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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The view from the upper reaches of the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles is magnificent: all Beverly Hills glitters below. But on a clear day last year the three people in Room 1429--the public-relations consultant Bumble Ward, her associate Bebe Lerner, and their client John Stockwell, a novice movie director--were huddled around a coffee table finishing up a hurried lunch. Disney Studios had rented the floor for a press junket to promote "Crazy/Beautiful," Stockwell's film about an interracial teen romance, and there was a short break between Stockwell's morning battery of five-minute television interviews with the international press and his afternoon roundtables--six twenty-minute sessions with groups of seven print journalists, who would toss rapid-fire questions at him and at the film's stars, Kirsten Dunst and Jay Hernandez. By stuffing the press and the talent together in a hotel for a weekend, a studio can market a film to every media outlet from the Dallas Morning News to FilmStew.com and Brazil's Globo television, at the relatively modest cost of three or four hundred thousand dollars.
Stockwell, a handsome, unshaved man of forty-one with a surfer's tan, was rolling his neck like a calf in a veal pen. "I keep hoping these journalists will go provocative and ask, 'How was your film neutered?' " he said. "Crazy/Beautiful" was planned as an R-rated feature, but then Disney executives decided that they wanted a more commercial PG-13 rating and made Stockwell cut thirty-five obscenities, bowdlerize a sex scene, and eliminate a character's drug use. "But with the Disney people hovering, and the journalists wanting to be invited back to the next junket, for the hotel and the free food, they don't. If they're asking you to autograph the press kits"--the signed packets often show up on eBay the next day, selling for about twenty-five dollars--"it's not going to be a very probing interview. In fact, it's unbelievably boring."
"It is boring," Ward agreed. A thirty-nine-year-old British woman with a tangle of dark-blond hair that she wishes she had the time to blow out more often--she feels better organized with straight hair--Ward had on a white silk pants suit and sandals whose high heels were made of raffia dipped in Lucite. "But if you have an agenda," she continued, "you need to cram it down the press's throat, say it four times." At a junket for "Planet of the Apes" in New York, a few weeks earlier, I had watched the film's director, Tim Burton, another Ward client, gamely repeat in most of his thirty-two-straight television interviews that the movie (which appeared to be about stars glumly capering in ape suits) was really about "globalization" and the "fragmentation of society."
"It's terrifying that if a journalist writes something negative the top three or four publicists will blacklist him," Stockwell continued. "Publicists are the death of interesting journalism about entertainment." Ward laughed and pretended to strangle herself.
Hollywood publicists polish their clients' images in one of two ways: either by making news or by extinguishing it. Old-fashioned press agents, silver-haired gents whose walls are covered with photos of themselves alongside Debbie Reynolds and Danny Kaye, will make news on behalf of the Harlem Globetrotters by arranging for, say, the Pope to accept an award as an Honorary Globetrotter. A newer breed of gatekeepers, sleek young whippets who return calls at midnight or never, allow the press to glimpse their stars only at Halley's-comet-like intervals. And in return for access they insist that journalists agree to all sorts of specific preconditions: never, for instance, ask Arnold Schwarzenegger if his father was a Nazi; don't quiz Eddie Murphy about the night the police stopped him for picking up a transsexual hooker on Santa Monica Boulevard; refrain from questioning Mark Wahlberg about the time he clobbered a Vietnamese man with a stick and called him a "slant-eyed gook motherfucker"; and if you're interviewing Tom Cruise--who once rejected fourteen writers proposed by Rolling Stone before agreeing to a reporter who turned in a puff piece--don't bring up anything personal at all.
Although Bumble Ward has little in common with the press agents of the old school, she does believe in making news. As the industry's leading publicist for directors--her twelve-person firm, Bumble Ward & Associates, represents Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Jay Roach, and Bobby and Peter Farrelly, among forty other directors--she has clients who both seek attention and can withstand it. "Filmmakers have fantastically interesting stories to tell, and actors don't," Ward says. She is also by nature a cheerleader. Many of the five dozen phone conversations she has each day close with a thunderclap of optimism: "Super! Lovely! Fantastic!"
Her clients often express a darker view. Quentin Tarantino, for example, has grown wary of journalists. "They don't have anything on you, but it's time in the cycle to take you down," he says. "So they kill you with verbs and adjectives. 'He lumbered into the room.' 'He hesitated over the shrimp.' 'Gesticulating wildly, the motormouth Tarantino . . .' Hey, fuck you, you wanna-be novelist!"
At the Four Seasons, Stockwell told Ward and Lerner, "You guys impressed me with that concept of the Tastemakers, the tiny group of media insiders who make everything happen, who generate buzz when they talk to, um . . ."
"Other Tastemakers!" said Bebe Lerner, whose toenails were painted silvery blue.
He went on to describe how the publicists had set up a lunch for him with Patrick Goldstein, the Hollywood columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and orchestrated a Newsweek article by Goldstein's friend John Horn. In Newsweek, Stockwell complained about Disney's edits and said the studio was "scared of anything on the edge," comments that inspired more articles. Ward also screened "Crazy/Beautiful" for Elle's film critic, Karen Durbin, who recommended it to a friend at the Times, and the paper's Arts & Leisure section later ran a long article about Stockwell.
"What does a full-page ad in the Times cost--a hundred thousand dollars?" Stockwell said. "And there we were with a full page and a photo. More people in hiring positions read the Times piece about me than saw the movie. In a strange way, that kind of exposure allows you to express yourself almost more than the actual movie does." He paused. "You just have to avoid turning into Michael Bay," he said, referring to another Ward client, the director of "Pearl Harbor" and "Armageddon," who flaunts his visits to the Playboy Mansion and will happily discuss the size of his penis. "Memo to...
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