I would appreciate advice on contacting the publicists of famous athletes, musicians and actors.
P.S. I am not a freak.
You can sign up for “pro” access at imdb.com, which will give you access to a large database of contact information.
-lv
A) affiliate yourself with a reputable organization (one a celebrity would wish to deal with, such as a newspaper or magazine)
B) make some phone calls.
If you have not first done A, I guarantee B will yield no results.
Be this guy.
I found a free site: http://www.whorepresents.com (pronounced “who represents dot com”). I haven’t had a chance to test the quality of the information.
I’ve signed up for the two-week trial period, but I’m a little disappointed that some of the contacts are just links to the artists’ Web sites. I don’t want to get lost amid e-mail requests for autographed photos.
A. Check.
B. I was hoping not to call people up at random and ask, “Do you have any celebrities in the house?”
In the future, everyone will be a talk-show host for 15 minutes.
TW - I am not sure there are any easy answers, bookers with fat filofaxes crammed with contacts are always in demand in the media, so it can obviously be done.
I guess you beg, borrow and steal a lot of contacts from friends and colleagues. If you are associated with an established media organisation, they should have a good contacts database of their own of celebrity agents and managers. Do lots of faxing (use letterhead) and follow up calling (“phone bashing”). It will certainly be a long and often frustrating process.
Some celebrities demand appearance fees, depending on what sort of appearance is requested for them. Chatshow bookers in the UK have a good list of B- and C-grade slebs they can get at a moments notice for a couple of grand.
Alternatively, if you only need them for print interviews, you can often just fax or email a list of questions. Again, faxing using letterhead is always a bit more solid, then follow up with emails and phone calls - they may find it easier to email you back, but hard copy in the first place is more official.
Getting in touch with the appropriate agents can be done as suggested above, even finding official (and hi-end fan) sites via Google will sometimes yield the agent information that you need.
Remember that these people are used to getting endless requests, so they won’t think it odd - it won’t be like cold calling. On the other hand, because they get endless requests, they may be picky or inclined to brush off requests from unknown quantities, etc.