That fame, and the pursuit thereof, is hurtful to the soul is the unexceptional if, I suppose, ever invaluable message of Starsuckers, the Chris Atkins documentary given genuine ballast by the details it selects with which to argue its case. Though overlong for what it is, and often veering off on tangents worthy of separate movies in themselves, it makes you laugh and wince in equal measure. Anonymity has rarely seemed a healthier place to be.
Still, if Atkins's terrain isn't exactly new, there nonetheless remains ammunition aplenty to fuel not just this particular film but, one imagines, countless others. The story of little Rudy, a six-year-old from Nevada consciously being groomed for stardom by his actually rather sweet-seeming parents, is as old as the hills: Stephen Sondheim and Jule Styne wrote a stage musical about it called Gypsy. On the other hand, that 1959 Broadway landmark never ventured as far as "baby boozers", a sequence captured on film by Atkins whereby American kids are asked to feign drunkenness in pursuit of the odd buck. One wonders how long it will be before those same pre-pubescents are knocking back the real thing.
Starsuckers is particularly strong on the collusion between the worlds of media and PR in an age of information overload coupled with dwindling journalistic resources. (The solution: take a press release and merely reprint it in full, adding someone's byline.) It's not just because I worked one summer during university as that uniquely American phenomenon, a magazine fact-checker, that I paid particular note to Atkins's chronicling of the complete irrelevance of facts to the task at hand - namely, selling papers. That, too, won't surprise those of us who recall David Hare and Howard Brenton's 1980s smash, Pravda
. More startling is footage of an English PR, Neon Management's Dave Read, who is seen assaulting an especially buxom client in order to generate headlines, his chosen "weapon" a half-dozen eggs.The public has long been asked to provide showbiz pages with more and more copy in the absence of paid employees, which makes for a remarkable sequence in which various papers are seen responding cold to phone calls from Atkins and his team reporting this or that falsehood, inevitably involving Sarah Harding, Amy Winehouse and the like. The sobriety of various editors' official bleatings about the Press Complaints Commission is tellingly contrasted with the deeply casual approach taken by their underlings to verifying - hah! - scoops with one or another stranger over drinks. All on expenses, one assumes.
Not all Atkins's anger carries equal weight, and one tends to be rather more galvanised by his account of the failure of much of the Live Aid money to reach its intended Third World recipients than by a made-up tale of "flamey Amy", with reference to an entirely fictitious mishap involving you know who's flowing hair.
As always with such things, narratives are begun that are then left dangling. So where is Kev "the pap" (the film's phrase, not mine) now, and what does he do for fun when not trawling Soho's Dean Street through the night? As for that pint-sized Vegas wannabe Rudy, one wonders how he'll look back on a childhood spent trying to imitate LL Cool J at his parents' behest.
Most tantalising of all is extended footage of Max Clifford in which numerous key names are bleeped out from the discussion, as are relevant financial figures, all presumably to keep the libel lawyers at bay. Starsuckers is a smart account of the deadening pursuit of dreamed-of glory that leaves us wondering how much else Atkins knows that the very system he is criticising won't let him tell.
- Watch Starsuckers on 4oD
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