A weekend with Maynard Nottage

The frenetic 48 hours at the end of last week turned into a furiously busy weekend, coping with the response to the Times’ article suggesting that Maynard Nottage was a hoax.
 
I have been fielding calls from producers interested in buying the rights to the Nottage story (there’s at least one director interested in the project, who has an A List star in mind to play the part of Nottage); answering emails of support from a great many people, including Victor Lewis Smith, Piers Morgan and Steve Jaffe; writing a letter of response to the Times (click here to read it) and communicating with Nottage’s surviving family, who have hired PR council in the USA in response to the Times article and will be releasing a statement in the next few days.
 
It’ll be interesting to see where all this goes next. I find it fascinating that people, living in the age of the internet where the ability to access information instantaneously is taken for granted, apply the same logic to the past. Records do not always survive, especially from times of great upheaval. Added to that, one of the main things The Fame Formula documents is the way Hollywood has tried to suppress its ugly side. And Nottage’s excesses are certainly the kind of ugliness that Hollywood would try to suppress.
 
As I mentioned last week on this blog, Harry Reichenbach, who was the most successful publicist of his time, barely merited a mention until a decade or so ago. And take the mysteries surrounding the death of William Desmond Taylor and George ‘Superman’ Reeves, for example, which have never been satisfactorily explained. These were big names in the Hollywood firmament; that a wayward publicist could be eradicated from the official annals of movie history should therefore not be a surprise, given how little publicists were held in regard in the early days of Hollywood and how, even then, they tended not to raise their heads above the parapets of their press releases.