When he interviewed celebrities, typically over lunch, longtime Parade columnist James Brady often did not take notes; he only needed three soundbites, which he memorized.
The National Enquirer and Star could theoretically be out of business within weeks, what with publisher American Media facing a creditor takeover or even bankruptcy.
Magazines! Nightclub appearances! The once easy-access revenue stream for desperate celebrities is swiftly drying up in the shadow of this New Depression.
Can you sell a book about celebrity-linked thieves, murderers and rapists when the darkest chapter is missing, but available for free online? Simon & Schuster is about to find out.
Anyone know about the purported layoffs at Star? A tipster tells us the second-tier celebrity magazine is firing a "bunch of people."
Maybe it sounded like Paula Abdul was "chiding" Fox on her satellite radio show Monday, as the AP headline has it, but the charge was quite serious: That the network purposely gave Paula Godspeed a slot on American Idol to irritate singer/judge Abdul. In other words, Fox put Godspeed on the show, repeatedly, not because they were ignorant of her history as a mentally imbalanced stalker, but precisely because they knew this history. Godspeed's 18 years of letter to Abdul and her stint on the show were capped, infamously, with an apparent suicide near Abdul's home.
Madonna's estranged brother Christopher Ciccone must be smirking at the news coming out of a British court: The singer claims an interior designer she hired to work on her Beverly Hills mansion surreptitiously photographed pictures of her wedding to Guy Ritchie, then sold them to the Mail On Sunday, which published them in October. Madonna wants $7.4 million in copyright damages from the paper and has identified the designer as Robert Joseph Wilber, heretofore unknown to the public. Of course she could have avoided this whole mess if she hadn't screwed over and disowned her interior designer brother, who worked on that very mansion.
When we overdose on celebrities and overindulge in gadgets, where's the vomitorium to hurl it up? Why, it's eBay, on whose shores the flotsam of every shipwrecked trend lands. Here's what was formerly hot in 2008:
People spent last week getting rid of people, but whatever the magazine saves next year by eliminating 18 editorial jobs, it's a drop in the bucket compared to what the magazine has to pay celebrities for pictures of their babies and weddings. To preserve its place at the top of the celebrity weekly heap, People has long stuck to a policy that it will never be outbid by the likes of In Touch, Us Weekly or OK!. Because celebrities auction off their most precious moments, the competition typically knows the sort of bottomless budget they're up against. And it's jaw-dropping: just these eight covers, all from this year, have set the Time Inc. title back by about $25 million.
People editor Larry Hackett sent out a memo late today indicating the celebrity magazine got rid of 18 editorial staff, per the goal it set in early November. The communique, reprinted after the jump, gave no indication of whether the voluntary buyouts the Time Inc. title sought had to be supplemented with involuntary firings. Nor did it specify which staffers were leaving, or which bureaus were most heavily affected. But then it was written by the same guy who let his magazine slide into the common tabloid muck it was once a cut above, only to rationalize and narrowly deny the whole scandal, so what do you expect, forthright, expansive honesty?
Security guards shot dead a man swinging samurai swords at the Church of Scientology's Celebrity Center in Hollywood. The fortysomething man with tatooed arms had gone back and forth to his car before getting "close enough to hurt" the security guards. Sure, Tom Cruise's cult has a history of turning viciously on its malcontents, but this particular ex-Scientologist was "very clear[ly]" threatening rather than protesting , Los Angeles police — still investigating — tell the LA Times. Which presents a bit of a PR dilemma to Anonymous, the ad-hoc anti-Scientology group that can't decide whether to stay the hell away from this story or flog the angle that the sect's three guards killed an innocent unnecessarily:
Amid pandemic media bloodletting and global financial meltdown, it's nice to finally find a silver lining: All those silly Barack Obama trinkets are making insane amounts of money for media companies and providing precious little stimulus to the economy. The Times estimated roughly $200 million sold so far, including more than $15 million in commemorative issues and books from People and Time, somewhere around $1.5 million for the online store set up by the New york Times Company and $700,000 for the Los Angeles Times. Commemorative plates and coins, meanwhile have become ubiquitous enough that Lewis Black ranted about them on the Daily Show (clip after the jump). The downside?
Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore shamed all of the United States of America by ceding hegemony over House Of Windsor gossip to filthy British tabloids. People is flying the white flag of surrender over its London bureau and shutting it down, two tipsters inform us, sending its handful of staffers, like writers Courtney Rubin and Pete Norman, packing. Former bureau chief Simon Perry was purportedly told to work from home after a demotion to "correspondent," but there's skepticism he'll comply. Good luck trying to crack the Brits' white-glove treatment of their silly "royal" family now, People! Meanwhile, a reckoning is coming in the U.S.
As a member of the vaunted Time Inc. magazine empire, People has always stood a cut or two above most celebrity magazines, ethically speaking. But Angelina Jolie is "scary smart," in the words of celeb-mag editor Bonnie Fuller, and the actress seems to have had little trouble corrupting People's soul. Set aside the now-common practice of paying for baby pictures. Judging from a Times exposé, Jolie also banished the word "Brangelina" from People's pages, dictated coverage of her charitable work in Cambodia and won from People the "positive" tone she demanded. She seems to have pulled this off with a little editor-source dance that gave People plausible deniability.
