naivety

Check out this article:

http://smh.com.au/news/opinion/the-tills-are-alive/
2006/01/06/1136387622246.html

It’s about magazine editors paying millions of dollars for the stories and photos of the stars. Sometimes I am impressed at how naive I can be or, at least, really unaware of how the whole publicity/popularity/starmaker thing really works. I had contemplated certain things, such as:

1. Has Kirstie Alley purposely put on and taken off weight as a publicity stunt?

2. Why are some celebrities all over magazines but not others who’d you’d expect to be there?

3. Isn’t it awful for those celebrities who get caught out on the beach or coming home from the shop with no make-up on or looking a little too skinny or a little too fat, or whose photographs are doctored to make them look a little too skinny or a little too fat.

As for Kirstie Alley, I was trying to figure out how the publicity stunt thing would work: just because she’s on lots of mag covers (especially when they’re calling her a fat, ugly cow), how does that actually get her money? Does it promote her own tv show, get Hollywood to hire her, let her be an advertising spokesperson? It never dawned on my she’d just say, hey $80,000 for this photo of me, thanks”. I thought the mags sent their own photographers around to snap photos (or photographers sell them to mags) and get their own writers to make up stories.

I’m not sure I really thought about which way the money flowed: from mag to star or from star to mag.

I always thought, you never see tabloid stories about Michelle Pfieffer or Harrison Ford, for example. I presumed that was because they were nice people who did not court the tabloids. And I thought maybe Jen and Brad were having their privacy unduly violated by hungry magazine editors, who were mostly making up stories. I didn’t think they were getting money for access to the story!

I never thought Princess Mary and her hubby, or any other royalty for that matter, were getting paid by magazines – more that they were offering themselves to the magazines because it helped their own popularity. How stupid do I feel!

I’m no longer going to feel bad for celebrities now that I know that get money to be featured in the tabloid press.

It’d be great to be able to do a story on how all this really works…