Making Dear Me
By Joseph Galliano - January 13, 2012
“Easy,” I thought, in December 2009, when I
set out on the task of compiling the new edition of Dear Me, A Letter
To My Sixteen Year Old Self. I had an agreement from JK Rowling to write
the foreword and a letter to her 16 year old self in my pocket – her
very kind friend, the comedian Peter Kay, acted as a go-between for me
(he had contributed to the first edition).
We had ambitions to take it to America, and a track record with a hit book based on the same idea that had featured a holy host of high profile UK contributors such as Elton John, Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross behind us.
“I’ll get this done by April and then have a holiday.” Two years later and I still haven’t had that holiday.
Penetrating the Hollywood Hills was a task for which I was utterly unprepared –in comparison to the UK’s publicity industry, which now seems homely and accessible to me, it’s a labyrinthine powerhouse where everyone is trying to make a deal and the gatekeepers have gatekeepers. Movie stars are, weight for weight, the most valuable properties on the planet, and as such, they are guarded fiercely. I realise now that because of the sheer volume of requests thrown at them, that they must be.
My request to a movie star to be involved in my charity project (we’re giving a donation to Doctors Without Borders for every copy sold) will have been one of perhaps 40 or 50 received on any day.
I made late night calls across the Atlantic from my crackly Skype phone only to be told over again: “Can you put that in an email and someone will get back to you.” There must have been something wrong with my server: Seemingly no-one was receiving them. I certainly wasn’t getting any replies.
It seemed that the only thing to do, if I wanted to succeed with getting an edition with largely high-profile American contributors onboard, was to simply get on a plane and go to the States.
I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew I had to be in the US if I was going to make this work. I literally made the decision and three days later was on a plane to America, holding an open-ended ticket. A dear friend who is an independent film producer set me up a couple of meetings with publicists he knew – which then made it a little easier to set up other meetings.
To start with the meetings went something like this:
“It’s a great idea and I just love the first book. Who else is doing it?”
“Well… we’ve got JK Rowling writing the foreword and….”
“And your other contributors…?”
Well, somebody has to go first, but until someone did, however enthusiastic people sounded, I was stuck chasing my tail. The first breakthrough came with a yes from Robot Chicken creator and Family Guy voice-er Seth Green, followed quickly by John Waters, former child star Chad Allen and Spiderman co-creator Stan Lee and then Hugh Jackman.
But where I had expected a flood of contributors, came a trickle, which slowly turned into a small stream until finally, like any good award speech, finally a gush. But boy the ball took a long time to get rolling. The book took more than a year longer than I thought it would to finish.
But what a journey: I had the privilege of seeing the Hollywood machine close up. I saw one publicist rant and rave, banging her fists on the table at me about how “cute it was I’d got on the boat and come over, but that this was ******* Hollywood and I should just go home. When I asked her why she had taken the meeting if she felt this way. She answered with a twinkle in her eye “because I’m ******* polite!” But then I saw another pacing up and down in his office exclaiming: “I became a publicist to do projects like this.”
I also learned that sometimes it’s the biggest stars who, once you’ve managed to get through that gate, are actually the easiest to work with – Hugh Jackman delivered his letter within about three days of signing up to the project and his team have remained helpful, encouraging, undemanding and engaged ever since.
I also found myself in New York with my accommodation fallen through, stranded by the volcanic ash cloud that swept across Europe, and was taken in by drag queens.
Working as a one man band and trying to figure out how to engage a world that I didn’t understand, was sometimes lonely and scary – and at other times exhillararting or just surreal, mostly conducted from my small appartment in South London. It’s led to me sharing tea and sympathy with The Duchess of York (I bought some new shoes, which I now call my Duchesses, for the meeting), pinging emails back and forth with the magnificent Kathleen Turner and James Woods and hanging out with my teenage hero Frank Zappa’s lovely children Moon and Diva.
It’s also been heartening and I’ve had some contributors help reach out to their friends on my behalf and a few I would now consider as friends. I’ve also extended my professional network by several hundred fantastic names but best of all I have a beautifully produced book crammed full of actors, movies stars, writers and other sundry celebrities who have poured their hearts out onto the page at my behest and given us beautiful photographs of themselves as teenagers – almost all previously unseen.
I wouldn’t have missed a single day.
We had ambitions to take it to America, and a track record with a hit book based on the same idea that had featured a holy host of high profile UK contributors such as Elton John, Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross behind us.
“I’ll get this done by April and then have a holiday.” Two years later and I still haven’t had that holiday.
Penetrating the Hollywood Hills was a task for which I was utterly unprepared –in comparison to the UK’s publicity industry, which now seems homely and accessible to me, it’s a labyrinthine powerhouse where everyone is trying to make a deal and the gatekeepers have gatekeepers. Movie stars are, weight for weight, the most valuable properties on the planet, and as such, they are guarded fiercely. I realise now that because of the sheer volume of requests thrown at them, that they must be.
My request to a movie star to be involved in my charity project (we’re giving a donation to Doctors Without Borders for every copy sold) will have been one of perhaps 40 or 50 received on any day.
I made late night calls across the Atlantic from my crackly Skype phone only to be told over again: “Can you put that in an email and someone will get back to you.” There must have been something wrong with my server: Seemingly no-one was receiving them. I certainly wasn’t getting any replies.
It seemed that the only thing to do, if I wanted to succeed with getting an edition with largely high-profile American contributors onboard, was to simply get on a plane and go to the States.
I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew I had to be in the US if I was going to make this work. I literally made the decision and three days later was on a plane to America, holding an open-ended ticket. A dear friend who is an independent film producer set me up a couple of meetings with publicists he knew – which then made it a little easier to set up other meetings.
To start with the meetings went something like this:
“It’s a great idea and I just love the first book. Who else is doing it?”
“Well… we’ve got JK Rowling writing the foreword and….”
“And your other contributors…?”
Well, somebody has to go first, but until someone did, however enthusiastic people sounded, I was stuck chasing my tail. The first breakthrough came with a yes from Robot Chicken creator and Family Guy voice-er Seth Green, followed quickly by John Waters, former child star Chad Allen and Spiderman co-creator Stan Lee and then Hugh Jackman.
But where I had expected a flood of contributors, came a trickle, which slowly turned into a small stream until finally, like any good award speech, finally a gush. But boy the ball took a long time to get rolling. The book took more than a year longer than I thought it would to finish.
But what a journey: I had the privilege of seeing the Hollywood machine close up. I saw one publicist rant and rave, banging her fists on the table at me about how “cute it was I’d got on the boat and come over, but that this was ******* Hollywood and I should just go home. When I asked her why she had taken the meeting if she felt this way. She answered with a twinkle in her eye “because I’m ******* polite!” But then I saw another pacing up and down in his office exclaiming: “I became a publicist to do projects like this.”
I also learned that sometimes it’s the biggest stars who, once you’ve managed to get through that gate, are actually the easiest to work with – Hugh Jackman delivered his letter within about three days of signing up to the project and his team have remained helpful, encouraging, undemanding and engaged ever since.
I also found myself in New York with my accommodation fallen through, stranded by the volcanic ash cloud that swept across Europe, and was taken in by drag queens.
Working as a one man band and trying to figure out how to engage a world that I didn’t understand, was sometimes lonely and scary – and at other times exhillararting or just surreal, mostly conducted from my small appartment in South London. It’s led to me sharing tea and sympathy with The Duchess of York (I bought some new shoes, which I now call my Duchesses, for the meeting), pinging emails back and forth with the magnificent Kathleen Turner and James Woods and hanging out with my teenage hero Frank Zappa’s lovely children Moon and Diva.
It’s also been heartening and I’ve had some contributors help reach out to their friends on my behalf and a few I would now consider as friends. I’ve also extended my professional network by several hundred fantastic names but best of all I have a beautifully produced book crammed full of actors, movies stars, writers and other sundry celebrities who have poured their hearts out onto the page at my behest and given us beautiful photographs of themselves as teenagers – almost all previously unseen.
I wouldn’t have missed a single day.
