THE SWEET SMELL OF ‘CREATIVE’ OSCAR ODDS : A Fresh News Angle? An Inspired Public Relations Ploy? Or Just the Show-Biz Press, Unwilling to Bite the Handout That Feeds It?

Disinformation: Misleading news fed to the media to influence opinion.

Infotainment: News presented as entertainment.

Disinfotainment: Misleading entertainment news fed to the media to influence opinion.

In 1983, veteran Las Vegas oddsmaker Lennie Del Genio put out his first line on the favorites for Academy Award nominations. The first five names in Del Genio’s best actor category were Paul Newman, at even money for “The Verdict”; Ben Kingsley, 6-to-5 for “Gandhi”; Dustin Hoffman, 9-to-5 for “Tootsie”; Peter O’Toole, 3-to-1 for “My Favorite Year,” and Jack Lemmon, 9-to-1 for “Missing.”

Bingo! When the actual Oscar nominations were announced, Del Genio’s top five matched up perfectly with the academy’s.

But that’s not what made Del Genio’s list interesting. The Frontier Hotel oddsmaker had actually gone seven deep on the best actor chart. The alternates were Richard Gere, at 20-to-1 for “An Officer and a Gentleman,” and Sylvester Stallone, at 15-to-1 for “Rocky III.”

Gere was a legitimate contender that season, but Stallone stood a better chance of winning the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes than an Oscar nomination.

How could Del Genio have been so right, and so wrong?

The answer, say publicists 282 miles away in Hollywood, is that Del Genio did not have all that much to do with the original Oscar tout sheet. They say the gimmick was dreamed up by Warren Cowan, one of the heads of the entertainment public relations giant Rogers & Cowan, whose client lists included the names of Del Genio’s pre-nominations favorite Paul Newman and long-shot Stallone.

“I was told the general outline of the story and I was told obviously to work as many Rogers & Cowan clients in as possible,” said Ian Abrams, a former staff publicist at Rogers & Cowan. “I tried to stay within the bounds of reality. I didn’t want it to seem like science fiction.”

Stallone, as a nominee for “Rocky III,” does seem like science fiction in retrospect, but no one in the news media questioned it four years ago. Nor did we question the equally preposterous inclusion of “Rocky III,” at 12-to-1, on the best picture lineup. Nor did we notice that Rogers & Cowan clients were ranked first in three of the five categories that Del Genio had reportedly handicapped.

Since then, the Frontier Hotel and Lennie Del Genio have become internationally known for their Oscar odds. The handicaps are moved over the news wires and routinely included among the wafer-thin items that pass for entertainment news in this star-struck era.

This incident is not Watergate, or Oscargate. It’s not even the Frontier Hotel-gate. It is unlikely that Del Genio’s meaningless odds (you can’t even place a bet on a non-sporting event in Nevada) swayed a single academy member’s vote.

It is simply an example of how easily today’s entertainment editors, in their panic to fill an items column or to hold TV viewers’ attention for five seconds, can be led to disseminate disinfotainment.

“I’m a press agent; a press agent looks for ways to create news,” said Dale Olson, who was president of the motion picture division of Rogers & Cowan when the Frontier relationship began. “This was simply to call attention to another publicity ploy for the Oscars, to call attention to your clients.”

“I think the real story is not that Rogers & Cowan did this for so long, but that it did this for so long without the press people catching on,” said Abrams, now the publicity director for Skouras Pictures. “It says more about the laziness of the Hollywood press than anything else.”

Cowan and Del Genio both denied that the agency initiated the Frontier Oscar odds, but Beth Herman, a former Rogers & Cowan staff publicist who is now writing a novel based on her experiences as a Hollywood press agent, said she was in a meeting with Cowan when the idea was born.

“We were sitting in Warren Cowan’s office talking about Oscar campaigns and he (Cowan) brought up Jimmy the Greek and odds,” Herman said. “He said, ‘Shouldn’t we write an odds story?’ ”

Herman said that because she had previously worked as a publicist in Las Vegas, she was asked to make contacts with some of the hotels there.

“I called about a half-dozen people I knew in Vegas,” she said. “I told them, ‘Listen, we don’t have to use your manpower, nothing. Just your name and your oddsmaker. We’ll do the rest.’ ”

Jim Seagrave, head of marketing and publicity at the Frontier Hotel, confirmed that the original idea came from Rogers & Cowan and said he doesn’t doubt that the motivation was to hype the agency’s clients. But he said the odds furnished him by Rogers & Cowan were merely passed along to Del Genio, who considered them along with other “inside information” before putting out his final line.

“They gave us their suggestions, but we modified them,” Seagrave said. “I don’t think Lennie has ever talked to anybody at Rogers & Cowan.”

Del Genio, who runs the race and sports book and the keno game at the Frontier, said he’s never heard of Rogers & Cowan. He said Seagrave came to him and suggested he do an Oscar handicap because of his family (his brother and an uncle are musicians, he said, and his dad, retired from the IRS, still plays the guitar on stage at age 74).

“The first year, we put the line on the nominations out as a lark,” Del Genio said. “The next day, ‘Good Morning America’ called. ‘Entertainment Tonight’ called. Ted Turner Broadcasting called. I have already had 15 calls this year. It’s a lot of fun.”

For the last four years, Del Genio said about 80% of his Oscar intelligence has been gathered by Seagrave. The rest he gets from his father in New York and from friends in Miami and Chicago.

“The information that I get from industry people very rarely correlates with what I get from my friends and family,” he said.

He’s now considering putting out odds on the Grammys. As soon as he can find some sources.

“I have very good sources in New York and Miami,” he said. “But I don’t know that many people in the record industry in Los Angeles.”

When Dale Olson left Rogers & Cowan in 1985 to form his own public relations company, the connection between the Frontier and Rogers & Cowan was broken. Olson was Seagrave’s main contact in Hollywood, and by then, the Frontier odds had taken on their own life. For the last two years, Olson has continued to provide his odds on the Oscars to Seagrave, but it’s gratis and without vested interest. Olson has had no clients in the running for nominations.

Putting out Las Vegas odds as a way of influencing academy voters is not new. Cowan said he had put out releases on Oscar odds for other Las Vegas hotels before and Maury Foladare, another veteran publicist, said he was doing Oscar lines for his client, the Union Plaza Hotel, more than 10 years ago.

You could bet on the Union Plaza line, Foladare said, but the state changed the law to limit gambling to sports events.

Cowan insisted that he did not attempt to control the Frontier handicap. As for Stallone’s inclusion in Del Genio’s 1983 sheet, Cowan said his memory is that Stallone was being talked about for a nomination.

The former Rogers & Cowan publicists quoted in this story were surprised at the query, and none of them condemned the scheme. It is creative publicity, they said, just one of many artificial events given widespread news coverage.

“There is no doubt that Warren Cowan is the most brilliant public relations man in Hollywood,” said Beth Herman. “Whatever he does he does to achieve the most he can for his clients.”

“I think this is a positive story about how an agency can present a client in the best possible way,” Abrams said. “If the media is dumb enough to take these stories year after year, it’s you guys who are doing the public a disservice.”