Quentin Tarantino - an important PR lesson

Movie director shows us how NOT to do PR...

IF Quentin Tarantino was writing a script for a movie - one where a businessman performs the ultimate PR coup in an interview, it might go something like this:

INT. HOTEL ROOM - DAY - QUENTIN TARANTINO is cool as a f*ckin cucumber. He has just delivered the best f*cking public relations line about a f*cking movie EVER.

NEWS REPORTER:

F*ck man, that's some cool a** sh*t you just said. Now everyone will want to sit their a** down for three hours and watch Django Unchained...

QUENTIN TARANTINO

Any other questions, mother f*cker?

NEWS REPORTER

(humbled by greatness)

Sh*t yea - what the f*ck is it with the guns, man?

QUENTIN TARANTINO

I have answered that question before, but to respect any newcomers to my art I'll tell you. I use my themes to bring the mother f*cking world together to discuss important topics - in this instance slavery -  and at times treat that with a certain dose of realism. But my use of violence which eventually is used to subvert this theme - and remind the audience we are in the realms of fantasy - is uniformly cartoon-like. Any mother f*cker takes my violent sh*t seriously is f*cking f*cked in the mother f*cking head.

Of course that's not how it happened. Quentin Tarantino, interviewed by Krishnan Guru-Murthy on the Channel 4 News, made himself look less like some sort of kitch daddy-cool character from some exploito-movie/airport novel, and more like a complete tool.

KRISHNAN GURU-MURTHY

But why are you so sure that there's no link between enjoying movie violence and enjoying real violence?

QUENTIN TARANTINO

I don't... I'm going to tell you why I'm so sure? Don't ask me a question like that -- I'm not biting. I refuse your question.

KRISHNAN GURU-MURTHY

Why?

QUENTIN TARANTINO

Because I refuse your question. I'm not your slave and you're not my master. You can't make me dance to your tune. I'm not a monkey.

And then, later...

KRISHNAN GURU-MURTHY

It's interesting that you have a different view, and I'm just trying to explore that.

QUENTIN TARANTINO

And I don't want to! 'Cause I'm here to sell my movie. This is a commercial for the movie - make no mistake.

KRISHNAN GURU-MURTHY

So you don't want to talk about anything serious?

It all gets much, much worse, and I've popped the video of Tarantino's PR mishap below.

But what has happened here - I mean other than Tarantino acting like a big mother f*cking baby?

Simple. He has either not been told, or not realised he is on a news programme. Now his little outburst might well have worked if Channel 4 News relied entirely on film stars. I can imagine if he had had a similar outburst at a movie magazine like Total Film or Empire it would have, quite understandably, made them sweat. But this is the news - they are in the business of what is relevant to them and nothing else. What's more, they don't have to care if they offend someone, because they will just do a story about that - and that was precisely what they did. Because his outburst was in the public interest (or at least interesting to the public) - people spend money on him, and idolise him, and this is how he acts on one of the country's main news programmes.

And what's more, all those precious fragile souls they do offend on the news - such as some easily offended politicians - will come back for more. Why? Because at the end of the day news programmes are objective arbiters... or as objective as it gets. Quentin Tarantino was wrong. He was not in a commercial. A commercial is what you buy. Commercials mean less in PR terms precisely because they are controlled, because they do exactly what you tell them to. News is much more valuable than a commercial to politicians, to businesses and, yes, to film makers, than any other way of getting your message out because it is scrutinised first. 

The solution in this case would have been for Tarantino to hold his temper  To explain that yes, the US premiere for his film was cancelled in light of the recent school shootings in Newtown - and he doesn't believe his films and real violence are linked - but right now he doesn't want to talk about it. He doesn't want to talk about it because he does not want to court publicity on the back of a genuine tragedy. At another time and another place he will be happy to discuss it... just not now.

Maybe that would have been enough, maybe not. He should have remembered, above all else, that you don't control the news. It's what makes it so special. But what it would mean would be that he could have kept his film - and not his craggy moment - in the limelight. 

Any last words of PR advice? Maybe one of his own scripts sums it up better than I can. These lines from Pulp Fiction, when Jules tries to stop a heist in a burger bar getting out of control:

JULES

We're gonna be like three little Fonzies here. And what's Fonzie like? Come on Yolanda what's Fonzie like? 

YOLANDA

Cool? 

JULES

What?

YOLANDA

He's cool. 

JULES

Correctamundo. And that's what we're gonna be. We're gonna be cool. 

Can Fox News make you thick and thin at the same time?

It seemed like any other afternoon. But Andrea Tantaros shocked a nation when she became the week’s second news anchor to be struck down by NAFS.

Tantaros, co-host of Fox News show The Five made a light comment amid the gentle right-wing repartee. Amongst the usual casual fare, this time about the poor living off food stamps, she said:  “I should try it because, do you know how fabulous I'd look? I mean, the camera adds ten pounds. It really does. I would be looking great.”

But as the condition known as NAFS set in, it prevents her from justifying her alarming comment. Instead, it sounds as if she has decided food stamps are a new slimming plan for masochists. NAFS, or News Anchor Forgetfulness Syndrome (geddit?) freezes neurons like a snowman’s knackers - right at the moment a person should explain comments... comments which, on their own, sound like something uttered by things in your most shiver-soaked nightmares.

The reaction? What do you expect? Twitter, to begin with, lit up with the ferocity of a Hammer film lynch mob. Women’s site Jezebel said she deserved the heartless demon-lady award, saying of Tantaros “she giggled. She fucking giggled at the thought of slumming it that hard.”

Luckily, this cruel bout of NAFS later released its grip on Tantaros’ mind, and she used Twitter to explain what she was saying: “Food stamps were sold as a fitness plan to "look great" by our liberal, dense government - remember?”

She is actually right – bizarrely enough, there is an obscure radio advert which says someone looks great because they have been on the food stamps plan. Some might needlessly complicate the matter – saying perhaps she should have well, you know, made reference to the largely unnoticed advert to explain what she meant. Or maybe that there is a difference between “looking great” and losing weight. Thankfully, as the argument raged on, her very adult use of capitals on Twitter meant everyone could just SHUT UP.

Unfortunately NAFS affected another Foxreporter the same week. In this case, one brave news anchor forgot to reveal hitherto unknown information – this time to justify a seemingly sexist comment.

Brian Kilmeade said to a caller, when they asked how Fox assembled its news team, that they opened a Victoria's Secret catalogue, and then checked if they could talk and went to college.

NAFS stopped Kilmeade from explaining himself, halting his many quick-witted neurons from justifying what he said. What people didn’t know was that a fellow anchor, Kimberly Guilfoyle, actually was a Victoria’s Secret model years ago. Luckily, this small missing piece of information somehow found its way into the papers in the next couple of days. Some might say it was coincidence, and that reporters happened to look into something on the back of Kilmeade’s bonkers comment – that perhaps he knew nothing about Guilfoyle. Some might say we don’t need to know anything like this about Guilfoyle herself, and that the past is the past. Even more might say was that even if Kilmeade was armed with this information, and explained it on air, what he said was sexist. I would say that these jelly-legged girly-men don’t appreciate the important house-style of Fox punditry, or appreciate how NAF is triggered.

NAFS - the cause

So how does my not-at-all fictional NAFS come about? I think it is from the ongoing stresses Fox presenters tirelessly endure, to bring people the best in 24-hour punditry. Punditry means you have to have some sort of opinion, and at Fox it may well mean you have to run this in line with a memo sent down by Fox management, who clearly want the best for their media teams, and to guide them in the kindest way that they can. The writer of Flat Earth News, Nick Davies, highlights one which said everyone had to refer to the “political courage and practical cunning” of the Bush administration throughout one particular day. I’m sure that, caught in amongst all these news stories you have to report on, this particular insight is easy to forget. But the memo is a great way of getting people to remember what’s important. And fun too: like a news version of Balls of Steel.

And an additional stress will have been caused by the mean and nasty things being said about everyone at Fox News. All these “studies” by “academics” and their “facts.” In one of these, the University of Maryland ran a survey on the channel’s viewers to find out the effects of the channel on its audience back in 2004. It said that 67 per cent of respondents thought Saddam Hussein had ties with Al Quaeda – as opposed to 56 per cent at CBS, 49 at NBC, and 16 per cent who just listened to NPR (formerly National Public Radio). Thirty-three percent of Fox viewers had thought Iraq had WMD, when just 11 percent of radio listeners thought this was the case. Meanwhile 35 per cent of Fox fans thought the world wanted the USA to have its war with Iraq, as opposed to 5 per cent NPR.

Equally, they need to deal with mixed and totally unfair attacks on their channel which actually say it makes people thick. These allegations followed two tests of people’s knowledge conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University. Although researcher Prof. Dan Cassino stepped in to rebuff some interpretations of his findings, many of which had said that Fox News makes people stupid, his mincing of words, well, make it worse:

“Overall, Fox viewers were not better or worse than the average respondent at answering the questions. That said, and all salient variables being geekily controlled for, there was not merely a zero effect but a negative effect of Fox News on viewers' ability to answer the questions; meaning that Fox viewers would have done better had they been using almost any other news source, or no news source at all. Results for the similarly partisan MSNBC were... well, similar.”(my italics)

Quickly Fox responded. “Considering FDU's undergraduate school is ranked as one of the worst in the country, we suggest the school invest in improving its weak academic program instead of spending money on frivolous polling – their student body does not deserve to be so ill-informed.” Yay Fox! You hit that professor – and about 12,000 students who had nothing to do with the research – where it hurts. And well done on striking back using a sound, reasoned argument.

But things have more recently been made worse by a self professed “mole” called Joe Muto, who had hidden amongst the rank and file at Fox, and stepped forward with his own shocking “opinion”. I’m sure some might say he was on some sort of Democratic mission to destroy the channel, drunk on West Wing box sets. “The people at Fox are not stupid,” he said to the Huffington Post. “They know when they have Dick Morris or one of these other pundits on predicting a landslide victory for Romney, the people behind the scenes know that it's all bluster. They know that this is sort of an entertainment. They know that a lot of these people are just hucksters ... we producers know that this is all a farce. The reason we don't step in and give a reality check to our audience is because that's terrible for ratings.”

Nonsense. How could I possibly share conclusions with this man? I mean, like I told that survey, Romney won... didn’t he?