Training | 2008.12.26
Scarlett does not reveal all
Easily my favourite news story of the week was the revelation that the interview with Scarlett Johansson in the current issue of Cosmopolitan didn\'t happen with Scarlett, exactly. It happened in the head of the journalist (or possibly, novelist).
The actress noticed some quotes in the piece that sounded a bit weird, realised she never gave the interview and suddenly that "exclusive" tag takes on a whole new meaning. Yup, this one sure was a one-off. As someone who has interviewed quite a lot of celebrities in my time, I found this story truly disturbing. Johansson reads Cosmopolitan? Sheesh, woman, get a life!
Cosmopolitan are claiming that they were also betrayed, that they printed the interview in good faith - even if they had never met the journalist who wrote the piece and now can\'t find the highly imaginative writer to get her side of the story.
But maybe Johansson and Cosmo are missing the point. For all their narcissism, celebrities, by and large, hate doing interviews and journalists, for all their hack-like nature, hate doing them too. The former are expected to discuss issues that they might not even mention to their shrink, let alone a total stranger, while the latter has to sit there with a straight face while the celebrity says things like, "Working on this $100m movie/record/TV series really helped me grow as a person, y\'know?" Celebrities go through this farrago to keep up their "exposure". Meanwhile, magazines believe that a month without Anne Hathaway on the cover is a month half-lived.
So fake interviews look like a smashing solution: the celebrity gets the coverage, the magazine gets the story and embarrassment is spared all round. Just jigsaw together phrases like "it\'s my family and friends that keep me grounded", and "I feel very lucky", the likes of which are all in the Cosmo piece, and you\'re good to go. Seeing as the photo on the cover has been unrecognisably airbrushed, why not apply the same fakery to the interview? (True, Cosmo did slip up a bit with Johansson\'s interview in that the actress talks about her marriage, which took place in September, when the interview allegedly happened in August, but let\'s not get disheartened by niggles.)
All this is based on the idea that celebrities sell magazines. But do readers expect anything from celebrity interviews except from, at best, vague generalities about their "craft", leavened with the occasional hilarious anecdote about Matt Damon?
This isn\'t entirely the celebrity\'s fault. Would you want to talk about your husband\'s affair with a slimy-looking journalist who\'s just looking for a catchy cover line? Equally, it takes a writer of true talent to extract something interesting from a media-trained, 19-year-old actress in half an hour. More often the most interesting part of a celebrity interview is the writing: the observational details, the little known biographical facts, the descriptions of the entourage. The celebrity quotes contribute little.
Yet because magazines have given celebrities so much power, their publicists often demand not just copy approval (adding yet more milk into an already milkily bland interview) but journalistic approval, ensuring that only the most sycophantic journalist will interview their precious cargo. Even Cosmo\'s faked interview is fearfully adoring. "Boy, do we wish all celebrities had [Johansson\'s] attitude," being an intriguing choice of phrase (what attitude would that be - imaginary?). So perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of this magazine article was not Johansson\'s fake quotes (for the £2 cover price, I want more than "I believe in finding a soulmate") but that, even when the interview is wholly imaginary, the result is as tedious as ever.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]/20/celebrity-press-cosmo-fake
