A Swiftie glitch (?), KP’s PR lessons, the binge business of streaming, celebrities calling paps, a bit about trailers, and the logistics of Lainey's styling
People want Leo to be Jack Dawson in real life, and the more evidence that mounts that he is not that type of person, the more stubborn people get about wanting him to be that type of person.
Those two also seem like interesting people. Leo, in the wild, seems blah. A caricature of a throw away Sex in The City not even boyfriend. His acting is also plateauing. Tell a joke. You literally came from a sitcom.
OMG Sarah!!! Throw Mama from the Train!!! I don’t know why, but that movie was one of maybe 5 VHS tapes we had at my house for while before cable and I watched it so much when I was bored! I had totally forgotten about it.
Thank you Lainey and team for bringing some sanity to gossip. As a society I think we went from being naive about celebrity and how famous people handle being famous and promoting themselves to believing everything is a set up.
I don’t think TnT called paps on themselves in the Bahamas since there were multiple angles and very grainy long-lens photos. If you don’t know exactly where someone is, you’ll have multiple people cover various spots so that you’re guaranteed a shot. If you do know where someone is, you only need to send one photographer to get the guaranteed shot. Pap set ups are usually much more obvious.
And Leo has been so famous for so long that he doesn’t have a lot to gain but lord knows, paparazzi and freelance photographers have a lot to gain as they know Leo has his habits will absolutely give them something to cash in on.
As for the Royal Family, one thing we’d be remiss to leave out of the conversation is the role of bots and foreign intelligence social media campaigns designed to destabilize Western cornerstones. Yes the KP response was bad (up until Kate’s video) but without bots, I don’t know that it’d be quite as bad. A lot of very smart people are still trying to figure out how to combat foreign intelligence ops (see what happened with Hunter Biden and how the US press learned very little from Hillary Clinton) which prey on clickbait to sow division and spread misinformation online. We really should treat everyday like April Fool’s Day when it comes to being skeptical of what we read online but we don’t.
For those interested in a deep dive into misinformation campaigns and how sophisticated, and frankly unsettling, it’s become, I highly recommend the podcast ‘Who trolled Amber Heard’, by Tortoise media. It feels like the information everyone should know if they’re online. (As an fyi, the pod isn’t about the trial or its specifics, but focused on the online activity surrounding it).
I work in digital marketing, and last summer went to a presentation by one of my company’s YouTube contacts. It was a pretty wide ranging talk but he had a section on creative and specifically talked about movie trailers, and how YouTube has changed the trailer game. He played a trailer from Cars as example from the old style and then, I don’t remember what the new style example was. Some action movie, maybe a Fast and Furious. He talked about how the first 10 seconds are the ones that count the most and that’s why most trailers will open with a quick clip show before settling in. It was pretty interesting to listen to him.
I’ve sat through this presentation from YouTube. In my version they used the trailer from Harriet as an example. There are different ways to lure someone in during those first 5 seconds but mainly either a “mini-trailer” or a specific scene that is particularly arresting.
So while perhaps trailer editing is a more formulaic in the past, there’s still an art to it.
Great mailbag questions and answers! Loved the inside baseball about film trailers and Lainey’s styling.
I think movie trailers from the 80s/90s are particularly bad, especially the voice over ones that are terrible and/or hilarious depending on your view.
One film I always recommend to friends with a similar sense of humor is Outside Providence (written/created by the Dumb & Dumber team), but the trailer never convinces anyone to watch it. 🤣
Me too! It's an easy re-watch. I'm waiting for Mr. Napkin Head. I'm waiting for useless situationship to explode. It's mindless and even Cameron running back on a very long drive (where do these people live????) is fine.
"Ego and petty are cornerstones of celebrity gossip. Please respect the range!" I'd be surprised if Taylor Swift (#14) wasn't smug at the celeb country club about making billionaire's list from *only* her music. But there's two sides to the same petty ego coin, no? We don't talk about TS as multi-hyphenate, because unlike Rihanna (#9), she isn't one. (Much love and respect to my #1 multi-hyphenate JLo.)
I think she’s smug about getting there through “only” her music because, let’s be real, she could start selling cat food tomorrow and have another billion dollars this time next year.
Those varied colored vinyls and whatever else is a level of diversification and slight carpetbagger-esque. They are convinced something new will be on the different color. Are Easter eggs her other hustle?
Agreed. To counter my original position, isn't creating her own metaverse make her a multi-hyphenate?
Also, that Capital One commercial with her in every costume/ era ending with her getting a white wine at an airport lounge was brilliant marketing/ the appetizer to what the NFL did for her.
Oh, I’m not a fan of the different vinyls all with one song you can’t get anywhere else, don’t get me wrong. I think it is a pure greed move. But it seems to be normal with many record labels/artists now. Capitalism, baby!
Taylor isn't a triple threat multi-hyphenate (singer, dancer, actor) but I would say she is a multi-hyphenate in the sense that she's a business woman, singer/songwriter and director (you can rightfully debate her level of skill in directing but she has done some of it.)
I agree - she's representing a different kind of "triple threat"/ multi-hyphenate. Dolly Parton comes to mind as an example of that kind of business woman/ philanthropist/ TV producer/ singer songwriter/ actress.
Great insights Lainey, thank you. This papparazzi thing has been confusing me for a long time - keeping in mind with the blind items, and also when you know that ”if celeb doesn`t want to be seen usually he/she isn`t”. For example we rarely see Beyonce out and about. But then again there are perioids of overexposure ie JLo sightings, gigi/Coop, emrata and KarJenners all of the time. That let me thinking which of them (or celebs overall) use papparazzies to stay relevant.
The bigger picture would of course be ie BR feeding daily Mail and the Sun information they want people to know. For example today (Page six) that William and Kate have asked Harry ne Meghan to bring children with them to the next UK vitsit… So like Anna said from our point of view: every day is April fools day.
Is it me, or has the Backgrid myth emerged from TikTok Blind Item culture? I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it clarified that Backgrid is not a “pap on call” service but a photo agency (including by Backgrid themselves) but the perception seems enduring.
Once misinformation is out there it’s hard to undo.
I think there’s an element of poor media literacy at hand (Gen Z and Boomers are equally terrible; it’s a little better for Millennials and Gen X), but I also think celebs calling paps on themselves all the time is an alluring idea for fans. It’s easier to believe this idea because it relieves fans of any guilt for looking at (and in some cases capitalizing off of, since this is how some influencers make their money) invasive pics of celebs.
Re: Netflix and binging, I remember reading two articles – one from The Baby Sitters Club showrunner and one from an animator for a children’s show that they lured away from Disney – where they said Netflix pretty much evaluates shows the same way, regardless if it makes sense for the type of show or the audience. The Baby Sitters Club showrunner said her show was released the same time as Squid Game, so Netflix wanted to see it consumed the same as Squid Game - by binging. She told them BSC is not meant to be binged, it wouldn’t make sense for the target audience of pre-teens, but Netflix didn’t care. And the animator said that Netflix removes titles from browsing once a viewer completes it because they want you to consume other titles. Well anyone with kids knows that kids love to rewatch the same stuff repeatedly, and a pre-reading kid isn’t going to use the search function. I don’t know if Netflix still does this, but it seems very short-sighted. When I subscribed to Netflix, I could tell that they were trying to make me engage with it in a specific way, and that’s one of the reasons I was happy to cancel. I hate it when products try to force me to engage with it in a way that doesn’t feel natural to me.
I wish I could remember where I heard this piece of information, and I apologize if it was Laineygossip, but the craziest Netflix manipulation that I've heard is that they change the thumbnail pics of the movies based on your watching habits. So, as an example, if you are a heavy romance film/tv watcher, they will take the one scene grab of a film that looks romantic and put it as a thumbnail even though the film is horror or action/thriller. Completely insane to me that this legitimately works on people.
Lainey’s dress link is how I learned you can make satin out of polyester. Always thought satin was made from silk. Secondarily, does revolve sell anything that ISN’T 100% polyester, because I feel like I have yet to find an item made from anything else on there!
I have been thinking about Lainey's great hair and dress ALL WEEK! The hair was luscious. The dresses were divine. Shoes. THE SHOES! A good shoe is hard work. I really appreciate having it in the mail bag because I never remembered to go look on IG. Didn't want to forget to type this.
Regarding KP strategy, Graydon Carter's outlet restated what Lainey, Sarah and the collective in this chat have mentioned. Stubbornness, amateur clown show and lack of foresight. Also that their own local media helped with the conspiracies. BP was praised as getting it right. Sure. I think this is the same story with different flavors going forward so there's no solution. I would only be interested in work gossip about the team. Their former coworkers telling us about former projects to allow insight into how their plays are in the present. Why are posh people working at the Daily Mail? American news is full of private school friends. Is it the same? Britain seems so above it with their class setup that I just don't understand how a so called posh person is fine being at a tabloid. Maybe I've watched too much Downton Abbey.
Thinking of Star Wars trailers, the one for The Force Awakens was so cool at the time—the opening shot of the desert with the voice over, then John Boyega popping up to scare the shit out of us. I actually didn’t think that movie was horrible but as a series that trailer may have been its high point.
Same Kathleen. Leo gives me Supreme Ick now but I was definitely in the camp of “I can change him..no really I can” in my 20s. The amount of men I let walk all over me is…too many.
People want Leo to be Jack Dawson in real life, and the more evidence that mounts that he is not that type of person, the more stubborn people get about wanting him to be that type of person.
And of course since George Clooney and Warren Beatty eventually married, people look to those examples and think he might follow that path.
Those two also seem like interesting people. Leo, in the wild, seems blah. A caricature of a throw away Sex in The City not even boyfriend. His acting is also plateauing. Tell a joke. You literally came from a sitcom.
OMG Sarah!!! Throw Mama from the Train!!! I don’t know why, but that movie was one of maybe 5 VHS tapes we had at my house for while before cable and I watched it so much when I was bored! I had totally forgotten about it.
Thank you Lainey and team for bringing some sanity to gossip. As a society I think we went from being naive about celebrity and how famous people handle being famous and promoting themselves to believing everything is a set up.
I don’t think TnT called paps on themselves in the Bahamas since there were multiple angles and very grainy long-lens photos. If you don’t know exactly where someone is, you’ll have multiple people cover various spots so that you’re guaranteed a shot. If you do know where someone is, you only need to send one photographer to get the guaranteed shot. Pap set ups are usually much more obvious.
And Leo has been so famous for so long that he doesn’t have a lot to gain but lord knows, paparazzi and freelance photographers have a lot to gain as they know Leo has his habits will absolutely give them something to cash in on.
As for the Royal Family, one thing we’d be remiss to leave out of the conversation is the role of bots and foreign intelligence social media campaigns designed to destabilize Western cornerstones. Yes the KP response was bad (up until Kate’s video) but without bots, I don’t know that it’d be quite as bad. A lot of very smart people are still trying to figure out how to combat foreign intelligence ops (see what happened with Hunter Biden and how the US press learned very little from Hillary Clinton) which prey on clickbait to sow division and spread misinformation online. We really should treat everyday like April Fool’s Day when it comes to being skeptical of what we read online but we don’t.
For those interested in a deep dive into misinformation campaigns and how sophisticated, and frankly unsettling, it’s become, I highly recommend the podcast ‘Who trolled Amber Heard’, by Tortoise media. It feels like the information everyone should know if they’re online. (As an fyi, the pod isn’t about the trial or its specifics, but focused on the online activity surrounding it).
I work in digital marketing, and last summer went to a presentation by one of my company’s YouTube contacts. It was a pretty wide ranging talk but he had a section on creative and specifically talked about movie trailers, and how YouTube has changed the trailer game. He played a trailer from Cars as example from the old style and then, I don’t remember what the new style example was. Some action movie, maybe a Fast and Furious. He talked about how the first 10 seconds are the ones that count the most and that’s why most trailers will open with a quick clip show before settling in. It was pretty interesting to listen to him.
There is data that shows people are more likely to watch a trailer if there is one of those 5 seconds "trailer starts now" hits to open it.
I’ve sat through this presentation from YouTube. In my version they used the trailer from Harriet as an example. There are different ways to lure someone in during those first 5 seconds but mainly either a “mini-trailer” or a specific scene that is particularly arresting.
So while perhaps trailer editing is a more formulaic in the past, there’s still an art to it.
Great mailbag questions and answers! Loved the inside baseball about film trailers and Lainey’s styling.
I think movie trailers from the 80s/90s are particularly bad, especially the voice over ones that are terrible and/or hilarious depending on your view.
One film I always recommend to friends with a similar sense of humor is Outside Providence (written/created by the Dumb & Dumber team), but the trailer never convinces anyone to watch it. 🤣
https://youtu.be/EU5GIIic3Rk?si=DUsFJzkCHfXR4mtz
Someone recently recommended “Dan in Real Life,” as a solid holiday/romcom and will say their trailer is also very bad, but the movie IS very good!
I saw Outside Providence in the theatre! 👵🏻
It’s so good!! My friends and I still sign emails, “Cocked in Rhode Island,” and I think about Drugs Delaney’s letter at least once a week.
I wanna like this a million times. My friends and I say “You know more than one person named Drugs” to each other to this day!
Hahahhaha it’s such a quotable movie!!! I am so happy to have met another fan of Outside Providence here! Might need to watch it later. 📯💨
I never loved The Holiday, and cannot recall…
Me too! It's an easy re-watch. I'm waiting for Mr. Napkin Head. I'm waiting for useless situationship to explode. It's mindless and even Cameron running back on a very long drive (where do these people live????) is fine.
😬😬😬
"Ego and petty are cornerstones of celebrity gossip. Please respect the range!" I'd be surprised if Taylor Swift (#14) wasn't smug at the celeb country club about making billionaire's list from *only* her music. But there's two sides to the same petty ego coin, no? We don't talk about TS as multi-hyphenate, because unlike Rihanna (#9), she isn't one. (Much love and respect to my #1 multi-hyphenate JLo.)
I think she’s smug about getting there through “only” her music because, let’s be real, she could start selling cat food tomorrow and have another billion dollars this time next year.
Those varied colored vinyls and whatever else is a level of diversification and slight carpetbagger-esque. They are convinced something new will be on the different color. Are Easter eggs her other hustle?
Agreed. To counter my original position, isn't creating her own metaverse make her a multi-hyphenate?
Also, that Capital One commercial with her in every costume/ era ending with her getting a white wine at an airport lounge was brilliant marketing/ the appetizer to what the NFL did for her.
Oh, I’m not a fan of the different vinyls all with one song you can’t get anywhere else, don’t get me wrong. I think it is a pure greed move. But it seems to be normal with many record labels/artists now. Capitalism, baby!
Taylor isn't a triple threat multi-hyphenate (singer, dancer, actor) but I would say she is a multi-hyphenate in the sense that she's a business woman, singer/songwriter and director (you can rightfully debate her level of skill in directing but she has done some of it.)
I agree - she's representing a different kind of "triple threat"/ multi-hyphenate. Dolly Parton comes to mind as an example of that kind of business woman/ philanthropist/ TV producer/ singer songwriter/ actress.
Great insights Lainey, thank you. This papparazzi thing has been confusing me for a long time - keeping in mind with the blind items, and also when you know that ”if celeb doesn`t want to be seen usually he/she isn`t”. For example we rarely see Beyonce out and about. But then again there are perioids of overexposure ie JLo sightings, gigi/Coop, emrata and KarJenners all of the time. That let me thinking which of them (or celebs overall) use papparazzies to stay relevant.
The bigger picture would of course be ie BR feeding daily Mail and the Sun information they want people to know. For example today (Page six) that William and Kate have asked Harry ne Meghan to bring children with them to the next UK vitsit… So like Anna said from our point of view: every day is April fools day.
Is it me, or has the Backgrid myth emerged from TikTok Blind Item culture? I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it clarified that Backgrid is not a “pap on call” service but a photo agency (including by Backgrid themselves) but the perception seems enduring.
Once misinformation is out there it’s hard to undo.
I think there’s an element of poor media literacy at hand (Gen Z and Boomers are equally terrible; it’s a little better for Millennials and Gen X), but I also think celebs calling paps on themselves all the time is an alluring idea for fans. It’s easier to believe this idea because it relieves fans of any guilt for looking at (and in some cases capitalizing off of, since this is how some influencers make their money) invasive pics of celebs.
Re: Netflix and binging, I remember reading two articles – one from The Baby Sitters Club showrunner and one from an animator for a children’s show that they lured away from Disney – where they said Netflix pretty much evaluates shows the same way, regardless if it makes sense for the type of show or the audience. The Baby Sitters Club showrunner said her show was released the same time as Squid Game, so Netflix wanted to see it consumed the same as Squid Game - by binging. She told them BSC is not meant to be binged, it wouldn’t make sense for the target audience of pre-teens, but Netflix didn’t care. And the animator said that Netflix removes titles from browsing once a viewer completes it because they want you to consume other titles. Well anyone with kids knows that kids love to rewatch the same stuff repeatedly, and a pre-reading kid isn’t going to use the search function. I don’t know if Netflix still does this, but it seems very short-sighted. When I subscribed to Netflix, I could tell that they were trying to make me engage with it in a specific way, and that’s one of the reasons I was happy to cancel. I hate it when products try to force me to engage with it in a way that doesn’t feel natural to me.
I wish I could remember where I heard this piece of information, and I apologize if it was Laineygossip, but the craziest Netflix manipulation that I've heard is that they change the thumbnail pics of the movies based on your watching habits. So, as an example, if you are a heavy romance film/tv watcher, they will take the one scene grab of a film that looks romantic and put it as a thumbnail even though the film is horror or action/thriller. Completely insane to me that this legitimately works on people.
Wow, that explains a lot, lol. Sometimes I would see a thumbnail pic that makes no sense for the title.
Lainey’s dress link is how I learned you can make satin out of polyester. Always thought satin was made from silk. Secondarily, does revolve sell anything that ISN’T 100% polyester, because I feel like I have yet to find an item made from anything else on there!
Best trailer for a movie that totally lived up to the hype: Logan. Perfect music, perfect dialogue, absolutely set the tone for what that movie was.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Div0iP65aZo
I have been thinking about Lainey's great hair and dress ALL WEEK! The hair was luscious. The dresses were divine. Shoes. THE SHOES! A good shoe is hard work. I really appreciate having it in the mail bag because I never remembered to go look on IG. Didn't want to forget to type this.
Regarding KP strategy, Graydon Carter's outlet restated what Lainey, Sarah and the collective in this chat have mentioned. Stubbornness, amateur clown show and lack of foresight. Also that their own local media helped with the conspiracies. BP was praised as getting it right. Sure. I think this is the same story with different flavors going forward so there's no solution. I would only be interested in work gossip about the team. Their former coworkers telling us about former projects to allow insight into how their plays are in the present. Why are posh people working at the Daily Mail? American news is full of private school friends. Is it the same? Britain seems so above it with their class setup that I just don't understand how a so called posh person is fine being at a tabloid. Maybe I've watched too much Downton Abbey.
Thinking of Star Wars trailers, the one for The Force Awakens was so cool at the time—the opening shot of the desert with the voice over, then John Boyega popping up to scare the shit out of us. I actually didn’t think that movie was horrible but as a series that trailer may have been its high point.
I also loved this way of thinking about the Leo’s and Clooney’s of the world, and have never thought about it that way.
I have dated MANY a fuck boi in my 20s/30s so, I can relate to thinking this way. Cringe.
Same Kathleen. Leo gives me Supreme Ick now but I was definitely in the camp of “I can change him..no really I can” in my 20s. The amount of men I let walk all over me is…too many.