Press Tours

One of the odder things about my last job was taking part in press tours. You know those features you read in the newspaper — like, say, this one, where I talked to Jason Reitman about his new film Up in the Air –in which a director/actor/writer/producer/whoever give their spiel about their film? Those come about during press tours: The talent is whisked from city to city to meet for 15 minutes with a slew of reporters, all of whom ask the same questions, all of whom are desperately earnest even if they’re entirely uninteresting, all of whom probably end up blending into the same basic figure.

These little meetings are not often much fun for the reporters — I mean, really, what kind of information can you hope to glean from a 15 minute conversation with someone?* — but they must be hell on the interviewees. Seriously: Think about the tedium of answering “So how did you get involved with the project” and “What was it like to work with so-and-so?” hundreds upon hundreds of times, in city after city, day after day. It’s all part of the show, I realize, but still: It must be mind-numbing.

Anyway, Reitman actually spent his press tour taking pictures of each of his interviewers and keeping track of the questions he was asked and whipped together this nifty little video that gives you a sense of just how crazy these things are. /Film has the premiere; click over and give it a watch. I make a split second appearance at the 1:50 mark.

*The best of these interviews were the ones in which you had a little extra time so you could talk about more than just the movie they were there to promote. Picked Ed Zwick’s brain about the writer’s guild strike, or James Toback’s about the box office chances of The Soloist was fun.