When is bad publicity a bad career move?
“The old saw of no publicity is bad publicity no longer applies,” warns Allan Mayer of Sitrick and Company, one of the leading Hollywood damage-control experts with a client list that includes R. Kelly and Halle Berry.
“After this kind of event, the public tends to start thinking of you as a character rather than as an artist. People may be talking about Janet Jackson, but they’re not talking about her singing and dancing.”
Mayer says it’s not difficult for him to get a client some media attention, but these days he has to be very careful about what he arranges. “What you are doing,” he says, “gets much more mercilessly explored than was the case in the past.”
Mayer argues that two kinds of celebrities still can benefit from stunts. Stars such as Madonna, who are smart enough to poke fun at image manipulation even while they do it, have a certain immunity.
Madonna changing her image? “That’s like a car company bringing out this year’s model,” Mayer says.
Thus it was no accident that Britney Spears locked lips with the master chameleon as a way of signaling her own potentially lucrative if arguably desperate career transition from teen heroine to seductive pop diva.
Then there are the figures such as Pamela Anderson or Paris Hilton who have little to offer beyond a tabloid presence.
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Article by Chris Jones
Source:Metromix.com
Thanks to Memphis
Amid the fallout from an unscheduled halftime appearance by a naked part of Janet Jackson at Super Bowl XXXVIII last Sunday, the 37-year-old singer this week issued a peripatetic array of explanations, apologies, revised explanations and videotaped apologies. Commentary pages and talk shows argued interminably about network culpability and the semantics of the naked breast, with frequent side trips to lament the sudden, precipitous moral decline in American family values.
But Americans who do real work for a living smelled a put-up job, old-fashioned showbiz flimflam retooled for the replayable, frame-by-frame age of TiVo. To many people, this alleged “wardrobe malfunction” was a manufactured cultural scandale, specifically designed so search words such as Timberlake and Jackson would get the smoke rising from an overloaded Google search engine.
Isn’t Janet Jackson‘s career on the wane? And doesn’t she happen to have a new album to promote? Surely, the lady doth protest too much.
“The old saw of no publicity is bad publicity no longer applies,” warns Allan Mayer of Sitrick and Company, one of the leading Hollywood damage-control experts with a client list that includes R. Kelly and Halle Berry. “After this kind of event, the public tends to start thinking of you as a character rather than as an artist. People may be talking about Janet Jackson, but they’re not talking about her singing and dancing.”
Indeed not. Weary real-world souls this week saw not the media’s designated moral apocalypse, but a star hoping to cash in on bad behavior. To many, this seemed like yet more irritating evidence that the pure of creative heart languish for lack of attention in today’s America but you can take boorish behavior all the way to the bank.
“Notoriety now equals celebrity,” said Deena Weinstein, a sociologist at DePaul University.
“There’s just no distinction anymore.”
But it isn’t so much that times have changed. It’s just that showbiz hucksters once could get away with this kind of stuff a lot more easily.
With hordes of journalists covering celebrities and news networks running day and night, even a single ill-conceived moment of looseness can spiral out of control, spark a backlash and destroy a career — especially if it comes with videotape. Just ask Howard Dean.
When John Lennon said in 1966 that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, he may have had a reasonable argument along with a quote designed to simultaneously offend and sell. But there’s a grand history of manufactured shocks in the service of a product or a personal career. Jackson’s Super Bowl stunt wasn’t even the first involving a breast.
‘Accidental’ nudity
When Howard Hughes set out to promote the Jane Russell movie “Underwater!” in 1955, he held a press screening in a submerged room off the coast of Florida. The actress Jayne Mansfield (who was notorious throughout her career for losing her bikini top whenever cameras were around) had her breasts “accidentally” emerge from the top of her bikini as she swam by the press, thus ensuring that it was she and not her rival Russell who became the big story of the day. Mansfield had been brought along merely as window dressing.
“Mansfield had the biggest flare for self-promotion,” notes the Hollywood biographer and film historian Jim Parish. “That incident helped make her career.”
In the supposedly moralistic 1940s, Hollywood historian Laurie Jacobson points out, Frank Sinatra’s handlers sent their young crooner out into the street in attire that was specifically designed to break away in the hands of the young women who clawed the singer. That made it look for the cameras like Sinatra’s clothing had been ripped away by fans in a fit of passion, increasing his desirability.
“How is that so different,” Jacobson asks, “from what Janet just did last weekend?”
Flush with stunts
In many ways, it’s not. But both Mansfield and Sinatra were at their prime in a very different media environment when celebrity coverage could be tightly controlled by powerful suits operating behind mainly cowed stars. Stunts were common. So were phony marriages. Florence Lawrence, an early movie actress once known as the Biograph Girl, even allowed her death to be faked — more egregious trickery, surely, than revealing a breast.
But with journalists who refused to play ball getting frozen out of access to coveted celebrities, studios and recording labels had the press in their pockets,not to mention swaths of the police and city hall. Events were routinely staged and manufactured, but their consequences and outcomes could also be precisely managed, carefully calibrated and accurately predicted.
And in gentler times, the events also could be tame and yet still get plenty of media attention. A gay celebrity looking for a coverup marriage just needed a couple of photos with the right member of the opposite sex to satisfy the gossip pages. These days one has to scream much more loudly (or reveal more flesh) to get attention and there’s a far higher danger of the kind of backlash that can suddenly turn one into a pariah at the Grammys.
To the Hollywood types specializing in the rehabilitation of dented celebrity goods, Super Bowl XXXVIII looks like bad news for Jackson in the long term. They don’t think it will help her sell records even if she’s currently the name on everyone’s lips.
Mayer says it’s not difficult for him to get a client some media attention, but these days he has to be very careful about what he arranges. “What you are doing,” he says, “gets much more mercilessly explored than was the case in the past.”
Mayer argues that two kinds of celebrities still can benefit from stunts. Stars such as Madonna, who are smart enough to poke fun at image manipulation even while they do it, have a certain immunity.
Madonna changing her image? “That’s like a car company bringing out this year’s model,” Mayer says.
Thus it was no accident that Britney Spears locked lips with the master chameleon as a way of signaling her own potentially lucrative if arguably desperate career transition from teen heroine to seductive pop diva.
Then there are the figures such as Pamela Anderson or Paris Hilton who have little to offer beyond a tabloid presence. Mayer referenced the steamy video of Hilton that surfaced on the Internet shortly before the hotel heiress’ “The Simple Life” reality show debuted on FOX. “When I was asked if the sex tape would help or hurt Paris Hilton’s career,” Mayer says, “I had to ask: What career is that?” Such people can morph notoriety into some B-list gigs Donald Trump said this week that he has asked Hilton to host the Miss USA Pageant.
But established recording stars are another matter. Parish, a specialist in Hollywood scandal, points out that Whitney Houston’s high tabloid profile hasn’t helped her career of late. “There’s a fast saturation point these days,” Parish says. “And a nasty backlash.”
Then again, R. Kelly (who has been charged with child pornography) not only has seen record sales remain strong, but he recently was nominated for an NAACP Image Award.
Of course, Kelly has been the beneficiary of some careful post-facto damage control, just as publicists for the movie “Cleopatra” once carefully exploited the personal marital scandals surrounding Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, even if they did not originally set it in motion.
Under-rehearsed
Mayer argues that has always been the case in Hollywood. In all probability, that notorious Super Bowl halftime show, like Broadway previews and awards shows in general — probably was chaotic in its planning and chronically under-rehearsed.
“Things are never planned as carefully in the entertainment industry as outsiders think,” Mayer says.
After the fact, of course, a veritable army of bright and highly paid people scramble like political spin doctors to get ahead of the event and help their clients and constituencies. But they are finding more and more that events just move too fast for their comfort. And that means that stunts such as Timberlake and Jackson’s have only become riskier and riskier.
Dripping with condescension, one newspaper report of the Super Bowl incident referenced the “tumbling out” of the breast of a “normal middle-aged woman.”
One could imagine Jackson’s publicists and promoters all gnashing their teeth and wishing the offended item had stayed undercover.