Journalism 101: Hollywood Follies

Listening to this week’s episode of the always-awesome radio show/podcast, The Business, I listened with amusement to the stories of reporters talking about what a nightmare it is to report on Hollywood.

I had no idea about any of this back in 1997, when I was working at the Potomac News and the second team for the $75 million disaster flick Deep Impact came to Prince William County, Virginia. They were there to film an evacuation scene on Interstate 66, heading out of Washington, DC as the comet approaches Earth.

My editor was told that we would be given a chance to participate in the scene — i.e., sit in my car on the blacktop for eight hours and write about the experience — which sounded like a fun little feature story.

I also got word that they’d be casting for said scene at middle school in Manassas in the gym. The news hole is always hungry, so I called for days and days, trying to touch base with someone — anyone — involved in the production to talk about what the process was like. Because movies don’t do a lot of casting in suburban northern Virginia, it was a story we all agreed would be of interest to our readership.

But I got nowhere with the telephone calls. The day approached and I said to myself, “Self, they’re meeting in a public venue” (this is obviously before the Columbine killings turned public schools across America into closed campuses) “and there’s no controls over who is coming and going, so it’s a public gathering. Just go and cover it.”

So I did.

The story came out in the paper, and a nice little slice of cinematic life it was.

And then a publicist for the production called up and screamed at my editor, saying I was banned from the set (Interstate 66) and that they didn’t want to see me anywhere near their production. My editor, Barb, eventually calmed her down enough to agree that another reporter could have the coveted sit-on-the-road-for-eight-hours gig. A non-features reporter got the story, and pretty much phoned it in.

This all seemed (and seems) highly irrational to me, but it’s apparently the way it goes in entertainment journalism, where information can be tightly controlled by the entertainment companies and the journalists are forced to dance to irrational whims. It was a shock to me, and I spitefully chose to not see the film, even if it does feature President Morgan Freeman.

In the end, Deep Impact commercially came in second to the other disaster-from-space flick to come out in 1998, Armageddon. I like to think it was my boycott that made the difference.

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