“Fame has a fifteen minute half-life, infamy lasts a little longer.”

The quote was taken from the film The Insider. Now, The Insider is not a particularly great film for the simple reason that there is very little action. I don’t mean cars blowing up, guns firing, and hand-to-hand combat action, I mean that most of the film involves people sitting across from one another talking. Nevertheless, it’s a dramatic retelling of Jeffery Wigand blowing the whistle on the cigarette industry. More specifically, the story is about his interview on 60 Minutes and the legal battle that ensued to get his interview aired (official transcript of interview). The power of his interview did not lay in the fact that cigarette can cause cancer or other health problem, but that cigarette companies knew about the addictive properties of nicotine and actively attempted to manipulate cigarettes to make them more addictive.

However, cigarettes are not the point of the quote. CBS was unable to air the interview when they originally intended due to a legal battle with the cigarette companies. The Insider implies that the corporate offices of CBS tried to brush the interview under the rug. Christopher Plummer as Mike Wallace uttered the aforementioned quote in response to an executive’s claim that CBS’s complicity with the tobacco industry would be forgotten shortly.

Granted, Plummer’s delivery makes the quote even more special, but like many quotes that I hold onto, it jives with my personal philosophy. At one job, my supervisor asked why I was so meticulous with certain projects. My response was something along the lines of, “When you do something right, you won’t hear anything from anyone. They take it as ‘Things working as they should.’ To some extent, they’re right. However, if something goes wrong, not only will you be sure to hear about it, but everything you do from there on in will be tainted with the memory of the time you messed up. In fact, you don’t even have to mess up, something could just go wrong, but it’s under your watch, so it’s your fault.” I still believe it to be true, and anyone would be hard pressed to convince me otherwise.

With news of Don Imus returning to radio, I got to thinking about the infamy quote again. It’s not the first time that infamy has been a good career move. Better to be talked about in a bad way than not at all, right? I’m not saying that Imus should never return to radio. I don’t believe that he should be deprived of his right to make a living. I believe he made a mistake, he apologized and though he may not get a complete pass, I didn’t think he should be crucified. Nevertheless, he was fired. Something just strikes me as wrong, in the fact that Imus could now conceivable turn a profit from his admitted mistake.

Martha Stewart was another person to turn a profit off infamy. She was convicted of obstructing justice and perjury (something not wholly unlike insider trading), went to prison for five months and on her release, her stock goes up (entry date versus release date). Granted, last I checked, her stock price was close to the day she entered, but for a little space in time, you could have turned quite the profit from someone going to jail.

O.J. Simpson signed a book deal, which eventually got Harper Collins editor Judith Regan fired. Now, the Goldman family may be repackaging the book and reaping the profits.

Infamy is not always a sure-fire key to success. Despite all her problems and run-ins with the law, Lindsay Lohan’s I Know Who Killed Me, has only taken $7.3 million. I would be surprised if that covered production costs.

Maybe Britney Spears should have timed her OK! Magazine meltdown for when she had an album ready for release.

Additional Links:
Martha Stewart Prison Diary