Publicists are very important. If you don’t believe it, just ask them.
At the gym the other morning, I glanced up at the TV monitor and noticed "Guarding Tess" on TBS. The 1994 film stars Shirley MacLaine as a widowed former first lady who is at odds with her Secret Service Detail, headed by Nicholas Cage. As luck would have it, the scene I caught was "Tess" on the golf course. I was there the day that scene was shot and was to interview her for my "ShowBiz This Week" program on CNN.
The publicist on duty kept telling me to be patient. When Ms. MacLaine was ready to do the interview, she (the publicist), would come get me. This went on for close to an hour. "No, you can't talk to Ms MacLaine until I set it up", she insisted. Suddenly, I look behind me and there is the Oscar winning actress herself. She turns to me and says, "Hi Bill, how are you?” “Fine”, I answered, “Do you want to get this thing over with?" Shirley answers, "Yea sure." We did the whole interview in five minutes. I don't know where the publicist went, but she certainly wasn't with Shirley MacLaine and myself.
If you’ve never seen "Guarding Tess", from Director/Writer Hugh Wilson, you should. In my opinion, it was underrated at the time of release, but holds up better than many films from the time. TBS will air it again soon I'm sure, as it seems they only have six films in their library. Thirty years ago when Ted Turner was just getting his local Atlanta channel up and running, due to a lack of cash, the same film would air at least twice a day. Ted said then, "When we start making money I'm going to buy enough films so we won't have to repeat them." That channel became SuperStationTBS, and many years and billions of dollars later, they still run the same films over and over again.
Posted by Tush at November 20, 2003 12:18 AM