Stephen Baldwin, who recently appeared on the NBC reality series I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here, filed for bankruptcy in New York City on Tuesday.
Reuters has learned that the 43-year-old star — who is the younger brother of Emmy-winning actor Alec Baldwin — filed for Chapter 11 protection this afternoon after [...]
Celebrity advocacy rights group Stoparazzi is proposing the passing of “Michael Jackson’s Law,” a statue named after the late pop star that would regulate how physicians, practitioners, and dentists prescribe highly addictive medications.
The proposed law would create a national database which would track prescriptions of all controlled substances and medications. The group has already started [...]
Cancer kills celebrated explorer of the boundaries between fact and fiction
The writer and novelist Gordon Burn, whose work explored the boundaries between fact and fiction, has died aged 61, his publisher announced today. Burn died on Friday 17 July, having been suffering from cancer.
Burn examined the contemporary obsession with celebrity in a series of books spanning three decades, including an account of the Yorkshire Ripper, a study of Fred and Rosemary West and a Whitbread award-wininng novel which imagined an alternative life for the British singer Alma Cogan.
His editor at Faber, Lee Brackstone, hailed his work as “far ahead of the rest of the literary world”, and lamented the loss of “one of the great literary innovators of these times”.
“Gordon’s subject of choice was often trauma, spectacle and dysfunction,” Brackstone said. “He was drawn to the dark side of celebrity … his literature and impulse always represented to me an attempt to find comfort, meaning and compassion in the most appalling or baffling of events.”
For the author himself, the central role of fame and mortality in his own work was clear. “Almost everything I have written,” Burn said last year, “has been about celebrity, and how for most people celebrity is a kind of death.”
Born in Newcastle on 16 January 1948, Burn began work as a journalist, writing for publications such as the Guardian, Rolling Stone and Esquire and remained a prolific interviewer and feature writer, making a name in recent years as an expert on contemporary art. Deliberately following in the footsteps of In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song, his first book, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son, was an attempt to tell the story of the Yorkshire Ripper from the inside out; he spent three years getting to know Peter Sutcliffe’s family after the killer’s conviction in 1981, turning up night after night to hear stories of the murderer’s early life. He turned next to the world of professional snooker, at its zenith during the era of Steve Davies and Dennis Taylor, following the circus for a year to research Pocket Money, published in 1986.
His first novel, Alma Cogan, revisited questions of death and fame, entwining the case of the Moors murderer Myra Hindley with an imaginary post-celebrity existence for the popular singer, who died in 1966, in a meditation on artifice and obscurity which won the Whitbread first novel prize in 1992. Novels of Fleet Street and showbiz followed with 1995′s Fullalove and 2003′s The North of England Home Service, but it was with his most recent novel, 2008′s Born Yesterday, that Burn’s fiction reached its logical conclusion. Hatched in a discussion over dinner with the CEO of Faber, Stephen Page, the book was an attempt to bring the non-fiction novel into the era of 24-hour rolling news.
“The idea was to find a story, and the moment the news explosion happened to go there and write about it, turn it into a novel in the way that happens all the time through rolling news, newspapers, blogging,” Burns explained. “And to turn it around fast, so that the novel came out while the news coverage was still fresh in people’s minds.”
For Brackstone, Born Yesterday was “an experiment as brave as anything attempted by Pound, BS Johnson, or Foster Wallace”. “Having worked as a journalist with a sharp eye for a story in the 70s, Gordon understood, questioned and celebrated, more than any of his peers, the advent of 24-hour news on loop – the pornographic, compulsive intensity of it,” Brackstone said. Written in a burst of just over a month at the beginning of 2008, the novel shapes the extraordinary events of the summer of 2007, including the resignation of Tony Blair and the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, into the dream-like vision of an insomniac version of Burn himself. As a cast garnered from the blaring headlines of 24-hour breaking news – Kate Middleton, Carol Thatcher, Jacqui Smith – crosses the boundary between fact and fiction, Burn confronts the subject which governed his writing life: the limits imposed on fiction and non-fiction alike.
“The news is always holding out the promise that we will know more and more and more, but we don’t,” Burn said. “With the West case, I had everything: I had access to their belongings, to the police interviews – everything, basically, that you could possibly wish to get – and you spend three years writing a book, and you still don’t know what made these two people do the kind of things that they did.”
This story isn’t making me want to stay in a hotel room anytime soon. Or look up celebrity sex tapes for that matter…
ESPN reporter Erin Andrews had her privacy violated when she was videotaped undressing in her hotel room without her even knowing. Now people who are looking for this tape are having their computers [...]
Statement shows which politicians, celebrities and journalists were entertained at the prime minister’s country residence
The entertainer Bruce Forsyth and the football commentator John Motson were among those who received official hospitality at Chequers over the last year, Gordon Brown revealed today.
Their names are included on a list of all those entertained at the prime minister’s country residence in 2008-2009, a ministerial statement showed.
The list – which includes a large number of politicians and journalists – always attracts considerable interest at Westminster, where it is seen as a guide to who belongs to the Brown social circle.
Embarrassingly for the prime minister, Sir Fred Goodwin, the bank boss blamed for the demise of RBS, was one of the City figures to enjoy the prime minister’s hospitality.
Downing Street did not say when guests were entertained at Downing Street, or whether they attended functions at Chequers, in Buckinghamshire, more than once.
Celebrities on the list include the showbiz stars Matt Lucas, David Walliams and Davina McCall, the author John O’Farrell, the singer Lesley Garrett, the actors Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson and Greg Wise and the runner Dame Kelly Holmes.
The former poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion and the former children’s laureate Michael Rosen were also guests.
Senior ministers invited to join Brown included Ed Balls and his wife, Yvette Cooper, Nick Brown, Liam Byrne, Alistair Darling, Lord Drayson, Harriet Harman, Tessa Jowell, Ed Miliband, Lord Myners, Lord West and Shaun Woodward
Sir Menzies Campbell, the former Liberal Democrat leader and a long-time friend of Brown from Scotland, was invited there, as was his wife, Lady Elspeth.
Journalists on the list include ITN’s Tom Bradby, Sky’s Kay Burley, GMTV’s Gloria de Piero, the Spectator’s Matthew d’Ancona, Will Lewis, Patrick Hennessy, Andrew Porter and Benedict Brogan, of Telegraph newspapers, Katharine Viner and Jonathan Freedland from the Guardian, Philip Webster from the Times, the Mirror’s Kevin Maguire, the Sun’s George Pascoe Watson and the Observer editor John Mulholland.
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Is Mariah Carey suffering from a gender identity crisis?
Some of you may wonder how it’s possible for heaven’s very own warbling angel, Mariah Carey, to pose our dilemma this week. It’s not as if she’s at the head of the fashion pack or likely to become a muse for Lagerfeld. Let’s face it, she barely manages to find clothes that fit half the time.
Neither does her window-shattering voice get us excited. In fact, there’s only one reason we’re listening to one of her songs (and if you’re of a nervous disposition, we advise you to take a few deep breaths now): the pneumatic one has had a ‘male-over’.
The singer wears a grey tracksuit, baseball cap and an abundance of facial hair in the video to her latest single, Obsessed. Drawing rapidly denied comparisons to Eminem, Mariah’s husband Nick Cannon told an MTV reporter that his wife has no beef with the rapper. He said (in what we can only describe as a truly original pun): “She’s not beefing, she’s a vegetarian”. Mariah herself tweeted, “I am NOT at any point in the video playing a specific person. I’m dressed as a ‘stalker’ in 3 different ensembles.”
Whatever she says, we think she looks exactly like a dodgy character from the streets of Baltimore. Our excitement levels peaked during the second scene when we thought that Jimmy McNulty might turn up drunk and arrest her for crimes against music. It didn’t happen, but when Mariah (in stalker guise) started dancing with a life-size cardboard cut-out OF HERSELF in a room bedecked with posters OF HERSELF we nearly got out a gun and shot the computer to hell.
Even more disturbing (it seems impossible, doesn’t it?) was Mariah’s acting ability, which made one scene so realistic that we wondered if art was imitating life. The adoring gaze that Mariah-as-doorman cast upon Mariah-as-superstar was reminiscent of the scenes between Frodo and Sam in Lord of the Rings. There was that much love. Unsubtle? Mariah? Never.
Summer jackets
Dressing is difficult at the moment, what with the weather being hot, cold and wet, all on the same day. With no way to predict when it’s going to rain or shine, a girl needs to carry around a lightweight jacket to throw on and off as the skies dictate.
Miss Selfridge has a nice Stella-inspired blazer (in the dreaded nude shade) that will keep you cool when the sun’s out and warmish when it’s in. For £40 it’s a bargain.
For those of a sporty persuasion, we like this bright pink jacket by Bench from Republic for £39.99.
On the denim front, this jacket by Levi’s at £54 is a classic that reminds us of our school days. Wear it a lot: the more distressed it is, the better – but for God’s sake, don’t wear it with jeans. Urban Outfitters has a selection of really nice denim jackets with a twist. We especially like this military one for £55 and this batwing one for £65.
For something a little more hardwearing, but still lightweight, try Barbour’s sandstone jacket and tap into the safari trend seen on the catwalks last season. It costs £209 and is available from johnlewis.com.
We love Rick Owens’ blistered leather jacket with its gorgeous feminine silhouette. However, we will continue to love it from a distance because it costs £1,465. We’ll make do with this soft grey leather jacket from All Saints for £200.
If you need a more formal look for the office try this white M&S 125 Years Bouclé Jacket, which smacks of Jackie O glamour for a mere £69.
Kim Kardashian
We never thought we’d see the day when self-made sex tape star Kim Kardashian would grace these webpages as Fashionista of the Week, but we love an LBD and this is a great example of one. We like it all the more because it’s from Topshop and only cost £38. The shoulders are very of the moment with their little peaks, and Kim accessorised the dress with a space-age silver necklace. Good work.
She comes off as genuinely sweet, sunny and slightly dim, her punkette look the thinnest candy coating over an interior filled primarily with airy, whipped pink goo and nuvo-hippie, gestalt-y wow-ness.
The New York Times’ Cintra Wilson waxes lyrical over Agyness Deyn.
An email fell into Fashion Statement’s inbox this week. It wasn’t an invitation to the latest celebrity party, and neither was it Karl Lagerfeld asking for an interview. It was news of the worst kind: American Apparel has launched a hideous new product called the ‘Nylon Tricot Micro-Mesh Two-Sided Legging’. Effectively it’s half legging, half 10-denier tights and it’s bloody awful. If you fancy a Lady Godiva-esque jaunt through town check out the look on American Apparel’s website.
Boyfriend not quite cutting it on the beach? Don’t worry, help is at hand at Debenhams. The nationwide store has just released “the wimp’s revenge” – spray-on muscles. The treatment from St Tropez costs around £30 and consists of two applications of fake tan, the second darker layer working to create an optical illusion of serious abs. Beware: it might take more than one can. Call 08445 616 161 for more details.
The word on the street is that Jil Sander’s highly anticipated collection for Uniqlo will be called +J. The range will consist of about 40 pieces for men and 100 for women, including coats, jackets, knitwear, T-shirts and accessories. The Sander trademark design features – simple, fluid lines – will carry on through into the high street collection.
A new exhibition celebrating men in fashion photography opens tomorrow at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. When You’re a Boy focuses on Simon Foxton, a stylist whose career spans the last three decades. The exhibition runs until 4 October and admission is free.
Want to learn more about what you can do to help the environment? Then it might be an idea to attend the Wee Do lectures – a smaller version of the Do lectures (which take place in Wales) run by clothing brand Howies. Once a month in Howies’ Carnaby Street shop you can stop by, have a drink and be inspired by ‘doers’ like Hackney City Farm, Cooler Magazine and Respect the Mountain. Visit thedolectures.com for more information.
Hadley Freeman answers readers’ penetrating questions including: ‘Why do female models always look as if they need to go to the loo?’
Celebrate the UK release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by crafting a magical Daniel Radcliffe cross stitch.
Get the lowdown on Vivo Barefoot’s
latest ethical trainers.
For all the latest fashion and celebrity news, visit guardian.co.uk/fashion
News to tell us? Email rachel.holmes@guardian.co.uk
Johnny Depp says that he would love to take his two kids to Disneyland, but his celebrity status prevents him from doing so.
The Pirates of the Caribbean actor revealed that he craved to have a “normal†life with daughter Lily-Rose, 10, and son Jack, seven.
“I would walk through Disneyland with my kids. That’’s what [...]
Michael Jackson’s memorial made me realize that not only do I need to write up a will, but I also need to plan my own memorial service and tribute for when that inevitable time comes.
Hadley Freeman can ease your fashion pain
Michelle, by email
I have many thoughts on the matter, none of which are wholly complimentary, In fact, I’d say they are entirely uncomplimentary. Orange? On your legs? Really? Did you intend to do that or did you just spill a family-sized bottle of Orangina down your thighs?
I know that such scepticism is showing my age worse than the concealer crumbling into my crow’s-feet because, as your question insinuates, colourful jeans are what all the cool kids are wearing these days. But listen up, cool kids: when I was a youngster, we had a name for people who wore red trousers. We called them clowns. Ooh, I think I just pulled a Werther’s Original out of my pocket.
I do feel a bit guilty about this sneering, not merely out of selfish vanity (ie, it’s making me look old), but also out of selfless love, because I actually quite like the store behind this colourful denim madness, and that store is Uniqlo.
Y’all know what Uniqlo is because it has spread through this country with the vehemence of swine flu paranoia, if not actually swine flu itself. One minute you had never heard of it, the next it became part of the M&S-Tesco-WH Smiths-Boots-Waterstone’s scaffolding that makes up this country’s high streets. I bought a rather fetching pair of Uniqlo cropped jeans the other day for a mere £15 and I’m pretty sure I can’t hear the screams of Chinese children as I pull them on in the morning.
However … furnishing me with a pair of cropped jeans is no excuse for encouraging the soft and susceptible minds of this country’s youths to wear bright green denim upon their legs. Green legs? What are you, a cricket?
Dear readers, there is nothing wrong with branching out to stand out (ooh, that was kinda catchy, wasn’t it? Perhaps only 1980s advertising executives appreciated it). But the person who buys into this nonsense not only isn’t branching out (because everyone is doing it, they are merely following the high-street trend, like a Technicolor sheep), they are therefore not standing out, either. The only thing they are doing is committing violence to my eyeballs.
Even worse, Uniqlo has now hired to star in its advertising campaign the one thing that is perhaps more ubiquitous on this planet than coloured denim: come on down, Agyness Deyn! (Alexa Chung must have been too busy being photographed at another fashion party. Amazing that she has time to change her penny loafers with such a hectic schedule, don’t you think?)
Even aside from their shared ubiquity, it is a pairing that makes sense in that a) both the trend and the model seem to have confused “being fashionable” with “being wacky – wheeeee!”; b) they both baffle me.
And now, not only are people wearing coloured jeans, they are wearing them, Agyness-style, with a trilby, a man’s blazer, spats and probably jigging their legs about, like marionettes.
Sticking with this Hornby-esque list technique, here are some handy tips on how y’all can stand out without having to wear orange on your legs:
1. Don’t wear jeans.
2. Don’t wear anything the mannequins are wearing in the front window of a high-street shop.
3. Don’t wear anything worn by a celebrity, especially if you don’t understand why that celebrity is famous.
No applause, just monetary expressions of gratitude, please.
Charlotte, London
Charlotte, you seem to see floral leggings as redolent of Daisy Lowe-style youthful fashion; I see them as something my grandmother’s bridge-playing friends might have sported in Miami. But fashion, of course, is subjective, so let’s focus on the bigger picture of your question and that is of the age limit of Topshop and fashion age limits in general.
In regards to the former, the whole Topshop experience has always been largely based on wheat and chaff and sorting the former from the latter. As one gets older, more sorting is required, not because you are too old to wear certain things, but because you are too wise to do so.
But leaving that aside, this page hates hates HATES this idea of people being too old to wear certain things, as though clothes are films with age-specific certificates, but in reverse. Did I mention that I hate them? It is just another way to make women feel bad about not weighing eight stone and being 21 years old. And the fact that the D*i*y M*i* actually has a column on its fashion pages called “Am I Too Old to …” proves how stupid it is. In fact, upsetting people at that so-called newspaper is actually a pretty good reason to wear a rah-rah skirt. I am woman. Hear me rah.
• Post questions to Hadley Freeman, Ask Hadley, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London, N1 9GU. Email: ask.hadley@guardian.co.uk
Get ready for funkyzeit as Austria’s greatest fashionista arrives on the big screen this week. But how would Bruno advise Gordon Brown, style Obama and deal with the BNP? We found out
Bruno – it’s just Bruno – has four major loves in his life: fashion, celebrities, entertainment and homosexuality (his and everyone else’s). It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the latter that gets Sacha Baron Cohen’s Austrian TV reporter into the most trouble. If you thought Borat bringing a plastic bag full of his own excrement to the table was uncomfortable, imagine how the people of Fort Smith in Arkansas felt when they’d bought $5 tickets for a Redneck Rumble only to see Bruno and another chap strip down to their smalls and get it on. Cohen, almost unbelievably, is still alive and his film is set to be the feel-dirty hit of the summer. But upsetting stupid people is easy- what’s hard is bringing real and lasting change to the world. So how would Bruno solve some of this season’s biggest issues?
Hello Bruno, how are you?
For a herpes-free 19-year-old with a perfect body, ich am pretty good – alzo ich have lost ein gramme since ich last weighed meinself an hour ago.
What are you wearing?
On my feet, a pair of powder blue Cavalli snakeskin courier boots, on my legs, a pair of low-rise velvet Vivienne Westwood culottes und on my chest, ze sweat und “manmilch” of a Cuban roomservice waiter named César.
Be honest: could the Guide get away with it?
Ich don’t think so; César is pretty choosy, he is not like some dog marking his territory.
That Eminem incident … we think he looked dangerously aroused. What about you?
Ja he vas very aroused. Let me tell you, the real Slim Shady vas beginning to stand up. Ich vas not so bothered. Ich vish ich had landed on Kanye Vest und he had assumed ze role of ein “Bruno Digger”.
The British political scene is in crisis, MPs have never been so reviled. How would you restore confidence?
Ich do not like to talk about politics. Ze last time an Austrian got involved in politics it resulted in ein horrific var, which resulted in ze annihilation of all major European fashion shows for six years. Ich know it’s controversial – but in my opinion – Hitler vas a bit of a bitch. I know someone who vas ze grandson of his personal assistant; apparently behind ze scenes he vas a real tyrant. Vorse zan Elton!
The ex-home secretary’s husband tried to claim his adult movie habit on expenses. He watched Raw Meat 3 – do you know it?
Nein, ich do not vatch adultmovies. If ich am feeling horny ich vatch Daniel Radcliffe movies. Zey are best watched on DVD vhen ich can pause it, und not run ze risk of accidentally finishing meinself off vhen ze old vizard ist on the screen.
Britain is about to be taken, if not roundly thrashed, by a group of smooth-cheeked public school boys. What should we do?
If you’re you are not into ze spanking, pull out ein dildo. Most guys will run quicker zan an Austrian child who has just found ze door to his dungeon unlocked.
How should Gordon Brown improve his YouTube hit count?
Lose ze grimacing: he has ze sort of creepy smile zat makes you check your drink for Rohypnol! He alvays looks so sad – ich think he needs some new batteries in his love eggs und ein makeover. He needs to go in some skinny jeans, und change his name to “DJ Shadow”. Und get some shpray tan – hello.
The crypto-fascists of the BNP are on the rise in our country. Do you have a message for them?
It is the wrong vay to get your message across! Look at Adolf, everyone remembers him for ze invading und ze fighting. No one remembers his bold use of colours and inventive accessorising. Or ze fact zat he could co-ordinate zose big shows vith thousands of people und hundreds of costume changes. Let me tell you, if Donatella Versace had been in charge of ze Nuremberg Rally, it vould have been a disaster! Ich have seen zese angry men mit zere shaven heads hanging abaus outside gay clubs. Too scared to come in. Ich says zere’s plenty of room in ze Jacuzzi for all types of guys. Not all gays like immigrants you know, so it’s no big deal, vassever.
Quantitative easing – is it a good thing?
Is this ze new colonic process? Ich think Gwyneth Paltrow vas talking about zis. Zey flood your arschenhalle vith yoghurt und you vear ein nappy for a veek vhile it seeps out. Nicht for Bruno.
How do you feel about Barack Obama’s first 100 days?
He has been OK, but Bruno vould have liked it more if he’d have set up en actual Fashion Police Department vith full powers of arrest. Zey should be able to baton-charge anyone in sweatpants.
Would you style him differently?
Ja, ich vould set that hot body free from its prison made of suits! He should follow Bruno’s rule: treat your clothes like you would do a pet. Love zem for a week, zen stick zem in a zip-up bag und throw zem in ze Danube. Then again Obama has to vear ein suit, or else zose gay marines who guard him vould be all over him like puppies on ein dropped ice cream.
Are you planning more Prop 8 demonstrations?
Of course! It is disgusting zat gay people don’t have the same rights as straights: the right to be trapped in a loveless sex-free marriage that ends in a massive legal fight over a house. And as for kids, why shouldn’t gays be able to adopt? Ein Third World baby is zis season’s must-have accessory, and it is discrimination to deny zem this.
Could you design a car that would save General Motors?
Ich had a dream about a car made of denim! Great for parking, you just fold it up and put it in a bag. If ich had to design ein car ich vould start mit ze driver und zen accessorise. You vould build your own car every morning like you build your look for ze day. You’re vearing platforms – make ze seat higher; going to ein fetische party – build it from wipe-clean PVC.
Is Bin Laden right? Is Obama antagonising Muslims?
Zose Al Qaida guys are so touchy! But then if all ich had to vear vas a black sheet und some sandals, I vould blow myself up too.
How would you tackle the Taliban’s takeover of Pakistan’s Swat region?
All ze problems in ze vorld and ze politicians just stumble around avoiding ze obvious solution – call Bono.
How will Bruno The Movie get around China’s internet ban?
Ze Chinese abuse of ze internet sickens me: everyone should have ze right to use it for vas intended for – porn und looking at how fat Britney’s got. If zey don’t allow access to mein movie via ze internet, then I suggest ein United Nations airdrop of it. Zis is ein humanitarian crisis und ve need to act now. Und vhile zey’re about it zey should drop ze Chinese some decent clothes. Zey all dress like zey are all still vorking on ein Olympic stadium building site.
Dubstep and electro-pop is the sound of the UK’s summer. What’s rocking Bruno’s iPod right now?
Ich have ein really vide taste in music – everything from early-90s techno to mid-90s dance. Ich like literally everything from Aqua to Scooter. Recently ich have got into Pink – he’s so hunky! Ich have several playlischts on mein iPod – Chillaus, Maximum Techno Love Party, und Bulimian Rhapsodies – zis is actually just Paris Hilton’s album on repeat. Brings up ze cookies every time.
What three changes would you make you heal the world?
* Ban ze elasticating of jean vaists.
* Free colonic hoses on street corners.
* Make Karl Lagerfeld head of ze UN – he got Tyra Banks to appear on ze same runvay as Naomi, he could easily fix ze Middle East.
Jane Bussmann used to pen facile interviews with Hollywood starlets. Then she decided to cover genocide in Africa. Why? She had a crush on a peace envoy, she tells Patrick Barkham
A comic novel about child soldiers is a difficult concept to grasp, particularly when it is written by a showbiz journalist based in Hollywood who travelled to Africa because she had a crush on an American peace negotiator. The Worst Date Ever, the true story of the last six years of Jane Bussmann’s life, is part romcom, part celebrity satire and part excoriating account of the failure to apprehend Joseph Kony, the Ugandan terrorist who has led his army of child soldiers on a 20-year campaign of hostage-taking, exploitation and murder in east Africa.
“I’m not laughing at sex slaves, I’m laughing at our excuses for not saving them,” says Bussmann, when we meet. A petite woman who looks like she could be Tracey Emin’s younger sister, she rattles out sentences peppered with expletives and dry one-liners. “It’s a book about me thinking I’ve got to change my life, with catastrophic consequences, and also the silliness of chasing a bloke you are never in a million years going to cop off with.” She calls it method writing: “You get way funnier shit in real life than you ever do in fiction.”
Bussmann became a showbiz journalist by accident. She grew up in Muswell Hill, north London, wanting to be a physicist. “Space travel seemed awesome and I remember Look and Learn books where we all wore jumpsuits to work,” she says. The future appeared perfect: “I could be really fat and wear a jumpsuit and live off pills. What could I do in this world of jumpsuits and pills? I’d probably just work on time travel. But that didn’t materialise due to the enormous quantities of booze I consumed after 16.”
Physics was supplanted by rebellion and the only A-level Bussmann picked up was in art. She was then inspired to write sitcoms by meeting Johnny Speight, the screenwriter who created Alf Garnett, when her journalist father interviewed him for the Guardian. For a decade, she scratched around the alternative comedy scene, writing for The Day Today, Brass Eye and So Graham Norton and creating a flurry of edgy sitcom ideas – about two rabbits being drafted into war and chainsmoking mums – which tended not to get made.
After moving to Hollywood to pursue her screenwriting career, she was forced to write about celebrities for women’s magazines to pay her bills. With her love of, as she puts it, booze, blasphemy and bad-taste jokes, she was spectacularly ill-suited to LA. “I can never make up my mind if LA is a really bitchy girls’ public school in which everyone is foul to each other all day long and constantly on a diet, or Jane Austen’s England where you can make a terrible social faux pas at any time but with longer life expectancy so this shit goes on for 70 years instead of 40,” she says.
It was the George Bush boom years and California was basking in “the golden age of stupid”. She would arrange an interview with Britney Spears, her entourage would cancel it, and Bussmann would have to concoct a story about how grounded and healthy Spears was when she was actually, at that time, a chaotic mess. The only good celebrities she met were Dolly Parton (“When you talk to her, you believe everything is going to be all right,” says Bussmann. “You just want to sit on her knee and your eyes are being sucked down into this valley of tits”) and Marilyn Manson (“You swoon when you interview him because he’s so gracious and funny”).
So she loyally lied about her celebrity subjects, indulging their opinions on chihuahuas and religion, until she interviewed Ashton Kutcher around the time he got together with Demi Moore. The interview was published with fictional quotes inserted by an editor, Kutcher and his lawyers went nuclear and Bussmann, who denied inventing the quotes, figured that now that she was hated by both her celebrity subjects and her journalist paymasters, she had better escape.
When she spotted a picture of John Prendergast, a US conflict negotiator who specialised in African affairs and sought to help end the conflict in Uganda, she fantasised about a route out. Prendergast “wasn’t just hot; he was wise,” she wrote. She fancied him, and as her “only job skill was turning people into celebrities” she decided to travel to Uganda to meet Prendergast and write a profile of him as the pin-up boy of peace, the George Clooney of conflict resolution.
She blagged a commission from the Sunday Times and travelled to a remote town in Uganda, only to find that Prendergast had dashed off again. Funny, excruciating and utterly exhausting, her book tells of her desperate blundering around Uganda, being spied on and befriended, and her gradual discovery of the evil surrounding Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army.
She has a keen eye for detail, from the marbled-wash jeans on sale in the markets to the “purposeful white people dotted everywhere” who drive self-important white Toyotas with UNHCR or UNESCO on the side, “the international acronyms for don’t shoot”, and her experiences expose some uncomfortable parallels between celebrity journalism and the life of a foreign correspondent. In both Uganda and Hollywood, people in power try to bludgeon journalists into accepting their twisted versions of the truth. In both worlds, Bussmann has her reality tested daily by bullies.
Her self-deprecating descriptions of her cluelessness might, however, suggest that any idiot can become a foreign correspondent. Can anyone really pitch up overseas and uncover complex stories of violence and corruption? “A real reporter could have done it in slightly less than six years and maybe covered another couple of wars in the meantime. They could have also done it without dropping Biros on the floor with your shirt undone and whatever desperate tricks I used to get close up to colonels,” she says.
She was spurred on by guilt, because when she met children in camps who had been rescued from Kony’s army, she “very foolishly” promised them she would help, “something a real reporter would never do in a million years”, she says.
While the camps of terrified and disorientated Ugandans displaced by the fighting in the north of their country are emptying today, Kony is still a wanted man, holed up in a remote corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo and continuing to commit atrocities with his army of young conscripts and hostages.
Between the one-liners, Bussmann argues that Kony is the “perfect villain” who helped his opponents in the Ugandan government attract foreign aid while some in the army enriched themselves. “The fact that an army of 40,000 couldn’t catch one man and a bunch of kids, who at the beginning just had machetes, is highly suspicious,” she says. “Look at the ghost soldiers. This is an army that according to the [Ugandan] government newspaper have up to 60% of soldiers in certain units missing because they never existed. Corrupt bosses were claiming salaries for soldiers who didn’t exist. I don’t know much about ghosts but I know they are fucking shit at catching child kidnappers. They are right up there with werewolves, they are unreliable and useless.”
Bussmann is scathing about ineffective international efforts to stop Kony and badly targeted aid money that has poured into Uganda. For many years the west assisted the country’s long-serving president, Yoweri Museveni, and elevated him into a golden boy “when for 10 years he’s had these people living in camps and hasn’t been able to catch this one guy for 20 years,” she says. “Look at Hillary Clinton’s [1998] comment, ‘There are no easy answers.’ One nun rescued 109 girls [from Kony] and the Ugandan army rescued one. There are some easy answers. The army is bent.”
Bussmann also aims her comic fury at many of the charities working in Uganda. She thinks they helped prop up a failing regime. Charities might point out that it is almost impossible to work in a country unless you are at least tolerated by the host government. It is easy for a maverick outsider to diagnose the ills; far harder to be a charity worker and cure them. “Look at the International Committee of the Red Cross. You can’t take the argument that you can’t piss off the people you are trying to work next to. The ICRC were aware of the death camps during the second world war but they didn’t speak up for that precise reason. You don’t work with these people: you call the cops.”
The charity projects that work, argues Bussmann, are “micro-financed”, accountable and transparent, and usually where small amounts of money are “given to women who need it and know what to do with it”. (One charity boss told her that 90% of women paid back loans whereas only 10% of men did.)
It would not be giving much away to say that Bussmann’s romantic quest – to bag Prendergast – ends in failure but she is actually quite coy about their meetings in her book. Did she ever seduce him? “We did go on a date. He might have been under the illusion it was an interview. I naively believed there was a moment when there was an ‘in’. Then I just looked at him and thought, you are so out of my league. He’s like Clooney, he belongs to the world so,” she sighs with jokey theatricality, “I let him go.” They met again last week at a conference in Washington. “He looked at me slightly differently when he saw me so I think he’s read the book. He looked slightly nervous.”
Before she wrote the book, Bussmann turned this extraordinary tale into a one-woman play, performing off Broadway and at the Edinburgh Festival. She has sold the film rights and is now working on the script. Given her contempt for Los Angeles, I am surprised when she says she is still living there. Why did she return? “Fuck knows.” Are there any good things about it? “The salads are huge. And old Hollywood – you feel you are surrounded by benevolent ghosts.”
Although she is planning to travel back to Africa to write a TV drama set in the Congo, she is still based in LA for her other work commitments. She is developing a sitcom and writing a book about her terrible dating experiences in California called Awful Nights. “I’ll do that and get the fuck out. I’m going to live in Nairobi. I’ve got it all planned.” Why Nairobi? Her answer is typical of Bussmann. “Lunatics. You don’t go a single day without an insane conversation”.
• The Worst Date Ever: War Crimes, Hollywood Heart-Throbs and Other Abominations is published by Macmillan at £12.99. Bussmann will be performing her show Bussmann’s Holiday at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, from 24-30 August.
It had the celebrity scoop of the decade when it broke the news of Michael Jackson’s death. Now Harvey Levin’s tiny gossip site TMZ.com has become a media giant
TMZ.com is now the hottest Hollywood celebrity gossip website on the planet. So hot, in fact, that when it broke the news of Michael Jackson’s death last week, its world exclusive popped up online six minutes before the singer actually died.
For its many critics this was confirmation that the website, which, amid endless surveillance videos of minor celebs parking their cars and walking to their front doors, brought you exclusives on Mel Gibson’s antisemitic ravings at a traffic cop, Alec Baldwin’s brutal mobile phone rant at his 11-year-old daughter and the contents of Anna Nicole Smith’s bedside table the night she died (Slim Fast and chewing gum), plays fast and loose with the truth.
But for TMZ, the explanation was simple. By the time Jackson was officially declared dead, at 2.26pm Los Angeles time last Thursday, one of the site’s sources within the corridors of the UCLA Medical Centre (it has a vast network that blankets the city) had already tipped it off.
Michael Jackson dead was the scoop of a lifetime for any media outlet, and the apogee of the four-year-old celebrity-obsessed site that boasts its snippets are “even more fascinating than the hype”. In that time, TMZ (the name stands for thirty-mile zone, the area of central LA thickly populated with stars), which is as voyeristic as it is speedy, has become one of the world’s most quoted sources of entertainment news, with rival sites, TV channels and traditional gossip columns, such as the New York Post’s infamous Page Six, quoting it regularly.
And for all that, we have Harvey Levin to thank. The well-built, 57-year-old former lawyer turned TV journalist is now something of a celebrity himself, popping up on Larry King Live, and a bunch of other news magazine shows that dip into celebrity content. When Natasha Richardson hit her head while skiing and suffered fatal brain swelling, Levin, who founded TMZ, was all over the news channels and appeared to have been in touch with paramedics who tended to her. The guy is that good.
A polite way to put it is that Levin is a man who polarises opinion. I’m A Celebrity contestant Janice Dickinson called him the lowest form of pond scum, Radar magazine’s profile on him was titled Sultan of Sleeze, while blogging site Gawker said he was a “schlocky managing editor of a thieving celebrity news conglomerate” and accused him of filching stories from the website Courthouse News Service and passing them off as their own.
For his part, Baldwin said that Levin “seemed to be that breed of tabloid creature that realised an almost sexual level of pleasure from ruining other people’s lives”.
Some rival media outlets so dislike and distrust TMZ that they didn’t report Jackson was dead until it had been confirmed by the Los Angeles Times and Associated Press. “That’s typical,” Levin told the Los Angeles Times. “No matter what they say, people know we broke the story. That’s how competitors handle it. There’s no issue about our credibility,” he added. “Today, I made 100 phone calls, and everyone else made 100 calls,” Levin said of TMZ’s reporters the day it broke the Jackson story. “Everyone blanketed the city.” That seems to be true. The website has sources everywhere: its first reports about Jackson variously quoted a cardiologist at UCLA, another source inside the hospital where the stricken star was taken, a Jackson family member and Jackson’s father, Joe.
Kevin Smith, co-founder of independent news and picture agency Splash News, says that while many newspapers and magazines rely on celebrity content to get sales, but fill their pages with everything from crosswords to horoscopes, TMZ has just cut down to the bone – celebrity is all it supplies. “It is very raw, it is very crude, it’s not polished, but it works. A lot of people look at them with envy and think, ‘Why didn’t we do that?’”
Levin, who gossip sites love to point out is happily partnered to his bodybuilder-turned-chiropractor boyfriend, trained as a lawyer, but found the lure of TV irresistible. He passed his bar exam in 1975 and taught law before becoming a legal reporter for KCBS-TV in LA, where he covered the OJ Simpson trial. He later became a legal analyst on The People’s Court TV show, before dreaming up his own TV concept, Celebrity Justice. But the show didn’t last; a victim of poor time slots, it was axed after three years.
Undeterred, Levin launched TMZ.com modestly in December 2005 as “a Hollywood and entertainment-centric news site”. It was a joint venture between AOL and Telepictures Productions, a division of Warner Bros, which produces the Ellen DeGeneres Show and the Tyra Banks Show. Both companies are divisions of Time Warner. The site is said to cost about $8m a year to run, but some have estimated that it could be worth up to $400m.
The site was profitable after the first year, according to Alan Citron, general manager of TMZ.com from just after it launched until late last year. “TMZ was one of the first sites to redefine celebrity coverage. When people were setting their web bookmarks, TMZ was there. I am a big believer in first mover advantage.”
According to Citron, Levin was a hard taskmaster who would work all hours. “At the end of the day, he’s a really good reporter. When he focuses on the story he is likely to beat the competition.”
The site, which attracts about 10 million unique users a month, created waves at Warner Bros in the early days with some of its scoops, according to Citron, now president of Buzznet. “I think that there was some nervousness about that and there were times when people would go, ‘Can’t you move a bit to the middle?’ but to their credit they never shut us down.”
There are two opposing schools of thought about its success. One, that TMZ is founded on good old-fashioned reporting, wearing out shoe leather in the finest tradition of Hollywood tip sheets. Two, it gets scoops because it pays people.
“If you have a story and you want to get paid then you call TMZ,” says Kevin Smith, whose agency is a major supplier to TMZ.
While this is a practice that half of Fleet Street would not bat an eyelid over, most traditional US media newspapers find this deeply troubling and refuse to pay for stories. Levin admits that the site pays for pictures and he also admitted to the New York Times that he will pay for story tips, but will not pay for unverified stories. “There are times when you have to pay,” says Smith. “What if Deep Throat had wanted money and not been acting out of political motivations? Richard Nixon would have remained president.”
Citron is quick to defend their use of chequebook journalism. “As long as information is accurate I don’t have a problem with that.
It is clear that even before the events of last week, TMZ had changed Hollywood and is starting to change the way the world’s media works. In times past other outlets would attempt to confirm a story themselves before running big on it. But with TMZ’s scoop last week, Sky News gave it blanket coverage very quickly, even though for nearly one hour TMZ was the only media organisation claiming the superstar was dead. News companies that waited for confirmation, such as CNN and BBC, were roundly criticised. The old rules of double sourcing stories appeared to be being rewritten before our eyes.
“In many ways, publicists ran Hollywood before we came along,” Levin told Television Week. “They would set the topics, they would set the agenda, they would tell these magazine shows what they could or couldn’t do. The power they had would be to say, ‘We won’t give you the interviews you really want, you play ball with us’.”
But who needs sit-down interviews with celebrities when you can run a harrowing image of pop star Rihanna’s face after she was beaten up, for which TMZ reportedly paid $62,000. Keith Kelly, the Media Ink columnist at the New York Post, is stumped to think of a major story the site has blown. “It’s not a massive profit-maker,” says Kelly. “They focus on one thing: breaking news, that’s it – and seem to do it fairly accurately. They have definitely had an impact. I don’t think that Hollywood agents and the power structure particularly care for them. In some ways, it’s a blessing, you don’t have to go and suck up to agents and swap favours for access.”
When TMZ broke the news of Jackson’s heart attack, but before it reported his death, UK news networks had no problem going big on the story, even though TMZ was virtually the only source. But US network CNN refused to report TMZ’s claim that Jackson was dead, even though both news outlets are part of the same company.
Levin is certainly hardworking. He works website hours, arriving at the office sometimes as early as 6am, and has often hit the gym before that. He wears several hats, cofounder and editor-in-chief of TMZ.com, executive producer and host of TMZ on TV, the successful TV show spawned by the site. The offices of TMZ off Sunset Boulevard double as the set of TMZ on TV. “If you went in there you wouldn’t find it run by journalists, it is run by young guys who know how to put stuff on the internet. But they have broken some very important stories,” says Smith, whose company is a major supplier to the site.
TMZ on TV is just like the site. In fact, it is like putting Heat magazine on television. The format is part squawk box, part bull ring. Levin stands in front of his staff, slurps from a drink bottle, wields a large marker pen and asks his troops in turn, “What have you got?’ Just like a real news conference in any news outlet anywhere. But here the stories are different. Staff report on the latest celebrity sitings, often with video. “We caught Twilight star Robert Pattinson’s butt cleavage!!” “Sam Ronson denies Lindsay Lohan pregnancy rumours, ‘if she is, it ain’t mine’”. It is a lot of shooting the breeze, interspersed with about eight minutes of content. It is also popular. So much so that the Fox TV network, where it airs every weeknight, is now planning a second TV show. TMZ on TV will expand with a trial run of a new series called Beyond Twisted that starts next Monday. It is billed as an “irreverent and funny take on jaw-dropping moments from around the world”.
It is possible to see the legacy of Walter Winchell, the newspaper gossipmonger who dominated radio and TV from the 1930s to the 1950s, in what TMZ does. Winchell’s quick-fire radio and TV shows, where he delivered news and gossip, accompanied by clattering telexes, gave him enormous power, and he perfected the use of slang to avoid legal disputes, promising his listeners each week the lowdown on celebrity and politics, “the very very low low down down”. But Winchell wasn’t really into camera-up-skirt content. In some ways, TMZ is the National Enquirer for the internet age.
It is clear that the site now has the power that Winchell once had. Smith waits to see if TMZ can build on its Jackson success. “The problem is, it’s hard to maintain it. The large majority of their stuff is just fluff. I don’t have a problem with that because we are supplying most of that fluff,” he says.
Keith Kelly sees it as on a mission to expose news that publicists want to keep a lid on. “So in a sense they are outsiders, which in a sense is what journalists should be – they shouldn’t be part of the power structure”.
July 2006
A police report obtained by TMZ reveals that Mel Gibson launched an antisemitic and sexist tirade at traffic cops when arrested in Malibu for drink-driving
November 2006
TMZ shows mobile phone footage of former Seinfeld star Michael Richards on stage in a comedy club launching a bizarre racist rant at a heckler
April 2007
TMZ broadcasts an abusive answering-machine message that Alec Baldwin leaves his daughter, 11, during a custody battle
February 2009
TMZ releases audiotape of Christian Bale going berserk at a crew member on the set of Terminator Salvation. Bale gets through 39 “fucks” in four minutes
February 2009
TMZ posts shocking photograph of pop singer Rihanna with deep bruises and black eyes after she was allegedly assaulted by her boyfriend on the morning of the Grammys
Are fat celebrities a danger to us?
We aren’t taking the war on obesity seriously, claims a new study published by Nuffield Health; and large celebrities, such as James Corden and his Gavin And Stacey co-star Ruth Jones, Beth Ditto and Eamonn Holmes, are encouraging us accept being fat as normal. Apart from the fact that I can’t seem to find the original research that this story is based on, which in itself is pretty interesting, I think we have to be wary of studies coming from a hospital that does gastric band surgery and thus makes money out of designating people as obese.
We are in a culture that is so fat-phobic you wouldn’t have thought fat people could be any more demonised, but Nuffield’s line seems to be that obese people in the public eye really should be. We’ve had – and continue to have – so many struggles about race and disability; but looking at the column inches that scrutinise fat and ageing people, both are heading the way of being illegal categories pretty soon. And if not illegal, then certainly worthy of disdain, contempt and commercial exploitation.
There has been a bit of public discussion about very thin girls and boys on catwalks and advertisements, but the style industries seem to have decided, in the end, that it’s all in the name of art and design, and thus the tyrannous aesthetic of size zero doesn’t really matter. That has left the devastating message that one size – skinny and tall – is good, aspirational and the passport to feeling acceptable. So it’s quite interesting that we’re uncomfortable when people actually rebel against the prevailing standard.
The Nuffield PR machine opens up the whole question of categorising people as fat and therefore somehow to be scorned, derided or unworthy – instead of fat being a description, a neutral one about adiposity. Such moralising categories don’t address the serious underlying issues so many people have with bodies and food. You can be eating when you are hungry and be large, or throwing up into the toilet all the time and be within the so-called normal range. Meanwhile, you can be a world-class movie actor – a gorgeous one like George Clooney – and sit in the ridiculous obesity statistics as they are currently conceived. What we have is a population very, very troubled in its eating habits, a fact that is expressed in both visible and invisible ways. That’s a public health emergency, not the fact that we happen to have a variety of shapes in public space.
• Susie Orbach is the author of Bodies and Fat is a Feminist Issue
I know it’s a problem but it’s my problem, thank you very much
The central tenet of this research is utter rubbish. People do not think its OK to be obese just because Beth Ditto is witty and talented. We are constantly reminded how wrong it is for us to be obese. There is more information available on the obesity crisis in the media than I can recall at any other time in my life. Paradoxically, the general pervasiveness of the perfect body in films and music and TV and advertising imagery is genuinely psychologically damaging and therefore an actual contributory factor to obesity. James Corden wobbling his gut in Mathew Horne’s face once a week is not.
I have been overweight for most of my life and I have been aware that it’s a problem. But it is my problem, thank you very much. I deal with it in my own way. I have never thought that my weight was permissible simply because I listened to Bad Manners or loved Jo Brand. My feeling is that if the popularity of Corden and Ditto can help to stop fat kids being picked on by their peers then they are performing a valuable service. A survey like this just sends people straight back to the fridge. The obesity crisis will only be solved by a radical overhaul of education, health and social policy, and certainly not by pin-headed inflammatory half-arsed “research”.
Phill Jupitus