Cruise's Effect on the Tabloid Life Cycle
Posted on June 23, 2005
Slate ruins everyone's fun by explaining the life cycle of a tabloid story, and why the TomKat phenomenon is really rocking the worlds of the celebrity scandal sheets.
The celebrity magazines sustain themselves on a limited and predictable set of story lines: Girl meets boy. They're keeping their affair quiet. They've gone public! Will the young couple wed? They're engaged! When and where will they get married? They're married! Wow, what a deluxe honeymoon! They want children, but can they get pregnant? She's pregnant! Is he cheating? It's a boy! It's twin boys! He's left her!Apparently the concept of "Internet Time" has now hit the celebrity magazines. The old life cycle was just too slow for our high-tech, high-speed lifestyle; we've now moved from first date to engagement and religious conversion within a matter of weeks. Who knew that Tom Cruise would be the man who changes the very way that celebrity news is reported?This recipe is flexible enough to allow both spoon-fed "facts" from publicists and original reporting by writers. As a result, a magazine may report in the same story that a star has hospitalized himself for "exhaustion," and that his anonymous friends say he's at the end of a coke binge. But such disparities have never thrown the genre into the editorial turmoil it's endured from the eight-week-old Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes affair. The blitzkrieg relationship of the A-list star and his C-list TV-star fianc�e, which peaked last Friday with a proposal of marriage atop the Eiffel Tower and a press conference afterward, has caused the celebrity magazine formula to warp and buckle.
The aggressiveness of the TomKat timetable completely violates the industry formula. If the magazines are going to invest pages in a star-on-star romance, they want the thing to unfold like two seasons of Desperate Housewives so they can string along their readers�and reap the longer-term economic benefits. After the first rumors of on-set canoodling, paparazzi shots of a disheveled lover leaving a romantic sleepover should appear. Then they should be photographed on vacation or walking their recently adopted pup before aerial shots of their jointly purchased love nest are published. Finally, the editorial interruptus also known as "wedding watch" begins. The buildup should usually last six months to a year or so before breaking into something big, like a distant-yet-opulent ceremony that's canceled once or twice. The magazines want a preview of the wedding dress and engagement ring, and they want the couple to sell the wedding pics and the honeymoon pics, to pose for at-home photos in the Xanadu they build in the Hollywood Hills, to share the marital troubles they overcome, and then finally, to feed their newborns to the publicity machine.