There is always one who ruins the hobby

Sometimes collecting autographs can be a depressing hobby. You work so hard for so long writing the perfect letter to your favourite celebrity only for something to ruin it for you. Many times over the years I’ve written to celebs only for them to switch to “fan mail services” which is just a nice way of saying “I can’t be bothered reading your letters anymore, here have a copy of my autograph”.
These services have always got my back up mainly because the celebrity clients that use them try to make out we are idiots. I have mentioned this before a few months ago and I won’t go into specifics but what I will say is this, if you get a letter from Studio Fan Mail there is a 99% chance your letter never made it to the celeb.
Then of course there are the other factors that can ruin it for you like spamming. Writing to celebs via a movie set or concert venue is a popular way to get the more difficult people. It’s a risk/reward type of situation and when you are rewarded sometimes it pays off big time. These via venue addresses are not out there for public display, oh sure if you look hard enough on the internet they are there but they have to be for other reasons. But that initial joy you get from first finding the right address and then sending off the letter can be destroyed when you discover someone has posted that same address for everyone to find. I’ve always been of the belief if you do the hard work to find the address then you should be rewarded for your effort. But when it’s out there for everyone, it gets hammered until it gets to a point where they no longer reply, ruining it for everyone. Of course it doesn’t always happen, but most of the time it does.
Then there are those other times, rarer than the ones previous stated but they are the ones that hurt the most; when someone who enjoys fan mail or always replies to fan mail stops because something has caused them too.  Today one of my favourite actresses Stana Katic had the respect to come online and say due to a security issue she could no longer accept fan mail. And to add to that she would not use a “fan mail service” because fans deserve the real thing.
In this case I’m lucky, I got Stana’s autograph in 2010 and its framed sitting on my desk but i know plenty who were still waiting to hear from her. I don’t know what the issue was but there are those fans that walk a very fine line and I just hope they haven’t crossed it.  Full credit to Stana though for respecting the fans enough to come out and say directly that she will no longer be replying. So many would simply stop and move on but she is so much classier than that. I just wish other celebrities would just take the same time and effort to save their fans the pain so future collectors don’t feel the same pain I have. 

The sad side of Autograph collecting

Its days like this when you wonder why you bother sticking with a hobby for so long. I have been collecting autographs since the year 2000, it started out as just some way for me to express how much I love an actor’s work but I didn’t think it would turn into the hobby it has. At last count I now have well over 1000 autographs in my collection and at least a third of them are from actors I admire. Whether it be background actors or your A list headliner I appreciate all of them for what they bring to the screen. It disappoints me when incidents like today happen, I received my photo back from Once Upon a Time actress Ginnifer Goodwin and my heart sank. I have been a fan of Ginnifers work for a very long time but when I saw she had switched agencies to Spanky Taylor I knew there wasn’t a chance that Ginnifer had even seen my letter.
When I opened up the envelope I wasn’t too sure at first, but after seeing an example from someone else who got theirs back a few days earlier my original doubts were realised that a machine had signed my photo. People have asked me how I know this. How can I tell? Well it’s pretty easy once you know how. Have you ever signed something and tried to replicate it exactly? Doesn’t come out exactly the same now does it? And this is where it’s obvious a machine has done it because every single autograph is 100% exactly every time. Every brush stroke, every mark all identical and when only one photo comes back signed it’s another obvious sign because 2 coming back would make it easy to compare. This is what’s called and Autopen, when a machine automatically does it for you. Of course many celebs do it and over the years I’ve learned to avoid writing to them.
Machines are not the only way celebs get around fan mail & autographs, preprints & secretarials are another. Preprints are obvious and easy to spot, you could rub your fingers all over the photos and that autograph is never coming off & a secretarial is where a celeb pays someone to sign their autographs for them.
I personally find secs worse than autopens because they even more so give the illusion that the celeb actually gave a crap. You could pour your heart and soul out and the celeb you are writing too may simply never see it. Of course you could be reading this thinking how on earth does she know? Celebs might get gifts etc or they might be too busy whatever. And of course sometimes that’s true; another Spanky Taylor client is Johnny Depp. Now you can only imagine the amount of fan mail that man would get, Orlando Bloom is another. But when mail is sent to these types of agencies gifts, heartfelt letters etc never make it to the celeb and so the only way you might catch them is in person or via a movie set.
What annoys me more is that I am prepared to wait; I am not one of these demanding fans who expect celebs to answer their fan mail around the clock. I know these people have lives and need breaks etc but would it kill them maybe once in a while take 5mins out of their day to appreciate their fans and not send these things back knowing full well they are fooling people? For me it’s now a simple case of adding another person onto the don’t bother writing to again list. People wonder why I am angry, well i'm not I’m just disappointed, it’s not fun knowing your letter that you put so much effort into never made it to its destination. People are also entitled to their opinion but this is mine and it isn’t going to change.