Now that I've solidified my status as a consummate professional in your minds, let me tell you all about profile writing.
The method – Start by searching through press clippings then sketch out a life map of the person. Interview their friends and foes and verify everything. That's just good journalism anyway. The subject of the profile might not talk to you but give them the chance to comment, to deny what's being written about them, just as if it were a regular defamatory news story.
- Think of it like a pen portrait
- An obituary... but for a living person
- Who are they?
- How did they become who they are?
- What does everyone say about them?
- Tell an anecdote/funny story that sums the person up
- Try a delayed drop introduction
- Don't comment in your own voice, just write the facts
- Apart from perhaps the into and outro tell their story in straight chronological order
- It must be balanced
We were given an hour in the session to create our own 300 word profile, apart from being far far too long and 15 minutes past the deadline I think it turned out OK. But of course I'm now fired from my imaginary magazine job. Never miss a deadline...
Tim Burton
“I would do anything Tim [Burton] wanted me to. You know - have sex with an aardvark... I would do it.” – Johnny Depp
His films have created cult followings so strong and fans so dedicated that Spielberg and Scorsese can only look on in wonder. His work is instantly recognisable and if he asked Johnny Depp to have sex with an aardvark, he’d do it. By all accounts, Tim Burton is unique, a man with a striking vision and one of the hottest properties in Hollywood.
His is the story of the outcast thrust into the spotlight. A misfit whose loner nature and dark imaginings, the very things that set him apart as a young man, would eventually make him the beloved idol of millions.
Born August 25, 1958 in Burbank, California, Burton had an uncomfortable suburban childhood and increasingly distanced himself from his family. He left at the age of 10 to live with his grandmother and developed a taste for the darker side of film. But perhaps it was this time of isolation that helped him create a different mindset to most of his creative peers – and earn him a scholarship from Disney animation. It was his odd and gothic animation work there that would earn him his chance in the director’s chair.
Early success with Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice meant his name was flying around the right circles at just the right time, when Warner Brothers were looking to shake the camp image of Batman from the sixties. A man with a dark, twisted vision was needed and Burton fitted the bill. Batman and its sequel Batman Returns were huge critical and commercial successes and Tim Burton had made the A-list.
He reached the lofty position that most directors can only dream of, picking his own projects and being given free reign to mould them with as little interference from the studios as possible. Whether working on his own tirade of bizarre creations (Edward Scissorhands, Corpse Bride) or transforming beloved classics into dark fairytales (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland), Burton has cemented his own style and generated such loyalty from actors that they would screw African mammals for him.
But whilst in many eyes he can do no wrong, Burton has had his fair share of critics. Misfires like Mars Attacks! and Planet of the Apes generated their fair share of flack and calls that he’d lost his touch, the latter being called a ‘curdled whimsy’ by Rolling Stone magazine.
Critical bomb or not, it’s hard to see how Burton could see Apes as a failure, it was there that he met fellow oddball and now wife Helen Bonham Carter. A woman who seems to have caught his attention and not let go, he’s cast her in nearly every film he’s made since. But before the cries of ‘whipped!’ fly out, it’s worth noting that he makes her audition for every role she gets. A sign that maybe Tim Burton’s personal life is still just as bizarre as his films.
