Celebrities, close down your Twitter accounts. Delete your blogs. If there’s a public forum in which you actively post in, stop going there. Seriously. This is not the good idea we all once thought it was. Look, I know this is an unpopular concept on both sides of the fence. After all, Celebrities are hounded 24/7, often in the most unlikely of places; why not be allowed to vent or share ideas publicly for all your fans to see, letting them get to know the real you? Why not? Because public relations people exist for a reason.
Look, the film news and review business is a mess right now. We are living in the Wild West gold rush of internet news; a period in which there is no regulation, people swarming to it like the streets are paved with gold and some very nebulous concepts about what constitutes original content. As print dies out, decades worth of experienced, knowledgeable writers are flooding into the scene, and with so many people sharing so little space, there are bound to be scuffles. And yes, as we all know, those scuffles often spill into the streets. Everyone is fighting for the next big scoop, busy trying to get ahead while keeping the audience they have from leaving and going to read the new guy who just showed up.
Compounding the problem is this: the amount of news generated in a week worth reporting hasn’t increased. Hollywood is still making the same number of movies, hosting the same number of award shows and inventing the same number of careers on any given day. And once one site gets the story, almost everyone jumps on reporting it. It’s just the way it works. 1% of the journalists in this industry generate the bulk of the news reported by the other 99%. And that fact is beginning to wear thin and is showing signs of stress in the industry. Everyone is desperate to break news, to prove that they are in the 1%, not the other 99%. And they are hungry, looking for something, anything to print.
Take for example Devin Faraci’s CHUD story on Kevin Smith’s very recent Twitter rant about Critics bashing Cop Out. It’s a slow news week. You can tell it’s a slow news week because Kevin Smith ranting about critics who trashed his movie is treated as news. Now, if there is one man in Hollywood in desperate need of a PR filter for his twitter, blog and podcast, it is Smith. I, like many others out there, thought it was pretty awesome that he was so committed to staying in touch with his fans. But with his recent foibles and now this bile filled rant about the uselessness of critics, he is slowly finding himself lowered in the Carbon-Freezing Chamber that is the Tom Cruise career path.
Remember when Tom Cruise wasn’t crazy? Sure you do. Of course, the truth is he was always crazy. You just didn’t start noticing until he fired his PR person and decided it was time the world got to know the REAL Tom Cruise. Big mistake. Well, without a secretive religion, radical beliefs about pharmacology or wild, excited couch jumping to fall back on, Smith has had a long, tough road to alienating the public. But now he’s well on his way. First there was him breaking a toilet, then Southwest, now poking the roiling, bitter mass of critics in desperate need of something to write about this week. AND THEY’RE OFF!
Seriously, celebrities, Kevin, it is time to take a step back. Every good filmmaker needs an editor. Every good writer needs an editor. So why shouldn’t YOU need an editor?Someone to filter out the crap and take a moment to say “Kevin, you know if you post this that you are going to be the top story tomorrow afternoon. These bitter, angry 20-somethings you keep writing about play for keeps, so do you REALLY want to have this headache in the morning?” No.
You really don’t. It’s time to cut the cord. Studios are already enforcing a no-twitter policy on a number of its working stars, and I, for one, don’t think it is the worst idea they’ve ever had. Celebrity or no, blogger or no, we all have bad days and say things we wish weren’t said the way we said them. But in this day and age, a celebrity having that day becomes news.
