J.K. Rowling's agent Neil Blair issued a statement this weekend slamming the masked protest that interrupted the gala for a new shortened version of "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" at the Palace Theatre in London, claiming the activists "put others at risk," per Deadline. The statement closed with a line to the effect that every fan deserves to enjoy the magic of Harry Potter "in an atmosphere of respect and security."
The sentence structure of a press release is worth a beat. "We respect peaceful activism and the right to express different views" is the load-bearing sentence. It exists so that the next sentence can betray it. The agent gets to own both halves: the respect for the first eleven words, the risk assessment for the rest. That is the whole product. One sentence, two receipts.
The verb the trades are using is "slams." In Hollywood, that verb is usually deployed against wars, terrorist attacks, and other companies. Here it is deployed against people who lay down on a red carpet in masks and were then removed by security. The risk list in the statement runs "audience members, performers and theatre staff." The agent is not on the risk list. The agent was not in the building. The agent is somewhere with better posture and stronger Wi-Fi, doing the one job a London agent is actually paid for, which is converting a red carpet into a press release.
What the statement is defending is the gala, and the gala is a promotional event for a new cut of the show. "Cursed Child" in the West End has been trimmed from a two-part, five-hour show into a single three-hour performance, and nobody has issued a statement about the two hours that got cut. Variety carries the protest group's own side, from an organization calling itself the Guild of Angry Transsexuals, whose statement says that attending the show "directly fund[s] the legal attack on trans people." That is a name doing as much PR as the statement it answers, and the two will trade headlines for a month.
The timing is the data point too. The protest was Thursday night. The statement made it out by the weekend. In agent time, that is instant, which is to say it was drafted before the carpet was rolled up. The "magic of Harry Potter" is now defined, per the memo, as "a welcoming and safe experience for everyone," a sentence that could have been written for any company defending any audience, and that is the point. The wand got retired. The memo is running the show.
YOUR TURN: If an agent can slam a protest from an office he wasn't in, what does the word "slam" actually do?
Comments (1)