Starsuckers

British filmmaker Chris Atkins examines the nature of celebrity in contemporary culture, and the impact it has had on politics, economics and the media in this documentary. Atkins presents Starsucker as a series of five "lessons" on fame in the modern world: how children are persuaded that fame is something they want, how television and the media reinforces the importance of celebrity and the efforts to attain it, how the mind and body reinforces our need to follow the activities of well-known people and strive to join their number, how the press became addicted to celebrity coverage, and how the art of promoting fame has led to celebrities and their handlers controlling the press instead of the press having say. Along the way, Atkins demonstrates how celebrity "news" with no basis in fact gets into print, why newspapers will run press releases almost verbatim, how parents will eagerly sign away the image rights to their kids, how certain mass scale charity events end up helping the performers far more than the causes they designed to support, and how publicists keep accurate but unflattering stories out of the news. Starsucker received its world premiere at the 2009 BFI London Film Festival.