Angelina Jolie, Soviet-Style

I guess Angelina Jolie is awesome. I can't actually think of a good movie she has been associated with (save for Gone in Sixty Seconds, obviously), but as a famous person, she appears to be doing something right. The New York Times reported on Friday that Jolie and partner Brad Pitt struck a deal with People magazine earlier this year in which the couple sold the magazine exclusive rights to photograph their newborn twins in exchange for $14 million dollars and, here comes the best part, "positive [coverage], not merely in this instance, but in the future."

So much for journalistic integrity. At least People had the good sense to deny that they had struck a deal that would sell the angle of its content to the very subjects the magazine covers, however, a number of sources close to Jolie confirmed that the deal did in fact go down. What makes the deal even more awesome, on Jolie's part, is that she doesn't even have a publicist; she works out all of her media appearances for herself. Setting up a deal over a major magazine in which one not only gets $14,000,000 for non-pornographic pictures of her children, but also editorial discretion over said magazine may be the most punk-rock thing I've ever heard. Forget the inherent weirdness in the fact that anyone gives a shit about some acJolie with her kids that don't cost $14 million plus any lingering thread of intergrity to seetress' stupid kids, much less is willing to pay millions of dollars for pictures of them; Jolie recognized that she had all of the leverage in a situation and used it for all it was worth. Dollars may suck now, but a bounty of 14 million of them is still a pretty nice thing to have, and control over media coverage of yourself is a luxury enjoyed by only a select few in the history of the press. Angelina Jolie is like Stalin.

She may be pretty weird, with the making out with her brother and all (not to mention the offputting-but-also-kind-of-hot Rolling Stone horse pictures), but Angelina Jolie has clearly got something going on other than being one of the most beautiful women on the planet that is keeping her a step ahead of everyone else.