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The Fame Formula: How Hollywood's Fixers, Fakers and Star Makers Created the Celebrity Industry
 
 

The Fame Formula: How Hollywood's Fixers, Fakers and Star Makers Created the Celebrity Industry (Paperback)

by Mark Borkowski (Author)
4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
RRP: £8.99
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Product details

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Pan (3 April 2009)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0330444883
  • ISBN-13: 978-0330444880
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 13 x 2.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 57,491 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories:

    #19 in  Books > Reference > Directories > Film & Performing Arts
    #26 in  Books > Reference > Directories > Art
    #60 in  Books > Music, Stage & Screen > Film > Production & Technology > Direction & Production

Product Description

Product Description

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”.

About the Author

Mark Borkowski has publicized some of the biggest names in entertainment - from Michael Jackson to The Matrix…  Archaos to Our Friends in the North.  His titular PR company has dealt with a broad roster of clients over the years, reflecting Borkowski’s wide-ranging interests, and encompassing international theatre and circus, charities such as Amnesty International, brands including Sony UK, Hovis, Freesat and IKEA, performance poets and celebrities such as Noel Edmonds. 

Regarded as an authority on the history of the publicity stunt, his first book “Improperganda: A Pictorial History Of This Artform” was released in 2001.  His one-man show “Sons of Barnum” was produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and became the basis for “The Fame Formula”.

He lives in Gloucestershire with his family and an astonishing archive of pop cultural ephemera and history.


Inside This Book (Learn More)
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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Customer Reviews

8 Reviews
5 star:
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4 star:
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3 star:
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2 star:
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Average Customer Review
4.1 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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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, 4 Sep 2008
By GlassGirl (Gloucestershire, UK) - See all my reviews
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.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellence, 17 Dec 2008
By E. Hernaman - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A dirty history!, 17 Dec 2009
By Mrs. A. Jackson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This is the real book on the history of PR and ShowBiz. Scandalous, yet brillaint!
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars A useful round-up
I agree with the suspicious reviewer - an Amazon reviewer who calls this book 'pure genius' must be a friend of the author. Read more
Published 16 months ago by J. Preece

2.0 out of 5 stars The other reviews are just PR
Okay, this is a book about the history of PR. The three reviews before mine are all five star reviews. Read more
Published 17 months ago by Johnjoe

5.0 out of 5 stars Fame Formula Review
This was one of the most interesting and insightful books I have read in a long time. It's not a dull historical chronology of PRs, it's more of an amazing journey through... Read more
Published 18 months ago by Bete Wednesday

5.0 out of 5 stars pure genius
As with the reviewer above, I've just got my copy of this book - having been looking forward to its publication for some time. Read more
Published 18 months ago by SH

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating story
This book is a really fascinating read detailing the history of the rise of the public relations industry and how it molded entertainment from vaudeville and early cinema in the... Read more
Published 18 months ago by David

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