The junket junkie and the agents of suppression
My early career switch from news reporting to the “toy department” – as the Entertainment section was referred to by hard newsies – saw some changes in dynamic.
Not least among these was a cloud of quasi-bribery that hung over what we did.
I’m not saying I took cash. But there were parties. And there were trips. While on movie junkets for the Sun, I did interviews in Paris, Rome, London (many times), Thailand, New Orleans, Miami, New York and Los Angeles (both many times), Atlanta, Denver, Dallas, San Antonio, Honolulu (twice), Acapulco, Mexico, the Bahamas (for its proximity to Johnny Depp’s private Bahamian island home) and oddball places like Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Shreveport, Louisiana.
According to Aeroplan, I’ve flown almost 900,000 miles since 1986. A couple of heavy-duty junketeers I know (including the Montreal-based blurb machine Mose Persico) have topped two million.
Showbiz writers weren’t the only ones who benefitted from this arrangement. Travel writers did, of course. And some sports writers. While at the Bangkok Film Festival, I met an Australian golf magazine writer whose entire life consisted of being flown from golf course to golf course, country to country.
“I live a rich man’s life on a poor man’s salary,” he said.
I was never inclined to go soft on a bad movie just because I got a trip out of it. But the studios’ actuaries must have provided general evidence to the contrary. It often seemed the worse the movie, the nicer the trip. I travelled to Rome for Angels and Demons, to Hawaii for Journey to The Mysterious Island, starring Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson, and to Paris for the terrible Johnny Depp/Angelina Jolie flick The Tourist, where I got to interview Angelina in her hotel room and she gave me a tour of her tattoos.
The ethics of junkets are certainly questionable. But, as Jeff Goldblum said in The Big Chill, defending the notion that rationalizations are more important than sex: “You ever go two weeks without a rationalization?”
In hindsight, the only junkets I felt somewhat guilty about were music ones – because the industry was structured such that the artists themselves were ultimately paying for my trip, under “recoupable expenses.”
Which meant Midnight Oil paid when I followed them to Boston and Celine Dion paid for my trip to Montreal in her pre-Vegas years. And Billy Joel paid when I interviewed him in Philadelphia. (A blizzard trapped him there, preventing him from returning home to then-wife Christie Brinkley.
He joined me in the bar several hours after our interview. Over many beers, Joel showed me how he could squash his boneless left thumb like a grub – the result of a motorcycle accident years earlier.
In that sense, when I thought of the privileged life I’d acquired by this career course-change, I always remembered an exchange from the movie Broadcast News, between William Hurt’s Tom Grunick and Albert Brooks’ Aaron Altman.
Grunick: What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams?
Altman: Keep it to yourself.
Not that I was actually exceeding my dreams. I dream pretty big. But there was no question I’d found myself a sweet gig and a fun life.
I’m not sure why, but I was rarely star-struck. In fact, I discovered that interviews with people I was a huge fan of often went disastrously.
I tailored my interviews to be conversations. And some of them, particularly with comedians, turned long-term friend-ish. I once forgot I had a phone interview scheduled with Lewis Black, and he speed-dialled me.
But there was also a definite change in power balance in the interview process when I went from interviewing civilians to interviewing celebrities.
Oddly enough, if you followed up at a murder scene or interviewed grieving relatives, it was not usually treated as an invasion of privacy.
In recent years, the words, “mainstream media” have become a slur. But when I began in news – a decade after Woodward & Bernstein – the regard for journalists was still so high many people seemed to feel it was required by law for them to answer reporters’ questions.
As an entertainment writer, conversely, I was constantly dealing with conditions from personal publicists, whom I euphemistically refer to as “suppress agents.” The most common, especially when there’d been a recent divorce or arrest, was, “we’re here only to talk about the movie/album/TV show. No personal questions are allowed.”
What I soon realized was that the “talent” themselves were often not aware of the restrictions or otherwise were okay with going there. I interviewed Lyle Lovett just after he divorced Julia Roberts and got the standard, “no personal questions.”
My tactic was as follows. “Lyle, I’ve been told I can’t ask any personal questions and I’ll respect that. The only question I’ll ask is why?”
His response: “Hell, you can ask me anything you want.”
He admitted a certain Ms Roberts played a part in some heartbreak songs whose lyrics I’d circled, but that his songs weren’t literal diaries. Reasonable answer.
I interviewed Jack Nicholson in 1994 for the movie Wolf just after he’d been charged with assault and vandalism for a road rage incident that saw him smash a Mercedes-Benz with a two-iron, a club he later explained he never used while playing. Maybe it was an oversight, but no one said I couldn’t ask, so I did. His response was clearly coached, but priceless.
“The SHAMEful incident on the FREEway, as I’m ALL-ways careful to characterize it, should NEVer have happened,” he began, making me feel as if I was watching a classic Nicholson performance. “It’s ABsolutely wrong to beat up another man’s VEhicle with a two-iron.”
I always felt I could have been a great media coach for celebrities and there are certain people I could point to as role models for them. Hugh Grant was one.
Most know how he defused his Beverly Hills-blowjob arrest with a profuse mea culpa on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show. But, years later, he was not averse to continuing to parade his shame with humour.
At a round-table interview for the movie Notting Hill, a woman asked him one of those open-ended fishing questions. “What was the worst point in your life, for you?” she asked, awkwardly.
“You mean besides that time I was in jail?” he replied, dryly.
Of course, one way to get the press onside with bad behaviour was to make them complicit. On the Detroit set of a movie that was never released in theatres – the cop comedy Collision Course with Jay Leno and Pat Morita, I sat with Mr. Miyagi himself in his trailer, while his assistant, a forty-ish woman, rolled a big fat joint and Morita went into his fridge, grabbed a couple of tall-boys of Miller and tossed one to me. I thought it would be rude to refuse and soon I was stoned with the Karate Kid’s sensei.
Celebrities-I’ve-toked-up-with is not a long list, but the most notable is Tommy Chong. At a Toronto International Film Festival party for the documentary a.k.a. Tommy – about his prison sentence for mailing promotional bongs across state lines, guests were greeted at the door with plates of special brownies and the admonition, “more than three and you’re on your own.”
Since we’d met on a couple of occasions already, I was invited to his roped-off VIP table, where a bud the size of a pineapple sat in the middle, almost as a centrepiece, though it shrunk as the night wore on.
A female reporter in her 20s said to me as I inhaled: “Do you think that’s professional behaviour, Jim?”
“Have you never heard of participatory journalism?” I replied.
The phrase participatory journalism was one I actually took seriously. As a journalist covering comedy, I wanted at least a taste of what I critiqued. So I entered a Funniest People with a Day Job contest at a comedy club and performed seven minutes of stand-up. I came second.
I accepted an offer to be a celebrity improviser at Second City and got thumbs-ups all around, save for my tendency to turn my back to the audience too often. But I could improvise a blues song on a dime.
I got hired for a time as a comedy writer by CBC Variety for various awards shows, including three NHL Awards and a Geminis.
How incestuous is Canadian showbiz? The year I wrote for the Geminis, I got a comedy writing nomination for the previous year’s NHL Awards (the first television writing I’d ever done). Those Geminis would be nominated the following year for Best Comedy/Variety special).
My editor was sanguine about it all.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Get your work here done in the morning and go write your jokes in the afternoon.”
And what I consider my crowning participatory journalistic moment came when I got myself hired as a zombie extra on Dawn of The Dead, the reboot of the George Romero classic, shot in Toronto by Zack Snyder (Justice League). This was one of those “fast zombie” movies, so I spent two hours in makeup and 11 hours of running, take after take. At a certain point, there was a debate between Snyder and his AD over whether zombies wore glasses. They concluded they didn’t so I spent most of the night-shoot effectively blind.
At one point, I was made to get up off the ground and chase actor Michael Kelly. With no clue as to personal space, I got up so close to him, he could feel my hot breath on his neck.
“Cut!” Snyder yelled. “You are in the movie, my friend.”
And I was, for several seconds.
In the director’s commentary on the BluRay, Snyder says: “That zombie in the suit? He’s a Toronto newspaper writer.”
In a newspaper/writing career that has spanned from the ’70s to the twenty-teens, JIM SLOTEK has interviewed thousands of celebrities, many of whom are still alive. He has eight critical writing awards, was nominated for a Gemini award for comedy writing and won a ceramic statue of the Hindu god Ganesh for scoring a perfect game in his pub trivia league. He is NOT fucking retired.