Remember that Paris Hilton film Pledge This? No? Well, without a shadow of a doubt that’s Paris Hilton’s fault.
She killed that movie. Not for the reasons stated by Pledge This investor Michael I. Goldberg, though. He says that the film tanked because Paris Hilton didn’t do enough to promote the movie, and because of this he’s dragged Paris to a court in Miami so that he can sue her for $8 million.
Which seems weird. We’re no legal experts, but we’d have assumed that Pledge This tanked because Paris Hilton was in it. Shows what we know, huh?
It’s amazing how many things can stop a movie from being successful. A good script can be mauled by a bad director. A good director can be hamstrung by bad casting. Good footage can be mangled by bad editing. Good films can be destroyed by bad marketing. And then there’s this, the 2006 Paris Hilton movie National Lampoon’s Pledge This…
National Lampoon’s Pledge This was released straight to DVD three years ago and scraped just over a million dollars worldwide. IMDb ranks it as the ninth-worst film in all of history. Now, judging by the trailer – because, good christ, we don’t hate ourselves enough to actually watch the whole thing – we’d say that National Lampoon’s Pledge This failed because:
1 - It looks like a bad 1980s straight-to-VHS sex comedy.
2 - It appears to have been made on a budget of approximately 12p.
3 - The soundtrack unironically features Pump Up The Jam by Technotronic, a 20-year-old song, to denote teenage fun.
4 - The production design has apparently taken all its cues from the terrible mid-1990s sitcom Hanging With Mr Cooper.
5 - It’s a National Lampoon film, which these days is a mark of quality you’d normally only expect from a film called something like You Will Definitely Catch AIDS And Die If You Even Watch A Second Of This Movie, Even By Accident.
Notice that none of those reasons included ‘Paris Hilton is in it’, because surely that’s a given. You put Paris Hilton in a film, you expect nobody to see it. Unless it’s a film of her sucking off a bloke on the internet. And Pledge This almost definitely isn’t that. But try telling that to Pledge This investor Michael I Goldberg, who has decided to sue Paris Hilton for $8 million, citing breach of contract based on her lack of promotion for the movie. So Paris Hilton went to court yesterday, as The Miami Herard reports:
[Goldberg's] attorney, Brian T. West, said that Paris was ”too busy” to do interviews in her many travels and public appearances, and that she skipped appearances on Jay Leno’s and Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk shows. Defense attorney Michael Weinstein countered that between December 2006 and May 2007, Hilton ”promoted the hell out of this movie.”
Yeah, and she would have continued promoting it, too, if only she hadn’t wound up in prison for driving around like a drunk old lunatic that time. Stupid prison, always messing up the promotional campaigns of obviously bad films.
Anyway, it seems pretty clear that everyone here – defence, prosecution, the judge – is pushing for a settlement, so that’s what everybody should expect. But the whole affair has meant that Paris Hilton will be forced to be far more diligent when it comes to promoting her movies in the future. And you know what that means – Paris Hilton is going to be on television an even more insufferable amount than she already is.
Michael I Goldberg, we hate you.
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