We apologize for revisiting the Holmes-Cruise debacle again, but this piece gives a good glimpse of the "reality" of Hollywood. Link. Excerpt:
In Hollywood, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who believes the romance with Katie Holmes is anything but a sham designed to generate publicity for both of them (her summer blockbuster, Batman Begins, having just been released in the US a few weeks ahead of War of the Worlds.) The industry scuttlebutt on last Friday's impromptu engagement is that it was merely Cruise and Holmes' way of making an excessively sceptical world believe they really, really are in love. Who, after all, gets engaged on the spur of the moment and calls a press conference a mere two hours later to announce the news?
It is, of course, possible that everything Cruise and co have been telling us is genuine, and all the rest no more than the warped product of cynical, hostile minds. But the scepticism has never been far from the surface, ever since Cruise and Holmes announced they were an item in April. And it blossomed into expressions of open disbelief and derision after Cruise's now-notorious appearance on Oprah Winfrey's chat show in May, in which he jumped up on the furniture, punched his fists in the air and declared his undying love for his new girlfriend. The whole thing looked like an amateur-hour audition in which an uncertain and inexperienced performer is plainly unaware of the degree to which he is over-acting.
To the studio executives and private consultants who make their living crafting celebrity images, all the better to lure bottoms on to cinema seats, the problem was not that Cruise might be trying to posit the existence of a love affair that was really no more than a business arrangement (something he and his handlers have repeatedly, and vehemently, denied.) The problem was that by making the case so unconvincingly he risked ripping down the entire curtain concealing Hollywood's frequently shameless publicity-making machinery.
"You can easily imagine how the deal was set up," one publicity executive at a major studio said. "She is told she will be turned into a major star in the next five years. In exchange, she is expected to play the perfect partner and do the other things he asks, like convert to Scientology. Perhaps they will get married. Perhaps they'll even adopt a kid ...
"The entertainment press will go along with it because they don't have a choice. Nobody will ask any questions they are not supposed to ask, because they know that would be the immediate end of their access to Tom Cruise, or any other Hollywood celebrity. Everyone has to make a living, to pay the mortgage and feed their children."
