About this Blog

"In the future everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes." So said the bleached-out, late lamented artist Andy Warhol. Having lived and worked in New York City, Warhol came to fully grasp the hold celebrity has on us. In this very famous sentence, he meant to point out that in a culture fixated on fame, many people will suddenly flash brightly onto the public screen, then--poof--will just as quickly disappear from public view--like shooting stars. Other individuals derive their celebrity from one stellar accomplishment (one hit song, one iconic role, etc.) that they never again match.

This blog is devoted to the one part of our celebrity culture that no one has written much about: temporary/one-shot celebrities.

The pace of modern life has quickened, and now we hear people speaking of someone's 15 seconds of fame. These "celebrities with a lower-case c" who will appear in this blog sometimes come to us from the world of entertainment, sometimes from the world of news. All are fascinating.

The need of our communications media for a continual stream of new material assures that we will have no end of colorful people who go quickly, where celebrity is concerned, from zero to hero (or villain) and back to zero. Now you see 'em, now you don't. What a crazy world, eh?

Temporary celebrities coming from the world of entertainment include one-hit recording artists; TV and movie icons who, although they might have had a great many accomplishments in their career, are remembered for one big role; standouts of reality TV; sports figures remembered for one remarkable accomplishment; and people whose celebrity came from one big role in a commercial or print ad.

News-based temporary celebrities come in many forms: mass/serial killers, other murderers of special note, sex-crime offenders, disgraced figures of government/military/business/media/religion, spies/traitors, hoaxers, femmes/hommes fatale, heroes, whistle blowers, inventors/innovators, and victims.

Celebrity Blogsburg will consider each category in turn.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Misc.: Marie Torre

Hard-working journalist Marie Torre became an important part of journalism's history--and a temporary celebrity-- in 1959 when she became the first U.S. woman to be jailed for refusing to divulge a news source.

Torre was jailed for contempt of court when she defied a court's order to name the source of unflattering comments about singer Judy Garland that she had attributed to a TV executive to whom she had promised confidentiality.

Her sentence was 10 days, during which the nation's media came loudly to her defense. Hers was an early example of many later legal disputes over source confidentiality.

The Brooklyn native had worked in both television and newspapers. She had written a column, was an entertainment writer, and was one of the earliest female TV news anchors in the nation--at Pittsburgh's station KDKA-TV. At the time of her contempt sentence, she was reporting for the International Herald Tribune out of New York City.

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