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Fixers, fakers, and star makers… They built the dream factory that is Hollywood, but until now, their own incredible stories have largely remained untold.
Who were the unsung heroes (and not a few villains) behind the glitter of Tinseltown? Rudolph Valentino had Harry Reichenbach. Theda Bara had Maynard Nottage. Judy Garland, Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn and all the other MGM stars had Howard Strickling and his team of illusionists.
Behind every star and movie mogul loomed a great publicist: manipulating headlines, concealing sins and shaping destinies. And it was these publicists, as much as anyone, who created the Hollywood dream: and by extension, the celebrity industry as it stands today.
“The Fame Formula” does for Hollywood what “Mad Men” did for the advertising business. It is the authoritative history of the birth of an industry that shaped the American dream and continues to define our world today.
With an insider’s knowing eye, Mark Borkowski introduces the reader to a secret cabal of great publicists whose carefully crafted images, stunts and flashes of divine inspiration have mapped the media agenda for the last century. From Phineas Taylor Barnum all the way through to “The X Factor” and “I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here” – the DNA fingerprint is clear.
Avoiding the limelight as assiduously as they pursued it for their clients, the wizards of Hollywood have finally met their nemesis in “The Fame Formula”.
Who were the unsung heroes (and not a few villains) behind the glitter of Tinseltown? Rudolph Valentino had Harry Reichenbach. Theda Bara had Maynard Nottage. Judy Garland, Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn and all the other MGM stars had Howard Strickling and his team of illusionists.
Behind every star and movie mogul loomed a great publicist: manipulating headlines, concealing sins and shaping destinies. And it was these publicists, as much as anyone, who created the Hollywood dream: and by extension, the celebrity industry as it stands today.
“The Fame Formula” does for Hollywood what “Mad Men” did for the advertising business. It is the authoritative history of the birth of an industry that shaped the American dream and continues to define our world today.
With an insider’s knowing eye, Mark Borkowski introduces the reader to a secret cabal of great publicists whose carefully crafted images, stunts and flashes of divine inspiration have mapped the media agenda for the last century. From Phineas Taylor Barnum all the way through to “The X Factor” and “I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here” – the DNA fingerprint is clear.
Avoiding the limelight as assiduously as they pursued it for their clients, the wizards of Hollywood have finally met their nemesis in “The Fame Formula”.
Book Description
The Fame Formula is a highly entertaining study of the creators of the publicity industry, taking us from vaudeville and the movies to the age of television and the internet. Starting with Maynard Nottage and Harry Reichenbach, who applied their anarchic talents to dreaming up stunts at the turn of the twentieth century, Borkowski goes on to describe how, in the hands of Hollywood fixers Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling, publicity agents Russell Birdwell, Warren Cowan, Henry Rogers and more, this freewheeling industry developed. These men hatched ostrich eggs to promote movies and hatched incredible stories to dress up the lives of stars, buried scandals and buried their lives in their work. And in so doing they laid the foundation of a billion dollar manipulation industry and the modern world's rampant celebrity culture. Borkowski also reveals how his research has led to the creation of a fame formula, an analysis of how long any celebrity can expect to stay famous - and how to avoid relegation to the Z list. 'A brilliantly original account of a neglected subject' Stephen Bayley 'Fascinating . . . one of Britain's top publicists tells all about what fame is, how to get it, and what to do with it' Lord Saatchi
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Rise and Fall of Hollywood Publicity,
By GlassGirl (Gloucestershire, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Fame Formula: How Hollywood's Fixers, Fakers and Star Makers Created the Celebrity Industry (Hardcover)
This is a fascinating book if you are interested in the dirty underwear of Hollywood, in how the publicists hid the soiled garments and how they replaced it with shiny new lingerie, which they then hung from the most prominent wires, helping stars, films, studios and, eventually, brand names look rather better than they did in real life.
The book most successfully details the lives, peccadilloes, disasters and lies that stuck early Hollywood together with the glue of publicity and goes into most detail about the early stunt-merchants such as Harry Reichenbach and Maynard Nottage, who moved into the movies from vaudeville and the carnival, influenced by the jovial hucksterism of PT Barnum. Their lives, particularly Nottage's, are a definite lesson in the price of fame. Nottage helped create stars, but came to believe his own hype - that he was a great starmaker - and drank himself into oblivion when the rest of the industry refused to believe him, dying in the 1960s, a bitter and lonely old man. According to Borkowski, nearly all of the publicists in the book end up eaten alive by the job or their own hype - they can either stop and vanish, usually in a cloud of bitterness, die young from overwork or keep going until they are wizened and old but still turning up and working. Harry Brand, publicist at 20th Century Fox, retired in the 1960s but was given an office by the studio that he used for most of the rest of his life. It was only the working community there that kept him happy; a rather sad end for the man who rescued Marilyn from public disapprobation after her early nude photo shoot. Out of the work of these obsessional men and women, Borkowski suggests, the modern celebrity industry was born. All these obsessive men and women gave rise to the great vast gas cloud of celebrity culture. Once, he implies, fame was worth having. Now, thanks to people like Jade Goody and Britney Spears and reality TV, the stock of stars in general has fallen. If the science of the actual formula at the end of the book is a little spurious, the thinking behind it is less so. Fame can last 15 months and needs constant replenishing? The more you look at the papers, the more this seems realistic. The science may not hold water, but the more people who know how the machine works, the more chance there is for it to be sabotaged. The book is fascinated with stunts; lighter stuff like people putting lions in hotel rooms, changing plain Janes into vamps, underwater weddings and the like - as well as the darker stuff, the cover ups of murder, abortion, lesbianism. Borkowski soars to theatrical heights describing the early, less dangerous and (slightly less) cruel side of Hollywood but peters out a little when essaying the corporate takeover of Hollywood publicity towards the end - no surprise there, I'd say. The Formula at the end of the book may be a stunt to get your attention but it's worth getting past that and giving the book a go, if only to discover the delightful foibles of Jim Moran, who sat on an ostrich egg for twenty days, hatched the ostrich and adopted it, all to promote a movie called The Egg and I. I doubt you'll approve of many of the people described, but the heights of imaginative artifice that went into promoting the rise and fall of Hollywood make for compulsive reading. It's a compelling, if occasionally flawed, read.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A dirty history!,
By
This review is from: The Fame Formula: How Hollywood's Fixers, Fakers and Star Makers Created the Celebrity Industry (Paperback)
This is the real book on the history of PR and ShowBiz. Scandalous, yet brillaint!
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellence,
By
This review is from: The Fame Formula: How Hollywood's Fixers, Fakers and Star Makers Created the Celebrity Industry (Hardcover)
Fantastic book. In order to explain what my job is (PR) to my grandfather, I simply bought him a copy, told him to read it and get back to me with his thoughts. Job done. He now understands!
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