Celebrities and gossip

Celebrities and gossip Celebrities and gossip, top news and gossip From 24-7 Press Release Newswire and youtube video collections. The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information, misinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives - has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage. Carl Bernstein I have no use for people who throw their weight around as celebrities, or for those who fawn over you just because you are famous. Walt Disney Not all celebrities are dunces. Carroll O’Connor I hate celebrities. I really hate them. Billie Joe Armstrong I can’t stand the gossip of celebrities’ lives, all the time! Every minute! William Shatner I don’t like celebrities; I don’t hang out with them; I don’t relate to that life. Lady Gaga Look at the way celebrities and politicians are using Facebook already. When Ashton Kutcher posts a video, he gets hundreds of pieces of feedback. Maybe he doesn’t have time to read them all or respond to them all, but he’s getting good feedback and getting a good sense of how people are thinking about that and maybe can respond to some of it. Mark Zuckerberg Adriana Lima Victoria's Secret Runway Walk Compilation 2003-2016 Gossip About Vips and Celebrities. The psychological aspect. By nature, humans are chatterers, says psychologist Robin Dunbar. He suggests that gossip is the human version of social grooming-a behavior common among other social primates in which one ape or monkey strokes the fur and picks fleas and ticks from the coat of another ape or monkey to strengthen group ties. Like social grooming, which helps other primates form alliances based on codependence, gossip helps humans develop trusting relationships and foster social bonds. Without that instinct to share the latest on a friend, peer or family member, there would be no sophisticated society, Dunbar claims, suggesting that societies depend on the individual’s ability to rely on others and understand something of the workings of another’s mind. About 65 percent of people’s discussions involve gossip - often to entertain or help strengthen group ties. One might think celebrity worship is a modern phenomenon, but from the gods on Olympus in ancient Greece to the bobby-soxers swooning over Frank Sinatra in the late 1930s and ’40s to Brad and Angelina today, adulation of the stars is an age-old pursuit, psychologists say. The public’s fascination with celebrities “may seem new because we are such a media-immersed society, but it’s really not,” said Stuart Fischoff, senior editor at the Journal of Media Psychology and emeritus professor of media psychology at California State University, Los Angeles. When the composers Frederic Chopin and Franz Liszt performed in the 19th century, women threw their underwear at them. And 80 years after the death of silent-film star Rudolph Valentino, fans continue to visit his grave, Fischoff noted. Celebrities tap into the public’s primal fantasies and basic emotions, lifting people from their everyday lives and making them believe anything is possible, said Dr. John Lucas, a clinical assistant professor of psychology at Weill Cornell Medical College and an assistant attending psychiatrist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. Humans at the core are social beings, and research has shown that the less connected people feel, the more they turn to celebrities, said Adam Galinsky, an expert in ethics and social psychology and a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “It’s a very adaptive and functional behavior.” Lucas added, however, that while worshipping the rich and famous is harmless in itself, it could be perceived as symptomatic of a rootless culture in which many people feel a sense of isolation. “What we know of celebrities through People magazine and other media sources fills a gaping and painful void in our lives,” Lucas said. The dwindling influence of religion adds to that sense of yearning in people, he added, making the stars’ exploits and eccentricities, their loves and losses, more than a form of entertainment. “Religion is faltering, and in the process people are grappling with infantile wishes, with magical thinking,” he said. Social instinct, suggests research by Frank McAndrew, PhD, an applied social psychology professor at Knox College. Our interest in celebrity gossip-as well as dirt on our family, friends and acquaintances-may be a byproduct of our evolutionary past, McAndrew says. Natural selection, he theorizes, pressured people to learn as much as possible about the people in their social network-be they an authority figure, potential romantic partner, teacher, political ally or enemy. Knowing about other group members helped people eschew risky alliances, by informing them, for instance, which group member might double-cross them. “If you weren’t curious about others, you’d pay the consequences,” McAndrew says. In the process, gossiping also helped facilitate bonds by showing others we trust them enough to share information. Throughout most of human history, McAndrew explains, humans not only had to cooperate with a social network of about 200 people for food and protection, they also had to compete with those same in-group members for the most desirable mates. His research about the appeal of gossip is part of a growing body of literature indicating that we’re drawn to gossip because it keeps us informed about the lives of the people in our social circle. That social circle is now much bigger, and so less tied to our survival, but the instinct to gossip is just as strong. Because we see and hear celebrities’ images and voices on television, radio and magazines, we gossip about them as if they are members of our social network, McAndrew says. “Gossip is like chocolate,” says psychologist Charlotte DeBacker, PhD, a University of Santa Barbara postdoctoral fellow and author of the forthcoming Dutch-language book, “Gossip: Why Gossip Can Be Healthy” (MOM/Unieboek, 2006). Humans are drawn to fatty, sweet foods like chocolate because such high-calorie foods were once our lifeblood in lean times. As a result, people crave those foods-even when they are not in dire need of calories. Likewise, the pleasure that people derive from gossip can create a tendency to “dish dirt” even when the subject matter doesn’t affect our lives, such as with celebrity gossip, or when divulging information could be more risky, such as at work, says DeBacker. In a follow-up study published in the same article, Dunbar and his colleagues examined the topics within that social banter by grouping the discussions into four categories: whether people were keeping track of other individuals in their social network; bragging about themselves as a romantic partner, friend or ally; seeking advice; or condemning slackers or free loaders. He found that the first two topics dominated conversations, suggesting that the exchange of social information may be one of the primary functions of language. As such, Dunbar agrees with McAndrew and DeBacker’s suggestions that the pleasure we derive from gossip is a side effect of an evolutionary pull to gain knowledge about one’s group. “Language evolved for social purposes, not spreading technical information like whether it will rain or how to get from New York City to Washington, D.C.,” he says. “Knowledge of the social world has a much deeper purpose... It’s not just the fact that I saw Jimmy kiss Penelope, but how that incident relates to me and the group.” Top 10 Most Important People Around The World Top 10 Richest People In The World Top 13 Richest Celebs Under 25 in the World Top 10 Most Famous Female Models in the World Top 10 Most Popular Male Singers 2017 Top 10 Most Iconic Female Singers of All Time Top 10 Richest Actors in the World 2016 Top 10 Most Successful Youtubers Top 10 Famous Speeches People  http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/peopleNews Celebrities  http://rss.24-7pressrelease.com/rss/ae_celebrities.xml Read the full article

Anyone visiting the headquarters of the Rank Organization at Pinewood in early January of 1957 would have found the studios operating at peak capacity, with films like High Tide at Noon, The Gypsy and the Gentleman, and Hell Drivers in pre- or post-production and others, like Zarak, on limited or general release. Hundreds of employs would have been toing and froing between soundstages, workshops and dressing rooms, scene docks and exterior lots, working hard to help create, from scratch, the Shakespearean "stuff" our dreams are made of. The irony of the inversion, from Prospero's memento mori to an artificial fantasy sold to millions was perhaps not lost on Rank executives and those who laboured under them.

Far more than the actual product, it was the marketing of the material, the selling of the dream, that proved to be Rank's lasting legacy. The bustling beehive may have impressed on the awe-struck visitor an image Rank were keen to project, of a globe-spanning entertainment empire, but the perfect picture belied a reality of decline underneath the shiny façade at the precise point in time, ironically, when the hiring of artists and other personnel reached its peak. The abundance of available talent, and the urgent need for Rank to advertise its capabilities, allowed the publicity department not only to mount Rank's own promotional strategy but to define the - albeit brief - era of Hollywood gloss in the British film industry.

Central to Rank's strategy as a self-styled entertainment empire was the photographic image. In addition to the obvious moving pictures this also comprised still photography, and here it was the easily mass-manufactured 8x10 studio portrait that lent itself in particular to advertising purposes. Reproduced in their hundreds, if not thousands, they would be distributed to advertising agencies, various media operations, sponsoring partners, and Rank-owned cinema chains to beguile potential audiences - so successfully, in fact, that they began to be appreciated in their own right, or as one marketing executive remarked, it was rarely if ever that one saw on the silver screen the "luscious confectionery" beckoning from the display boxes outside.

What made Rank's displays so uniquely irresistible in the eyes of adoring fans and competitors alike was their sheer visual impact: Cornel Lucas joined Rank in 1951, and his position at the time was something of a novelty - and considered an outrageous extravagance in an industry which continued for the most part to rely on hiring theatrical photographers on a film-by-film basis or as needed. Cornel Lucas, by contrast, was employed full time, with his own studio facility, a permanent staff of several electricians, hairdressers, and make-up artists, as well as an endless supply of sitters under varying degrees of duress. The free-lance colleagues of earlier times had been theatrical photographers in the tradition of 18th and 19th century theatrical painters of ornate tableaux, and we see the tradition continue certainly in the theatre but also in "staged" film stills until well into the 1950s and sometimes beyond (e.g. All Night Long, 1961).

Using a large-format Kodak "Model B" view camera, Cornel Lucas embarked on a busy schedule of three to four sessions for each day of the working week, helping the actors develop their on-screen character (experimentation was to an extent encouraged) and, crucially, helping them feel at ease with their Rank-assigned persona. In a view camera, the lens forms an inverted image on a ground-glass screen at the back. The photographer then has to calibrate light, shadow, and general composition to achieve the desired exposure, under a dark hood, in advance and from an upside-down, full-open aperture preview of what will hopefully be the final result. Once he is satisfied, the glass-plate is replaced with an 8x10 sheet of Kodak Super XX Panchromatic black & white film for maximum texture and tonal range. Other than cost and ease of reproduction, it is unclear if any artistic considerations influenced Rank's preference for monochrome photography, or whether it was a conscious decision on the part of the photographer to discard the well-worn utensils and standard techniques of previous decades.

Cornel Lucas has stripped away the scenery, and even most of the actor's own tools, by focusing the camera on his subject's face to the exclusion of nearly everything else. Neither can our eyes stray far from where the lens is pointed. The actor and his audience are locked in an intimate exchange of glances; nevertheless, it is an illusion of intimacy - and a one-way mirror for the actor. The captured character remains behind the fourth wall, in a state of public solitude. Constantin Stanislavski's definition of the actor's task before his audience would seem to suggest there is such a thing as a perfect moment that can be captured in a single photograph when in fact the opposite is the case: developing the character is a gradual process and Cornel Lucas has documented the journey over multiple sessions and in dozens of photographs, each capturing a unique moment along the way.

The exceptional, from Rank's perspective: excessive, abandon with which Cornel Lucas went to work on "G Redman" in January of 1957 has indeed remained something of an outlier in the Organisation's handling of publicity and in the industry as a whole. Against a backdrop of unlikely circumstances (rationing of fuel and paper, dwindling audiences), the sophisticated and, yes, laborious studio session was allowed to flourish for a brief period before it gave way to the more dynamic approach of the 1960s which introduced small-format, hand-held action shots, and new notions of immediacy and authenticity. By 1959, the Rank Organization as a Hollywood-style production company had ceased to exist, and with it disappeared the need - and the demand - for posed portraits. Free-lance still photographers now worked on the set alongside the actors, who could even be entirely oblivious of their presence.

While it lasted, the symbiosis between Rank and Cornel Lucas created an environment in which the photographer had carte blanche to produce as many alluring shots as he could of a (new) Rank hopeful with the full blessing of the company, whose strategy was built on the assumption that the more alluring the promotional photograph the more willing potential audiences would be to buy tickets to see the (far less exciting) film. This dual purpose of promoting the film and the actor at the same time (Rank assets, both) also had the effect of reinforcing the contrast between the two: whereas most of Rank's cinematic output has faded into obscurity, the work of Cornel Lucas continues to fascinate.