The Mystery Publicist

A Brian Flemming's Weblog Investigation

News flash: If you loudly launch an anti-Christian movie project, you will get strange emails. Many of them will be insane rants, thousands of words long. Others will simply contain one word, "devil," with no further explanation.

But a few will be more intriguing than that, if you are as easily intrigued as I am.

At 12:30 a.m. Pacific Time on Sunday, I received this message from the address "pmk@publicist.com":

From: "PMK HBH" (pmk@publicist.com)
To: Brian Flemming
Subject: Client inquiry

Although it may be too late, I apologize for the slow response. I understand that someone from your company made an inquiry a few months ago regarding getting in touch with actress Majandra Delfino (Roswell) and former olympian turned actor Rey-Phillip Santos (Dark Angel, Blade 2) for possible roles in one of your upcoming feature film projects titled "The Beast". Ms. Delfino and Mr. Santos are not repped by our company. But I do have their contact information, Ill be sure to forward your contacts to their representatives. Or you can try checking their current agent contacts at www.imdb.com for your convenience, but I suggest you try contacting them directly, rather than going through us.

Good Luck, 

Emily Berger - PMK/HBH

Some facts:

1. Nobody associated with The Beast contacted PMK/HBH (one of the biggest publicity firms in the entertainment industry) about any actors.

2. I just called PMK and asked to be connected to Emily Berger. The receptionist said nobody by that name works there, in any capacity.

3. The email message does not appear to originate from PMK. The domain "publicist.com" allows anyone to sign up anonymously for a free email account (like Yahoo or Hotmail do). It is not actually associated with any publicity firm.

4. The content of the message is odd, given its stated premise. If I already specifically inquired about these actors, why would Emily Berger refer to their credits and attributes in this way? This is like bad exposition in a movie--one character telling another information that the other presumably already knows.

5. Publicists are the laziest people in the world. It is virtually impossible that a publicist would be working late Saturday night sending emails on behalf of people who aren't even clients. (Plus, both performers' difficult names are spelled correctly--no way did a publicist write this.) The only element militating for authenticity is the opener. It is plausible that a publicist would fail to get back to somebody for months.

I wrote back to Ms. Berger ("CD" stands for "casting director"):

Emily,

Thanks for writing. I'm pretty sure our CD didn't make that contact with you, though. Probably a prankster. This project gets a lot of that sort of thing.

Sorry for the trouble.

Best,
Brian Flemming

And she wrote back to me:

Thanks for clearing that up. I went ahead and forwarded your contact information to them just in case one of them is interested in fure projects.

:)Emily

And that's the extent of our communication to date.

So...who is Emily Berger?

--An overzealous fan of Majandra Delfino who believes (perhaps correctly) that Delfino would be a good candidate to play Danielle in The Beast?

--A friend of mine who thought (correctly) that I might enjoy browsing the pictures of Delfino at IMDb?

--A fan of Rey-Phillip Santos who believes that Santos would be a fine candidate to play...I dunno?

--Someone who thought (incorrectly) that I might enjoy browsing the picture of Rey-Phillip Santos at IMDb?

Although it will surely invite a torrent of spam, I am enabling comments to allow public speculation on this mystery.

Also, any suggestions as to what I should write next to Emily Berger are appreciated.