Rejected!

Peter Riegert

There are a lot of ways for a journalist to get rejected in Hollywood. Chris Neumer details three of his personal favorites here. (And by personal favorites, he means the three most soul-crushing, comically over-the-top rejections that he wouldn’t believe if they hadn’t happened to him)

by Chris Neumer

During my tenure at Stumped, I’ve done a lot of interviews. Well into the hundreds. However, these interviews only mark the tip of the iceberg for me; you can see the hundreds of interviews I’ve done, you can’t see the thousands of interview pitches I’ve made to publicists detailing why they should put me in touch with their clients. For every interview that I’ve actually done, I’d hazard a guess that I pitched ten others that I was turned down for. Part of this rejection ratio is my own doing; I don’t simply interview Hollywood talents who are touring the country promoting their latest theatrical releases. As a matter of fact, I prefer not to interview Hollywood types under those conditions. Interviewing people when they aren’t in the middle of a press tour and speaking to dozens upon dozens of other journalists provides for a much more intimate and unique conversation. It also is much, much harder to do. As such, I’ve had to develop quite a thick skin over the years. It comes about naturally when you’ve been rejected more often that Jim Levenstein, Alvy Singer Louis Skolnick and Napoleon Dynamite, combined.

Publicists turn down proposals in one of two ways: 1) they state that whatever talent you’ve requested to interview is busy and/or not doing interviews at the moment.* Or 2) They don’t respond to any of your e-mails or phone calls. I’m not sure how the math works on this, but the aforementioned two scenarios occur 108% of the time.

* They are often busy and/or not doing interviews at the moment because I am not called from Entertainment Weekly or The New York Times.

Trouble only enters the equation when the publicists feel the need to clarify why their talent is busy.** My three favorite encounters of this nature came as I tried to get interviews with director Roger Avary (pre-manslaughter charges), actor Peter Riegert and actor Dennis Farina.

** Because publicists do sometimes understand that journalists realize that their talent is never too busy for Entertainment Weekly of The New York Times.

In Avary’s case, I had just seen his film The Rules of Attraction and was fascinated by his use of split screens; split screens that often melted seamlessly into one another. While poking around on line, I came across Avary’s blog. Avary had posted his latest entry about five minutes before I stumbled onto his site. He talked at length about how bored he was, about how he was sitting around his house in sweatpants doing nothing and how he would have leapt at the chance to do anything. Knowing Avary, it’s possible that he then listed several really off-the-wall things that he wouldn’t have minded doing instead of sitting and doing nothing.

Taking that as a sign from God, I called his publicist at the time and told her I wanted to request an interview with Avary. “He’s extremely busy right now,” Avary’s publicist said. “He doesn’t have any time to do interviews at the present.”

I asked his publicist if she’d read his most recent blog; a lengthy entry that expounded upon exactly how bored Avary was and how he wasn’t doing anything. Without batting an eye, Avary’s publicist said that she was aware of his blog, but “That was then, this is now.” I starred at my phone quizzically and stated, “But that was six minutes ago.” She paused for a second and closed the conversation by asking me, “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

In the case of Riegert, an actor I’m hard pressed to even qualify as a ‘character actor’ at this point in time, I was informed by his publicist of the time that he couldn’t do an interview Stumped because “He is busy trying to put something into pre-production.” The phrase is seared into my brain. Not only did I write it down while I was on the phone, but I’ve repeated it so many times that it just rolls off my tongue. “He is busy trying to put something into pre-production.”

I nodded appreciatively at the sentiment. Filmmakers have far better things to do in pre-production than talk to journalists. I started to say that and then cut myself off when I realized that Riegert’s publicist hadn’t said that he was in pre-production on a film, but that he was working on getting a project into pre-production. For the uninitiated, making the statement that you’re trying to get something into pre-production only works if there’s a step in the filmmaking process before actually beginning work on something. The time period before pre-production for filmmakers is commonly known as “down time”. I asked Riegert’s publicist to repeat her last statement. And she did, verbatim. Then she said, “So I hope you’ll understand how busy he is.”

Upset that I was getting brushed off by Peter Riegert of all people, I asked the publicist, “Is there ever a time he’s not trying to put something into pre-production? I mean, I’m not even a filmmaker and I could honestly tell people that I am trying to put something into pre-production.”

Suffice it to say, I never got the interview with Riegert. Six years later, I believe the man is still diligently trying to put something into pre-production. In retrospect, I think I’d rather have this story than the interview I’d have gotten. C’est la vie.

In the case of Farina, I was heading to New York about a week before Christmas to do an interview with Josh Lucas. I figured that since I was going to be in the city that I’d see if Farina were going to be around. I’ve been a fan of the man’s since 1986’s Crime Story and have always liked his rugged, blue-collar panache. Since he was on Law & Order at the time, it made perfect sense to see if he’d be in New York at the time.

I got on the phone with his publicist and mentioned my desire to speak with Farina. She asked me when I was going to be in Manhattan. I told her. She sighed and told me that Farina had wrapped on Law & Order for the holidays and was vacationing in Hawaii with his family. In other words, Farina was extremely unavailable. It happens.

I went to New York the next week and spent my time there doing other interviews and going to meetings with people. One of the meetings was with Palm Pictures. Palm’s office is near the Chelsea Piers, on 23rd Street, in a very old building that used to make railroad cars. It is the only building I’ve ever been in that has a truck loading dock on the 12th floor, but this is neither here nor there.

I was talking to several people at Palm when one of them mentioned to me that someone, possibly Palm themselves, had rented out the space next to the Palm offices to the TV show Law & Order. They were spending the day there filming. My contact at Palm then asked me if I’d be interested in going over and seeing what was going on. I said sure.

On the way to the Law & Order set, my contact informed me that Jesse L. Martin and Farina had been hanging out in the hallway during down time and were as nice as could be. I stepped onto the set and saw Farina in the distance filming a scene. My contact introduced me to Martin (who was as nice as could be), we stuck around for a few minutes–the entirety of which Farina spent shooting–and then left.

It’s one thing to be blown off by an actor who is trying to put something into pre-production, it’s another thing entirely to be told that an actor is vacationing in Hawaii and then run into him in the city on the set of a show that allegedly wrapped a week before.

Unfortunately, while Skolnick, Levenstein, Dynamite and Singer ended up with the girl, in these three cases, I have yet to land my interviews with any of these men after that first taste of cold, bitter rejection. Maybe one grand gesture would help me… Or maybe I should just get really good at tetherball.