TV shows too scared to touch 'Angelina'
The leaks from Angelina Jolie's upcoming unauthorised biography are swelling into a full-blown gusher, but you wouldn't know that from the entertainment news shows.
Even as St. Martin's Press moved up the release date of Andrew Morton's "Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography" three days to Saturday, such syndicated shows as "Extra," "Access Hollywood," "Entertainment Tonight" and "The Insider" have maintained virtual silence on one of the celebrity world's hottest topics. And it's not like these programmes shy away from celebrity controversy.
The publisher's publicity director John Murphy offers a theory: Entertainment news shows worried about losing access to Jolie or Brad Pitt -- both among Hollywood's biggest "gets" -- are being intimidated into ignoring the story.
"The fear that might have been imposed on these so-called entertainment news shows by the Brangelina PR machine has got them running scared from the story," Murphy said.
As PR machines go, neither Pitt nor Jolie have particularly big operations. Both actors work without publicists, relegating press bookings and the like to their managers. A call to Jolie's manager, Geyer Kosinski, was not returned.
The virtual blackout is hardly unprecedented: Kitty Kelley discovered that her latest unauthorised-biography subject, Oprah Winfrey, had allies at many high-profile outlets when she found her TV-interview options quite limited. Morton also has felt the cold shoulder before, with biographies on Tom Cruise and Princess Diana.
But what's new, Murphy said, is that TV shows fearful of alienating celebrities typically worked around interviewing biography authors by simply reporting on the inevitable prerelease leaks.
The newsmagazines haven't even done that, while everyone from the New York Times to TMZ has seen fit to weigh in.
Even by the high-gossip quotient typically maintained by these kind of books, "Angelina" offers no shortage of revelations, from the neglect she suffered as an infant by her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, to affairs with Leonardo DiCaprio and Ralph Fiennes.
Jolie's next film, "The Tourist," expected to be released next year, has her opposite Johnny Depp.