Word: agente
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis): "A press agent eats a columnist's dirt and is expected to call it manna.... A columnist can't do without us - except our good and great friend J.J. forgets to mention that. You see, we furnish him with items." J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster): "Yes, with your clients' names attached. That's the only reason the poor slobs pay you: to see their names in my column all over the world.... [Press agents also] dig up scandal about prominent people and shovel it thin among columnists who give them space." - dialogue from the film "Sweet Smell...
...Around Winchell buzzed a cordon of courtiers - the famous, the has-beens and wannabe's - and their representatives, the press agents, fighting to catch the columnist's attention and get an item (a joke, a movie deal, a simple "was glimpsed confabbing with...") in his daily mix of gossip. Like a duke's dresser in the court of the Sun King, a press agent sees his client at his worst and must present him at his best. The trick was to paint a heroic portrait, of a person with plenty to hide, and sell it to a columnist...
...like, the really cute one [and here J.J.s voice grows flintier], is the quick, dependable chap. Nothing he won't do for you in a pinch - so he says. Mr. Falco, whom I did not invite to sit at this table tonight, is a hungry press agent, and fully up to all the tricks of his very slimy trade. [He pulls out a cigarette and turns to his victim.] Match me, Sidney." Sidney: "Not right this minute, J.J." - from the film "Sweet Smell of Success...
...This was an inside job - a story that could have been written only by a press agent. In the early 40s, Lehman had ground out flackery for the noted press agent Irving Hoffman, who was close to Winchell. A-brim with fascination-repulsion for the Broadway milieu, Lehman wrote a long story about a columnist and a press agent. He sold it to Cosmopolitan. But before the issue hit the stands, Hoffman was leaked (what else?) the story and felt betrayed, not just for himself but what he saw as calumny toward the powerful columnist. To Lehman, the complaint must...
...cans and the Broadway columns in those newspapers and the lives that revolved around those columns. As I walked uptown, I kept seeing trash cans filled with people. And it didn't make me feel any better to know that I had filled more trash cans than any press agent in town." - from Ernest Lehman's story "Sweet Smell of Success...