Transcript: The Human Fly & the Kardashians

A brief history of Hollywood’s ‘earned’ media

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for the Ankler.

When the Hal Roach Studios released the comedy classic Safety Last! in 1923, they knew they needed a big publicity splash to launch the picture. So they hired a famous stunt climber, Harry F. Young — known in show business as “The Human Fly” — to climb up the side of the Martinique Hotel in Manhattan and cause a commotion.

If you’re an old movie buff, you might remember why. Safety Last! is one of Harold Lloyd’s classic silent movie comedies. The most well-known sequence of the movie — and one of the most famous shots in movie history — has the actor dangling from the spire of a downtown Los Angeles skyscraper, clinging for life to the minute hand of the tower’s clock. It’s a hilarious, scary-funny moment that still works today, 100 years later.

What Lloyd and his studio were aiming for when they hired The Human Fly was something that people in show business have always prized: free publicity. A guy climbing up the side of a tall building — in a direct imitation of the movie’s signature moment — would get people talking, and it would generate more buzz than a million dollars of paid advertising. It’s called “earned media” — meaning, I guess, that the attention is earned rather than bought and paid for.

But no one earned it more than The Human Fly, though, who lost his grip about 10 stories up and plunged to his death, creating exactly the kind of buzzy spectacle that movie studio marketing departments dream of. Even better than a successful climb was one that ended in a tragic splat! on the pavement, reinforcing the idea that Harold Lloyd’s stunt in the movie was seriously risky. (Which it wasn’t. The camera was angled in such a way that viewers didn’t see the wide ledge just beneath the dangling star.)

I can only imagine the scene: a young studio executive bursts into the chief’s office, beaming and shouting for joy. “Great news, boss! The guy we hired to shimmy up the building did a triple gainer down to the sidewalk in front of the crowd and the newspaper boys and everyone!” And the boss whooped merrily and passed out cigars and predicted that Safety Last! would be one of that year’s biggest pictures. (Which it was. It was the third-biggest movie of 1923, just behind The Ten Commandments and The Covered Wagon.)

And then some killjoy would say something dreary and negative like, Hey, fellas, a man died, have some respect and they would all pause for a moment and mutter something along the lines of yes, yes, terrible tragedy, mysteries of life, God’s unfathomable plan, etc., etc. and everyone would get quickly back to counting the money.