For Film Publicists and Magazines, It’s Mutual Exploitation

When the writers of the NBC television hit “West Wing” decided to flash back during this season’s opening episode to show what C.J. Cregg, the president’s press secretary, did before she came to Washington, they focused on her last day in a Hollywood public relations firm.

The show portrayed her as having been fired from that firm because one of its most important--and most obnoxious--clients blamed her when he fell from third to ninth in Premiere magazine’s upcoming list of the 100 most powerful people in Hollywood.

The scene got a good, if uncomfortable laugh in Hollywood, where studio executives and other movers and shakers--real and wannabe--often hire publicists to lobby Premiere, Entertainment Weekly and Vanity Fair in an effort to be placed as high as possible in their annual power lists.

The lists serve a dual purpose for the magazines. They generate buzz and they provide the magazines’ reporting staffs with good opportunities to gather information and cement relationships with high-level sources.

“You get access to agents and studio executives who might not return your phone calls during the rest of the year,” says John Horn, who spent two years at Premiere before joining Newsweek last summer.

For magazine reporters, that’s a delicious turning of the tables. Magazines have become so dependent on celebrities in recent years that Hollywood publicists have come to wield enormous power, turning journalists into supplicants and refusing to make star clients available unless magazines promise they will be on the cover, timed to appear when their new movie is released. Some publicists ask some magazines to assign or bar certain writers and photographers and to allow the celebrity to approve any photos or quotations that are used and not to take too much of the celebrity’s time and not to ask certain, potentially embarrassing questions and not to allow the material to be used in any other venue and . . .

Peter Bart, editor in chief of Variety, remembers the most recent of the “good old days in Hollywood,” from the late 1960s into the ‘80s, “when you’d call a press agent and say you wanted to do a story on Steve McQueen, and you’d wind up seeing more of Steve McQueen than ever you wanted to, no conditions attached.”

Supply and Demand

But today, as Horn says, “There are more magazines than there are celebrities to go around. Given the law of supply and demand, it’s out of control--it’s a seller’s market.”

Most editors insist they don’t give in to the most egregious demands made by publicists, but most are willing to promise that they will put a star on the cover if their writer and photographer are given sufficient access to the star.

“We will go so far as to agree that certain interviews will be cover stories,” says James Seymore Jr., managing editor of Entertainment Weekly, “but we never let a subject choose the photographer unless it is someone we were going to use anyway or that we had worked with in the past.”

Publicists generally have a more difficult time exacting a cover promise from the newsmagazines because even stories that are planned for their covers can be postponed or moved off the cover at the last minute if a big news story breaks.

“We never use the C-word,” says Jan Simpson, senior editor in charge of arts and media coverage at Time magazine. What she tells publicists instead involves a kind of mutually understood code--”This is something we’re very interested in.” Or: “We’re going to do something substantial.” Or: “We’re going to do a big package.”

Two years ago, Time was planning to do a big package on “Saving Private Ryan” just before the movie opened. “Did the studio think they were going to get a cover?” Yes. So did Simpson.

DreamWorks SKG, which made the movie, cooperated fully with Time. Knowing that Time wanted the story exclusively, DreamWorks declined requests from Newsweek for photos from the set and for an interview with Tom Hanks, the star of the movie. Newsweek did the story anyway, finding its own photos, using an old interview with Hanks--and beat Time to the newsstand.

Time then decided to postpone its story a week--and take it off the cover.

In the highly competitive world of newsmagazines, such decisions are not uncommon. Indeed, when journalists complain about arrogant stars and imperious publicists, publicists are quick to point out that journalists are not shy about imposing their own conditions on stories.

“They want to be first or they want to have the story exclusively,” says Marci Granata, executive vice president in charge of marketing and publicity for Miramax Films. “They want you to reveal yourself entirely, to talk about things you don’t want to talk about.”

Pat Kingsley, widely regarded as the most powerful and most demanding of the Hollywood publicists, says she understands both sides in this battle but adds bluntly, “I have to be concerned with our side.”

Moreover, says publicist Stephen Rivers, “Putting a celebrity on the cover is a commercial decision, not a journalistic decision. You’re using my client to sell your magazine; why shouldn’t I want a role in picking the photographer and everything else?”

Vanity Fair, which publishes an annual Hollywood issue and hosts an A-list party at the Academy Awards, is generally cited as the prime example of a magazine that publishes solid journalism on other subjects but uses celebrity covers to attract readers. To maintain access to those celebrities, the photos and stories on them are almost invariably flattering; it amounts to what New York magazine recently called “fetishistic coverage of Hollywood.”

The cover of the January issue, for example, features a fetching Catherine Zeta-Jones, billed as “Catherine the Great.”

Friendly to Hollywood

Talk magazine, the 17-month-old joint venture by Miramax Films and the Hearst Corp., is also friendly to Hollywood--and especially so to Miramax and its parent, the Walt Disney Co. For four consecutive issues at the end of 1999, Talk’s cover featured stars from movies made by those two companies. Then, last October, Talk’s cover featured Ben Affleck, the star of upcoming Miramax and Disney films. The cover on the December-January issue featured Matt Damon, the star of “All the Pretty Horses,” released by Miramax on Christmas Day.

Time and People magazines, owned by Time Warner, have published stories about Warner Bros. movies that raised questions about the purity of their journalistic intent as well. Editors at both magazines, as at Talk, have denied carrying any corporate water.

Interestingly, the magazine that had to face the most skepticism about possible conflicts of interest when it began publication in 1990--Entertainment Weekly, also owned by Time Warner--has by all accounts done an admirable job of avoiding that problem.

Entertainment Weekly “didn’t do Warner’s any favors,” says Nancy Kirkpatrick, who spent 18 years as a publicity executive at Warner’s before becoming Paramount’s executive vice president for worldwide publicity last year. “We had huge problems with them. They were as tough as they could be.”

Entertainment Weekly’s film critics often give Warner Bros. movies lower grades than do critics for other publications, and in 1999, when Warner’s released its big movie of the summer, “Wild, Wild West,” Entertainment Weekly published a negative 3,000-word cover story that infuriated Warner’s executives. The story said the movie had been “swarmed by bad buzz all year,” had a budget that “bloated to $200 million” and was given a test screening that “went so poorly the audience actually booed.”

James Meigs, the first movie editor at Entertainment Weekly and later the editor of Premiere magazine before his dismissal late last year, says any suggestion that Entertainment Weekly has gone easy on Warner Bros. is “a bad rap. I’ve seen no evidence of that.”

Premiere, meanwhile, has continued the kind of aggressive reporting and edgy writing that it has been known for since it began publication in 1987. Premiere’s July 1998 story on New Line Cinema was so critical that executives of the company haven’t spoken to the magazine since. The March issue of Premiere, which is scheduled to be on newsstands next week, contains a story on Arnold Schwarzenegger that’s so negative he’s reportedly considering a lawsuit against the magazine.