The first editor I ever had once told me this: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
Now, he had nothing against my mother. The point of the statement was that as a reporter, I was to check out everything. Talk to the cops and talk to the witnesses. Ask questions of everybody who has even partial knowledge. Only then, can one put together the pieces of the puzzle in order to get a more complete picture.
I started out reading Chris Fenton’s Feeding the Dragon, anxious to understand how American business have to navigate while doing business in China. Given the geo-political tension existing between the US and China, this topic is worthy of serious thought. The insights of a Hollywood insider would go a long way to explaining how things work.
Or, so I thought. After a chapter or two, the book devolved into a series of personal stories and anecdotes, most of which were only marginally related to the proposed subject. (Spoiler alert: he went to a Duran Duran concert in his pajamas). And as the book went on and on, the tales of the author’s continuous intervention to save the day grew to be beyond belief.
While I didn’t bother to hunt down the manager at the Olive Garden where he said he was fired for snacking on tiramisu, I did speak to an ex-colleague at William Morris Agency, where he was fired for being “too nice a guy”, certainly a questionable statement in the book (but not the only one). The ex-colleague also stated Fenton told people he was “going to take over the agency someday.”
But I’m not the only skeptic. In an article recently published on True Hollywood Talk https://www.truehollywoodtalk.com/debunking-hollywood-agency-chris-fenton-feeding-the-dragon/, another former colleague stated Chris was known as a bit of a “big talker” type”. I can certainly see why. In the same article, it said he was also fired from MBST, a prominent entertainment management company. Interestingly enough, he does not even mention his employment at MBST in his book. Am I to assume his firing there was for “not” being too nice of a guy?
So, is he really the “Robin Hood” of The Olive Garden? Did he even make such a ridiculous statement….he did. Did he really rewrite the end of World War Z? It seems not, as he’s not a writer and he has no credit on the film. And by the way, how did he negotiate with the Chinese government if he doesn’t speak Chinese beyond doing some karaoke or has spent more than a few weeks there? Again it’s a little hard to believe. Did his editors not fact check the book? Clearly not.
