These days, Hollywood public relations is all about the elections.
These days, Hollywood public relations is all about the
elections.
Candidates for the presidency are venturing to the West Coast to garner
support and money from its high-profile constituents. At the same time,
Hollywood bigwigs often busy themselves with candidacies - or even toy
with running, in the case of Warren Beatty - for the myriad power lists
that appear in magazines such as Entertainment Weekly’s ’Power Issue’
and industry publications.
This, alas, is why the recent rash of Beltway-to-Dream-Factory
migrations shouldn’t be especially surprising to anyone. For Columbia
Pictures’ Barbara Dixon and 20th Century Fox’s Florence Grace, two of a
handful of PR pros who have made the move West, this season of platforms
and power lists highlights the differences between their past and
current careers.
Dixon, who worked for 13 years as a lobbyist for the Motion Picture
Association of America before joining Sony last year as SVP of
publicity, says that the most difficult part of leaving DC was that
after 20 years, the people she had worked with were in positions of
power and influence. ’These are people who are making policy decisions
that affect normal people, and I miss them,’ she says. On the other
hand, she adds that, ’In DC, you don’t get to interact with these very
creative, outside-the-box people like you do in Hollywood.’
Asked if they miss the weight given issues rather than individual egos,
both Dixon and Grace maintain a politically correct stance. ’The two
cities are alike because they are one-company towns,’ says Grace, a
Reagan White House veteran and current VP of corporate communications
for Fox. ’People here are more creative and are just trying to make
movies. Back there, they’re really trying to change the world.’
Pointing out similarities between the two PR climates, Grace says that
’as corporate people, our work tends to be more news-driven. We have to
react immediately, on deadlines, which goes back to everything we dealt
with at the White House.’
While Dixon says that the press is similar on both coasts, ’Out there
(DC), the press is about covering different issues, the big-picture
stuff like where are we on healthcare. The term ’publicist’ doesn’t
exist in Washington. You’re not publicizing someone or something - it’s
about communicating a message or an issue.’
Grace concedes, however, that Washington tends to have a better
understanding of how the press operates: ’They don’t have any illusions
that you can get a reporter to hold a story just because you don’t want
it to run.’ Clearly, a lesson that needs to be learned.
