Carmen Electra's
Guide to Reporting
"I appreciate the press more than ever now," CARMEN ELECTRA said to us at a party for Cartier's orchid jewelry collection the other night.
KIRSTEN DUNST, ROSARIO DAWSON and RACHEL WEISZ were there, but we were naturally drawn to Ms. Electra, who is now a reporter for the Style network.
It was interesting to hear her fresh perspective on this little game they call Celebrity Journalism. Even her offhand observations were loaded with wisdom, wisdom borne out by our own misadventures at cocktail parties and on red carpets.
So for those young struggling gossips, we present here some of Ms. Electra's keener observations, along with our own real-life examples.
"You feel uncomfortable going up to people that are just here to see the show. They want to be left alone. I feel like I'm bothering them."
Last week, we were standing next to MADELEINE ALBRIGHT at the Rainbow Room, at a dinner in honor of VIKTOR YUSHCHENKO. Drawing on the hours that we've spent flipping though Foreign Affairs, we casually observed that it seemed rather odd for Mr. Yushchenko to be here just a week or so after he dismissed his entire cabinet.
"I don't want to get into that," Ms. Albright replied curtly.
O.K. Um, so how do you think our president is doing lately?
"Our president? I don't talk about our president."
"You have to get your information right. Because they get irritated. I don't want to mention any names. But even if it's just a small thing or you're just a little bit wrong, they don't like it."
Can we point out that ALBERT MAYSLES and D. A. PENNEBAKER are both documentary filmmakers? Both of them! Mr. Maysles made an influential documentary about the ROLLING STONES, and Mr. Pennebaker made an influential documentary about BOB DYLAN.
Both documentaries are about music, we'd like to point out. So forgive us if, when we saw Mr. Pennebaker on Monday at the premiere of MARTIN SCORSESE's documentary, "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan," we had our filmmakers confused. And if we asked Mr. Pennebaker if he had ever met Mr. Dylan.
"Did I meet him?" he asked incredulously. "Pretty much yeah. I've met him off and on. Going to and from bathrooms we met a lot." He laughed. "I spent about a month with him. A couple of months."
"You have to be careful what you ask people."
So true, which is why we ask painfully convoluted questions that cover several different topics at once, in the hopes that some tiny bead of gossip sap might trickle down into our waiting reportorial pails.
For example, we were at the Ziegfeld for the screening of "Peace One Day," a documentary about one man's attempt to persuade the world to set aside one day of global ceasefire. ANGELINA JOLIE was our interview subject. And this was our question:
What does it feel like to have millions of people devoting time and energy to your relationship with BRAD PITT, while peace remains so difficult to convey?
"I'm not sure I understand the question," she said (entirely appropriately we might add). "But I think it depends on what you write tomorrow in the paper."
Uh oh.
"You have that privilege as the media to decide how you are going to tell the story and what you are going to excite people by. That's a choice you make. We have to just do what we think is the right thing to do, which is just come together, support the things we love to do, be artists, be friends, do good things and hope it doesn't get lost in the interpretation by the press."
See? That 58-page photo spread of Ms. Jolie and Mr. Pitt in W Magazine was misinterpreted by the press to be about their relationship, when it was actually about third world debt relief.
This is perhaps the most important rule of all: Be careful what you ask, or you may find out that everything is your fault.