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The Worst Celebrity Profile Ever
By Kyle | June 22, 2007
The always-perspicacious Ron Rosenbaum has an excellent piece on how brain-dead celeb profiles work. Why does anyone read these things? I have no idea. When I worked at People magazine, many times celebrities refused to talk to us because we were too honest. We had a rule about always printing the age of the celeb, for instance, and we didn’t take the star’s word for it either. We always checked DMV records, which frequently yield a different number.
If the celeb wouldn’t talk, the resulting piece became a “writearound,” meaning we’d speak to everybody else we could track down. The result? A much better story! A refreshing bit of honesty! Anecdotes from ordinary people who interacted with His or Her Highness! The general tone was usually still friendly to the celeb, but it was a much more rounded and interesting picture. I used to write those things so artfully that the average reader probably didn’t even notice that there was no interview with the subject. A truly useless magazine story is the “I went to a blues club with Johnny Depp!” (and nothing happened) variety.
June 25th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
What an excellent story. I recently interviewed a celebrity who complained that People had mentioned his height based on erroneous DMV records, without checking with him: he ended up being the shortest “sexiest man” that year, even though he’s in fact 6′2″ or so. Checking DMV records in California is so restricted that People must have a in-house licensed P.I.
On the fun side: two years ago, a L.A. troop, L.A. Innuendo, did a fantastic show with a simple concept: actors, journalists and even a celebrity blogger (Defamer) read out loud pompous celebrity profiles. The Bruce Wagner profile of Keanu Reeves made the audience cry with laughter. It’s unbelievable:
http://www.keanuvision.com/archives/001389.html