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Hollywood Spin
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Sexy PR
People Magazine’s annual “Sexiest Man Alive” derby is a brilliant stroke of nothingness, designed to promote the publication and Hollywood’s bottom line.
Wednesday, November 26, 2003
By Richard Horgan
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When Mel Gibson was anointed the first ever “Sexiest Man Alive” by People Magazine on February 4th, 1985, his response was simple and direct: “That implies there are a lot of dead guys who got more points than I did.”
Two decades later, the annual title of worldwide male hottie, which was awarded last week to a 40-year-old Johnny Depp, has become as iconic a signpost of American magazine publishing as Sports Illustrated’s perennial Swimsuit Issue, which launched in 1964 with Babette March on the cover, and Time Magazine’s Person Of The Year selection, beginning in the late 1920s with the likes of Lindberg, Chrysler and Ghandi.
Since two-thirds of People Magazine’s readership is made up of women, there was never any doubt about what the gender of its annual tent pole issue should be, nor any concern that with the odd exception such as John F. Kennedy Jr., all of the sexy honorees seem to live and work in Hollywood.
Ironically, while women around the country are still debating whether this year’s cover should have gone to Depp or his main rival for the magazine’s 2003 testosterone trophy, Irish actor Colin Farrell, many of the previous honorees share the general sense of befuddlement and self-deprecation that was originally expressed by Gibson.
For example, when Brad Pitt was doing the promotional rounds a few years ago for Ocean’s Eleven, he would make fun of himself by first mentioning the Oscars won by co-star Julia Roberts and director Steven Soderbergh, and then pointing to himself and declaring, “Sexiest Man Alive … Twice.” It’s a double honor that only he and Richard Gere have been afforded.
Meanwhile, Pitt’s co-star and pal George Clooney was so outraged by his selection as 1997’s Sexiest Man that he publicly abdicated his title, only to help fuel sales of that year’s issue. More recently, he has begrudgingly joked in interviews that he foresees life as a senior citizen as someone walking up to him in a bar and saying, “Hey, aren’t you George Clooney, the guy who used to be the Sexiest Man Alive?”
Today, thanks to the conglomeration of the media and the spread of the Internet, People Magazine’s celebrated cover boy is cross-promotional manna for its Time Warner siblings. For example, tens of thousands of people took part in a front page CNN.com poll last Friday to answer the question, “Is Johnny Depp a good choice as People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive?” (for the record, about two-thirds said no). Meanwhile, the story was also front and center on AOL’s main login page, its Instant Messenger news summary pop up, and so on.
It’s a cottage industry at People as well. Not satisfied with the Sexiest Man Alive, the publication now accompanies its selection with a separate list of the “Ten Sexiest Men.” Thankfully, no one in this year’s consolation prize to Hollywood publicists is anywhere as dubious as one of those mentioned in last year’s runner-up category – Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
There’s also the “50 Most Beautiful People in the World” issue, which launched in 1990 with Michelle Pfeiffer on the cover, and a ranking first published in 2000 of “America’s 100 Most Eligible Bachelors,” which, to its nominal credit, featured farmers and doctors alongside the requisite athletes and actors.
But the real progenitor of People’s wildly successful listings of the sexiest, most intriguing, best/worst dressed and so on is Richard Selzer, a.k.a. fashion designer Mr. Blackwell. It may be hard to believe, but the mother of all modern day pejorative self-promotions – his Ten Worst Dressed list - dates back to 1960, when it was published as a one-off article in American Weekly, that era’s equivalent of the Sunday newspaper supplement Parade Magazine.
Despite or because of the initial outrage among those named, Blackwell decided to make it an annual affair to help promote his burgeoning Hollywood couturier business. After a couple of lean years, journalists started attending his acerbic press conferences and the whole thing just took off.
“I love the lines,” Blackwell once told Montreal radio personality Peter Anthony Holder. “I think that's what made it. It's not that I criticized their clothing, by telling you I didn't like it because it was green or blue and it had a bow and it had a deep neck, or it didn't. I did impression lines.”
“I did lines that in a way told you what I thought about their clothing without ever mentioning the clothes. Do you remember the dress Geena Davis wore to the Academy Awards in 1992 with the mess hosiery and that big tail behind it? She was number two on my list that year, but I never mentioned the color of the dress (yellow). All I did was I said, "Big Bird in heels. A Follies Bergere fiasco."”
Which brings us to the other main ingredient of People’s successful parade of Harrison Ford’s, Denzel Washington’s and now, heralding an edgier new direction, Johnny Depp’s. Brevity. In today’s world of syndicated and re-purposed sound bytes, blank + “Sexiest Man Alive” equals a high concept attention grabbing winner.
People is purchased by more than 3.7 million people each week and is acknowledged as the country’s most profitable consumer magazine. It broke even a mere 18 months after it was launched in 1974, at the time an industry record. Along with his former Time Inc. cohorts, Christopher Meigher III, the colorful New Yorker who presided as publisher at the time that Mel Gibson first beat out a lot of dead guys, deserves credit for recognizing the public’s willingness to indulge such choices.
| Is there any self-respecting entertainment media outlet today that doesn’t have an equivalent of one sort or another? Think about it … E! Entertainment’s “Rank”, Premiere Magazine’s “100 Most Powerful People in Hollywood”, Entertainment Weekly’s “Hot Sheet by Jim Cullen”, The Hollywood Reporter’s female Power 100, and so on.
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Of course, this being the Internet era, a grassroots spoof of People’s penultimate popularity contest is just a mouse click away. Since 2000, the Sexiest Geek Alive competition has honored computer geniuses from Boston, Oakland and Dallas by means of an informal pageant and crown presentation.
We’re definitely not talking Hollywood here. For example, 2001 winner Ellen Spertus drives an electric car with a license plate that reads “V EQ IR” (that’s shorthand for Ohm’s law, e.g. Volts equals Current times Resistance). Initially put on by Silicon Valley outfits Imark Communications and Geek and Guru magazine, the contest is now – post-Internet bubble – a veiled commercial for Austin, Texas multimedia production company Explore-It!.
| Early last year, after an extremely successful five-year run as managing editor of People Magazine, Carol Wallace stepped down and handed the reigns to Martha Nelson, the founding editor of sister publication In Style. For People is ultimately a magazine for women run by women and, so far under Nelson’s tenure, it has decided the time is right for edgier and younger sex symbols.
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Why? Because the magazine wants to lower their median reader age of 40.1; because today’s blockbuster films, the context within which most of People’s Sexiest Men Alive are chosen, is heading out to sea with younger stars such as Depp and Ben Affleck (the 2002 winner) at the helm; and because Nelson, whose personal life keeps her in contact with Hollywood’s movers and shakers, realizes that the days of putting a 56-year-old Harrison Ford on the throne (as Wallace did in 1998) have past, at least for now.
Who knows? Earlier this year, Keanu Reeves probably looked about as sexy from both a box office and release date timing perspective as anyone bandied about the People conference room. But it’s amazing how a summer blockbuster pirate movie and a December 2nd, 2003 DVD release date can redefine a magazine’s definition of male sex appeal.
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