Tom Cruise is allegedly in talks to sell photos of his baby girl for up to $1 million. Whichever agency obtains the first official snaps of the tot will be able to sell them to the world’s newspapers and magazines. We have photographs for sale of a baby, a pretty baby who looks like any…
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…
I received a call late last night from Steve Jaffe in LA who told me that Jay Bernstein, the legendary publicist, died on Sunday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles, after a massive stroke. He was 69. Jay Bernstein was the flamboyant Hollywood personal manager, best known as the “star maker” who launched Farrah…
Home Secretary Charles Clarke resisted calls today to update Parliament urgently on efforts to track down more than 1,000 wrongly-released foreign criminals. The Home Office said he would give only a progress report “by the end of the week”. Charles Clarke, Charles Clarke, no bite just bark, would have failed to count animals into Noah’s…
That’s shoe business Speculation about a possible link between Wayne Rooney’s injury and his choice of footwear could mean Nike keeping its head down at the World Cup. http://media.guardian.co.uk/marketingandpr/story/0,,1765949,00.html
In the late 1920’s an organisation for the Preservation of American Musicians was set up to protect the ‘live’ performance, due to burgeoning fears that the rise of the radio and record industries would put thousands of musicians out of work. Apparently, musicians felt under such a threat that the organisation employed Larry Neive, a…
Next stunt for ‘Yank in tank’ is going to be breathtaking Scotsman – … Mark Borkowski, a British showbiz publicist, said he believed Blaine had been bruised by his London reception, but predicted the illusionist’s latest stunt … http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=640942006
When the Wall Street Crash struck, Variety came up with a publicity wheeze and ran free classified ads for show people. At one point there were over 25,000 actors idle, all placing ads in the trade paper. One of the biggest PR clangers came from the usually savvy Hearst, who started a breadline on Broadway….
Great press agents have all been touched by madness. This letter by Richard Maney, one of the great Broadway publicists, was sent to George Bernard Shaw has a resonance in the 21st century. “There are over sixty theatrical press agents in New York, most of the fine sober and reliable as so many Congressmen. This,…