Hey, remember Zeusefer? Who was that masked man?

The Oscar coverage game has obviously blown up in the eight years that I’ve been doing it.  What started out as old media writing annual, singular columns dedicated to the race at hand (and generally right just before the show or nominations announcement) eventually gave way to niche-oriented sites headed up by passionate individuals who just wanted to write about movies and the Super Bowl of film.

The early names were obviously Tom O’Neil, Pete Hammond (via Tom’s site), Sasha Stone and Nathaniel Rogers.  I jumped on board in 2000-2001 and soon, already established writers like David Poland and Jeffrey Wells began to offer up Oscar coverage (seeing the remunerative prospects, no doubt).  Today, any and everyone covers the Oscars, from the amateur fan-site trenches to major media outlets looking to capitalize on advertising potential.

But there was one guy doing all of this nonsense long, long ago who made a splash then suddenly disappeared.  He ranked the major categories in ever-changing lists of 30 and had studio publicists at their wits end trying to locate and, obviously, influence him.  His name, as we knew him, was Zeusefer, and veteran publicist Reid Rosefelt has written something of a letter to his shenanigans.

Unfortunately, you can’t go back and check out Zeusefer’s work because AOL’s hometown site, where the writer set up shop, has been shuttered.  You can poke around the web archive for some nostalgia, however.  The site kind of looked like this.

And I do remember Pete Hammond phoning me up for this blow leveled at amateur sites back in 2002 (when Pete was the broad-chested rooster in the hen house, so to speak).  “Do you know how I can get in touch with Zeusefer???”

Writes Rosefelt:

Zeusifer (sic) didn’t evaluate actors’ chances based on the quality of their performances, or prognosticate with the usual “Oscar voters traditionally go for…blahblahblah”—he rated people solely by the amount of press they were getting. A noteworthy media booking, like a magazine cover, The New York or LA Times, The Tonight Show, could move a contender higher on the chart. Zeusifer—who I assumed was a guy–didn’t explain his methodology and he didn’t make any claims that more press would definitely lead to a win. But obviously that was the idea…

As you might imagine, Zeusifer was a nightmare for publicists who had clients who read him. If it wasn’t all our fault already, here was this dude to shove it in our faces.
But who the hell was he? Was it someone big shot or little shot in the industry? Or was he just some nerdy high school student in his basement with a stack of magazines and the TV on all the time?

I liked the name a lot: a combination of Zeus and Lucifer, God and the Devil. Zeusifer was God because he had given himself the power to make people in high places pay attention to him. And our curiosity was intensified because no one ever saw him, like the Wizard of Oz, J.D. Salinger or Nikki Finke. But he was the Devil because he played into our basest instincts—our belief that the Oscar, our holiest sacrament of true cinematic genius, can be bought by hiring a good PR firm.

Zeusefer, if you’re out there, it’s time.  Show yourself.  Who was the man (woman?) behind the curtain?  And where did you go?

(Thanks to Roger Ebert for the tip.)