Posts Tagged ‘maynard nottage’

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

The press release put out by Nottage’s family last week has wandered through the internet like a virulent digital contagion. From Business First of Buffalo to the Earth Times, the Houston Chronicle to the Los Angeles Times, Soapdom.com to Inbox Robot, Reuters to Marketwatch, Maynard Nottage is pretty much everywhere in America’s digital collective consciousness. I found at least eighty different links to the press release on the web.

There is still no response from the Times, however. Perhaps that’s because they failed to even report the conversation they had with Nottage’s great-grandson, whose disgruntlement with this treatment lead to the press release.

Also, reports of interest in a film of Nottage’s life are still spreading too, as this link to a French website shows.

Dustin Hoffman’s interest in playing Maynard Nottage has taken the story all over the world, from India to California. The story crops up on the Cinematical website, which says that Nottage: “lived a pretty wild life… touring with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and enjoying the booze and the babes he encountered along the way. His partying ways caused him to fall out of favor in the moralistic Prohibition era, and he died, a Hollywood outcast, in 1965.

“But as if that’s not movie-worthy enough, there’s more! Nottage’s life was largely forgotten until he became the focus of Mark Borkowski’s biography, The Fame Formula.”

OK, so they got a detail wrong – The Fame Formula is of course a history of the PR industry in Hollywood, not a biography of Nottage – but it’s rather nice to see that people agree that his life would make a good movie.

But the biggest mention has been a reference to Hoffman’s interest in the role in the highly regarded Page Six gossip column of the New York Post – click here to read more.

In yesterday’s blog I wrote that Maynard Nottage’s family had hired PR council and were preparing a release to rebut the Times’ assertion that Nottage was a hoax. They have hired Los Angeles PR firm Jaffe & Co and the press release has now hit the internet.

Click here to read more.

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.

The frenetic 48 hours at the end of last week turned into a furiously busy weekend, coping with the response to the Times’ article suggesting that Maynard Nottage was a hoax.
 
I have been fielding calls from producers interested in buying the rights to the Nottage story (there’s at least one director interested in the project, who has an A List star in mind to play the part of Nottage); answering emails of support from a great many people, including Victor Lewis Smith, Piers Morgan and Steve Jaffe; writing a letter of response to the Times (click here to read it) and communicating with Nottage’s surviving family, who have hired PR council in the USA in response to the Times article and will be releasing a statement in the next few days.
 
It’ll be interesting to see where all this goes next. I find it fascinating that people, living in the age of the internet where the ability to access information instantaneously is taken for granted, apply the same logic to the past. Records do not always survive, especially from times of great upheaval. Added to that, one of the main things The Fame Formula documents is the way Hollywood has tried to suppress its ugly side. And Nottage’s excesses are certainly the kind of ugliness that Hollywood would try to suppress.
 
As I mentioned last week on this blog, Harry Reichenbach, who was the most successful publicist of his time, barely merited a mention until a decade or so ago. And take the mysteries surrounding the death of William Desmond Taylor and George ‘Superman’ Reeves, for example, which have never been satisfactorily explained. These were big names in the Hollywood firmament; that a wayward publicist could be eradicated from the official annals of movie history should therefore not be a surprise, given how little publicists were held in regard in the early days of Hollywood and how, even then, they tended not to raise their heads above the parapets of their press releases.

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.