Fulleresque

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The most uncompromised aspect of Nikki Finke's 7.16 post about Bonnie Fuller's hiring by Mail.com Media Corporation (MMC) to run HollywoodLife.com is -- of course, as ever -- the reader comments. I was particularly struck by the following comment posted at 10:53 pm last night by "Stacy," to wit:

"Egads...Bonnie Fuller? Queen of Tabloid Lies? That woman has zero conscience when it comes to lying about celebrities, making up stories based on the pictures, terrorizing her staff and making a mockery of the media's first amendment rights.

"Fuller is a cat with nine lives. After American Media (i.e., Star, The National Enquirer, Globe) fired her I really hoped she'd fade into the woodwork and no one would hire her to taint their organization and turn young and impressionable "journalists" into lying scumbags like she did at Us Weekly and the American Media mags.

"But when all anyone cares about is the bottom line then Bonnie Fuller is the person you want. HollywoodLife.com can kiss morals, truth, verified and named sources and just plain old good taste on the ass and wave bye-bye.

"I can see it now. On Fuller's first day HollywoodLife.com's homepage will read, 'BRAD BEGS JEN FOR SECOND CHANCE' or 'ANGIE DRIVES BRAD AWAY FOR GOOD!' or 'BRAD TELLS JEN, 'I STILL LOVE YOU''. Just when I thought this fuckery was going to end, along comes Bonnie Fuller out of the woodwork. Bleh. That's the unfortunate thing with cockroaches -- they'll survive a nuclear holocaust and the rest of us will be deader than doornails. Roaches outlived the dinosaurs and Bonnie Fuller will outlive her fellow cockroaches."

Stacy needed a better kicker than the dinosaurs/cockroaches analogy. And the line about "this fuckery" coming to an end is a little simple-minded given that (a) the likelihood that mindlessly made-up tabloid stories about celebrity relationships would fade away is less than zero given that (b) the young under-educated females who lap this stuff up every week have certain emotional appetites, diseased philosophies and self-esteem issues that exist independent of Bonnie Fuller's ravings and imaginings. But the point is made.

There are many ugly and deplorable elements in U.S. society. The people who worship the ravings of Glenn Beck, for example. But sometimes, particularly after buying groceries at a supermarket, I find myself muttering that there's nothing worse -- nothing lower, shallower, stupider, and more spiritually rancid or pathetic -- than the longings and imaginings and material aspirations of Fuller's female readership.

Here is David Carr's dry-as-a-bone reporting about the MMC/Fuller announcement.

"Particularly Vile"<< previous | next >>Thompson to Indiewire

Posted by Jeffrey Wells on July 17, 2009 at 4:53 AM

comment #1

lbeale says ...

I worked for Bonnie Fuller as a staff writer at Us Weekly. The one thing I can say in her defense is that all the stories in the mag were carefully fact checked and vetted. She may be into celebrity garbage, but she's not into fabricating and lying.
However, she is an awful, awful person to work for. Cold, cruel, cares nothing about the staff. She'd do things like go out to a screening on the night we closed the book, and because she had final say on page approval, everyone just sat around until Bonnie came back hours later, because no one had the authority to make final judgements on anything. This why why we rarely closed an issue until 2 a.m. on Mondays.
Bonnie is all about Bonnie. The fact people continue to hire her, well, she does have a sort of golden touch when it comes to conceptualizing trash. She's really, really good at running low-end enterprises. But hiring her is a tradeoff, that being that all the really good talent will soon decamp, unwilling to put up with her terrorizing personality.

Posted by lbeale at July 17, 2009 6:01 AM

comment #2

byanyother says ...

Integrity and the bottom line - what does it take to run a successful media empire these days? Shit, shit and more shit. If you want to blame women for the tabloid nonsense well then let's blame men for all of the horrible movies released every year - ten pieces of crap to one's dumb women's movie.

This post was depressing, Jeff. Thanks.

Posted by byanyother at July 17, 2009 6:11 AM

comment #3

p.Vice says ...

But isn't pretty much everything nowadays, byanyother?

Posted by p.Vice at July 17, 2009 6:35 AM

comment #4

lkay09er says ...

Young? The women I see buying up the tabloids are usually bored housewives in their 40's and 50's, a dying breed. The young and simple go to Perez, Bonnie Fuller is a dinosaur.

Looking at an article in Us Weekly busting Jon Gosselin cheating on his wife, or uncovering John Edwards affair doesn't reveal my life aspirations, I get a charge when they zero in on hypocrisy. A family selling itself with Christian self-righteousness is revealed to be a total lie, a politician who uses his wife's cancer to "connect" to voters while carrying on an affair, in those situations the tabloids feed an misanthropic itch.

Posted by lkay09er at July 17, 2009 6:39 AM

comment #5

btwnproductions says ...

I preferred "Fulleresque" when it referred to Sam.

Posted by btwnproductions at July 17, 2009 6:42 AM

comment #6

KC says ...

I love when you present this "sometimes I think about it and realize that vapid women are the real cancer in the guts of humanity, that's right I went there!!" crap as if it's some devastating straight-talk wisdom people like to gloss over for the sake of dishonest politeness rather than age-old bullshit.

There are ads for that G.I. Joe movie in every bus shelter I pass on the way to work and that thing really represents everything I hate about film and pop-culture in general...guns! Violence! Explosions! Titties! OH WHOOPS WE FORGOT TO WRITE A SCRIPT!!, based on a shitty cartoon with the twin objectives of selling children on action figures and the U.S. military. You don't even have to reach for another example of this type of POS, they come out every two weeks during the summer and saturate our culture with hideousness and stupidity. I wonder what the target audience for that movie looks like?

But of course the bigger boil on America's ass is those damn giggly women, some of them look pretty but boy you wish you could just stick something in there to shut them up!!

Posted by KC at July 17, 2009 6:44 AM

comment #7

Glenn Kenny says ...

Lou Reed: "You remember that song by this dude from Texas whose name was...Bonnie Fuller? I'll sing it for you, went like this: 'I fought the law and the law won. I fought the law and the law won.'"

Posted by Glenn Kenny at July 17, 2009 7:02 AM

comment #8

Stringer Bell says ...

Geez ... Fuller ran 'Star Magazine'. Isn't it a prerequisite to lie?

Fuller is a typical female boss. They're the worst.

Now, if they break the long held 'Cruise/Travolta is really gay' with cold hard facts, I'll have a teenty tiny more respect ...

Posted by Stringer Bell at July 17, 2009 7:14 AM

comment #9

Jeffrey Wells says ...

Wells to lkay09er: I don't have any hard data to link to on the age range of the readership of gossip tabloids and magazines. For all I really know Fuller's former American Media readership could primarily be "bored housewives in their 40s and 50s," as you stated, with the younger demo just clicking on Perez Hilton. But whomever and whatever they're reading, my statement about the spiritual vistas of young under-educated women (i.e., the kind who sit in groups of four to six at tables in sports bars and in Starbucks cafes and giggle loudly) stands.

Posted by Jeffrey Wells at July 17, 2009 7:30 AM

comment #10

buster keaton says ...

Bonnie Fuller will be lost working for an online property. Aside from her lack of management skills, her main contribution to the world of pop culture journalism was the over-use of bright pinks and purples to highlight page after page of fashion accessories spreads and paparazzi shots. Yawn. . . .

As anyone who has ever read this woman's tweets or mind-numbing ramblings on the Huffington Post knows, she's an idiot who clearly knows nothing about what's really going on behind the scenes.

Hopefully, we can look forward to Bonnie and Nikki getting into the mother of all catfights and leaving both of their disgusting, rancid, unprofessional carcasses on the sidewalks of Sunset Blvd. Hopefully, their rotting corpses will be far away from The Hungry Cat or even Musso's up the street on Hollywood Bvd. so I don't have to step over them when I go in for a delightful repast.

Posted by buster keaton at July 17, 2009 7:42 AM

comment #11

Bilge says ...

Hey, lay off the readership: I know a lot of women who read these magazines. A lot of them are Yale and Harvard grads. (I"m not kidding.) They don't take it seriously -- they accept it as trashy entertainment, a guilty pleasure.

That said, I think I would rather cut off my testicles than ever work for Bonnie Fuller. Everyone I know who's worked for her ran away screaming after less than a year.

Posted by Bilge at July 17, 2009 8:03 AM

comment #12

superset5 says ...

i follow bonnie on twitter and for the life of me she really can't figure out how to LINK at all. She probably gets the link correct about 40% of the time. How the F is she going to run a website if she can't even get her links right on twitter half the time. see for yourself, http://twitter.com/BonnieFuller

she's already fucked up 3 or 4 times TODAY showing how clueless she is at linking.

Posted by superset5 at July 17, 2009 8:22 AM

comment #13

byanyother says ...

I hate to break it to you superset5 but I seriously doubt Bonnie Fuller is updating her own Twitter. Can you imagine that woman having that much time on her hands? It's obviously some sad intern/lacky.

Posted by byanyother at July 17, 2009 8:44 AM

comment #14

Manitoba says ...

As a Canadian, I feel somewhat guilty about Bonnie Fuller who got her start at the Toronto Star. The comment from a former US magazine staffer is very interesting.I wonder if CBC television should update it's old 2005 documentary on Fuller: Fast and Fearless: The Life and Times of Bonnie Fuller? I'm not sure how many careers ago that was now.

Posted by Manitoba at July 17, 2009 8:49 AM

comment #15

MovieBob says ...

KC
" I wonder what the target audience for that [GI Joe] movie looks like?"

Partially 5 to 13 year-old boys, MOSTLY guys in their 20s and 30s who make your world run by inventing/maintaining all this lovely technology you're using right now. Your welcome ;)

Posted by MovieBob at July 17, 2009 10:37 AM

comment #16

raygo says ...

Sadly, I would have to choose Bonnie Fuller over Perez Hilton, not that there is much difference.

Posted by raygo at July 17, 2009 11:42 AM

comment #17

KC says ...

Haha, what the...I guess I should blame myself for forgetting that the H-E gang is basically 4chan plus maybe fifteen years and a better grasp of the New Hollywood.

MovieBob, following your shitty logic - even if we are to go with what I am taking as your assumption that the women who pick up gossip rags and giggle at Starbucks are doing nothing with their lives but shopping, watching Jon and Kate Plus 8, and spitting out babies while the noble nerds with fond memories of jerking off to Lady Jaye busy themselves making the world spin 'round...doesn't that also demand respect for the 15,000 hausfrauen who saw that Nia Vardalos shitfest, allowing their work raising a generation of children to cancel out their crimes against Art and Culture? Or wait, I forgot, nurturing kids is something animals do all the time, nothing like the high-wire quicksilver artistry involved in developing iPhone applications.

I don't even know what to do with the implication that there is a genuine lineage to be drawn between the titans of modern industry who pull the criss-crossed web of fiber-optics over the surface of the globe at the climax of Spaceship Earth and some film-blog-posting, skidmarked-drawers-wearing goober who doesn't know the difference between "your" and "you're." In conclusion, eat a dick.

Posted by KC at July 17, 2009 2:39 PM

comment #18

KC says ...

Although actually maybe the skidmarked drawers themselves are the touchstone. I always thought Sergey was kind of oddly cute but that Larry looked like he maybe had to make a project out of remembering to wash his bath towel.

Posted by KC at July 17, 2009 2:42 PM

comment #19

O-P-N says ...

If Fuller can lie about her deceased mother. I don't think she'll have any remorse lying about anything or anyone not related to her.

Posted by O-P-N at July 17, 2009 6:21 PM

comment #20

MovieBob says ...

"MovieBob, following your shitty logic - even if we are to go with what I am taking as your assumption that the women who pick up gossip rags and giggle at Starbucks are doing nothing with their lives but shopping, watching Jon and Kate Plus 8, and spitting out babies"

Y'know, if you're going to be mad at anyone, it should be the entertainment industry proper for offering women almost nothing BUT dreck for the last decade or so.

Look, it "blurs" here and there but has always been "men's entertainment" and "women's entertainment;" and quite often you'll find periods where one of the two sides has more "good" stuff getting produced within it. For a lot of the 90s, a good deal of the "smart" movies, TV etc. happened on the "female" side while the "cultural rot" stuff was mostly being made by or for the guys (see: Filmography of Jean Claude Van Damme.)

For most of THIS decade, though, it's been the opposite - the HUGE cultural presence of gossip rags and reality TV, both aimed mainly at women, attest to this. Go out and compile a list of the most WRETCHED, awful, collective-intelligence-destroying things in the culture right now and you'll find that RIGHT NOW most of them are intended for women. I don't like this, don't expect you to either, but it IS how it is.

You can even see it just looking at movies: What were the "guy movie" blockbusters last year? Dark Knight and Iron Man - smarter-than-they-needed-to-be films that didn't talk down to anyone. What was the big "chick flick" blockbuster, again? Oh yeah: "Sex & The City," just about one of the most worthless, disposable things ever committed to celluloid.

Again: This is something ANYONE can see just looking around the culture - why be mad at Wells for pointing it out instead of the producers of this stuff for giving women so few good options?

Posted by MovieBob at July 17, 2009 9:48 PM

comment #21