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Date Posted: 12:41:03 11/16/04 Tue
Author: The Guardian
Subject: Tales of the Junket
In reply to: MIKE SCHNEIDER, AP Business Writer 's message, "DISNEY: Currying favor with the press" on 12:39:36 11/16/04 Tue

Tales of the junket

A new Julia Roberts comedy aims to satirise the great Hollywood institution in which heavily policed access to movie stars is traded for TV footage and column inches. Does the film get it right? US entertainment journalist Gary Susman, who has been to hundreds of these events, explains this surreal world - and asks other veterans for their stories

Friday October 5, 2001
The Guardian

If you read a movie star interview in a newspaper or see them talking about their movie on TV, your local correspondent probably didn't land that interview because he or she is chummy with Tom Hanks or Michelle Pfeiffer. Rather, your reporter was one of dozens who queued in assembly-line fashion over the course of a a gruelling weekend in one of showbusiness's least-known and most poorly understood rituals: the movie press junket.
With the imminent release of the film America's Sweethearts, more moviegoers may learn how this process works. Ostensibly a Julia Roberts romantic comedy, the movie is set at a press junket where two once-happily married stars (Catherine Zeta-Jones and John Cusack) must promote their latest film while putting a positive spin on their embarrassing break-up and hiding the blooming romance between the leading man and his sister-in-law (Roberts). In a life-imitates-art-imitates-life moment, America's Sweethearts was itself promoted during a US junket earlier this summer, where Roberts had to put a positive spin on her embarrassing breakup with longtime boyfriend Benjamin Bratt.

Junkets are an essentially industrial process, in which the studios fly hundreds of reporters to Los Angeles or New York (or, in the case of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii) for a weekend and put everyone up in a luxury hotel, screen the movie, and make the stars available for brief talks. After seeing the movie, say, on Friday night, journalists who work in print, radio, or the internet will spend all day Saturday at "round tables", broken up into groups of eight to 16 reporters at separate tables, while the "talent" (the stars, the director, and sometimes a producer and a screenwriter) goes from one table to the next, giving each group 15 to 30 minutes. On Sunday, the stars may talk to TV reporters, who get each performer one-on-one, but only for three to five minutes. Here, it's the interviewers who go from room to room, each with their own cameras and lighting, while the talent stays in place all day. It's a grinding regimen for the stars but also for the journalists, who may cover three or four movies this way in a weekend, if the studios cooperate with each other. As a freelance newspaper journalist and film critic, I've attended hundreds of junkets over the years, though I'm not one of the 200 or so road warriors who attend them virtually every weekend.

Junkets have been getting a bad rap lately as cesspools of graft, where journalists are supposedly encouraged to write puff pieces and glowing reviews because the studios pay their way, giving them flights, hotel rooms, food and liquor, bags of novelty items bearing the movie's logo (which often end up sold on the internet auction house eBay) and maybe $150 per day in other expenses. To avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, some newspapers pay their own way, but their reporters get the same access as the freeloaders - and are subject to the same subtle pressures to play nice. In fact, when the scandal broke this summer that Sony Pictures had invented a fake movie critic to praise several mediocre films in newspaper ads, many observers wondered why the studio bothered, when so many real-life "junket whores" might have happily praised the movies in return for an airline ticket, a T-shirt and a chance to see their names in print. This assumption that movie journalists are so easily bought is behind a class-action lawsuit filed this summer by Citizens for Truth in Movie Advertising against the major Hollywood studios. The plaintiffs would like to shut down junkets altogether.

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Neither the studios nor most film journalists see junkets this way, however. For many reporters, especially those from smaller outlets or overseas, paid junkets are the only way they can afford to get access to the celebrities their readers and viewers demand to know about. We don't think of the jaunts to Hollywood to stay in posh hotels and interview stars as vacations but as giving up our weekends and time with our families to work.

It is easy, however, for journalists to be cowed into submission. There's always an army of publicists hovering over our shoulders, some from the studios, some employed by the stars, all making sure we don't ask anything impolite or embarrassing or anything that strays too far from the movie. The threats are never spoken but always implicit - if you ask the star about his ex-wife, he'll walk out, and you'll have ruined the interview for yourself and your colleagues; or worse, you'll be blackballed from future junkets.

The studios certainly expect their cushy treatment of journalists and their stage-managed interviews to result in positive coverage, but they don't explicitly demand it, which is why they're not worried about CTMA proving their case in court. In fact, the studios operate on the Oscar Wilde theory of publicity: they would rather have you report negatively than not at all. I've always found that the studios will keep inviting me back as long as I give their movies column inches and spell everyone's name right, no matter what I write. Case in point: years ago, I attended a junket where I was to interview Al Pacino, a brilliant actor but a man who, in those days, could barely deliver a coherent sentence unless you spoke to him in the afternoon, after he'd been fortified with several cups of strong coffee. I thought nothing of it when I spotted him on Friday night at the hotel bar with Phil Collins, but when we did the roundtable Sunday morning, he was still wearing the same clothes: his tie was around his forehead, he had a stained blazer, an open shirt, an unzipped fly, moccasins. Getting a comprehensible answer was even more difficult than usual. I described this painful experience in my article because Pacino was due to visit my city's film festival and receive a lifetime achievement award sponsored by a champagne company. Still, the studio kept inviting me back for junkets, and I kept getting to interview Pacino on future films.

Other journalists have their own stories of celebrity misbehaviour at junkets - the one about the married leading man who slept with a publicist, or the one about the vintage Hollywood star who handed a reporter his bowl of pot leaves and asked him to pick out the stems and seeds during a press conference, or the one about the publicist who begged reporters not to ask about the married star's sex-addiction therapy (a topic that wouldn't have come up had the publicist not raised it). We swap these stories at junkets between interviews, when we feel free to be ruthless and catty and honest. (America's Sweethearts gets this exactly backwards; its journalists are bulldogs during the interviews and pussycats afterwards.) They also have tales of the mind-numbingly repetitive, energy-draining interview process, the extravagant lengths to which some studios go to dazzle journalists with Hollywood glamour, and the general surreality of the whole experience.

Jeffrey Birnbaum Entertainment journalist

Going on these junkets every weekend is not always a pleasure cruise. Granted the ticket is paid for, yes, you're staying at the top LA hotel Four Seasons, yes, the food is good, but it's a job. You're giving up your weekend. The thing that gets me is all the complaining about "junket whores" getting $125 per diem. That's usually just enough to cover all the phone calls back home to your family and a drink at the bar. One of my favourite junkets ever was the junket for Johnny Be Good, where Anthony Michael Hall was so incapacitated, the publicists pretty much said, "Have a good time." Nobody did any interviews with anybody. Orion probably wrote the whole thing off. And I remember interviewing Melanie Griffith at the Working Girl junket, when she was supposedly in her big cocaine phase. She got up two or three times during the interview to go to the bathroom, and that was just at our table.

My favourite junket story ever was the weekend Miramax was junketing Senseless and Jackie Brown. There was a journalist from an alternative paper who was insulted by the out-of-date, gay jokes that made up most of Senseless. So the journalist called the director, Penelope Spheeris, on it. She got totally upset. He was polite, but he didn't let it go. She got very defensive and said, "Look at the other movie junketing here, the Tarantino movie. They say 'fuck' and 'nigger' every other word." And she began to lose it. She said, "What paper are you from?" He wasn't from a major paper, so called him a "fucker and a party pooper". She started crying and excused herself, and I'll never forget her exit line. She said, "Do you have everything you need?" Miramax led the journalist out, obviously to the slaughter: that was his last Miramax junket.

Peter Keough Film editor, the Boston Phoenix

At the Pearl Harbor junket, where were the movie stars? For a while, it looked like we might have to content ourselves with former basketball star Dennis Rodman.

At the last minute, Ben Affleck was downgraded from roundtable interviews to a 15-minute press conference. His eloquent words were undermined when he self-consciously flirted with all the female reporters who asked questions. His comments on the perks and price of fame ("You can't sleep with all of them...That's a joke") also came off as smart- ass and smarmy. To his credit, though, he extended his allotted 15 minutes to half an hour. Nobody asked Tom Sizemore much of anything. Sizemore was then shooting Black Hawk Down [due in 2002], in which he plays an Army Ranger. He still had his Ranger haircut and looked like a pissed-off William Bendix. "This generation has no idea what it takes to win a war," he said. "It's easier to die for your country than to kill." With the possible exceptions of James Caan and Shirley MacLaine, he is the scariest person I have ever interviewed.

Ricky Tomlinson Actor, Mike Bassett: England Manager

I've done loads of them. I'll tell you what it's like. I'm a plasterer by trade and it's 10 times easier than spending 12 hours on a building site. You've always got someone there to look after you. You've always got a cup of tea and you stop for lunch. In the main, people are very, very good to you so I've got no problems with it at all. What's hard about spending a day in a first-class hotel being bloody pampered, given whatever you want to drink and stuff like that? It goes with the job. And if they're good enough to give me air time or viewing time to promote what I've done then I'm certainly prepared to go along and do that.

Lea Saslav Freelance entertainment journalist and former USA Today correspondent

In America's Sweethearts, the journalists and the stars mingle at a cocktail party. In reality, the VIPs almost never hang out with reporters, though I remember a big party for Ed Wood, where we did get to hang out with Tim Burton, Bill Murray, Spike Lee and other stars. A bunch of us sat at a table with Martin Landau and assured him that he was going to win an Oscar for his Bela Lugosi in that movie, which he eventually did. He didn't quite believe us. I'm just kicking myself that I didn't ask him all about James Dean; I didn't learn until years later that they had been friends.

Disney's always thrown the most lavish junkets. You would not believe the excess at the Aladdin junket. The studio flew everyone and their families down to Orlando, put us up in the Epcot resort hotels, and gave us free passes to all the parks. For the Aladdin party, they closed the entire MGM theme park and turned it into an Arabian bazaar, with a quarter of a mile of buffet tables stacked with food. They had a parade, where the actors in the movie rode in on camels and elephants. Even [Disney CEO] Michael Eisner was walking around with a look of dazed amusement about it all. At the end of the parade was some poor Disney peon with a shovel whose job it was to clean up after the elephants. A group of us were reminded of the old joke about the circus guy who had that same job, and when asked why he didn't quit, he said, "What? And give up show business?" We imagined this guy thinking to himself, "OK, so right now, I'm shovelling elephant shit, but what I really want to do is direct."

Of course, it wasn't much of a vacation. They really worked us hard. After hours and hours, everyone was exhausted, and Gilbert Gottfried came to our table. Someone casually suggested that Gottfried wasn't the first guy you'd think of to voice a children's cartoon, and he rasped, "That's where you're wrong," and went into this hilarious improvisation, ranting about Walt Disney's cryogenic freezer, Sharon Stone, being a Jew in an Arabian-themed movie, Sophie's Choice, Saturday morning cartoons, and on and on for 25 minutes. We were laughing so hard we couldn't breathe. It was the funniest interview I've ever done.

Paul Sherman Contributing writer, the Boston Herald

At the Honeymoon in Vegas junket (1994), James Caan was utterly blasting Bette Midler (this was after For the Boys, which she also produced). He said, literally, "She couldn't produce a chair." Then he went on The Tonight Show and denied ever saying anything of the sort.

Jack Claire Freelance entertainment journalist

You can write a good story and ask tough questions, but you have to be diplomatic about it. I thought I was being diplomatic at the Unforgettable junket when I asked Ray Liotta, "Did you and Linda Fiorentino discuss the vagaries of the business?" His career had had ups and downs, and she'd been on top of the world after The Last Seduction but had followed it up with Jade. It got back to Linda that I had asked that question, and I got thrown out. The MGM publicists were very nice. They said, "We know it's not your fault. Can we buy you lunch?" Like that would make up for losing my interviews. Still, someone felt bad, and they arranged it so that Ray and I got an interview in a bar a few days later.

Some stars are just plain rude and difficult. Tommy Lee Jones is mean to everybody. Even publicists hate him, but they'll do their best to protect him when the junket's on.

Jasmin Chavez Publicist, Sony Pictures

Once the dates are locked in, it takes three to four weeks to organise a junket. Getting the talent approval [over which media outlets to invite] is probably the dreariest part of the job. You have to argue for your press. Sometimes a personal publicist will say no, and you have to fight for that outlet. Meanwhile, journalists are biting at your heels. We don't actually sit inside the interviews. Some studios do, but we don't because the talent's personal publicist is usually there in the room with them. We put the responsibility on them [to monitor the interviews for personal questions]. That's more in their interest. We just want journalists to ask questions about the film. It's a professional under standing that they're not going to ask personal questions. At the junket for The People vs Larry Flynt, somebody asked Courtney Love a question about Kurt Cobain. She answered that question beautifully, but that journalist now has a reputation with us. That kind of question can ruin the interview for the other journalists, too.

Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford, the actors who've been in this business longer, know this is part of the job. Mel really works. Catherine Zeta-Jones, same thing. She's a workhorse. For America's Sweethearts, we started at 9 am, and we didn't think she'd show up that early, but she did. Some of the younger actors, you have to start at 10 and beg them to be on time. I like dealing with the press. They've travelled halfway across the world to see this film, so I'm not going to be unfriendly to them. The big no-nos for me with journalists are: a) if they don't show up, and b) if they start complaining about something that we have no control over. Also, we're paying for their air fare, we're paying for their hotel, then they want an extra night, and all of a sudden, you become their travel agent.

With the September 11 terrorism attacks, junkets may change a little. Our junket for Riding in Cars with Boys, with Drew Barrymore, is going to be the test case. Some journalists would like to come, but they're just not comfortable flying right now. Actors may not want to fly either. I don't blame them. But it's a surprisingly small number. There's this drive to return to normal. Interest in celebrities is still there.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet Director, Amelie

Don't talk to me about these interview junkets. I mean, I very nearly went mad - I can't tell you how close I came to going nuts - doing one in Japan for Alien Resurrection and I am a very calm person. I do not speak Japanese. And I had no idea when I went there how seriously the Japanese took the film, which was good in one way, but . . . well, you had to be there.

For days and days I would be stuck in a hotel room while I was asked long, long questions about tiny things in the film - often things I hadn't noticed myself. All these questions had to be first translated for me and then my answers had to be translated back so it would take about five minutes for every little detail. They would nod and smile at each answer and most of the time I think they had no idea at all what I meant. After one really crazy question I remember saying, "It's just a film, you know." And I could see that they were upset by that. After many days of this you think you will never escape. After one particularly bad interview I remember running into the next room to just scream. I wanted to cry. Making a film takes a long time, but not as long as the interviews if you are making one for a big studio.

Mike Hodges Director, Get Carter and Croupier

The most horrendous junkets are in America where you are taken to some hotel in downtown LA or even in the Valley. They bring in 500 to 600 TV reviewers who are totally ignorant of anything going on. I remember doing a junket for the film Black Rainbow which went straight to cable. [The director] Robert Altman had warned me about the TV junkets he had done. But I was so angry with Miramax not giving the film a proper cinema release that I went along and was exposed to the most horrendous situation. The vast majority of the interviewers had not even seen the film.

Alan Jones Freelance film journalist

I must have been to thousands of junkets. The US have got the system down to a fine art. You have four minutes, if you're lucky, with each star and towards the end they give you a 30-seconds warning. A note may pop up from nowhere saying: "Don't ask anything else." Two junkets really stand out for me. One was the funniest and the second was the most dramatic. At the Mars Attacks!/Tim Burton junket in New York, a Japanese journalist misunderstood the plot and asked Lisa Marie, Burton's girlfriend, what it was like being the daughter of the king of rock'n'roll. Lisa Marie pointed out the mistake and the journalist ran out of the room screaming, never to be seen again. The most dramatic was the junket for Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. It was on the day after the death of Princess Di. Mike Myers was a real state, repeatedly demanding that a scene, referring to her, needed to be cut out.

Additional reporting by Matthew Keating, Sam Delaney and Fiachra Gibbons. 'Jeffrey Birnbaum' and 'Jack Claire' are pseudonyms. America's Sweethearts is released on October 19.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/friday_review/story/0%2C3605%2C563160%2C00.html

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