Have you read How to be Famous: Our Guide to Looking the Part, Playing the Press, and Becoming a Tabloid Fixture?
Speidi posing and promoting their book
It’s a book “written” by (former) reality TV couple Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag, once named “most embarrassing Americans.” Promotional copy promises that, “with Heidi and Spencer as your personal coaches, you, too, could transform yourself into a red-carpet-ready superstar!” and that it will help readers:
• Discover why getting and talking about plastic surgery is a must
• Unlock the secrets of celebrity couple math (e.g. Speidi > Heidi + Spencer)
• Mesmerize the media with outrageous behavior … and much, much more!
Has it truly become so easy? Does anybody see, recognize, hear or care about substance anymore?
Remember the days when songs took a while to climb the charts … and people watched to see a record climb? This happened well before they were labeled a “hit.” The same with a TV show or a theatre movie. They weren’t labeled “smash hit” until they sold out so many times or won the ratings race. Now, we see countless shows, movies, books, artists and songs immediately being labeled “star”or “hit.” Come on people! If you take away the special effects, the glitz, the digital layering, what you all too often discover is a mediocre singer at best; an actor who is stiff and unseasoned; an artist who really has not earned the title.
How to be Famous… reminds me of a time years back when I visited an art museum and a friend later mentioned, “Just because it’s in a museum doesn’t mean it’s great art.” Perhaps the flipside may be that all these “anointed stars” make it easier to identify the truly talented. People with gifts. The type who don’t necessarily know that and who work at their craft to EARN stardom.
We should remind ourselves that, typically, style over substance is fleeting – as evidenced by the fact that sales of Speidi’s book were low and that E! banned the duo from its network claiming viewers polled voted overwhelmingly that they were sick and tired of their self-promoting ways. The network actually stated it would no longer cover “the misadventures of Speidi until the pair does something truly newsworthy.”
For certain, the importance of branding and packaging should never be underestimated. But neither should evidence that (even in Hollywood!) style plus substance perseveres.
— Diane Blaszka
— Tom McManimon
Points Of Stimulation 