The four leads appeared last week on the Today show to promote their new film. News articles on Halloween touted the 1-hour co-hosting gig that the actors would undertake. And, apparently, it was not a rousing success. The poor guys didn't seem into the experience at all.
Unfortunately, I can't find a copy of the video to embed - NBC's video offerings are limited (it would take too long to explain how inadequate their site is in this regard). But I will direct you to a page where you can watch it, in addition to embedding two other interviews gone bad, below.
So click here if you want to see what happens when some of the most distinguished actors in the US show up to a party that they immediately want to leave - but can't.
There's been a slate of celebrity interviews that have gone sideways lately. Naomi Watts walked right out of an interview wit the BBC's Simon Mayo - as I noted a while back, I follow that podcast, and it was clear that Ms. Watts took one of Mr. Mayo's questions and everything went downhill from there. A few months ago, Bruce Willis flat-out told that he found promo junkets a mandatory waste of time, like study hall or detention.
The case of Watts v. Mayo
The case of Willis v. Sanity, Manners, et al.
There are many more examples, of course, but isn't it about time that studios lay off on these assignments? Promoting a film to increase box office attendance is not a real part of acting, as a professional - it's an ancillary task that's been tacked on for $ purposes. If the guys and gals of Hollywood hate it so much, maybe their burden should be reduced. Surely several of them want to promote the smaller-budget or "important" or indie works they do, but an "over-50 Hangover film"...
To be fair, Bruce Willis seems to treat a fair number of his acting gigs as if they were detention (or maybe naptime). It's not a big surprise that he can't muster greater enthusiasm for promoting the films, which is a real political-campaign style grind.
ReplyDeleteI don't know that there's any alternative to having these actors go out to support their movies. The films haven't gotten any cheaper, the entertainment media hasn't gotten much smaller, and the demand for interviews with movie stars hasn't died out. If these guys want to continue to be paid like movie stars, doing media is part of that job. It sucks that some promotion gimmicks seem like things that were dreamed up by a publicist without the stars' participation or consent (that sounds like the situation with Last Vegas and the Today Show).
Yeah, it's seeming more and more like Bruce Willis is suffering from a Mariah Carey-esque case of "exhaustion." He's described as insanely low-key in real life by many people, and the pitches and business decisions he's approached with must be genuinely tiring.
DeleteIt's true that there are not a lot of alternatives - save slightly-less promotion, which will never make sense for suits - but since the results have become so increasingly-mixed, one would hope that creative alternatives would start to occur to the people in charge. Bad promotion is hardly worth it, right?...