The Corporatization of the Hollywood Flack

In today's NYT, Michael Cieply showed nice restraint in illuminating how the 2008 world of flacking works in Hollywood, a story that could easily have been laced with snark.

While individual celebrity publicists still roam in large numbers, Cieply points out that the dominant machinery has not only grown quite large, but also gone quite corporate.

Where studio flacks once handled every aspect spin, they are now much more specialized, which Cieply characterizes as the creation of offensive and defensive teams. The segmentation actually follows the traditional org design of the PR departments of the corporations that now own the studios. Most corportate flack departments are divided into an investor-centric group that looks after the corporation itself, and a selling-centric group that focuses on brand publicity and trade media. Studios now have much the same, with some flacks watching over the studio's business, and other dedicated to actually pushing films and programming.

The tendancy to match flacks to individual studio executives also mirrors many corporations, with many a corporate spinner knowing exactly where "the body" is 24/7. To make it real, Cieply calls CNBU's flacks by name.

Cory Shields looks out for the chief executive, Jeff Zucker. Cindy Gardner takes care of the Universal Studios president, Ron Meyer. At Universal Pictures, Stacy Ivers is the designated hitter for the chairman, Marc Shmuger, and the co-chairman, David Linde. Michael Moses keeps busy with domestic publicity for the studio's films, like "American Gangster" and "Charlie Wilson's War." (International film publicity requires still more bodies.) Adriene Bowles stands guard for James Schamus, chief executive of Universal's Focus Features division, and commands a crew of picture publicists....

Based on Cieply's account of the coordination engineered during the writer's strike, competing studio flacks would seem far better at locking arms with each other than the flacks in most other industries.

And finally, for non-flacks looking for a quick Media Inquiry 101 checklist, Cieply describes everything you need to know in 70 words.

Call Ms. Ivers with a question, and she will ask you a lot of questions in return: What's your angle? What have you got? Who else is talking? She'll almost certainly check signals on the inside. Sometimes, she'll cross-check with counterparts like Chris Petrikin at 20th Century Fox or Sue Fleishman at Warner Brothers. Before you get an answer, if you do, it may have been vetted across the industry.