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

by Mark Borkowski (Author)
4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
RRP: £16.99
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Customers buy this book with Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media by Nick Davies

The Fame Formula: How Hollywood's Fixers, Fakers and Star Makers Created the Celebrity Industry + Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Sidgwick & Jackson (1 Aug 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0283070390
  • ISBN-13: 978-0283070396
  • Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.2 x 3.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 290,017 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #84 in  Books > Music, Stage & Screen > Film > Business Issues

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Product Description

Piers Morgan

'Borkowski has shone a brilliantly illuminating light on the disgraceful, hilarious, and undeniably effective Tinself Town PR war machines that inspired the current celebrity/PR meltdown we see today. I loved every page.'


Daily Express

'Fascinating new book'
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Customer Reviews

7 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.1 out of 5 stars (7 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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8 of 8 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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4 of 5 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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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Fame Formula Review, 11 Aug 2008
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 carnivals, circuses, Hollywood and our own mad celebrity crazed world. I had never realised where publicists got their inspirations, and certainly hadn't ever understood the power those Hollywood publicists had to squash stories and keep their stars in and out of the news. It's fascinating to see how people's careers are really maniuplated. We knew it happened, but this book explains the process. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would definitely recommend anyone to read it.
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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 13 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 14 months ago by Johnjoe

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 15 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 15 months ago by David

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