with 40 people dressed as giant pandas for the release of Kung Fu Panda, while Pamela Anderson arrived by the same method, dressed as Barb Wire, for her forgettable 1996 action film of the same name. And who can forget Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat in his mankini in 2006?

“So what of this year? Potential comes in the form of Ken Loach’s Looking for Eric, which will have its party in a local football stadium. Hopefully it’ll yield a kung-fu kick or two.”

Click here to read the full article.

I enjoyed the launch of the Fame Formula paperback at the Riverside Studios at Hammersmith on Wednesday night for many reasons: it’s a great venue, the people who came were interested and interesting, it was good to expound on the brilliance of publicist extraordinaire Russell Birdwell to an audience and it was marvellous to see one of the films he promoted, Nothing Sacred, on a big screen for the first time. And what a film it is!

It may have been made in 1937, but Nothing Sacred still resonates today, thanks to Ben Hecht’s razor sharp script and William Wellman’s ironic, deadpan direction. The film features a disgraced reporter who, desperate to make good with his editor after a series of exposed scams and fake news stories, discovers a girl who is dying of radium poisoning and decides to bring her to New York to be feted by the world.

It’s extraordinary how like the Jade Goody story the film is, but for the fact that Hazel Flagg, played by the luminous Carol Lombard, is not actually dying of cancer. From the ecstatic headlines reporting Hazel’s every move and utterance to the grand plans for a funeral to see her off in style – something she deserves because she is so “brave and vulnerable” – it skewers modern celebrity reporting perfectly.

Nothing Sacred turns the screw on the nature of celebrity ever tighter, right up until the end, despite being made 72 years ago. If you haven’t seen it, you really should. I’d even suggest it should be remade, but it would have to be done by someone with a sharp, satirical eye like Jason Reitman – this is not a film that deserves softening by Hollywood.

Next up on the promotional trail is my head-to-head debate with Max Clifford at the London College of Communication on Tuesday, May 5th at 6 p.m. discussing the toxic nature of modern celebrity. I’m not sure if there are any tickets left, but if you can’t make it, rest assured that the volatile results will be filmed for webcast and recorded for podcast.