Like millions of others, I watched Tammy Faye Messner's last interview Thursday night on Larry King, then woke up Friday to the news she had passed away.
Luckily, Tammy Faye was able to spread her message of hope and bravery in the face fo death to millions of people just hours before cancer took her life.
I started to wonder how many people die every day without having the ability to spread their message to others.
When I started Contact Any Celebrity, Corey Rudl of the Internet Marketing Center was the expert and mentor I turned to for advice.
Corey later invited me to speak on two panels at the last Internet business seminar he gave in California before he was killed in a car-racing accident.
After Corey's death, I had to find a new mentor, so I turned to Dan Kennedy. Not long ago, Dan was almost killed the same way, except this time it was horse racing instead of car racing.
What's my point? That we must learn as much as we can from experts while they're with us, because they could go at any time.
Which is why I'm excited to announce I've just acquired the rights to Corey Rudl's last interview, so I can continue spreading Corey's message even after he's gone.
In this interview, Corey and Dan Kennedy discuss the best ways to start or expand a business both online and offline:
Click the link above to listen in...
P.S. If you're thinking about starting or expanding a business, you MUST listen to this once-in-a-lifetime interview with Corey Rudl & Dan Kennedy:
Well this Tuesday, June 26th, my friend Arielle Ford is hosting a free teleseminar with Tim where he's going to reveal how you can create a four hour workweek for yourself as well!
The call will start at 5 p.m. PST (7 p.m. CST and 8 p.m. EST).
Tim will also reveal how he made his book a New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal bestseller.
If you can't listen in by phone, the call will also be available as a live webcast so you can listen in over your computer.
P.S. Tim Ferris has literally become a celebrity overnight with the success of his new book "The 4 Hour Workweek." He's appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, NBC, and MAXIM. His book became a #1 bestseller in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.
Now he's going to reveal how he did it, plus talk about how you can create a four hour workweek for yourself!
Two loves have greatly influenced Annie Leibovitz's work: her mother (a dance instructor) and writer/essayist Susan Sontag (her "lover"), who died of cancer in 2004.
It's obvious Leibovitz truly loved Sontag, as she gets a little choked up every time she talks about her. In fact, there are almost more photos of Sontag in the exhibition than there are of the celebrities Leibovitz is best known for shooting.
(Nicole Kidman, New York, 2003. Courtesy of "Vogue.")
Although Leibovitz's work mostly reflects life, she clearly doesn't like to take photos of people with smiles. In fact, you'll
be hard pressed to find any of her subjects in the exhibition smiling.
"You have to understand, my family was the kind that always smiled for
pictures. I just thought it was kind of... fake. In the portrait I took of
my mother, she's not smiling. She thought she looked old and didn't
like the photo. But at an exhibit once all these people were
gathered around asking for her autograph, so she kind of liked that."
(Pondering photos of lover Susan Sontag undergoing chemotherapy.)
"I've recently started looking for a cemetery, which is sort of like looking for a good apartment in New York City. People are afraid to talk about death. So before my dad died, I made sure to talk to him about... those kinds of things. But I promise there's more to this exhibition than just death," she says with a laugh.
"The great thing about this photo is if you love George Bush, you love this photo. And if you hate Bush, you hate this photo. I only had 45 minutes to take it, which was a LONG time."
When asked why she thinks she's become such an icon, she says, "A lot of hard work. It's all about the work. Also I don't think of myself as a photographer. I think of myself as an artist who uses photography."
Leibovitz has been under contract as a landscape photographer with "Conde Nast Traveler" since 1993. Other contracts include "Vanity Fair," "Rolling Stone", and "Vogue."
And what about that famous "Vanity Fair" cover of Demi Moore nude and pregnant 1994? "I had worked with Demi a lot, and did her wedding pictures when she married Bruce Willis. I told her then that I was interested in photographing a pregnant woman, which I had never done before."
"I shot some close-ups of Demi Moore for the magazine, and I said, 'you know, we should do some nudes just for you.'"
"Demi called me when she was pregnant with her first child. Bruce was working on a film in Kentucky, so I stopped there on the way back to New York from Los Angeles. Then three years later, when Demi had a movie coming out, 'Vanity Fair' asked me to take a picture of her for the cover. As I was shooting I said, 'You know, this would be a great cover.
'Vanity Fair' decided to go with it -- I didn't quite understand the
impact it would have on people."
"I photographed Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino standing next to each other in my studio, but I had to cut them into two separate photos because they couldn't be together."
In 1994 her most shocking photo at the High Museum was Whoopi Goldberg in a bathtub filled with milk. This time around she's got Chris Rock donning "whiteface" and Beyonce as Alice in Wonderland. Clearly some things haven't changed, but a lot has, like getting to finally photograph Queen Elizabeth II. Leibovitz is the first American honored with taking her portrait.
(Brad Pitt, Las Vegas, 1994. Courtesy of "Vanity Fair.")
"They gave me 30 minutes to photograph her. She said she remembered
me asking if I could photograph her years ago, and she felt bad for
turning me down. The photos were good, but they were more like a
document. I did a lot of research; they sent me books of her clothes
and jewelry I could choose from.
I wanted to include everything, so we did the shoot at Buckingham
Palace. She was a little feisty because she had to wear the whole outfit and
everything -- it was a bit like photographing your 80-year old aunt. But she was great. At the end I told her I had made a bit of a
mistake and needed her to come back so I could do something else, and
she did."
"I got rid of my studio. It was becoming a burden, so now I prefer to shoot in the great outdoors. I'm also using a lot of digital, which I love. If I want to make it look like film I can, and it gives me a lot of leeway with color. For instance I used to not be able to shoot a subject in front of a green tree, because green looks black on film. But now I can do that. I first started using digital when I shot Barack Obama, because I wanted it to look like 'now.' It looks sort of like television."
So what advice does Annie Leibovitz have for budding photographers? "The thing I tell artists now is to make sure they preserve their work. Put it into a book. It doesn't have to be published, but put it into something."
(Contact Any Celebrity President Jordan McAuley (far right) with Annie Leibovitz, friend Matt Burkhalter and a High Museum representative.)
We caught up with Reichen Lehmkuhl on vacation in
Hawaii to talk about his newfound celebrity, if he was really just using Lance for
publicity, and of course... that infamous Perez Hilton:
