Oh, the joys of being a Hollywood publicist. You think your life is going to be a glamorous mixture of palling around with A-listers, partying at Cannes, imbibing designer drugs, and enjoying the company of high-class escorts. Instead most of your time is spent quashing rumors that your clients are on the brink of divorce, or doing damage control after they get huffy and walk out on journalists, or denying accusations that they are in rehab. “______ asks for privacy and understanding during this painful time” is a sentence you’ve written so many times you can type it with your eyes closed.
Well, at least the publicity hounds for Fox’s The Revenant are getting a workout. First they worked overtime to convince people that the film will be ready to open on Christmas Day, even though the production was “a living hell” that went way, way past its schedule. Then they felt compelled to include the dictionary definition of the movie’s title on the poster. And today somebody at Fox was forced to write the words “there is clearly no rape scene with a bear.” Following an unfounded rumor that popped up on Drudge Report that the film includes “a shocking scene of a wild bear raping Leo DiCaprio!”, Fox publicists released a statement that the bear-on-man action in the movie is entirely consensual … hang on, let me check that … sorry, Fox publicists released a statement denying the rumor: DiCaprio’s character is mauled by a bear, nothing more.
