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Hollywood Spin
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Bogus Blogs
Welcome to the new frontier of celebrity impersonation, where a physical resemblance to your Hollywood director or actor of choice is no longer a prerequisite.
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
By Richard Horgan
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Steve Grayson/Wireimage.com
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A cog in someone else's blog
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A few months ago, Quentin Tarantino’s publicist Bumble Ward discounted the blog QT’s Diary as a fake. “The guy is doing a great job, don't you think?” she told the leading James Bond discussion site CommanderBond.net, which became interested after an online lament was posted by the director about his failure to get the opportunity to remake Casino Royale. “Truly, I'd hate to ruin his fun; but it's fake,” Ward continued. “Quentin hardly knows what a [computer] mouse is.”
And then, just last week, a pair of aspiring Los Angeles screenwriters – Christian Newton and Casey McAdams – ran into some predictable trouble after taking their private joke public via NickNolteDiary.com. Thanks to a quickly dispatched cease-and-desist letter from the actor’s lawyers, the site now has a bright red ‘Not’ image emblazoned across the original ‘Nick Nolte’s Diary’ logo, along with an apologetic note that rings somewhat hollow.
The web site statement reads, in part:
We apologize for any deception we created. This was all intended to be wholesome entertainment and we never thought people would take it seriously for more than a moment or two. The diary got much more popular much more quickly than we had ever imagined.
Our aim here was to celebrate an individual. Never was it our intent to ridicule or deceive anyone. This site is and was a tribute to a wonderful human. For those of you who were offended, hurt or deceived, we are sorry.
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Lester Cohen/Wireimage.com
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Tarantino at recent Hwd fest
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Until recently, those responsible for deceitful celebrity impersonations were psychopaths rather than humorists, motivated by things like adulation from the opposite sex and free room and board. People like Joseph Manuella, a Robert DeNiro stunt double who narrowly avoided a two-year sentence in 2001, or Alan Conway, the gent who conned everyone in London into thinking he was the late director Stanley Kubrick, around the time that the reclusive filmmaker was shooting Eyes Wide Shut. In Conway’s case, it was largely for the purpose of facilitating some same sex hanky panky.
The latter real-life scenario is the basis of Colour Me Kubrick, a 2005 release that just recently wrapped production in England; it stars John Malkovich as Conway and was directed and co-produced by Kubrick’s former assistant Brian W. Cook. By the time the movie hits theaters, there could be several fake John Malkovich blogs, each claiming to offer the inside scoop on this intriguing, post-modern squib.
Still, it’s not necessarily easy to pass yourself off as an Internet celebrity. Even though the author of QT’s diary vociferously refuted all claims that his entries were pulp fiction, before apparently losing interest, the hoax was somewhat transparent. The verbiage was a little off, the lengthy entries provided added opportunities for a stumble and, quite frankly, the author is/was not enough of a Tarantino freak/geek.
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Shapiro West
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Oh, what he could have done...
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The phenomena of fake celebrity blogs is still in its infancy, but one of the most interesting blueprints so far appears to have been put forth by either ICM agent Nick Reed or his cartoonist client Keith Thompson. According to the San Diego based web site MuseumOfHoaxes.com, one of these two pranksters is most likely responsible for Hollywood’s recent cause celebre, the Rance Web Log, which purports to be the pseudonymous diary of a major Hollywood leading man.
At the outset, Rance generated a flurry of guessing game activity, with theories ranging from Owen Wilson to Ben Affleck. But ironically, like the celebrities they mimic, these fake celebrity blogs quickly go from the top of the WWW heap to URL also-ran. Indeed, if you check out the Rance Web Log today, you can almost see the cobwebs.
And what does it say about Hollywood that a fake blog for Nick Nolte generated more heat than the real one from Jeff Bridges, or that more people were talking about the Quentin Tarantino goof this summer than the idea of an online diary kept by Cameron Crowe. Perhaps it’s because fake celebs update their blogs a lot more frequently than the real ones, or that the average Internet surfer likes nothing more than to drop in on an exposed or soon-to-be-exposed ruse.
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Comedy Central
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Short as Jiminy Glick
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In other cases, the fake web logs are the byproduct of overzealous fans. Earlier this summer, after 16-year-old Scottish teenager Katie Leung was cast as Cho Chang in the fourth installment Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, a bunch of fake blogs such as this one popped up claiming to offer a day-to-day diary of her on-set experiences. It got so confusing for the rabid J.K. Rowling Internet crowd that Warner Brothers clarified that none of the blogs were real.
The new crossroads of celebrity fakery are places like Blogspot.com and Blogs.com, where for no charge or as little as $4.95 a month, you too can pretend to be the late comedian Andy Kaufman and offer up a tasteless diary from beyond the grave. The only problem with that is that it’s just as easy for someone else to take up arms against it, which in the case of this spring 2004 flourish is exactly what happened. Shortly after andykaufmanreturns.blogspot.com hit the airwaves, John Ulmer, a London, England area film critic and ardent Andy Kaufman fan, threw up his counter in the form of andykaufmanhoax.blogspot.com. The former can still be viewed; the latter is now dark.
Still, there was some cleverness to the Andy Kaufman goof. The comedian’s alleged resurrection and online announcement thereof was timed for May 14th, 2004, the twentieth anniversary of the comedian’s death. The author joked that The Drudge Report had been the first to jump on the story and then later detailed complications such as this one:
I got a call today from some investigators at the LAPD who said they wanted to ‘ask me a few questions’ about my disappearance 20 years ago. I told them about the statute of limitations (7 years) on faking one's death, but they persisted and said they have ‘other ways of getting to me.’ Should I be worried? This may mean I'll have to go back into hiding sooner than I had thought.
Around the same time, the cable TV channel Oxygen became one of the first to engineer a successful blog on behalf of a fictitious real person. Jane’s Blog which, if you came to it directly via some sort of search engine results link appeared to be the juicy confessional of a sexually active Angeleno, was in fact nothing more than promo copy for the sitcom Good Girls Don’t.
| This nascent co-opted trend is definitely something we will soon see more of, and in much more tricky form than say the recent A Dirty Shame promotional blog engineered by gossip site Defamer.com. For example, a Martin Short blog for Jimini Glick in La La Wood, his upcoming feature-length expansion of his Comedy Central character that closed this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, would seem to be a perfect next step in the evolution of the Hollywood blogosphere.
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On the heels of non-celebrities pretending to be real ones, why not a real celebrity pretending to be a fake one? If ever a movie was tailor made for a seamless promotional blog, it’s one featuring a character such as Jimini Glick. Just imagine how the inept showbiz reporter could riff on, and link to, the various online reviews and features about his big screen debut as the movie itself played out.
So far, only the NickNolteDiary.com pair of aspiring screenwriters have gotten a mild bump as a result of their celebrity ‘skull bloggery.’ But as sure as a counterfeit Jesus Christ blog in the months leading up to the release of The Passion of the Christ would have gotten the author a flurry of agent and manager calls, the best or worst is yet to come.
| A fake George Lucas blog in advance of Episode III? A contentious daily imagining of Danny Moder’s life with Julia Roberts and their newborn twins? A foul-mouthed Christina Aguilera spoof courtesy of Ashton Kutcher and Punk'd?
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It’s all entirely possible and, in the short term, topped for sheer wackiness only by the idea of Nick Nolte waking up one day in Malibu and deciding he really does want to have his own blog.
[Every Wednesday, Richard Horgan’s FilmStew.com opinion column “Hollywood Spin” takes a look at a notable entertainment industry personality, PR trend or salient industry topic. To reach the author, please click here. To comment on this week’s topic, please go to our Hollywood Spin Discussion Board.]
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