The New Yorker, September 23, 2002 P. 38
ANNALS OF SHOW BUSINESS about Hollywood publicity agents and specifically about Bumble Ward, 39... Writer describes a series of interviews she arranges for John Stockwell to promote "Crazy/Beautiful" at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles... At a junket for "Planet of the Apes" in New York, a few weeks earlier, I had watched the film’s director, Tim Burton, another Ward client, gamely repeat in most of his thirty-two-straight television interviews that the movie (which appeared to be about stars glumly capering in ape suits) was really about "globalization" and the "fragmentation of society."... Hollywood publicists polish their clients’ images in one of two ways: either by making news or by extinguishing it. Old-fashioned press agents, silver-haired gents whose walls are covered with photos of themselves alongside Debbie Reynolds and Danny Kaye, will make news on behalf of the Harlem Globetrotters by arranging for, say, the Pope to accept an award as an Honorary Globetrotter. A newer breed of gatekeepers, sleek young whippets who return calls at midnight or never, allow the press to glimpse their stars only at Halley’s-comet-like intervals. And in return for access they insist that journalists agree to all sorts of specific preconditions... As the industry’s leading publicist for directors-her twelve-person firm, Bumble Ward & Associates, represents Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Jay Roach, and Bobby and Peter Farrelly, among forty other directors-she has clients who both seek attention and can withstand it... Tarantino describes her efforts on his behalf... Publicity campaigns for big-budget movies are as noisy and purposeful as a cloud of locusts. Studio publicists view every magazine cover as a potential movie poster, and they adhere to a strict formula: each of a film’s stars should appear on two or three covers, and if it’s an ensemble cast the group should adorn the cover of Entertainment Weekly. Studios sell stars because it’s efficient: their images are already established. Because Bumble Ward is selling directors, she has to work harder, finding sympathetic journalists who will champion her clients... The office suite, with its robin’s-egg-blue walls and sisal-covered floors, has an informal Caribbean feel, and Ward’s publicists, all women, stop by her office every few minutes... Tells about the premiere for "K-PAX"... A première is the crowning event of a studio’s publicity campaign, the last chance to "event-ize" a movie. Last summer, "Pearl Harbor" ’s première was held aboard an aircraft carrier in Hawaii and featured five hundred journalists, two thousand guests, parachuting Navy SEALs, and a twenty-minute fireworks display. The splashiest premières cost a million dollars; this one cost more than five million... Writer describes the abuse she is subject to at the hands of her volatile clients... Ward has begun working on a novel and admits she would rather be doing something else...
