It occurred to me quite early during press junket for Never Back Down that I'd be a very poor rich person. What I mean by that self-negating comment is that I'm horrible at being served. Examples: Ashtrays whisked to me before I've lit a cigarette, tons of free food and drink, plates taken away, valet parking wherein the valet shuts my car door for me, free food, free shit (t-shirts, key-chains, etc.) I can't embrace this leisure class lifestyle even for a day. I drain a coke can to use as an ashtray and shut my own busted car door while the valet stands there looking useless. See? No good at being served. Which is an unfortunate quality to have, because junkets are in essence all about serving the press in order to guarantee a wholly positive fluffity-puffity piece. Free advertising, basically, and I'm always happy to provide it. Even if some of the elements of junket life make me squirm in my service job skin.
Junkets are always held at fancy hotels. I feel like Britney Spears, dropping into the Four Seasons one week, the Beverly Wilshire the next. Parking is always taken care of at these places, an important feature as ritzy areas like Beverly Hills permit off all their side streets to keep out unwanted cars like my own. The press junket for Never Back Downwas scheduled for the tail end of February; still sweater weather. On my way up to the seventh floor, I could feel like Joan Didion happily lunching in a hotel on a grey afternoon in the tail end of February, except that Didion derived pleasure from lunching in solitary bliss. Junkets are never solitary. On the contrary, junkets are like being characters in a game of Clue (Hotel Edition) with assigned monitors shuffling you around from room to room. First you sign in down the hall, then you walk one room over to eat, and then you get assigned to a room for the interview with a few other journalists. We are plied with coffee and tea, left to wait for the actors to show up. Junkets rarely if ever start on time. You meet people in passing. You see other people you wish you hadn't seen again. Everyone moans about wanting to leave by four o'clock. Then the actors show up.
Interviewing actors is usually the most pedestrian thing in the world. It's not that they are universally dumb; the biggest surprise is that they are not. Though they all basically say the same thing, praise each other an inordinate amount, and talk about the pre-conceived "message" of the film, the actors have it worse than the journalists do in junket duties. While we sit in one room with our recorders, they run from group to group, answering the same questions over and over. So it's not wonder they all sound like parrots after a while. The most un-parrot like of the Never Back Down bunch was Amber Heard, a pin thin Texas gal with powdered white skin and upswept blonde hair. She's dressed like she's going to the ballet, an image that belies the fact that she's been up all night working on The Stepfather, a remake of 1987's Terry Quinn film. Heard is also basically a feminist, though she never calls herself as such – it's a dirty word these days. Discussing her character as a "mirror to society" and talking about her early interest in women's studies, one gets the feeling she would make a great grad student some day.
Sean Faris, the lead actor in Never Back Down, is also Texan but had a different vibe altogether. Much less brooding than his character in the film is, Faris once tricked his neighbors into believing he was Tom Cruise's son. It's believable. He tells us about his recent European trip, which he treated himself too during the writer's strike, naming Amsterdam and Prague as personal favorites. This would be an interesting line of question to follow, but we must talk about the movie. One of the most jarring aspects of junkets is how these types of funny, personal stories come up during interviews, but because these details are irrelevant to the task at hand (free press, remember) they rarely make it into interviews. When I asked him how it felt to play a high school student for the film he exclaims, "All I ever play is high school students, I can't wait to graduate and go to college!" Look for Faris in the upcoming "guerilla journalism" film Glass Eye.
Finally we got to the biggest movie star on the menu this afternoon: Djimon Hounsou. Almost right off the bat he is asked how to pronounce his name. A lesser man with a non-Anglo name might have taken offense, but the soft spoken and casual Hounsou remarks that his name is pronounced differently everywhere, and it ultimately doesn't matter. How Zen. The actor is very tall but not as intimidating as he comes off in movies. His near-menacing screen presence is not really an accident: Hounsou admits that he has a penchant for "heavy" movies and part of doing Never Back Down was to participate in something a bit lighter (though not much). On a political note, Hounsou says that the election of Barack Obama would be a great symbol of change to the rest of the world. It’s then the aforementioned Tim Curry-like monitors come in to announce that the clock has expired, and we’re all welcome to leave now, taking our t-shirts and key-chains with us. Game over.
Food, free stuff, free parking, and 20 minutes with a movie star: the hallmarks of the press junket. Is it exciting? Yes. But it is not as exciting as getting home to realize that your tape recorder has not recorded 85% of the interviews conducted during the junket. Coming up with something to write about using only some hastily scribbled notes and your caffeine addled brain? Now that's exciting.
