Life at the Junket Table Is Hardly a Picnic

A few months ago, I sat with a half a dozen other journalists in a hotel room interviewing actress Miranda Richardson. At one point, amid the innocuous questions about a character she played, I asked her something equally innocuous, something like, “How do you like living in upstate New York?”

Richardson went pale, her eyes got very large and tendons stood out on her neck. Her voice, when it finally came, was strangled, as if somebody had their hands around her neck. She launched into a tirade about how sick and tired she was of being confused with that other actress, and don’t you reporters do your homework?

She was right, of course. In a moment of what might charitably be called derangement, or more accurately be called stupidity, I had mixed her up with actress Natasha Richardson, who has a place in upstate New York with her husband, actor Liam Neeson. Obviously, this was something that had happened to Miranda Richardson before.

Needless to say, I felt like crawling under the table. An ominous quiet fell over the room. This was followed by a few minutes of desultory questioning, after which Richardson left, her 20 minutes with us up.

“The nerve of that woman!” one journalist said. “Who does she think she is?” said another. “It’s an easy mistake to make,” consoled a third. There was general agreement that Richardson had overreacted, and there was nary a word about how I made everyone look bad, not just myself. Never have I felt more grateful to colleagues. But their sympathy and solidarity also served as a lesson in humility. For this was a junket, and these were people I could theoretically look down on.

Junkets are to journalism as marketing is to the truth. Junket reporters are journalistically, if not ethically, challenged. At a typical junket, dozens of print and electronic journalists are flown to, say, New York or L.A., often on the studio’s nickel, put up in a hotel, fed, bused to a screening and then herded to suites where they get about 20 minutes with the stars and the director and sometimes the producer of a movie.

How much territory can you cover in 20 minutes? How many follow-up questions can you ask? Nobody likes this arrangement, not the stars, not the press, not even the publicists, but the studios do, and it works.

I am not a regular member of the junket circuit, just an occasional (unsubsidized) visitor. I don’t know the journalists very well, so I’m on the outside looking in. They are often a tired-looking bunch, sometimes from socializing the night before, more usually from their grueling schedule of connecting flights, screenings and round tables, because they often cover more than one movie during a junket. (A reporter told me he’s lucky if he spends one weekend out of the month at home.)

They come from mid-size cities and represent regional papers, syndicates, radio stations and TV broadcast and cable stations. At one point, dot.com reporters were making an appearance, but as the Internet bubble burst, their numbers have dwindled. The radio people generally have their own interview rooms, bristling with equipment. A whole day is set aside for TV, and it’s not unusual for a star to do as many as 100 interviews on camera.

At a typical print journalist round table, such as the one I had with Richardson, you sit down at 9 a.m. and slog through three hours of banalities about the movie and the stars’ parts in it. The questions asked are notoriously softball, admiring, unanswerable. What sort of research did you do for your role? (This question was asked of Anthony Hopkins for his serial-killer role in “Hannibal.” Well, he ate people.) What was it like to work with De Niro-Streep-the Coen brothers? (Horrible, awful, they were completely unprofessional.)

Sometimes you learn more about the person asking the question than the one answering it. As in any group, there are people at round tables who don’t say much and others who won’t shut up. I remember on one occasion a journalist interrupted another to ask if he’d mind letting someone else ask a question. The star was appalled, as if he’d stumbled in on a family argument. On the other hand, it’s nice to have a verbose journalist around when no one has anything to say.

To fill the bill or make up for a star’s absence, studios sometimes include actors nobody cares about (producers occasionally fall into this category). This sounds cruel, but it’s true. One such actor, well aware of his lack of star power, actually took a reporter to task for not having his tape recorder on while he was talking.

Although the questions you hear can sometimes be embarrassingly sycophantic, the worst offense in my book is the autograph session that sometimes follows an interview. Just as the publicist swoops in to spirit the star away, out come the pictures for them to sign. Now, these are journalists asking for autographs, not fans. More than likely they’ll turn around and sell the photos. In a similar, but not too similar, vein, I’ve been told that foreign journalists have the culturally permissible habit of having their pictures taken with stars after an interview. I wonder if they can sell that?

Given these time constraints, conflicts of interest and ethical lapses, it’s easy to be dismissive of junket reporters. But there is something appealingly “Front Page” about them. They’ve seen and heard it all--I daresay they’re better informed than the supercilious magazine writer who sits down for lunch with a celebrity all by himself.

Also, for all the fluffiness of their queries, these people are tough critics. They know garbage when they see it and are not afraid to call it that (though certainly not to the star’s face). They are harshly critical of stars as interview subjects. They even see an agenda--other than the obvious one--in the freebies the studios hand out, the promotional hats, umbrellas, jackets, soundtracks, stationery, pens, candy, etc. I overheard one veteran say that the expense of the goodies is inversely proportional to the quality of the movie--the worse the movie, the more and classier the stuff you get.

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John Clark is a freelance journalist and regular contributor to Calendar and other entertainment publications.