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Hollywood Spin
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Gossip Reloaded
To comment or not to comment? That is the question for publicists faced with the prospect of an unflattering item about one of their clients in the New York Post’s influential Page Six daily gossip column.
Wednesday, June 4, 2003
By Richard Horgan
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Unlike the tabloids, which publicists tend to ignore or easily discount, and the growing legion of Internet gossip sites, which do not yet have a mass following, an item in the New York Post’s Page Six column is tantamount to a five-alarm PR fire.
In addition to reaching an increasingly large number of people through its availability online and the growing efforts of publisher Rupert Murdoch to distribute a national edition of the newspaper, the column is also closely followed by others in the media business.
So, just as US Weekly recently put Limp Bizkit lead singer Fred Durst on the cover of the magazine after he served up an X-rated thrashing of Britney Spears on Howard Stern’s morning radio show, chances are that a juicy lead item in the New York Post, true or not, will quickly be picked up on across the entertainment reporting world.
One recent example of this was an article suggesting that a mini-rebellion had occurred on the set of X2: X-Men United when director Bryan Singer was temporarily incapacitated after being given the wrong pain killer medicine for a bad hip by one of the film’s driver in Vancouver. According to the report, production was momentarily thrown into disarray as Singer and producer Tom DeSanto clashed over the latter’s threat to have the employee fired.
In this case, a spokesperson for Twentieth Century Fox decided to respond directly and was quoted in the December 2nd item, confirming that DeSanto and Singer “did have a spat" but that the cast never threatened to walk off the set, as suggested. The spokesperson went on to say that "the cast got together to decide how to get the day finished, what they would shoot and when, if Bryan wasn't coming back. They were antsy to leave."
What’s unusual is that Singer himself followed up several months later and personally addressed the item, complaining that it was a tempest in a teapot and had been completely overblown. Tellingly, perhaps, Singer does not appear to have a personal publicist.
Meanwhile, a few weeks ago, publicists for both Warner Bros. and The Matrix Reloaded director Larry Wachowski refused to comment in connection with an extremely inflammatory Page Six item featuring the comments of one Jason Miller, a man claiming to be the estranged husband of the woman who accompanied Wachowski to the Los Angeles premiere of the summer blockbuster.
Based on remarks Miller first shared in a Sunday
edition of the British newspaper The Daily Mail
out of London, Page Six led off on May 20th with
an item suggesting that the woman, Karin
Winslow, was a professional dominatrix who was
engaged in kinky games with Wachowski and had
caused him to leave his wife of fifteen years.
| Still, for publicists on retainer pondering the question of whether or not to comment on something that New York Post gossip meister Richard Johnson and his crew are about to unleash, there is now an additional wrinkle. Several Internet gossip sites such as www.gossiplist.com are revealing the names of the celebrities who are alluded to anonymously in so-called blind items published by Page Six and other outlets.
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However, unlike the major repercussions earlier this year when a rival newspaper claimed that Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax was the person mentioned in a particular Page Six blind item, triggering a PR nightmare that eventually led the New York Post to personally apologize to the retired athlete, only the 3,000 or so subscribers to the weekly email newsletter put out by www.gossiplist.com are currently privy to that outlet’s best guesses.
Since the New York Post seems relatively impervious to Hollywood publicists and has the media muscle to go ahead an publish what it feels is fit to print, one would think that the best tactic for a publicist is to comment directly within the piece. But it is not necessarily always that simple as PR flacks scramble to reach clients, confer and build a consensus on how to deal with Page Six without often the benefit of enough time.
| In fact, publicists have been known to call back Page Six soon after being told that Richard Johnson is considering an unflattering item about one of their clients and offer up an even juicier piece of dirt about some other celebrity, hoping to thereby bump the news about their own client right off the page.
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It’s a move that would make Stu Shephard, the shady publicist portrayed by Colin Farrell in Phone Booth, proud.
[Hollywood Spin is a new weekly column that takes a close-up look at the world of entertainment publicity and PR. To reach the author, please email rhorgan@filmstew.com. ]
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