Posts Tagged ‘Times’

The more I think about Lady Gaga’s meaty costume worn at her appearance at the MTV Awards, the less sure I am about the intentions behind it.

Is it 1) a controlled and thoughtful satire in meat couture about the plight of women in the pop industry, who are oiled up, lubed up, dressed in schoolgirl attire and presented in an assortment of cheesily provocative poses for the pleasure of older men all over the planet, MTV being the spiritual home of this meat market? Given that Gaga has come out on the side of the outsider in a number of interviews, this is perfectly possible.

Or is it 2), a huge, desperate mistake, concocted in the back rooms of her PR company by giggling rejects from a Chris Morris media satire determined to multiply the outrage Gaga generates every time she goes out?

Given Gaga’s wardrobe people have been vying to outdo their previous creations (cigarette sunglasses, playing a piano sat on a toilet for the X Factor etc) each time they come up with a new one, it would be forgivable to suspect the latter. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a good week for stunts – the Barefoot Bandit’s a classy effort, but a little over-complicated. More gloriously simple is Island’s approach to promoting Tom Jones’s new album of hymns, Praise and Blame.

Leaving the praise to the critics, who see it as an equivalent to Johnny Cash’s late bid for credibility, Island’s VP, David Sharpe, seems to have taken it upon himself to do the blaming, in an accusatory leaked email that suggests he would rather not have spent millions on a church album and wanted a repeat of Jones’s Sex Bomb stylings.

This was written in May, but leaked only now, in the week of release, just in time for the Sunday Times, the Telegraph and pretty much every other media outlet to get all hot under the collar about it and puff the album’s arrival in spectacular fashion in news and reviews pages.

Stunt of the week, without a doubt. But that’s not unusual, given that it was also the conversation of the week.

What is the status of the 12-year-old Samantha Cameron photo shoot that’s been sashaying its way across the news agenda over the last 24 hours? Has an enemy found something new to embarrass the Tories with or is this just another shot across the bows of the upcoming election by the party’s spin doctors? Have these photos really been in an attic all this time?

I’d say not. It strikes me, looking at this morning’s excitable ruminations on SamCam’s modelling “past” in the press, that this is a sure-fire PR distraction from Lord Ashcroft and other pre-electoral woes, that the Tories will revel in the “slightly racy” past of SamCam at the expense of having to worry about her husband’s policies and his party’s veracity. Read the rest of this entry »

I took part in the Cambridge Union debate last night, arguing for the proposition ‘This House Believes that Reality TV Represents Everything Wretched about Britain Today’. I underestimated the space, at how steeped in grandeur it is, and found myself more than a little nervous.

The debate was well attended; over two thirds full. Joining me to argue for the proposition were Max Clifford and the retiring Union president, Jonathan Laurence. Opposing the motion were Times journalist Hugo Rifkind, showbiz writer Zoe Griffin and James McQuillan, who appeared on The Apprentice.

The other speakers last night went for a comic interpretation of the motion. My technique was more serious-minded, more Old Testament – Quentin Tarantino fans might have deduced I was trying to mimic Samuel L Jackson’s famous biblical Pulp Fiction speech. Read the rest of this entry »

The BBC seem to think that the revelations about cutbacks in the last few days are a job well done, given the leak to the Times and the reactions it engendered. The deliberate leak is certainly a small PR coup, given that it went to one of the papers most vocally opposed to the BBC and it shows Auntie Beeb willing to wield the axe.

But will the cutting of BBC6 Music and the Asian Network be seen, at least by papers such as the Daily Mail who are naturally opposed to the BBC and didn’t get the exclusive, as anything more than cosmetic, as more than the the wielding of a very small axe? Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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.

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.