WASHINGTON (Variety) - In an edgy Hollywood and an anxious nation, the mail must not go through -- not anymore. Media companies have shut down mailrooms and publicists have stopped delivering fan mail.
With anthrax found in a White House mail screening facility on Tuesday and separately confirmed as the cause of death for two Washington, D.C., postal workers, the threat of bioterrorism has become vividly clear.
At a Washington news conference, President George W. Bush said, "I don't have anthrax." He declined to say whether he had taken a nasal swab test but stressed that no traces of anthrax had been found at the White House itself.
It had to be chilling to Hollywood when White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said there was little doubt that the person or persons behind the anthrax attacks went after two "high-impact" crowds -- news anchors and Washington solons.
The revelation about the White House came one day after studio and TV execs held a private meeting with California Gov. Gray Davis, the FBI and other high-level law enforcement officials about developing a sound plan of action in the event that Hollywood is hit. Confab, held in Beverly Hills, was called by Motion Picture Assn. of America president Jack Valenti, who declined comment on the meeting.
News divisions at ABC, CBS and NBC all counted their blessings that no one came down with the more serious form of anthrax that has now claimed the lives of two postal workers stationed in Washington, as well as a photo editor for Boca Raton, Fla., supermarket tabloid the Sun.
Fearful that they could meet the same fate as the two postal workers who died of anthrax after merely handling letters with the deadly bacillus, public relations firms, talent agencies and studios are either rerouting or setting aside thousands of pieces of fan mail. Much of it is being sent to professional fan mail services, many already oversubscribed.
"For the time being, we are just not opening fan mail," said publicist Pat Kingsley, principal at PMK/HBH. "Just to be careful, we are putting it off for now," she emphasized.
"Some of our clients were using fan mail services," said Tracy Shaffer, also at PMK/HBH, "but before the Florida incident, if they didn't, it probably would get sent on to their assistant or their home. That's over now. But unfortunately, now that we've received it, we're wondering, Now what?"
Officials said a mail sorting machine at an off-site military facility where White House mail is submitted to security screenings -- had tested positive for anthrax spores Monday morning. As of Tuesday evening, investigators still hadn't identified the piece of anthrax-laced mail that apparently contaminated the sorter.
The White House raised the possibility that the piece of mail may not have contained anthrax but could have been contaminated at the postal center where all mail coming into Washington, D.C., is sorted.
Both Bush and Fleischer stressed that the White House tested clean.
"We're making sure that the West Wing at the White House is safe. I'm confident when I come to work tomorrow, I'll be safe," Bush said.
Nevertheless, employees with mail-related duties at the White House, along with employees at the military site, were being tested for exposure.
Meanwhile, CBS News and ABC News are still undergoing environmental cleanups after their own anthrax scares.
On Tuesday, traces of anthrax were found in the office of "CBS Evening News" anchor Dan Rather, and the New York Times shuttered its mailroom after a staffer opened an envelope containing a suspicious white powdery substance.
Some fan mail services, in turn, are now complaining of being overwhelmed with a backlog of mail that concerned publicists had set aside, unsure of how to safely dispose of it.
"We have to screen everything," said one worker at a fan mail service. "We're all wearing gloves, but you start to imagine things -- that your hands are itching, and so on. It's scary, but we need the money, so frankly there's not a lot we can do about it."
Many fan mail houses handling up to 10,000 units of mail in a given week. Although most are simple notes of admiration or gifts, such parcels have long been approached with wariness. Suspicious letters and packages are flagged and checked.
None of this comes cheaply to start with, and it will get more expensive, predicts one fan mail company worker. That fan mail handler said the typical per unit cost of a single response is $1.50 for smaller stars. Bigger name thesps like Robert De Niro or Julia Roberts get a break on the price, spending $600 to $700 a month on mailed responses to letters that often number a thousand a week.
At the rate things are going, those costs may double, the source said.
"I'm most concerned that the clients' offices that handle the mail are at risk," said Spanky Taylor, whose fan mail service has operated in Hollywood since 1988, handling at least 5,000 pieces a week. "My workers are all wearing gloves and masks, at my insistence," explained Taylor.
Some TV and movie studios like Sony Pictures Entertainment and Warner Bros., have stopped delivering fan mail altogether.
"We are returning fan letters and sending a note along asking them to correspond by email," said a Warner Bros. spokesman.
So too at the Endeavor agency, which represents high-profile thesps like Matt Damon, Edward Norton, Drew Barrymore and Ben Affleck. Two weeks ago the firm stopped accepting fan mail for clients, encouraging them to use or establish fan club Web sites to accept mail.
Studio Fan Mail Services, one of the oldest and largest in the country, has begun advising fans to send postcards rather than letters. "The public can be so strange and crazy, but having said that, I don't want to feed the fury, either," Taylor said. "We're doing everything we can, and so far, nothing's happened, praise God. Not to belittle what's happened to the eight people who got sick, but if you reported about every traffic accident in America, you'd never get in your car again."
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