Guest-blogger John August survives Press Day

This post is the fourth in our continuing series from John August, a screenwriter whose directorial debut, The Nines, (starring Ryan Reynolds, left) is teaching him all about how much fun it can be to helm a big fancy movie. Today, John explores the magical world of junkets.

In my continuing effort to destroy any illusion of glamour or authenticity in the business of promoting a movie, let me explain to you how Press Day works.

A press day — also known as a press junket — is when you gather together a group of entertainment journalists to interview the stars and filmmakers behind a movie. Generally, you do this at a hotel in Los Angeles or New York, but occasionally you'll fly everyone to somewhere exotic. For Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we held our press day in the Bahamas. True, you wouldn't normally associate Dahl's snowy tale of confectionary salvation with a Caribbean resort, but Johnny Depp was busy shooting Pirates, and stars trump everything.

After the jump, the word "hackery" is put into play...

For The Nines, we held our press day at The Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. The morning consisted of television interviews, while the afternoon featured roundtables for radio, print, and Second Life journalists.

If you've watched entertainment TV shows like Entertainment Tonight or Access Hollywood, you might have noticed that the stars always seem to be sitting in front of the same backdrop, with a strategically placed poster on a stand behind them. Did you ever wonder why?

Efficiency.

For a television interview, you need a camera, lights, microphones. It's a lot of expensive equipment, and if every program brought their own, it would be a logistical nightmare. So instead, the organizers of a junket provide the video crew, the lights...everything. The only thing the TV show has to provide is a journalist. She comes in, sits down, and asks questions for five minutes. When she's done, the video crew hands her a tape of the interview, and she leaves. Then the next journalist sits down.

This innovation allows publicists to crank out 12 interviews in an hour. The problem is, as an actor or filmmaker, you're doing 12, 18 or 24 interviews back-to-back, with no break at all. It's efficient, but it's a grind.

For The Nines, I did all 20 of my interviews sitting next to Melissa McCarthy [Gilmore Girls], who is getting well-deserved acclaim for her performance in the movie. After a while, it became a game: How will John rearrange the phrase, "To me, the movie is really about, 'What is a creator's responsibility to his creations?'" Asked for the 15th time which of the three characters she plays was the most fun, Melissa started randomly switching her answers.

Deep into the second hour, Melissa and I decided to be furious at each other, just for the hell of it. Later, an impossibly perky journalist explained that her channel allows swearing, so not to censor ourselves. That led to possibly the filthiest five minutes I've ever put on tape.

Here was the worst question of the day: "Have you ever seen a ghost?"

I was too polite to call this lazy reporter on her hackery. She clearly had not seen the movie, or read the production notes, and was sitting down for this interview after only seeing the trailer. She'd mistakenly thought it was a haunted house movie. It's not.

I answered the irrelevant question as earnestly as I could, knowing that in four minutes and 12 seconds, another reporter would be sitting in her place, ready to receive my latest rephrasing of "Creator, responsibilities, creation."

Press Day is a sham, but of the most benign sort. It's like the Hollywood version of a Japanese tea ceremony: a polite ritual with well-defined rules, which keeps the social machinery running. Ryan describes the process of doing junket interviews as a kind of fugue state. You go on automatic pilot, listening to yourself answer the questions, while inside you're reconsidering what you ordered for lunch. (Ryan had the salmon. Melissa and I had the Asian chicken salad.) So the next time you see a clip featuring an actor in front of the poster for his movie, remember that he's answered that exact question 19 times before. He's been in that chair, under those lights, for at least an hour. So forgive him if he sounds a little less than spontaneous.