I received an email today which recounted a tale from Las Vegas in the 1960’s which demonstrates the flip side of PR stunts. Will Jones’s variety act, a troupe of amazing chimpanzees that played the pianoforte, were doing a support show in Las Vegas, off the strip, for a magician. Norman Berry decided to set…
The 1960’s saw the dawn of the creative publicity campaign for television. The very best TV producers were alive to the concept of drumming up ideas to entice journalistic interest. Ever since the dawn of the TV age, the publicist Warren Cowan had cast his considerable professional shadow over the promotion of television. There was…
Much hype surrounds the launch of the ‘Da Vinci Code’ in Cannes, newspapers around the globe are filled with snaps of the cast pictured alongside a train. On Tuesday at Waterloo Terminal, the Eurostar high speed train was renamed The Da Vinci Code. The high speed beast of burden took stars and producers of the…
Many of the great Hollywood publicists had died by the 1970’s, so tracing their histories can often be fruitless. When information is available, it’s like gold dust as so many great careers have gone undocumented. But the career of Pete Smith, an original disciple of Harry Reichenbach, is not only fairly well documented, but also…
The practice of using new technology to create havoc is not new to the 21st century. Unscrupulous publicists hired companies to spike telegraph messages at the turn of the last century. Sophisticated equipment developed for espionage was made available to all those industries that might be able to afford them. Wire tapping was rife in…
It is thought that the modern phenomenon of celebrity culture has only recently created the dim-witted agent or publicist. The stupid gene has existed ever since the first press release was issued. The venerable sage Ezra Goodman noted this phenomenon back in the 1950’s. Goodman, was the most distinguished Hollywood reporter of Time Magazine, he…
The publicist’s skill in crafting a great sound bight has a long an illustrious history. Harry Reichenbach made Walt Disney aware of the power of seeding an anecdote. It is rumoured that it was Harry’s influence that crafted this Disney gem. When the film producer was asked about how it felt to be a celebrity….
Last week the Guardian asked me to write a feature on Jay Bernstein. It appeared this morning in the Media Section under the banner “End of a great Hollywood era”. Jay Bernstein’s death a week ago at the age of 69 means entertainment publicity will never be quite the same again. He was a one-off…
Reading the transcript of the Jay Bernstein interview I found this moving moment when the legend contemplates his professional and personal loneliness. “I had a conversation with Michael Moore a while back. I said to him you are like me. We run on compliments. We fill our tank with compliments from people. We have what…
The Church and various religious groups have always created brilliant copy, and the film and theatre business have benefitted from outraged clerics who find inoffensive theatre shows too sexually explicit for words. This is not a modern phenomenon. The first Church offensive against the fun brigade was in the 1920’s. Clerics in the U.S. were…