Tad Friend (no relation) writes about film marketer Tim Palen in the Nouveau-Yorkais:
Palen, who is 47, has a shaved head, a graying beard, and the bulging, tattooed arms of a steamfitter.
Straight people and their alternate universe. (A basket is a “package”; a fuckbuddy is a “friend with benefits.”) Show a straight writer an old guy who doesn’t play football and who’s built like a brick shithouse and the writer has to stretch all the way back to the Industrial Revolution to explain him away.
Here’s Tim Palen, as shot by Dimitrios Kambouris for WireImage (detail):
Palen helped us out in this photo by wearing a nice skin-tight polo shirt. Do you see any steamfitting going on here?
Tim Palen is plainly a musclebear. In a small way, articles like this one – though it states Palen is gay and names his longtime lover – efface the facts of our lives. Incidentally, I ran this whole business by Palen via E-mail, but he did not respond.
“I told you so” alert
Posters are intended to tell you the film’s genre at a glance, then make you look more closely. Horror posters, for instance, have dark backgrounds; comedies have white backgrounds with the title and copy line in red.
In other words, “This movie sucks,” say the fonts.