If you read a movie star interview in a newspaper or see them talking about their movie on TV, your local correspondent probably didn't land that interview because he or she is chummy with Tom Hanks or Michelle Pfeiffer. Rather, your reporter was one of dozens who queued in assembly-line fashion over the course of a a gruelling weekend in one of showbusiness's least-known and most poorly understood rituals: the movie press junket.
With the release of the film America's Sweethearts, more moviegoers may learn how this process works.
Ostensibly a Julia Roberts romantic comedy, the movie is set at a press junket where two once-happily married stars (Catherine Zeta-Jones and John Cusack) must promote their latest film while putting a positive spin on their embarrassing break-up and hiding the blooming romance between the leading man and his sister-in-law (Roberts).
In a life-imitates-art-imitates-life moment, America's Sweethearts was itself promoted during a US junket earlier this summer, where Roberts had to put a positive spin on her embarrassing break-up with longtime boyfriend, actor Benjamin Bratt.
Junkets are an essentially industrial process, in which the studios fly hundreds of reporters to Los Angeles or New York (or, in the case of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii) for a weekend and put everyone up in a luxury hotel, screen the movie, and make the stars available for brief talks.
After seeing the movie, say, on Friday night, journalists who work in print, radio, or the Internet will spend all day Saturday at "round tables", broken up into groups of eight to 16 reporters at separate tables, while the "talent" (the stars, the director, and sometimes a producer and a screenwriter) goes from one table to the next, giving each group 15 to 30 minutes.
On Sunday, the stars may talk to TV reporters, who get each performer one-on-one, but only for three to five minutes.
Here, it's the interviewers who go from room to room, each with their own cameras and lighting, while the talent stays in place all day.
It's a grinding regimen for the stars, but also for the journalists, who may cover three or four movies this way in a weekend, if the studios co-operate with each other. As a freelance newspaper journalist and film critic, I've attended hundreds of junkets over the years, though I'm not one of the 200 or so road warriors who attend them virtually every weekend.
Junkets have been getting a bad rap lately as cesspools of graft, where journalists are supposedly encouraged to write puff pieces and glowing reviews because the studios pay their way, giving them flights, hotel rooms, food and drink, bags of novelty items bearing the movie's logo (which often end up being sold on the Internet auction house eBay) and maybe $150 per day in other expenses.
This assumption that movie journalists are so easily bought is behind a class-action lawsuit filed this summer by Citizens for Truth in Movie Advertising against the major Hollywood studios. The plaintiffs would like to shut down junkets altogether.
Neither the studios nor most film journalists see junkets this way, however. For many reporters, especially those from smaller outlets or overseas, paid junkets are the only way they can afford to get access to the celebrities their readers and viewers demand to know about. We don't think of the jaunts to Hollywood to stay in posh hotels and interview stars as vacations, but as giving up our weekends and time with our families to work.
It is easy, however, for journalists to be cowed into submission. There's always an army of publicists hovering over our shoulders, all making sure we don't ask anything impolite or embarrassing, or anything that strays too far from the movie. The threats are never spoken, but always implicit - if you ask the star about his ex-wife, he'll walk out, and you'll have ruined the interview for yourself and your colleagues; or worse, you'll be blackballed from future junkets.
The studios certainly expect their cushy treatment of journalists and their stage-managed interviews to result in positive coverage, but they don't explicitly demand it, which is why they're not worried about CTMA proving their case in court.
I've always found that the studios will keep inviting me back as long as I give their movies column inches and spell everyone's name right, no matter what I write.
Case in point: years ago, I attended a junket where I was to interview Al Pacino, a brilliant actor but a man who, in those days, could barely deliver a coherent sentence unless you spoke to him in the afternoon, after he'd been fortified with several cups of strong coffee. Getting a comprehensible answer was even more difficult than usual. I described this painful experience in my article because Pacino was due to visit my city's film festival and receive a lifetime achievement award sponsored by a champagne company. Still, the studio kept inviting me back for junkets, and I kept getting to interview Pacino on future films.
Other journalists have their own stories of celebrity misbehaviour at junkets - the one about the married leading man who slept with a publicist, or the one about the vintage Hollywood star who handed a reporter his bowl of pot leaves and asked him to pick out the stems and seeds during a press conference, or the one about the publicist who begged reporters not to ask about the married star's sex-addiction therapy (a topic that wouldn't have come up had the publicist not raised it).
They also have tales of the mind-numbingly repetitive, energy-draining interview process, the extravagant lengths to which some studios go to dazzle journalists with Hollywood glamour, and the general surreality of the whole experience.
Jeffrey Birnbaum, entertainment journalist
Granted the ticket is paid for, yes, you're staying at the top LA hotel, Four Seasons, yes, the food is good, but it's a job. You're giving up your weekend.
I remember interviewing Melanie Griffith at the Working Girl junket, when she was supposedly in her big cocaine phase. She got up two or three times during the interview to go to the bathroom, and that was just at our table.
My favourite junket story ever was the weekend Miramax was junketing Senseless and Jackie Brown.
There was a journalist from an alternative paper who was insulted by the out-of-date, gay jokes that made up most of Senseless. So the journalist called the director, Penelope Spheeris, on it.
She got very defensive and said, "Look at the other movie junketing here, the Tarantino movie. They say 'f**k' and 'nigger' every other word." And she began to lose it. She said, "What paper are you from?"
He wasn't from a major paper, so she called him a "f**ker and a party pooper". She started crying and excused herself, and I'll never forget her exit line. She said, "Do you have everything you need?"
Miramax led the journalist out, obviously to the slaughter: that was his last Miramax junket.
Peter Keough, film editor, the Boston Phoenix
At the Pearl Harbor junket, where were the movie stars? For a while, it looked like we might have to content ourselves with former basketball star Dennis Rodman. At the last minute, Ben Affleck was downgraded from roundtable interviews to a 15-minute press conference.
Nobody asked Tom Sizemore much of anything. Sizemore was then shooting Black Hawk Down due in 2002, in which he plays an army ranger. He still had his ranger haircut and looked like a pissed-off William Bendix.
"This generation has no idea what it takes to win a war," he said. "It's easier to die for your country than to kill." With the possible exceptions of James Caan and Shirley MacLaine, he is the scariest person I have ever interviewed.
Lea Saslav, freelance entertainment journalist and former USA Today correspondent
In America's Sweethearts, the journalists and the stars mingle at a cocktail party. In reality, the VIPs almost never hang out with reporters, though I remember a big party for Ed Wood, where we did get to hang out with Tim Burton, Bill Murray, Spike Lee and other stars.
Disney's always thrown the most lavish junkets. You would not believe the excess at the Aladdin junket.
The studio flew everyone and their families down to Orlando, Florida, put us up in the Epcot resort hotels, and gave us free passes to all the parks.
For the Aladdin party, they closed the entire MGM theme park and turned it into an Arabian bazaar, with a quarter of a mile of buffet tables stacked with food.
They had a parade, where the actors in the movie rode in on camels and elephants. Even Disney CEO Michael Eisner was walking around with a look of dazed amusement about it all.
At the end of the parade was some poor Disney peon with a shovel whose job it was to clean up after the elephants.
A group of us were reminded of the old joke about the circus guy who had that same job, and when asked why he didn't quit, he said, "What? And give up show business?"
Paul Sherman, contributing writer, the Boston Herald
At the Honeymoon in Vegas junket (1994), James Caan was utterly blasting Bette Midler (this was after For the Boys, which she also produced). He said, literally, "She couldn't produce a chair." Then he went on The Tonight Show and denied ever saying anything of the sort.
Jack Claire, freelance entertainment journalist
You can write a good story and ask tough questions, but you have to be diplomatic about it. I thought I was being diplomatic at the Unforgettable junket when I asked Ray Liotta, "Did you and Linda Fiorentino discuss the vagaries of the business?"
His career had had ups and downs, and she'd been on top of the world after The Last Seduction but had followed it up with Jade.
It got back to Linda that I had asked that question, and I got thrown out.
The MGM publicists were very nice. They said, "We know it's not your fault. Can we buy you lunch?" Like that would make up for losing my interviews. Some stars are just plain rude and difficult. Tommy Lee Jones is mean to everybody.
Even publicists hate him, but they'll do their best to protect him when the junket's on.
Ricky Tomlinson, actor, star of Mike Bassett: England Manager
I've done loads of them. I'll tell you what it's like. I'm a plasterer by trade and it's 10 times easier than spending 12 hours on a building site. You've always got someone there to look after you. You've always got a cup of tea and you stop for lunch. In the main, people are very, very good to you so I've got no problems with it at all.
What's hard about spending a day in a first-class hotel being bloody pampered, given whatever you want to drink and stuff like that? It goes with the job. And if they're good enough to give me air time or viewing time to promote what I've done then I'm certainly prepared to go along and do that.
Jasmin Chavez, publicist, Sony Pictures
It's a professional understanding that the journalists are not going to ask personal questions. At the junket for The People vs Larry Flynt, somebody asked Courtney Love a question about Kurt Cobain. She answered that question beautifully, but that journalist now has a reputation with us. That kind of question can ruin the interview for the other journalists, too.
Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford, the actors who've been in this business longer, know this is part of the job. Mel really works. Catherine Zeta-Jones, same thing. She's a workhorse. The big no-nos for me with journalists are: a) if they don't show up, and b) if they start complaining about something that we have no control over. Also, we're paying for their air fare, we're paying for their hotel, then they want an extra night, and all of a sudden, you become their travel agent.
With the September 11th terrorism attacks, junkets may change a little. Our junket for Riding in Cars with Boys, with Drew Barrymore, is going to be the test case. Some journalists would like to come, but they're just not comfortable flying right now. Actors may not want to fly either. I don't blame them.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet, director, Amelie
Don't talk to me about these interview junkets. I mean, I very nearly went mad - I can't tell you how close I came to going nuts - doing one in Japan for Alien Resurrection and I am a very calm person. For days and days I would be stuck in a hotel room while I was asked long, long questions about tiny things in the film - often things I hadn't noticed myself.
After one really crazy question I remember saying, "It's just a film, you know." And I could see that they were upset by that. After one particularly bad interview I remember running into the next room to just scream. I wanted to cry. Making a film takes a long time, but not as long as the interviews if you are making one for a big studio.
Mike Hodges, director, Get Carter and Croupier
The most horrendous junkets are in America where you are taken to some hotel in downtown LA or even in the Valley. They bring in 500 to 600 TV reviewers who are totally ignorant of anything going on.
I remember doing a junket for the film Black Rainbow which went straight to cable. The director Robert Altman had warned me about the TV junkets he had done. But I was so angry with Miramax not giving the film a proper cinema release that I went along and was exposed to the most horrendous situation. The vast majority of the interviewers had not even seen the film.
'Jeffrey Birnbaum' and 'Jack Claire' are pseudonyms
Additional reporting by Matthew Keating, Sam Delaney and Fiachra Gibbons
America's Sweethearts is on general release